Rugby Union Books for christmas: An appealing winter's tale that shirks nothing: Steve Bale on a tour de force in rugby union literature which leaves the game a winner

ALL HE wanted to do, as he tells us in his very first line, was play guitar in Bruce Springsteen's band. Instead Stephen Jones ended up as rugby union's first winner of the William Hill / Sportspages sports book of the year award.

Using the unrelievedly congested rugby year from August 1992 to July 1993 as his structure, Jones's Endless Winter (Mainstream, pounds 14.99) is a hugely stimulating tour through the manifold and manifest issues confronting the game. Actually, less a tour than a tour de force.

As readers of the Sunday Times, even including those who may profoundly disagree with him, will know, Jones never shirks anything - and here they all are: amateurism, South Africa, the new laws, rugby league and the rest, beginning way back with the All Blacks and Wallabies against the Springboks and ending with the Lions against the All Blacks.

Do not be misled by this obvious chronology into expecting predictability. By doing it this way, Jones really does ensure that nothing of importance in 'The Inside Story of the Rugby Revolution', as the book is subtitled, is omitted. This is analysis as much as - in fact more than - a simple diary and the author's profound love of the sport he has known from the cradle, an appealing amalgam of sympathy and empathy, shines through.

You could coin a phrase by saying that, through Jones's winning the Sportspages award, rugby itself is the winner - as Jones will be if he picks a winner with the pounds 500 win- or-bust voucher presented him by William Hill as part of his prize. We are constantly told that there is no rugby literature worth bothering about but Jones beat some exceptional alternatives and Frank Keating's The Great Number Tens (Partridge Press, pounds 16.99) also made the final shortlist of six.

Keating, in that quirky fashion familiar from the pages of the Guardian, brings to life a century of outside-halves (many of them actually wore No 6), linking the development of this pivotal position with the evolution of the game itself. Reading Keating makes you wish you had been there in the 1890s to see the Curly-Haired Marmosets, the brothers Evan and Dan James, and a few years later the Dancing Dicks, Jones and Owen of that ilk. Like their sobriquets, these guys were pure poetry.

Fortunately the likes of Richard Sharp, Barry John, Ollie Campbell, John Rutherford and Mark Ella are of sufficiently recent vintage for most of us, including the adulatory Keating, to have seen them. 'As long as life and the good game go on - be assured, so will the rich and royal line continue of those good fellows who play in the shirt numbered 10,' the author concludes.

Jones and Keating have immensely enhanced rugby union's library and while the rest of this year's oeuvre is scarcely in the same class there have been enough books to leave shelves groaning. Take Will Carling: what other man, let alone sportsman, ever had five books published about him by the time he was 27? (He was 28 on Sunday.)

Lately we have had Will Carling: The Authorised Biography (Headline, pounds 16.99) by David Norrie and in direct opposition the distinctly unauthorised Carling: A Man Apart (Witherby, pounds 14.99) by Peter Bills. Both ostensibly set out to reveal the real Carling, though the day anyone succeeds in that endeavour will be the 20th-century equivalent of finding the source of the Nile.

Norrie relies mainly on the man himself and, although there is a warts-and-all feel to it, inevitably starts from the premise that England's captain and centre is a good bloke: which, despite all that has been said about him, he is. Bills's book, being a spoiler and dependent for opinion on everyone except its subject, is inevitably harsher. The truth probably lies somewhere in between.

At least they are more interesting than the usual platitudinous rugby biographies of which there have been so many in recent years. Upfront (Mainstream, pounds 14.99) is the autobiography of the England prop Jeff Probyn, ghosted by Barry Newcombe. Probyn's chapters on that perennial topic, Carling, and the England team manager, Geoff Cooke, are outspoken without being as offensive as the publishers might have preferred, but otherwise the fascinating and forthright East End character who comes across so well on, say, the radio more or less disappears.

You could not say this of Nick Farr-Jones: The Authorised Biography (Stanley Paul, pounds 14.99) by Peter FitzSimons, the noted Sydney journalist who has accompanied Australia's World Cup-winning captain at club, state and international level. The trouble is that you feel ready to give up by the time you have waded through the interminable early chapters on Farr-Jones's birth, upbringing and education.

I have it on good authority that, even so, the end product was savagely cut from the original, though in fairness the subsequent chapters on Farr-Jones the rugby player are insightful and of particular fascination for their comparative assessment of the bitter rivals who coached Farr-Jones's Australia, Alan Jones and Bob Dwyer.

Back home, the achievements of Bath and Leicester make them the finest clubs in England and both are chronicled in celebratory books. Bath: Ace of Clubs (Breedon Books, pounds 16.95) by Brian Jones concentrates on the last decade of superlative achievement, going through the trophy-winning years in strictly chronological order.

The Tigers' Tale (ACL Polar, pounds 24.95) by Stuart Farmer and David Hands is a weightier tome with a price to match. For all that, it is a definitive book of its type, a statistical gold-mine but also a good read sumptuously presented. Originally a limited edition aimed at Leicester's vast membership of 10,000, it has sold so many that more have been printed for a wider audience.

The Lions' tour, discerningly examined in Endless Winter, is the subject of So Close To Glory (Queen Anne Press, pounds 9.99) by the Lions coach, Ian McGeechan. This hurriedly produced, overpriced and very thin, picture-led paperback sheds little new light. By contrast another paperback, David Parry- Jones's Action Replay (Gomer, pounds 9.95) is a substantial memoir and, though not exclusively a rugby book, has an oval-shaped seam running right through it as Parry- Jones was for years the highly respected BBC Wales commentator and so, in a literal sense, the voice of Welsh rugby.

Among the hardy annuals Alex Spink's instructive Rugby Union Who's Who 1993-94 (Collins Willow, pounds 9.99) is a needed reflection of what players think: something not always solicited by the powers that be. The French are included this time but Nigel Redman, an England hero against New Zealand last month, is out, doubtless on the grounds that surely his international days were over.

The International Rugby Almanack 1994 (Blandford, pounds 16.99), edited by Derek Wyatt, is a newcomer which irreverently addresses issues but contains so many mistakes that the editor had to send out an apology with his advance publicity blurb. Older members of the year-in-year- out club include Rugby Annual For Wales (Welsh Brewers, pounds 4.95) and The Official Rugby Union Club Directory (TW Publications, pounds 11.99) as well as the one no one in rugby would be without, Rothmans Rugby Union Yearbook (Headline, pounds 14.99).

Which brings us back to Stephen Jones, who edited Rothmans in between writing Endless Winter, travelling the rugby world and holding down a (Sun)day job. He could never have played guitar in Bruce Springsteen's band - he wouldn't have had the time.