In an eleventh-floor corner office in downtown Cleveland during the spring of 1961, 30-year-old George Steinbrenner sketched with his hands the future as he dreamed it. He grabbed the young basketball player who was sitting near him by the shoulder with one hand and jabbed the air with invisible designs with the other. A glittering 12,000-seat basketball palace, Steinbrenner said to Larry Siegfried, the just-graduated captain of the Ohio State basketball team, would soon spring from the weedy empty lots along the Lake Erie shoreline. It would be an arena fit for the basketball royalty Steinbrenner was assembling for the Cleveland Pipers of the new American Basketball League. Before the Pipers' tumultuous story was over, Steinbrenner would win Siegfried's services and the ABL championship.

In George Steinbrenner's Pipe Dream, Bill Livingston brings to life the remarkable story of the one-season wonder Pipers and their unlikely national championship. Drawing on personal interviews and extensive research, he introduces readers to the personalities that surrounded the organization, including John McLendon, the first African American head coach in any professional sport; Jerry Lucas, one of college basketball's greatest players; Dick Barnett, the best player on the team and the driving force for their ABL championship; the extravagantly talented prodigy Connie Hawkins; and Jack Adams, the Pipers' captain, who was traded in midseason in a fit of pique on Steinbrenner's part.

Bill Livingston takes readers along for the Pipers' short but wild ride, providing a compelling and entertaining story about a fascinating chapter in sports history.

Two Olympic medalists were recognized at Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio, days before Christmas 2004. One was the Cleveland Cavaliers' LeBron James, the Chosen One of the NBA. He had a bronze medal from the Athens games that summer. The other was a Cleveland homeboy too, a gold medalist who had flown higher than anyone before on the Olympic stage. Hardly anyone knew his name. He was Tim Mack.

His high school coach did not see anything particularly promising in the young pole-vaulter. Mack never made it to the state meet, and he was the first to admit he had a fear of heights. But thanks to his unflinching determination and confidence, Mack went on to prove that he was anything but mediocre. In 2004 the young athlete won the Olympic gold medal for pole vaulting. His jump of 19 feet 6-1/4 inches was not only Mack's personal best but the highest in Olympic history.

Award-winning sports columnist Bill Livingston follows Mack as he practices one of the world's most dangerous and demanding sports. Livingston reveals the fascinating subculture of pole vaulting--from Bob Richards, the only man to win Olympic gold twice in pole vaulting; to Sergey Bubka, the most controversial pole vaulter ever; to Don Bragg, a rowdy Tarzan-like character who swung on ropes in his backyard to build upper-body strength; to the stirring duel between Mack and Toby Stevenson as they battled for gold in Athens.

Readers will discover how Mack struggled and endured, while working in a factory, as a mascot in a bumblebee costume, and as a janitor, and how Mack changed his training and revamped his body and mind in a three-year program that made his AOL username, Goldnathens, a self-fulfilling prophecy.