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 study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | HEALTH & FITNESS | SPORTS & RECREATION
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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. 22, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Categories: NATURE | SPORTS & RECREATION
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