An enjoyable, colorful look at the intersection of sports and politics.
A study of how the true characters of U.S. presidents have been revealed by the sports they played, watched, and followed.
The Oval Office can be a lonely place, and all presidents have sought to escape the pressure through sports, whether participating or watching. As CNN politics reporter Cillizza shows, it can also be a way of projecting an image of common-man virility. Eisenhower had played a variety of sports in his younger days, but when he was in the White House, he obsessively focused on golf, even setting up a putting green on the lawn. He also played a mean game of bridge. Kennedy played golf but used the touch-football games with his family as media props. Socially awkward, Nixon tried to compensate by memorizing statistics about football so he could make small talk. A peculiarity of Nixon is that he was a good bowler, and he even had lanes built in the White House basement (although he always bowled alone). Reagan was not a great sportsman while president, although he exercised vigorously and loved riding horses. George H.W. Bush played many sports well but was especially skilled at horseshoes. Clinton was a dedicated runner but later concentrated on golf. George W. Bush likewise pounded the pavement and even had a treadmill put onboard Air Force One. Obama is remembered for pickup games of basketball; like most presidents he showed himself to be hypercompetitive, even aggressive, when playing. He also took up bowling, using Nixon’s lanes. All this is good fun, but Cillizza cannot restrain himself when it comes to the chapter on Trump, which is dripping with snark (“it’s impossible to see where Trump ends and his golfing bullshit begins”). Though many of Trump’s actions deserve scorn, it’s a sour ending to an entertaining, good-natured read.
An enjoyable, colorful look at the intersection of sports and politics.Pub Date: April 18, 2023
ISBN: 9781538720608
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
Basketball fans will enjoy Pippen’s bird’s-eye view of some of the sport’s greatest contests.
The Chicago Bulls stalwart tells all—and then some.
Hall of Famer Pippen opens with a long complaint: Yes, he’s a legend, but he got short shrift in the ESPN documentary about Michael Jordan and the Bulls, The Last Dance. Given that Jordan emerges as someone not quite friend enough to qualify as a frenemy, even though teammates for many years, the maltreatment is understandable. This book, Pippen allows, is his retort to a man who “was determined to prove to the current generation of fans that he was larger-than-life during his day—and still larger than LeBron James, the player many consider his equal, if not superior.” Coming from a hardscrabble little town in Arkansas and playing for a small college, Pippen enjoyed an unlikely rise to NBA stardom. He played alongside and against some of the greats, of whom he writes appreciatively (even Jordan). Readers will gain insight into the lives of characters such as Dennis Rodman, who “possessed an unbelievable basketball IQ,” and into the behind-the-scenes work that led to the Bulls dynasty, which ended only because, Pippen charges, the team’s management was so inept. Looking back on his early years, Pippen advocates paying college athletes. “Don’t give me any of that holier-than-thou student-athlete nonsense,” he writes. “These young men—and women—are athletes first, not students, and make up the labor that generates fortunes for their schools. They are, for lack of a better term, slaves.” The author also writes evenhandedly of the world outside basketball: “No matter how many championships I have won, and millions I have earned, I never forget the color of my skin and that some people in this world hate me just because of that.” Overall, the memoir is closely observed and uncommonly modest, given Pippen’s many successes, and it moves as swiftly as a playoff game.
Basketball fans will enjoy Pippen’s bird’s-eye view of some of the sport’s greatest contests.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982165-19-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
Smart, engaging sportswriting—good reading for organization builders as well as Pats fans.
Prolific writer Benedict has long blended two interests—sports and business—and the Patriots are emblematic of both. Founded in 1959 as the Boston Patriots, the team built a strategic home field between that city and Providence. When original owner Billy Sullivan sold the flailing team in 1988, it was $126 million in the hole, a condition so dire that “Sullivan had to beg the NFL to release emergency funds so he could pay his players.” Victor Kiam, the razor magnate, bought the long since renamed New England Patriots, but rival Robert Kraft bought first the parking lots and then the stadium—and “it rankled Kiam that he bore all the risk as the owner of the team but virtually all of the revenue that the team generated went to Kraft.” Check and mate. Kraft finally took over the team in 1994. Kraft inherited coach Bill Parcells, who in turn brought in star quarterback Drew Bledsoe, “the Patriots’ most prized player.” However, as the book’s nimbly constructed opening recounts, in 2001, Bledsoe got smeared in a hit “so violent that players along the Patriots sideline compared the sound of the collision to a car crash.” After that, it was backup Tom Brady’s team. Gridiron nerds will debate whether Brady is the greatest QB and Bill Belichick the greatest coach the game has ever known, but certainly they’ve had their share of controversy. The infamous “Deflategate” incident of 2015 takes up plenty of space in the late pages of the narrative, and depending on how you read between the lines, Brady was either an accomplice or an unwitting beneficiary. Still, as the author writes, by that point Brady “had started in 223 straight regular-season games,” an enviable record on a team that itself has racked up impressive stats.
Smart, engaging sportswriting—good reading for organization builders as well as Pats fans.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982134-10-5
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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