Owen's usual game is golf and, as might be expected from the author of The Walls Around Us (1991), this book displays his usual wit. Although he played as a teenager, Owen didn't rediscover his love of golf until he was 36 and a newly transplanted suburbanite. Now he even dreams about golf. This volume essentially is a collection of his magazine pieces on the game (originally published in places as various as Golf Digest and the New Yorker), held together loosely by the subject matter and his loopily funny perspective on it. Over the course of the book, Owen goes to golf school, where he falls in love with a variety of high-tech gadgets; makes the obligatory pilgrimage to Scotland's fabled courses; profiles inventor and club manufacturer Karsten Solheim; plays in the Disney Classic pro-am; reports on the dramatic 1993 Ryder Cup competition; and relates other golfing adventures. Owen is hilariously candid about his own shortcomings as a golfer (although judging from the scores he records as the book goes on, his game can't be too shabby) and about his fascination with the paraphernalia of the sport, from bag tags and golf towels to a wild variety of instructional gimmicks. He is suitably respectful of the game's history and lore without getting sappy about it. As he notes in one typical passage, ``To play the classic Scottish courses is to glimpse the logic that shaped the game we play today. Plus, the beers are bigger and you get to drive on the left side of the road.'' The book's only disappointment is the Ryder Cup piece, which adds little to the literature already accumulating around that contest. Although readers who play will get more out of it, even non- golfers will find much to amuse them in this excellent collection. (Author tour)
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-41487-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
The former internist for the NFL's Los Angeles Raiders tells it like it is in this engaging muckraker's guide to the business of pro football. For over 30 years, the Raiders have been the outlaws of their sport. Huizenga, who was with the team from 1983 to 1990, chronicles how this game devours its young. The NFL proudly boasts that football features the biggest, fastest, and toughest athletes in the world. But, according to Huizenga, many players are emotionally immature, overgrown galoots who gladly abuse themselves by ingesting performance-enhancing and painkilling drugs while ignoring the obvious consequences—a fact underscored by offensive linemen Charley Hannah's assertion, made to Huizenga and some teammates over dinner one night: ``We're making too much money, we're having too much of a good time. They're going to have to drag me off the freaking field kicking and screaming.'' Much of Huizenga's memoir revolves around his relationships with players, including stars Marcus Allen (whose unwillingness to risk serious injury landed him in team owner Al Davis's doghouse), the late Lyle Alzado (one of the game's most notorious steroid abusers), and Bo Jackson (who sustained an injury that ended his football career and now plays baseball for the California Angels). However, the most inflammatory passages are reserved for Huizenga's many clashes with Davis and his incompetent team orthopedist, Dr. Robert Rosenfeld, whose frequent dismissal of potentially crippling injuries provides the book's title. Huizenga illustrates why Davis is a pariah among the NFL's owners; his mantra, ``Just win, baby,'' embodies his crass indifference to players' physical and emotional pain. While occasionally melodramatic, Huizenga keeps his vituperation in check, often allowing Davis's appalling actions to speak for themselves. Although many of Huizenga's revelations are old news, juicy gossip about the Raiders always gets tongues wagging. Fans looking for something to pass the time between autumn Sundays could do a lot worse than read this no-punches-pulled tell- all. (First printing of 60,000; author tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-11353-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
Expanding the Harper's piece that won a National Magazine Award, Frey deepens his devastating indictment of big-time college basketball's recruiting circus and the long shot at redemption it offers four talented New York City high school players. The flirtations of college coaches who promise TV exposure and a shot at the NBA might seem merely pathetic: One coach makes his play with inept card tricks; another signs a fawning letter to a recruit ``Health, Happine$$ and Hundred$.'' But for the young men Frey follows through their senior year at Abraham Lincoln High School, home is the projects of Coney Island, an end of the line literally, because it's a subway terminus, and metaphorically, because young black men seeking their fortunes have two options: drug-dealing or basketball. In a neighborhood where gang members rain beer bottles and taunts on players on the court and where turf wars lend an air of necessity to the style of basketball called ``run-and-gun,'' the father-figure pitches and broken promises of college coaches (many of whom have six-figure salaries and million- dollar endorsement deals with sneaker companies) are nothing less than abject. Harper's contributing editor Frey dishes the inside dope—the slave-market atmosphere of summer basketball camps, the corrupting influence of companies like Nike, the winks and nods with which coaches skirt the ``byzantine'' NCAA recruiting rules. And he does it without self-righteousness, simply letting coaches skewer themselves. Eventually the NCAA (which fares no better under Frey's blistering scrutiny) banned him from recruiting sessions. But what gives the book its powerful emotional punch is the bond between the players and the community of family, fans, and local coaches who support them—and between Frey and the kids. He captures—in lean, lyrical prose—the psychological drama and physical beauty of the game, and the joy it brings those who play it and see it played at its best. A heartbreaking, gritty piece of work.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-395-59770-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
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