Former sports agent Luchs uncovers the thinly veiled corruption within big-time college football, as agents do whatever it takes to get stars to the NFL.
In the multibillion-dollar college-sports industry, the agent who is able to befriend the star player, become his “confidant, advisor, and shrink,” will probably end up his agent when he turns pro. This is what Luchs accomplished fairly well for 18 years. Contacting a player early in his college career is illegal, as is paying him money, providing him a car or a condo, paying for vacation trips and covering up his transgressions. As a player neared the NFL draft, Luchs would cook the data on his strength and conditioning, provide him with answers to the Wonderlic IQ test and hire NFL coaches to privately train the young player. The author contends that the majority of sports agents are in on it. College coaches funnel their players to their own agents, sports gurus tout particular players for particular agents and governing agencies like the NCAA and the NFL Players Association turn a blind eye to the corruption all around them. Many of Luchs’ claims will be familiar to sports aficionados, but his book is unique in two ways: He names names, and he writes (assisted by co-author Dale) with humor, honesty and, for a sports agent, a reasonable amount of humility. He changed from a young boy fascinated by sports to a hustler without rules, and in the end found it all “soul-eating”—so he eventually got out. Can big-time sports, especially football, be reformed? Luchs says it can, but not easily. Fundamental changes must occur, including sharing with the players the billions that colleges make off them. A troubling, entertaining indictment of the hypocrisy of big-time sports.
Pub Date: April 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-60819-720-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2012
In these insightfully droll essays, Gierach shows us how fishing offers plenty of time to think things over.
The latest collection of interrelated essays by the veteran fishing writer.
As in his previous books—from The View From Rat Lake through All Fishermen Are Liars—Gierach hones in on the ups and downs of fishing, and those looking for how-to tips will find plenty here on rods, flies, guides, streams, and pretty much everything else that informs the fishing life. It is the everything else that has earned Gierach the following of fellow writers and legions of readers who may not even fish but are drawn to his musings on community, culture, the natural world, and the seasons of life. In one representatively poetic passage, he writes, “it was a chilly fall afternoon with the leaves changing, the current whispering, and a pale moon in a daytime sky. The river seemed inscrutable, but alive with possibility.” Gierach writes about both patience and process, and he describes the long spells between catches as the fisherman’s equivalent of writer’s block. Even when catching fish is the point, it almost seems beside the point (anglers will understand that sentiment): At the end of one essay, he writes, “I was cold, bored, hungry, and fishless, but there was still nowhere else I’d have rather been—something anyone who fishes will understand.” Most readers will be profoundly moved by the meditation on mortality within the blandly titled “Up in Michigan,” a character study of a man dying of cancer. Though the author had known and been fishing with him for three decades, his reticence kept anyone from knowing him too well. Still, writes Gierach, “I came to think of [his] glancing pronouncements as Michigan haiku: brief, no more than obliquely revealing, and oddly beautiful.” Ultimately, the man was focused on settling accounts, getting in one last fishing trip, and then planning to “sit in the sun and think things over until it’s time for hospice.”
In these insightfully droll essays, Gierach shows us how fishing offers plenty of time to think things over.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6858-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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A thoughtful and compelling book following the members of a single recruiting class at Penn State's distinguished football program through their college gridiron careers. By the end of their four (and in some cases five) years of college football, the group of 28 young men who had entered the school in August 1988 were reduced to a near-handful by injuries, academic shortcomings, transfers, and graduation. They had come to the small town of State College to play for one of the sport's fabled coaches, Joe Paterno, a man with a reputation for combining coaching excellence with a commitment to academic and ethical integrity. Denlinger, a Penn State alumnus who covers college football for the Washington Post, found that reputation for the most part merited. However, this is neither a bronzing of Paterno nor a whitewash of college sports. Given the trajectories of the young men he covered, that would be impossible. As Denlinger proves, college football is a bruisingly brutal sport, and several of the students he followed found their careers ended abruptly by torn-up knees, battered backs, and a variety of fractures large and small. About midway through the book, Denlinger observes, ``All college football players fall into two categories: The haves and the have-nots.'' To his credit, much of his book focuses on the latter group—from a student manager who improbably became the team's long snapper to the kids who never got much playing time. Finally, he closes by suggesting two major changes in college football: the elimination of artificial playing surfaces and a severe cutback in scholarships. Denlinger captures in equal parts the frustrating pain and the adrenaline-pumping thrill of playing college football at the highest level.
Pub Date: Sept. 23, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-11436-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
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