The William Hill Sports Book of the Year has come a long way in 20 years, much further than its short geographical trek across London from the cramped aisles at Sportspages to the cocktail bar in the flagship Piccadilly branch of Waterstone's. For the first 15 years of its life the annual announcement of the award was held in its spiritual home: the snug, scruffy bookshop where guests whose teeth had turned blue from quaffing the sponsor's claret would be packed together like Tokyo commuters.
Those of us who worked there alternated between trying to get discreetly hammered and having to ferry copies of League Express or Grorty Dick out to customers on the forecourt who were livid that the shop was shut for the bash. Since its move, the event has lost the air of a raucous, smoky sauna, but the hubbub as the wait for the identity of the victorious book to emerge remains, as does the significance and prestige of the prize.
So, too, do the two men who set it up, Graham Sharpe of Hill's and the founder of Sportspages, John Gaustad, who still chairs the judging panel. When they hand over the cheque to the winning author on Monday they can be proud of the impact their initiative has made. Having endowed Dan Topolski and Patrick Robinson with £500 apiece for True Blue back in 1989, they will mark the award's anniversary by giving this year's victor £20,000. Given that the sales of the chosen book usually treble once it gets the bookmakers' laurels on its cover, winning the award can now be a life-changing phenomenon for a writer, which is surely the best result a literary prize can achieve.
In recent years it has been attacked for its routine shortlists, which is traditionally a sign of how established an award has become. Any system used to cull the best six books from several hundred submissions is bound to lead to some compromise between the judges.
Think of anything picked by a panel and the Brummie sage Barry Taylor, from Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, comes to mind. Warning of the perils of preferential voting when a ballot decreed the Düsseldorf hut had to be painted yellow despite no one having it as their first choice colour, he chirped: "That's democracy, Dennis. Everybody gets what nobody wants."
But I don't think that applies here, nor that the charge of conservatism stands up. Look at the range of subjects that have won - aikido, rowing, rugby, golf, cycling as well as the multiple winners, football, boxing and cricket - and it doesn't seem hidebound to me.
Would Angry White Pyjamas or something with a title like A Social History of English Cricket - truly a wolf in sheep's clothing - have got a sniff at the rival British Sports Book Awards?
Paul Kimmage, Don McRae of this parish, the only double winner, and Nick Hornby might have prominent careers now but they won with their first books. They weren't shunted off into a "new author" category and given a pat on the head. That is a testament to the award's integrity, as is the fact that, despite its sponsor, only one racing book, Seabiscuit, has swept the bookies' jackpot. "We have brought some damn good books, many of them outstanding, to the attention of the book-buying public," says Gaustad. They have certainly had more hits than misses.
Sure, there have been omissions. Harry Pearson should have won for The Far Corner in 1995 and I still don't understand how Pete Davies's All Played Out was left off the shortlist in 1991. That account of England at Italia 90 was the first football book in years not to suffer by comparison with The Football Man and Only a Game. Simon Inglis's Football Grounds of Britain preceded the award but it, too, was a shining light in football's literary wilderness years and deserves an accolade for proving that there was a market for something more substantial than retreads of Jimmy Greaves's anecdotes.
A personal choice would have been Nick Tosches' Night Train in 2000, which might have been better served had it kept its far more evocative US title, The Devil and Sonny Liston. Lance Armstrong won that year and, though I didn't care for it, a vast readership testified that it was "inspirational".
It is a pity they have not marked the anniversary by electing a winner of winners but I suppose Fever Pitch would have been such a shoo-in that it would have been a cakewalk.
If ever a book's first line, "It's in there all the time, looking for a way out", had me at hello, it was that one. It is trendy to give it a kicking now but at the time it was deservedly acclaimed. It must have been good if it passed The Absolute Game test, a brilliant fanzine with a magnificently vitriolic book reviewer. He had no need to swallow a bromide before recommending it as "passionate, thought-provoking and perceptive".
Blaming the book for its legion of anaemic imitators is like holding The Who responsible for The Merton Parkas. Whoever wins on Monday is joining an august line with Hornby at its head.
