A must-read for Packer and Lombardi fans, and will interest most NFL fans as well.
The exciting chronicle of Vince Lombardi’s pivotal first season as head coach of the Green Bay Packers.
Former Baltimore Sun sports columnist Eisenberg (The Great Match Race: When North Met South in America’s First Sports Spectacle, 2006, etc.) looks back at 1959, a year that witnessed one of the more momentous turnarounds in NFL history. In his first season as a head coach, Lombardi took the one of the worst football teams ever and led it to its first winning season in more than a decade. Having sunk to 1-10-1 under Scooter McLean the year before, the 1959 Packers were expected to win no more than three or four games, but Lombardi righted the ship, steering them to a 7-5 record that year and initiating their run to six championships during his nine-year tenure as head coach. How the stout, brash Brooklyn native was able to transform a directionless assemblage of players into a gridiron behemoth is as much the subject of Eisenberg’s exhaustively researched account as his thrilling description of each game. Relying on period articles and interviews with key players from the Lombardi dynasty, the author convincingly shows that the coach’s fierce work ethic, militaristic-style training camps, perfectionist tendencies, belief in fitness and ability to instill confidence in his players were as central to the team’s metamorphosis as his brilliance as a game-play strategist. Though his “sarcastic, critical” coaching style didn’t always endear him to the players, when they saw the results of his simple, run-centered offense and powerful zone defense, he soon won their trust.
A must-read for Packer and Lombardi fans, and will interest most NFL fans as well.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-618-90499-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
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
Bill, Hillary, and Al? Nope—Boston Globe sportswriter May means big as in BIG. His three are the towering trees of the Boston Celtics: Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, and Robert Parish, whose lives and baskets are cheered to the rafters in this gung- ho hoop-scoop. May has a hot topic here since, as he shouts more than once, the tremendous trio did indeed make up ``the greatest frontcourt in the history of basketball.'' Also the longest-lived, dribbling together for nearly a decade, snaring heaps of championships along the way. As a portraitist, May hits three-pointers every time. Bird: the hick from French Lick, Indiana; the human basketball machine; winner of three consecutive MVPs; the best team player in history and, except for Michael Jordan, the best, period. McHale: laid-back, undervalued, dribbling and driving with breathtaking grace but always in Bird's shadow. Parish: the silent one, indestructible and inexorable, still on the courts in 1993, now the oldest player in the league. As a historian, however, May slows the game to a snail's pace as he reports in endless nit-picking detail about the trio's high-school days, scouting reports, signings, and contract hassles. Things speed up when the guys hit the NBA and tear up the court, blowing away archrivals Philadelphia and Los Angeles and—in the 1985-6 season, when they were 40-1 at the Boston Garden—reaching an apex of basketball harmonics never seen before or since, and making a strong claim to being the best team ever assembled in any sport. ``If I could, I would go back and play that year every year for the rest of my life,'' says McHale with an intensity that readers, egged on by May's partisanship, will likely echo. Not as thrilling as a Bird-McHale-Parish charge to the basket, but good enough for those who never saw—or who want to recapture—the real thing. (Eight pages of b&w photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-79955-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1993
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