A savvy look at the intense preparations for a football game that affects the entire state of Alabama. (16 pp. b&w...
Two sportswriters cover the exciting buildup to the 2000 Iron Bowl, a college football grudge match between the Univ. of Alabama and Auburn Univ.
Maisel (Sports Illustrated) spent game week in Tuscaloosa with Alabama’s Crimson Tide while Whiteside (USA Today) stayed in Auburn with the Tigers. Since the 1800s, Alabama, a state school, has condescended to Auburn, with its “land grant” status and agricultural tradition; their rivalry for the Iron Bowl, a state tradition since1893, is judged the most intense in the country by many sports announcers. The Tigers accept their anachronistic underdog status and use it to prepare. Maisel finds a gloomy atmosphere in Tuscaloosa. With a 3-7 record, Coach Dubose and his staff have been given notice, and a recruiting scandal threatens the program’s future. Coaches speak bluntly about the poor leadership of the seniors and the failures of highly touted recruits. Fans, who had expected a national championship, vehemently express their disappointment. Across the state, Tommy Tuberville savors his first winning season at Auburn; with an 8-2 record and a big win over Georgia, he and his staff receive raises during game week. Success has come with running back Rudi Johnson, a junior-college transfer, whose durability and selflessness inspire his teammates and whose gift of a prized game ball to a souvenir-hunting teenager has made him beloved in the community. (An interesting subplot concerning Rudi, his academic advisor, and a paper due on Friday disappointingly vanishes without resolution.) For all the thousands of hours the coaches and players spend watching videotape, Alabama's strategy comes down to stopping Rudi on defense and passing the ball on offense. Local television stations promise viewers that any news from the Florida presidential vote-count will not interrupt the game telecast. On Saturday in Tuscaloosa, no ticketholder stays home because of a massive sleet storm.
A savvy look at the intense preparations for a football game that affects the entire state of Alabama. (16 pp. b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-019800-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
A new convert to the game of football, Oppenheimer (Private Demons, 1988) decided to observe, record, and analyze the daily activity of her son's 1988 Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School team. Like the team's season, the results are mixed. Toby, senior offensive lineman in only his second year, didn't like the idea: ``What seventeen-year-old wants his mother hanging around a locker room?'' The BCC Barons and head coach Pete White, meanwhile, felt there was reason for optimism despite going 5-5 in 1987, their best record in years. ``Win 8 in '88 and go to state!'' was the battle cry. The talent at this ethnically diverse, affluent suburban school included a 300-lb. center, a 5'-6'' Korean linebacker, a swift Jamaican running back, and an assortment of blacks, Asians, and white kids more inclined toward soccer. It wasn't always a comfortable mix. As Oppenheimer follows their progress, she scrutinizes their attitudes toward one another and the coaches, toward winning and losing, their sex lives, and their use of drugs and alcohol. Fighting off her own anxieties—``Zen and the art of football parenting''—about her son, she rarely inserts herself in the picture but allows the boys to speak in their own, often inarticulate, tiresome way: But I'm, like, okay, so I go, and he goes.... There's a disappointing opening game; a racist coach (``black kids...were more arrogant, tougher, meaner''); a bitter, injury-rife, one-point loss to rival Einstein; the boys' cockiness following the homecoming victory; and, finally, the season-ending trouncing at the hands of ``mammoth, untouchable, abandon-all-hope'' Gaithersburg. The annual banquet, despite the 4-6 record, would toast individual achievements and look toward next year. At times self-conscious and shrill (the locker room, ``a place for the ancient rites of grabass'') and at other times perceptive, but Oppenheimer never quite puts it all together. Rather like missing the point after.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-671-68754-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1991
An engaging journey through, as poet Merrill puts it, ``the enchanted lands of soccer.'' When, in 1990, the US team qualified for the World Cup for the first time in 40 years, Merrill (an avid amateur soccer player) followed the team through preliminary games stateside and then to Italy for the month-long tournament. The Americans were 500-1 underdogs, given little chance to do more than make a brave showing, especially with Bob Gansler at the helm, a coach so conservative and defense-oriented that his own players had sworn to scrap his game plan. In the opening game, Merrill says, Czechoslovakia ``outclassed'' the US in ``skill, speed, strength, tactics, and creativity,'' but in the second game—largely through the play of New Jersey goalie Tony Meola—the Americans scored a moral victory against heavily favored Italy, to whom they lost by only one goal. The third game, though, against Austria, was an ugly loss marred by ineptness and fighting. As Merrill progresses through the World Cup play (finally won by West Germany in a brutal match against defending champion Argentina, signaling the imminent downfall of superstar player Diego Maradona, whose drug and prostitution connections would bring him to disgrace and banishment), he offers lovely and knowing passages on the art, architecture, and ambience of Italy's cities and provides deep historical background and understanding of the game of soccer itself. Of particular interest are his insights into why ``the world's most popular game'' has never caught on in sports-mad America. The rarity of goals, Merrill contends, has ``doomed'' soccer in a country ``hooked on instant gratification'': Americans want to see lots of scoring but, ``like poetry and jazz, soccer is a subtle art, a game of nuance.'' An intelligent and literate work that could broaden American interest in soccer in time for our 1994 hosting—for the first time ever—of the World Cup.
Pub Date: Nov. 10, 1993
ISBN: 0-8050-2771-8
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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