A fun, frenetic memoir of one of the more volatile college gridiron campaigns in recent memory.
Attention college-football fanatics: If you couldn’t find your way to either the Golden Dome in South Bend or the Swamp in Gainesville last season, never fear, Austin Murphy (How Tough Could It Be?: The Trials and Errors of a Sportswriter Turned Stay-at-Home Dad, 2004, etc.) is here.
College football always has its share of soap-operatic story lines, but the 2006-07 season was about as gripping as it gets. It had enigmatic Coach Urban Meyer overseeing the University of Florida juggernaut, Notre Dame quarterback/golden boy Brady Quinn going through a roller-coaster senior year and the University of Southern California Trojans trying to pick up the pieces in their first post–Reggie Bush/Matt Leinart season. For these college football powers, the year had a compelling natural arc, making their parallel journeys a natural subject for a book-length memoir from an intrepid, fly-on-the-wall reporter. Enter Murphy. Once referred to by Dallas Cowboys behemoth Nate Newton as “that preppy motherf***** from Sports Illustrated,” Murphy wears his love for the sport on his sleeve (or, in this case, on the page). Rather than merely cover the season, he takes a put-the-author-into-the-story tack, a tricky approach that succeeds thanks primarily to his unabashed enthusiasm, unpretentiousness and insider access. Nothing is taken too seriously, which is exactly the way it should be; after all, it’s just a bunch of kids playing ball. The prose is loose, the reportage at times flat-out comedic—think Frank Deford meets Nick Bakay. Murphy also makes the wise choice to periodically step away from college football, reporting on Terrell Owens’s suicide attempt, professional golfers and his fellow journalists. All of which is why you don’t have to be a Trojan, or a Gator, or a Buckeye or even a college football aficionado to appreciate this book—you just have to be a sports fan.
A fun, frenetic memoir of one of the more volatile college gridiron campaigns in recent memory.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-137577-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
New tales and golden oldies, all told with a touch of spicy mustard.
Sportswriter Lally (co-author, Long Balls, No Strikes, 1998, etc.) skillfully weaves together eyewitness accounts of famous moments in Yankee history.
World Series stories form the largest part of the narrative. Yankee shortstop Frank Crosetti and Cub third baseman Woody English witnessed Babe Ruth’s “called” shot against the Cubs in the 1933 Series: Surviving film is unclear as to whether Babe pointed to center field before hitting a home run there. English tells why Babe was angry with the Chicago team; “Crow” tells what he saw and how Babe shrewdly embellished the incident. Lou Gehrig’s rapid deterioration in health in 1939 stunned friends like Elden Auker, whose playful wrestling with the Iron Horse caused Gehrig real pain. Fans, who love or hate the Bronx Bombers for always getting the best players, will be amused to see how Tommy Heinrich slipped out of the Cleveland organization and joined the Yanks in 1937. In the ’50s, the Yankees recruited the best young talent for their minor leagues, before an equitable draft system was instituted in 1965. Casey Stengel led the team to 10 World Series in 12 years, and Lally focuses on the exciting final one against the Pirates in 1960. Jim Coates, Bobby Richardson, and Ralph Terry remain perplexed by Casey’s decision to start Art Ditmar in Game One instead of ace Whitey Ford; they suggest that Casey was showing signs of senility. Willie Randolph, Roy White, and Oscar Gamble paint a flattering portrait of hard-nosed manager Billy Martin, who improved any team he led. Clutch homerun hitters—Chambliss in ’76, Reggie Jackson in ’77, and Bucky Dent in ’78—recall their dramatic blasts. Lally wraps up with the 2000 Subway Series, and 14 Yankees and 8 Mets review the big moments (Clemens vs. Piazza, Jeter’s homeruns) of the Fall Classic that the Yanks won 4–1.
New tales and golden oldies, all told with a touch of spicy mustard.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60895-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Surely enjoyable for a readership among academy grads and fans of sports history. Of less service as a window onto WWII.
Are we running out of WWII stories?
Certainly some of the premises are getting a little thin, and this is a case in point. The setup is just right for Sports Illustrated reporter Anderson (The Proving Ground, 2001, etc.): On November 29, 1941, the Army-Navy game proved to be one of the most thrilling matches ever waged between Annapolis and West Point, with 100,000 spectators (including Eleanor Roosevelt) in the stands. By the end of the game, writes Anderson, “the undermanned Cadet players had fought as hard as Vikings, but the Midshipmen prevailed 14–6.” Nine days later the US was at war with the Axis, and Anderson’s Rockwellian evocations of prewar military life (“Just the name of the naval academy sounded glamorous to him; it conveyed some magical faraway place where everyone was smart and strong”) give way to the hard realities of combat in episodes starring four of the game’s players, now commissioned officers. Anderson’s account of the game itself is first-class, and the lessons to be drawn vis-à-vis football and war will be familiar to anyone who’s been inside a locker room: “We were officers in the war,” one officer recalls, “but really, we were just kids in our early twenties. But most of us were put in charge of hundreds of soldiers. It’s much easier to deal with that kind of responsibility once you’ve had the experience of playing football in front of 100,000 people.” Anderson’s war tales are pretty well done, too, though there’s a been-there-done-that quality that will make some readers wish he had done a Seabiscuit and stuck to the game and others of its kind during the war years—as he notes, and most interestingly, the 1944 bout alone raised $58 million in war bonds, while for other reasons “never in the history of the Army-Navy game had the two service academies played each other with so much on the line.”
Surely enjoyable for a readership among academy grads and fans of sports history. Of less service as a window onto WWII.Pub Date: Dec. 12, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-30887-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
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