Texas Sports Heroes

A story about NFL quarterback Tony Romo's journey to stardom, intended for young readers.

With its sprawl of teams in major, minor, and independent leagues, with its narrative interwoven with our national history, with its catalog of larger-than-life characters, baseball is always a story. The story of baseball is often told by the players and the managers whose faces we recognize. Those storytellers are always men. But this baseball story is a girl's coming-of-age memoir. Addie Beth Denton's 108 Stitches reminds us of the women and girls whose lives were shaped by America's national pastime. Denton's father and uncle were baseball men: her uncle, Harry Craft, was a manager for major league franchises in Kansas City, Chicago, and Houston. As a minor league coach, Harry Craft was Mickey Mantle's first manager. 108 Stitches captures the sights, smells, and sensations of growing up with baseball from Addie Beth's unique vantage point. There are home runs, no-hitters, cantankerous old-timers, and ambitious young gunners, but there are also warmhearted family stories, adolescent melodramas, and the multifaceted experiences of girlhood lived within a man's world. Written for fans young and old, male and female, Addie Beth Denton's memoir stitches together her heartfelt memories of a nostalgic period in American and baseball history.

Gabriel "Gabe" Rivera was one of the greatest players in the history of Texas Tech football. He earned All American status, was enshrined into the College Football Hall of Fame, and saw his name elevated to the Texas Tech Ring of Honor. After his college career, Rivera became a first-round selection of the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1983, but his career would be tragically cut short by an accident during his rookie year that left him paralyzed from the waist down. Sports historian Jorge Iber's newest book chronicles this Mexican American athlete's rise to prominence and later life. Beginning with the Rivera family in Crystal City, Texas, a hotbed of Chicano activism in the late 1960s, Señor Sack seeks to understand how athletic success impacted the Rivera family's most famous son on his route to stardom. Football provided this family with opportunities that were not often available to other Mexican Americans during the 1940s and 1950s. While Rivera's injury seriously derailed his life, Señor Sack also chronicles his struggle to regain a sense of purpose. With great effort and despite adversity, over the final two decades of his life, Rivera found meaning in helping minority youths in his community of San Antonio, serving as an example of what can be accomplished even under incredibly trying circumstances. Ultimately, the true legacy of Gabe Rivera is not just on the football field, but also in the lives he touched with his volunteer work. One of the most storied Red Raiders and a legend of Texas football, Gabe Rivera powered through many obstacles to make way for future generations of Latinos in American sports.