Winner
Joe Nocera and Ben Strauss, Indentured: The Inside Story of the Rebellion Against the NCAA 
The $5,000 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing honors a nonfiction book about sports. Eligible titles should be of a biographical, investigative, historical, or analytical nature and of the strongest literary character.
From the Judges’ Citation
Indentured: The Inside Story of the Rebellion Against the NCAA by Joe Nocera and Ben Strauss is the book on the NCAA we need, one that follows up admirably on years of work on the economics of big time college sports. Fans too often think of these problems both abstractly and without context — they may agree that the NCAA hurts athletes or even that some athletes should be paid, but the issue is too often framed as a moral question, one can be debated and weighed and brought to some middle ground conclusion. Indentured ends the discussion. It is the best sort of polemic, one that never wavers from its thesis — that the NCAA is corrupt and exploitative — but makes its argument through definitive reporting and argumentation.
Finalists
The Last Innocents: The Collision of the Turbulent Sixties and the Los Angeles Dodgers
Michael Leahy
HarperCollins
Amazon | Indie Bound
Catching the Sky
Colten Moore with Keith O‘Brien
Atria Books/Simon & Schuster
Amazon | Indie Bound
Indentured: The Inside Story of the Rebellion Against the NCAA
Joe Nocera and Ben Strauss
Portfolio/Penguin Random House
Amazon | Indie Bound
Playing Through the Whistle: Steel, Football, and an American Town
S.L. Price
Atlantic Monthly Press/Grove Atlantic
Amazon | Indie Bound
Fastpitch: The Untold History of the Softball and the Women Who Made the Game
Erica Westly
Touchstone/Simon & Schuster
Amazon | Indie Bound
Longlist
Boys Among Men: How the Prep-to-Pro Generation Redefined the NBA and Sparked a Basketball Revolution
Jonathan Abrams
Crown Archetype/Penguin Random House
Amazon | Indie Bound
American Pharoah: The Untold Story of the Triple Crown Winner’s Legendary Rise
Joe Drape
Hachette Books
Amazon | Indie Bound
The Last Innocents: The Collision of the Turbulent Sixties and the Los Angeles Dodgers
Michael Leahy
HarperCollins
Amazon | Indie Bound
Catching the Sky
Colten Moore, Keith O‘Brien
Atria Books/Simon & Schuster
Amazon | Indie Bound
Indentured: The Inside Story of the Rebellion Against the NCAA
Joe Nocera, Ben Strauss
Portfolio/Penguin Random House
Amazon | Indie Bound
Gunslinger: The Remarkable, Improbable, Iconic Life of Brett Favre
Jeff Pearlman
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Amazon | Indie Bound
Playing Through the Whistle: Steel, Football, and an American Town
S.L. Price
Atlantic Monthly Press/Grove Atlantic
Amazon | Indie Bound
Blood Brothers: The Fatal Friendship Between Muhammad Ali and Malcom X
Randy Roberts, Johnny Smith
Basic Books/Perseus Books Group
Amazon | Indie Bound
Fastpitch: The Untold History of the Softball and the Women Who Made the Game
Erica Westly
Touchstone/Simon & Schuster
Amazon | Indie Bound
Black Gods of the Asphalt: Religion, Hip-Hop, and Street Basketball
Onaje X.O. Woodbine
Columbia University Press
Amazon | Indie Bound
Judges
Jay Caspian Kang wrote the novel, The Dead Do Not Improve, and he is a writer-at-large for the New York Times Magazine and a correspondent for Vice on HBO.
Juliet Macur is an award-winning sports columnist for the New York Times and a best-selling author. Her book, Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong, a biography of Armstrong, the cancer survivor and disgraced cyclist, was published in 2014. Ms. Macur worked at the Orlando Sentinel and then the Dallas Morning News before joining the Times in 2004. She graduated from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, daughter, and Labrador retriever.
David Owen is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a contributing editor of Golf Digest. He has written more than a dozen books, including several about golf. His most recent book is Where the Water Goes: Life and Death Along the Colorado River (which will be published in the spring).
Past Winners
Marshall Jon Fisher, George Dohrmann, Dan Barry, Mark Kram, Jr., Mark Fainaru-Wada & Steve Fainaru, and John Branch.
Click here for additional information, including submission guidelines, for the award.
