Fine reading from leading lights of the fourth estate Tragic: The late Stathi Katsidis on Shoot Out in 2010. Photo: Chris Lane The Agony and the Ecstasy" of Stathi Katsidis, by my Fairfax Media colleague Chris Roots, is placed to advantage in More Important than Life and Death. Roots was voted the Rod Allen Racing Writer of the Year recently but his great work on Katsidis came previously. Stathi Katsidis admits he took ecstasy - he served a nine-month ban for testing positive to it in 2008. He also insists he wasn't the only sportsman to take the party drug, claiming about half the jockeys and footballers take it. It's a claim that sends tremors through the football and racing industries. But Katsidis is not bitter. Instead he credits the whole episode with helping him turn around his life. Later in the "Turbulent death and life of a gifted sportsman" Roots eulogised: "At his best, Stathi Katsidis could ride like an angel, but he had his demons, too. The jockey had a troubled past ... Now just days out from what promised to be another career highlight ... Katsidis is gone. He was found dead by his partner, Melissa Jackson, at his Eagle Farm home. Perhaps the Katsidis chapters are more macabre than colourful, as is a contribution by Craig Young, formerly a Fairfax Media scribe and now driving buses on the central coast, regarding champion jockey Darren Beadman. It emphasises the extent of injuries and was the first indication Beadman's career was in jeopardy. It seemed like a simple fall. I was knocked out for like two hours," Beadman said. I've had race falls, been involved in them. I've been conscious all the way through. Sometimes I've been knocked out. It feels like you're going in slow motion, everything slows down. This one I don't even remember going down. They sent me home from hospital a couple of days later but the room at home kept spinning. I'd get up to go to the toilet and I'd fall over. Young, known as "Stinger" since birth, and Beadman had a fine rapport, producing columns in The Sydney Morning Herald. When he first started as a columnist and was told he could choose his ghostwriter, Beadman replied: "Do you mean I can engage my own writer?" The champ asked and plumped for Stinger, a lower-order batsman at the time. But More Important Than Life And Death - Inside the Best of Australian Sport (Fairfax Books - Allen and Unwin) edited by Peter FitzSimons and Greg Growden, is a fine testimony to all the gamuts of Australian sport written with insight and humour. The big names are there as well as up-and-coming talent, but don't miss "The View of Viewed," a chapter by Phil Wilkins, who for decades has been a great all-rounder. My wife Coleena's favourite was Jessica Halloran's "Jelena Dokic." Pearls fall down Jelena Dokic's back where bruises once tarnished her caramel skin. She idles on a tennis court in a ball gown, diamantes decorating the nape of her neck. She's laughing now, where hours earlier she was soberly explaining how she'd escaped the physical rage of her father, Damir ... Once you know and hear more about her darkest days, you realise how remarkable this young woman is. And Roy Masters goes into sacred territory with "Redemption, Resilience and the Great Game." The foundation club is an antidote to the occasions when the code suffers from a lack of a looking-glass self: when it cannot see itself as others do. I'm not referring to the sneering rugby union purists or Melbourne's AFL worshippers, who see none of the rhythm and the entire bruise of rugby league. Rather Souths is a reminder in times when the code strays from its virtues: stoic bravery, flint-eyed honesty, social justice and above all else resilience. South Sydney won more premierships than any other club because it relied on its juniors from working-class tenements of Redfern, Botany and Mascot, recruited wisely and contracted all players fairly. What Aboriginal kid wouldn't want to come to Redfern when stories of Kevin Longbottom kicking goals bare-footed from halfway spread to the bush? Masters - we go back to when he was a Fibro coaching Wests, subsidised with being paid wordage by the Sydney Sun, the greatest afternoon tabloid ever, before he became a silvertail with St George - is a different story. At times I'd answer the phone when his mother Olga would ask me to pass a message that she'd just made an apple pie. I had to listen to university tales when he fraternised with Germaine Greer. Now he holds me to ridicule for appreciation of, not conversion to, Australian rules. Once you've got Redfern Oval in your blood you never lose it. But when you see Adam Goodes taking a mark under extreme circumstances, Kieren Jack charging through the centre, and Jude Bolton just being Jude, well that's special. Just like Nathan Merritt finishing a try-scoring movement like he's done in the red and green for the past decade.