By IAN HARRISON
SPORTSNET.ca

Georges Laraque doesn’t pull many punches in his new tell-all book, The Story of the NHL's Unlikeliest Tough Guy. The retired enforcer makes claims of rampant steroid abuse by both fighters and scorers, and calls out Wayne Gretzky for being a bad coach. While Laraque doesn’t identify drug cheats by name, he’s hardly the first writer to expose sordid stories from inside the locker room. This week, The List goes to the library to check out some of the best and most influential sports books on the shelves.

Former slugger Jose Canseco’s explosive writings about widespread steroid use might not have won him any friends or literary awards. But in his 2005 book Juiced, the so-called ‘Godfather of Steroids’ became the first to reveal the depth of baseball’s doping problems. And unlike Laraque, Canseco had no problem naming players who used needles, identifying Mark McGwire, Juan Gonzalez and Jason Giambi as drug cheats. Juiced tore the rawhide off the steroids story, spawning a congressional investigation and baseball’s Mitchell Report.

Legendary goalie Ken Dryden took readers inside the locker room and onto the ice in The Game, his 1983 book about life as an NHL netminder. Needless to say, unlike Canseco and Laraque, the thoughtful and eloquent Dryden didn’t need scandalous accusations to make his work a page-turner. Considered one of the best hockey books ever written, The Game is a diary from Dryden’s 1979 season in Montreal, with plenty of digressions on the history of hockey and its revered place in Canada’s consciousness.

No book pulled back the curtain more than Jim Bouton’s Ball Four. The former Yankee kept a diary of his 1969 season between the expansion Seattle Pilots and Houston Astros, mixing in many old tales from the Bronx. An explosive insider look at players’ off-field habits, from drugs and booze to ‘beaver-shooting,’ it was extremely controversial, with Bouton eventually blacklisted after refusing to recant. When the New York Library picked its top books of the 20th century, Ball Four was the only sports title to make the cut.

Almost two decades after Bill James started writing the story behind the stats, Michael Lewis attached it to a team and it turned into a sensation. Moneyball, now a movie starring Brad Pitt as A’s GM Billy Beane, offers a fascinating inside look at Oakland’s front office during their under-salaried seasons of success. Read it, and you’ll never look at on-base percentage the same way again.

Peter Gent didn’t use real names in his novel -- North Dallas Forty is a work of fiction. But read between the lines of this 1973 work and there are plenty of things Gent surely saw during his days as a wide receiver with the Dallas Cowboys, like drug-use and partying off the field and heavy use of painkillers to get back on it. Gent turned his book into a screenplay, with Nick Nolte playing the role of the receiver in the 1979 film version.

One of basketball’s best reads isn’t the inside observations of a player, but a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. In The Breaks of the Game, David Halberstam spends the 1979-80 season with Portland Trail Blazers, details the history of the NBA and explains the game in social and racial terms. As extensively researched and excellently written as any of Halberstam’s books (including his baseball work Summer of ’49), The Breaks of the Game is a favourite of basketball junkie Bill Simmons.

The passion, pride and misplaced priorities of a tiny Texas town were laid bare in Friday Night Lights, the story of the Permian High Panthers football team and their 1988 season. Also written by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Buzz Bissinger’s book exposes the unhealthy obsession for football in Odessa, and its effects on the town. Friday Night Lights was adapted into a Hollywood movie and also inspired two different television series.

The joyous highs and despairing lows felt throughout a life of sports fandom have seldom been told so eloquently as in Fever Pitch, the first book by British writer Nick Hornby. An exhaustive and emotional look at Hornby’s years of support for London soccer club Arsenal, and the life experiences that surround them as he matures, this one is even an enjoyable read for Chelsea fans.