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
New tales and golden oldies, all told with a touch of spicy mustard.
Sportswriter Lally (co-author, Long Balls, No Strikes, 1998, etc.) skillfully weaves together eyewitness accounts of famous moments in Yankee history.
World Series stories form the largest part of the narrative. Yankee shortstop Frank Crosetti and Cub third baseman Woody English witnessed Babe Ruth’s “called” shot against the Cubs in the 1933 Series: Surviving film is unclear as to whether Babe pointed to center field before hitting a home run there. English tells why Babe was angry with the Chicago team; “Crow” tells what he saw and how Babe shrewdly embellished the incident. Lou Gehrig’s rapid deterioration in health in 1939 stunned friends like Elden Auker, whose playful wrestling with the Iron Horse caused Gehrig real pain. Fans, who love or hate the Bronx Bombers for always getting the best players, will be amused to see how Tommy Heinrich slipped out of the Cleveland organization and joined the Yanks in 1937. In the ’50s, the Yankees recruited the best young talent for their minor leagues, before an equitable draft system was instituted in 1965. Casey Stengel led the team to 10 World Series in 12 years, and Lally focuses on the exciting final one against the Pirates in 1960. Jim Coates, Bobby Richardson, and Ralph Terry remain perplexed by Casey’s decision to start Art Ditmar in Game One instead of ace Whitey Ford; they suggest that Casey was showing signs of senility. Willie Randolph, Roy White, and Oscar Gamble paint a flattering portrait of hard-nosed manager Billy Martin, who improved any team he led. Clutch homerun hitters—Chambliss in ’76, Reggie Jackson in ’77, and Bucky Dent in ’78—recall their dramatic blasts. Lally wraps up with the 2000 Subway Series, and 14 Yankees and 8 Mets review the big moments (Clemens vs. Piazza, Jeter’s homeruns) of the Fall Classic that the Yanks won 4–1.
New tales and golden oldies, all told with a touch of spicy mustard.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60895-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A wryly spun tale of waning warriors.
Amusing and poignant journal of the author’s first-ever season in organized football—at age 39.
The adventure began in 2004, when St. Amant, a Division III soccer player back in college, got talked into a season tryout as a kicker with the Boston Panthers in the semi-pro Eastern Football League. The lily-white, five-foot-eight, 160-pound author found himself on a chewed-up high-school football field mingling with a bunch of African-American men, most of them a lot younger and a few of them nearly 200 pounds heavier. St. Amant hailed from Beacon Hill, one of Boston’s posh addresses; his teammates were from tough, predominantly black towns like Dorchester, Roxbury and Mattapan. Hoping to become the team’s first regular kicker (lacking one, the coach preferred two-point tries after every touchdown), the author was initially regarded almost as a mascot. Despite never having kicked a football in his life—and few balls of any kind since college—he gradually caught on, but head coach Pittman maintained a wary skepticism, forgoing field-goal tries for fourth-down Hail Mary plays as the Panthers went 2-2 early in the season. St. Amant’s candid portraits of his teammates, some of whom become his drinking buddies, lend insight into the life of the typical semi-pro player: a guy who might have made it in college and maybe even had a shot at the NFL, but who never got the breaks; battered and aging, he just can’t give up the game. The Panthers often beat themselves with careless play and needless penalties, but as St. Amant developed his leg, things improved and the team gelled. The Panthers made the playoffs, then blew the big one. But “the worst defeat of all,” declares the author, would have been living so close to his African-American peers and never meeting or playing with them.
A wryly spun tale of waning warriors.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-8675-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2006
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