Christmas 2013: best sports books of the year Little wonder. As a teenager O'Sullivan was an unprecedented prodigy: he was making centuries by the age of 10 and won his first tournament at 12. He went on to win his first 38 ranking matches as a professional. "It all changed," he writes, "when Dad got banged up for murder." O'Sullivan's father, who worked in the porn business, stabbed Charlie Kray's driver in a fight in a Chelsea nightclub. O'Sullivan's erratic form on the baize has always been a reflection of the chaos in his personal life. In Running he opens up about his "benders": spliffs for breakfast, vodka and orange from dusk till dawn and getting smashed with Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards. While he is often hard to like, especially in his attitude towards women, he is at least aware of his flaws and seems genuine in his efforts to better himself. And when he starts talking about snooker and his rivals, he is fascinating. Yet it wasn't snooker that ended up saving him from the booze and drugs - it was distance running (hence the title). It has given him a less destructive buzz to chase. Running is obviously at the heart of Mo Farah's book, Twin Ambitions (Hodder & Stoughton, T £18). Farah's rise to glory was more precarious. The part of Somalia in which he grew up was flattened by bombs a year after he moved away; he almost lost the use of his arm when it was burned in a kitchen accident; when he first flew to London the plane nearly crashed; he had resolved to join the Army before a chance meeting saved his athletic career. Distance running does not lend itself to the page. Rather than focus on the races, then, Farah goes into the sacrifices that make those runs possible. How to beat the Kenyans? That is the question. The answer? Method running. He goes to live with the Kenyans, eats like them, sleeps like them and trains like them. And ends up running like them too. Sir Alex Ferguson is no stranger to endurance: to football fans of my generation there did not exist a time when he was not Manchester United manager. Then, just when we were beginning to adapt to life without him, Alex Ferguson: My Autobiography (H&S, T £20) comes out and he's everywhere again. Has one document generated more headlines? Never mind WikiLeaks or Edward Snowden, this is the real secret stash: Ferguson, the great propagandist, opening up the archive of the last decade. The identities of his victims are well known, from Benítez to the Football Association. Most fascinating is his depiction of Roy Keane going all Col Kurtz in his last days at Old Trafford. Ferguson has few peers when it comes to qualifying compliments or damning with faint praise. When he really goes for someone, you wince. It feels less like reading, more like rubbernecking. There are also, though, glimpses of Fergie's vulnerability. He talks about sitting in his office, lonely, hoping someone would knock on the door for a cup of tea and a chat. You almost feel... pity? But then he starts talking about how scoring against his team "was a provocative act that would invite terrible retribution" and all feels right about the universe again. Justice is another theme of this year's sports books. It is most satisfyingly served in Seven Deadly Sins (Simon & Schuster, T £7.99), journalist David Walsh's account of his pursuit of Lance Armstrong. No one did more to expose Armstrong; Walsh held his nerve even as he was being attacked through legal channels. This is not only heroic reporting but a story well told: Walsh's tenacity is matched by his talent for turning a sentence. Avoiding a sentence is foremost in Harry Redknapp's mind in his book. The first chapter of Always Managing (Ebury, T £15) begins in Southwark Crown Court, with Redknapp in the dock, accused of squirrelling away money in a Monaco bank account to avoid paying tax, and ends with him walking away exonerated. Justice is fickle, however, and in chapter two Redknapp is denied the England manager's job when the Football Association go for Roy Hodgson. The bitterness does not last; Redknapp is soon into his repertoire of anecdotes. He is well served by his ghostwriter, Martin Samuel, who captures Redknapp's garrulous manner adroitly. There have been few people more in need of a ghost. Redknapp's verdict on his literary talents? If I tried to write a letter you'd think it was a six-year-old who had got hold of the pen and paper. Perhaps it is fitting then, to end with a book with serious literary ambition. Stillness and Speed: My Story (S&S, T £16) is a collaboration between Dennis Bergkamp and David Winner, the author of the wonderfully eccentric Brilliant Orange: the Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football. In his preface, Winner tells us he decided to model the book on François Truffaut's interviews with Alfred Hitchcock as a way of focusing on Bergkamp's "technique and creative process." Truffaut! Dutch tactics! A dialectical structure! The football hipster's satchel will feel empty without this book. And great fun it is too, especially as Bergkamp ends up behaving like a mortal footballer instead of an intellectual. He might well talk about his innovation of the shadow striker role at Ajax, but he also tells the story of pulling down Ray Parlour's shorts while he was signing autographs. And the worst of it? The Romford Pelé was going commando.