A lively, discursive account of American-style football as it expands its European fan base.
Anderson (co-author, Pickup Artists, 1998) spent the spring of 2000 with the Scottish Claymores, one of six teams in the NFL Europe league. He had access to the team’s practices in Glasgow and traveled to games in Berlin, Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, Amsterdam, and Barcelona. A Sports Illustrated writer, he’s at his best when covering the origin and growth of the league. Developed by the NFL in the late 1980s as a response to the global growth of the NBA in the Magic/Bird/Jordan era, the World League of American Football had teams scattered over eight time zones. By 1995, the WLAF had evolved into NFL Europe, which succeeds today as a training ground for the domestic league. (Underused rookies, rehabilitating veterans, ambitious coaches, and even referees work in Europe, knowing that game videotape will be carefully analyzed in the US.) On the initial 2000 NFL rosters, 159 players were veterans of Europe, including Super Bowl Quarterback Kurt Warner. The author demonstrates the low-budget atmosphere of the league, e.g., the Glasgow hotel housing the team has small rooms, nasty food, and computer-incompatible phone lines. Anderson portrays so many people that none emerges as a compelling protagonist. Only Jim Criner, the unlikable head coach, receives extensive attention. Light-hearted moments are based on cultural differences, such as Ziggy, a German bus driver, mistaking the team for a wedding party and taking them to a Frankfurt reception instead of the Düsseldorf stadium. And Nachi Abe, one of two Japanese players on the team, rejoices in his one-member fan club. In his accounts of the Claymore’s ten regular season games and the concluding World Bowl, Anderson ably captures the excitement of the play.
An informative introduction to the NFL’s minor league. (20 b&w photos, throughout)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-26975-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
Categories: SPORTS & RECREATION
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A basketball legend reflects on his life in the game and a life lived in the “nightmare of endlessly repetitive and constant pain, agony, and guilt.”
Walton (Nothing but Net, 1994, etc.) begins this memoir on the floor—literally: “I have been living on the floor for most of the last two and a half years, unable to move.” In 2008, he suffered a catastrophic spinal collapse. “My spine will no longer hold me,” he writes. Thirty-seven orthopedic injuries, stemming from the fact that he had malformed feet, led to an endless string of stress fractures. As he notes, Walton is “the most injured athlete in the history of sports.” Over the years, he had ground his lower extremities “down to dust.” Walton’s memoir is two interwoven stories. The first is about his lifelong love of basketball, the second, his lifelong battle with injuries and pain. He had his first operation when he was 14, for a knee hurt in a basketball game. As he chronicles his distinguished career in the game, from high school to college to the NBA, he punctuates that story with a parallel one that chronicles at each juncture the injuries he suffered and overcame until he could no longer play, eventually turning to a successful broadcasting career (which helped his stuttering problem). Thanks to successful experimental spinal fusion surgery, he’s now pain-free. And then there’s the music he loves, especially the Grateful Dead’s; it accompanies both stories like a soundtrack playing off in the distance. Walton tends to get long-winded at times, but that won’t be news to anyone who watches his broadcasts, and those who have been afflicted with lifelong injuries will find the book uplifting and inspirational. Basketball fans will relish Walton’s acumen and insights into the game as well as his stories about players, coaches (especially John Wooden), and games, all told in Walton’s fervent, witty style.
One of the NBA’s 50 greatest players scores another basket—a deeply personal one.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1686-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
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BOOK REVIEW
A maddening, well-constructed tale of medical discovery and corporate coverup, set in morgues, laboratories, courtrooms, and football fields.
Nigeria-born Bennet Omalu is perhaps an unlikely hero, a medical doctor board-certified in four areas of pathology, “anatomic, clinical, forensic, and neuropathology,” and a well-rounded specialist in death. When his boss, celebrity examiner Cyril Wecht (“in the autopsy business, Wecht was a rock star”), got into trouble for various specimens of publicity-hound overreach, Omalu was there to offer patient, stoical support. The student did not surpass the teacher in flashiness, but Omalu was a rock star all his own in studying the brain to determine a cause of death. Laskas’ (Creative Writing/Univ. of Pittsburgh; Hidden America, 2012, etc.) main topic is the horrific injuries wrought to the brains and bodies of football players on the field. Omalu’s study of the unfortunate brain of Pittsburgh Steeler Mike Webster, who died in 2002 at 50 of a supposed heart attack, brought new attention to the trauma of concussion. Laskas trades in sportwriter-ese, all staccato delivery full of tough guy–isms and sports clichés: “He had played for fifteen seasons, a warrior’s warrior; he played in more games—two hundred twenty—than any other player in Steelers history. Undersized, tough, a big, burly white guy—a Pittsburgh kind of guy—the heart of the best team in history.” A little of that goes a long way, but Laskas, a Pittsburgher who first wrote of Omalu and his studies in a story in GQ, does sturdy work in keeping up with a grim story that the NFL most definitely did not want to see aired—not in Omalu’s professional publications in medical journals, nor, reportedly, on the big screen in the Will Smith vehicle based on this book.
Effectively sobering. Suffice it to say that Pop Warner parents will want to armor their kids from head to toe upon reading it.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8757-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
Categories: SPORTS & RECREATION
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