A smashing retelling of the fabled Notre Dame-Michigan State game that ended in a 10-10 tie and decided the 1966 national championship. Bergen (N.J.) Record sportswriter Celizic (coauthor, On the Run, 1991) was a freshman at Notre Dame in 1966 and here makes no effort to hide his partiality. No matter; Celizik gives Michigan's Duffy Daugherty and his vaunted Spartan defense their due alongside Ara Parseghian's legendary Fighting Irish. Celizik provides deep background, giving detailed histories of each school's football program and setting the stage, game by game, for the rare late- season meeting between undefeated first- and second-ranked teams. The slightly favored Irish limped into East Lansing for the showdown with top player Jim Seymour nursing a bad ankle and star running-back Nick Eddy out with a shoulder injury. It would get worse: Before the first period was over, both All-American center George Goeddeka and the esteemed Terry Hanrattay would be lost. Michigan scored first on a plunge up the middle. They added a field goal to make the score 10-0, but backup quarterback Coley O'Brien brought the Irish back with a long touchdown pass. The score remained 10-7, with the teams trading stalled drives, punts, and turnovers, until Joe Azzaro's field goal early in the fourth quarter. His subsequent miss with 4:39 left in the game set the stage for a controversy that beleaguers coach Parseghian to this day. With the national title at stake, Parseghian, with 1:24 remaining, chose ``not to lose'' by not gambling with an inexperienced quarterback and a banged-up offense. He played it safe and ran the ball, thus preserving the tie and Notre Dame's top ranking. Though vilified by the press (the L.A. Times headline: ``TIE ONE FOR THE GIPPER'') for that decision, Parseghian will find vindication here. An exciting, intelligent, well-written football book that brings a classic game to pulse-quickening life with the immediacy of today's sports pages. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-75817-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1992
One of the NBA’s 50 greatest players scores another basket—a deeply personal one.
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. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
At this rate, Tyson may write a multivolume memoir as he continues to struggle and survive.
An exhaustive—and exhausting—chronicle of the champ's boxing career and disastrous life.
Tyson was dealt an unforgiving hand as a child, raised in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn in a "horrific, tough and gruesome" environment populated by "loud, aggressive" people who "smelled like raw sewage.” A first-grade dropout with several break-ins under his belt by age 7, his formal education resumed when he was placed in juvenile detention at age 11, but the lesson he learned at home was to do absolutely anything to survive. Two years later, his career path was set when he met legendary boxing trainer Cus D'Amato. However, Tyson’s temperament never changed; if anything, it hardened when he took on the persona of Iron Mike, a merciless and savage fighter who became undisputed heavyweight champion of the world. By his own admission, he was an "arrogant sociopath" in and out of the ring, and he never reconciled his thuggish childhood with his adult self—nor did he try. He still partied with pimps, drug addicts and hustlers, and he was determined to feed all of his vices and fuel several drug addictions at the cost of his freedom (he recounts his well-documented incarcerations), sanity and children. Yet throughout this time, he remained a voracious reader, and he compares himself to Clovis and Charlemagne and references Camus, Sartre, Mao Zedong and Nietzsche's "Overman" in casual conversation. Tyson is a slumdog philosopher whose insatiable appetites have ruined his life many times over. He remains self-loathing and pitiable, and his tone throughout the book is sardonic, exasperated and indignant, his language consistently crude. The book, co-authored by Sloman (co-author: Makeup to Breakup: My Life In and Out of Kiss, 2012, etc.), reads like his journal; he updated it after reading the galleys and added "A Postscript to the Epilogue" as well.
At this rate, Tyson may write a multivolume memoir as he continues to struggle and survive.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-399-16128-5
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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