Apple Books gave Dawn Staley a fresh pop-culture spotlight on Aug. 7 when it put her memoir, Uncommon Favor, on a Ted Lasso favorites list. The move tied a book released in May 2025 to a TV character whose name carries weight far beyond sports readers.
That connection matters because Ted Lasso is the star of the show played by Jason Sudeikis, and the fourth season premiered just two days earlier, on Aug. 5, after shifting the series’ focus from men’s soccer to women’s soccer. For Staley, whose memoir is titled Uncommon Favor: Basketball, North Philly, My Mother and Life Lessons I learned from All Three, the placement puts her story in front of viewers who may have come looking for the show and left with a basketball book.
Apple Books framed the pick with a praise-heavy graphic that called Staley a legendary NCAA coach, former WNBA player and all-around bada**, and said the book shows readers how to handle setbacks and hiccups with a game face strong enough to knock them right off the court. That is a tidy fit for a memoir built around a coach whose life story is rooted in basketball and discipline, even if the choice still lands as a surprising crossover between a sports title and a scripted series.
There is also history behind the pairing. Sudeikis has attended college and WNBA games as a women’s basketball fan, was in Cleveland in 2024 when the Gamecocks and Staley won their third national championship, and later turned up on July 16 wearing a South Carolina women’s basketball hoodie made by Playa Society at Fanatics Fest in New York City. Staley and Sudeikis were both at the 2026 WNBA All-Star game in Chicago in July, but the available facts do not confirm whether they spoke there or met in person.
Staley did, however, make the next step plain on X. She thanked Sudeikis for reading Uncommon Favor and invited him to a Gamecocks game, turning a book-list mention into an open invitation. The unanswered part is not whether the memoir reached him — Apple Books has already shown that it did — but whether he shows up in COLUMBIA when South Carolina plays next.
