I KNOW A FOOTBALL PLAYER

Whether a professional football player actually qualifies as a community helper is debatable, but there's no debating the unhelpfulness of the primerish illustrations, which not only fail to catch the game's color and excitement, but make the supposed big league players look like highschool boys and portray their young friend so inconsistently that he looks five years-old in one picture and twelve in the next. The visit to the pro team's practice session -- where the unnamed boy learns the rules of the game, sees the inside of a locker room and tries the 100 yard dash, grid course and kicking drills along with the real players -- is moderately informative. However, any young fan worth his salt would want to know the name of Jim's team and would resent both the vaguely fictionalized framework and the drab pictures.