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Whether the phrase is that records are "made to be broken" or that a particular record "will last forever," rarely does a sports fan go an entire day without reading a newspaper, listening to the radio, watching television, surfing the internet or merely engaging in a conversation without being exposed to one phrase or the other.

Although the durability of sports records is a popular topic, never has it been researched or analyzed in such a thorough and engaging manner than in Shatterproof: The 100 Most Unbreakable Records in Sports and Why.

Author Richard Sowers chronicles the 100 most unbreakable records in sports in order and includes numerous others as honorable-mention selections. Shatterproof also carefully explains why many of the most impressive and famous records are not included, under what circumstances and conditions some of the records that were included eventually could prove vulnerable and why many others should endure beyond the lifetimes of even the youngest readers.

Sowers, a sportswriter for two Virginia newspapers before he spent five years as sports editor of North Carolina's largest afternoon newspaper, four years with the Louisville Courier-Journal and eight years as news editor of The Sporting News, is perhaps uniquely qualified for the task of selecting and chronicling the 100 most unbreakable records in sports in order. The author of The Complete Statistical History of Stock-Car Racing, Stock-Car Racing Lives and The Abstract Primer of Thoroughbred Racing has covered college and pro basketball, college and pro football, baseball, golf, tennis, boxing and track & field extensively in addition to auto racing and horse racing.

"Perhaps the toughest part of writing the book was to compare not only the records in one sport with those in another, but to compare and rate the relative durability of records that were set in the course of a career, a competitive season, a single event or consecutively as a streak," Sowers said. "I wrote far more than 100 chapters because I discovered that I had to erase any pre-conceived notions I may have had and not only evaluate the records carefully, but make the arguments for, or against, each record's durability before I could rank them properly and, of course, eliminate many from consideration."

Thirty-nine of the 100 most unbreakable records in sports are career records, 17 were set in a season and/or calendar year, 13 in a single event, 30 as consecutive streaks and another stands as both a career milestone and a streak.

Sports' 100 most Shatterproof records are held by 55 male and eight female athletes, two coaches and/or managers and 13 teams. One athlete owns seven of the most unbreakable records, two others have four, another two possess three and four claim two each. One team has three records, another has two, and in one case two teams combined to set a record. And 17 of the 100 most invincible records in sports are held by athletes born outside of the United States.

Baseball accounts for 33 of the 100 most unbreakable records in sports, followed by college basketball (10), college football (8), pro football (8), ice hockey (8), pro basketball (6), golf (6), track & field (5), auto racing (4), boxing (2), tennis (2), horse racing (2), swimming & diving (2), figure skating (1), skiing (1), triathlon (1) and archery (1).