A knowledgeable, entertaining account of a sport’s seemingly unstoppable growth.
The league that’s too big to fail.
Football diehards and casual fans alike will find plenty of interest in this dexterous blend of analysis, character study, and behind-the-scenes color. The New York Times’ Belson opens with a stunning fact: “Seven players from the 2001 New England Patriots”—Tom Brady’s first Super Bowl season—“died before they passed fifty years old.” The long-term impact of the game’s violence causes public relations nightmares for the NFL, but as Belson shows, Patriots’ owner Kraft, Dallas Cowboys’ owner Jones, and league commissioner Goodell have become adept at weathering scandal while generating ever-greater revenue. “Social chameleon” Kraft and Jones, who employed his “haphazard speaking style” when likening negotiations with the players’ union to an owl and a chicken having sex, shared a goal. “The league’s two most powerful owners” were “desperate” to settle big debts incurred when buying their teams, Belson writes. Jones built a showcase stadium and aggressively sold marketing rights, urging other owners to follow. Kraft, “the closer” in a pivotal labor deal with players, also cleaned up messes. After the league botched its reaction to player protests about police violence against Black people, Kraft burnished the NFL’s image by forging a high-profile partnership with Jay-Z. “Once again,” Belson writes, the league fixed “a crisis by throwing its money and marketing muscle around.” The NFL’s cash grabs can be brazen. One stadium has been renamed eight times by a parade of companies that bought the rights. By 2027, the league could meet Goodell’s annual revenue goal of $25 billion. Run by self-styled free marketeers, the NFL resembles “a socialist collective,” with TV deals guaranteeing each owner $400 million a year. Alongside user-friendly financial reporting, Belson shares funny anecdotes about owner pettiness, vanity, and arrogance.
A knowledgeable, entertaining account of a sport’s seemingly unstoppable growth.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781538772553
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
Basketball fans will enjoy Pippen’s bird’s-eye view of some of the sport’s greatest contests.
The Chicago Bulls stalwart tells all—and then some.
Hall of Famer Pippen opens with a long complaint: Yes, he’s a legend, but he got short shrift in the ESPN documentary about Michael Jordan and the Bulls, The Last Dance. Given that Jordan emerges as someone not quite friend enough to qualify as a frenemy, even though teammates for many years, the maltreatment is understandable. This book, Pippen allows, is his retort to a man who “was determined to prove to the current generation of fans that he was larger-than-life during his day—and still larger than LeBron James, the player many consider his equal, if not superior.” Coming from a hardscrabble little town in Arkansas and playing for a small college, Pippen enjoyed an unlikely rise to NBA stardom. He played alongside and against some of the greats, of whom he writes appreciatively (even Jordan). Readers will gain insight into the lives of characters such as Dennis Rodman, who “possessed an unbelievable basketball IQ,” and into the behind-the-scenes work that led to the Bulls dynasty, which ended only because, Pippen charges, the team’s management was so inept. Looking back on his early years, Pippen advocates paying college athletes. “Don’t give me any of that holier-than-thou student-athlete nonsense,” he writes. “These young men—and women—are athletes first, not students, and make up the labor that generates fortunes for their schools. They are, for lack of a better term, slaves.” The author also writes evenhandedly of the world outside basketball: “No matter how many championships I have won, and millions I have earned, I never forget the color of my skin and that some people in this world hate me just because of that.” Overall, the memoir is closely observed and uncommonly modest, given Pippen’s many successes, and it moves as swiftly as a playoff game.
Basketball fans will enjoy Pippen’s bird’s-eye view of some of the sport’s greatest contests.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982165-19-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
Smart, engaging sportswriting—good reading for organization builders as well as Pats fans.
Prolific writer Benedict has long blended two interests—sports and business—and the Patriots are emblematic of both. Founded in 1959 as the Boston Patriots, the team built a strategic home field between that city and Providence. When original owner Billy Sullivan sold the flailing team in 1988, it was $126 million in the hole, a condition so dire that “Sullivan had to beg the NFL to release emergency funds so he could pay his players.” Victor Kiam, the razor magnate, bought the long since renamed New England Patriots, but rival Robert Kraft bought first the parking lots and then the stadium—and “it rankled Kiam that he bore all the risk as the owner of the team but virtually all of the revenue that the team generated went to Kraft.” Check and mate. Kraft finally took over the team in 1994. Kraft inherited coach Bill Parcells, who in turn brought in star quarterback Drew Bledsoe, “the Patriots’ most prized player.” However, as the book’s nimbly constructed opening recounts, in 2001, Bledsoe got smeared in a hit “so violent that players along the Patriots sideline compared the sound of the collision to a car crash.” After that, it was backup Tom Brady’s team. Gridiron nerds will debate whether Brady is the greatest QB and Bill Belichick the greatest coach the game has ever known, but certainly they’ve had their share of controversy. The infamous “Deflategate” incident of 2015 takes up plenty of space in the late pages of the narrative, and depending on how you read between the lines, Brady was either an accomplice or an unwitting beneficiary. Still, as the author writes, by that point Brady “had started in 223 straight regular-season games,” an enviable record on a team that itself has racked up impressive stats.
Smart, engaging sportswriting—good reading for organization builders as well as Pats fans.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982134-10-5
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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