A beloved career college football coach reflects back on his coaching years in this endearing and modest autobiography. For 32 years, Cozza served as Yale’s football coach: From 1965 to 1996, his overall record was a .599 (179 wins, 119 losses, and 5 ties), with four championships and five co-championships. But although key games and rivalries are retold in detailed fashion, what comes out most in True Blue, co-written with Odermatt, a former newspaper reporter, columnist, and editor, is Coach Cozza’s appreciation for and commitment to his players. Cozza writes lovingly of his former players, including 14 who ended up in the NFL (such as Calvin Hill, Gary Fencik, John Spagnola, Dick Jauron), others now famous in other endeavors (Stone Phillips, Jack Ford), but most of whom found fame only in their college football years. Stories of young men who played hurt, such as Kelly Ryan and Jon Reese, are retold in a folkloric, inspiring way. Cozza, who turned down the position of athletic director in 1976 to remain the football coach, also shares his opinions on many issues such as the antiwar demonstrations of the 1960s and the restriction of competition. Most significantly, Cozza writes about the decline of Yale football, citing many factors including: the change from NCAA Division I-A to Division I-AA; the halving of male enrollment at the school due to coeducation; the escalating cost of education at Yale, which offers no athletic or full-ride merit scholarships; recruiting excesses and abuses that were a result of the proliferation of TV money; the dropping of Ivy League games from network telecasts; and an unresponsive admissions office. A book that will make all Yalies and Ivy League football lovers a little nostalgic. Coach Cozza’s story and his modest and paternal way of developing student-athletes can also serve as a blueprint for all college coaches.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-300-08099-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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