Insightfully assessing a famed coach and his celeb-adjacent squad’s rise and fall.
A SoCal sports powerhouse.
This look at the dominant mid-2000s USC football program succeeds on multiple fronts, coupling multifaceted character studies with memorable tales of excess, dysfunction, and controversy. Center stage is Pete Carroll, who coached the Trojans to consecutive national championships. His players call him a “psychological ninja” and “a big-ass kid.” Per the author’s diligent reporting, both characterizations fit. Burke depicts a football lifer who rejects the industry-standard “authoritarian” model. Carroll’s approach, informed by applied psychology ideas that emerged in the 1960s, foregrounds fun. More than once, we see him try to keep practice loose by staging “morbid” pranks simulating untimely deaths. After mediocre coaching stints in the NFL, Carroll’s USC winning percentage topped 83%. The staff’s “good cop,” he employs full-throttle assistants. One strips naked during a pep talk; another tackles a curfew-breaking player in a hotel. Burke presents a rounded portrait of Carroll, who has since returned to pro ball. A prominent former player describes the coach as “sneaky,” and some of Burke’s other sources say Carroll’s oversight was too lax. Burke’s reporting includes an ex-USC athlete’s claim that he supplied steroids to players and glimpses of hard-partying Trojan stars. Burke wrings an impressive amount of drama from accounts of old ballgames, including one considered among the best-ever college tilts. He has an occasional tin ear, however, casually describing rape allegations against L.A. Lakers legend Kobe Bryant as “an icky scandal.” The Trojans’ accomplishments were tarnished when the NCAA levied stiff penalties after finding that a star player accepted cash and other prohibited compensation. Since-adopted rules permit college athletes to earn money, and to the delight of its many critics, the NCAA’s commitment to “false amateurism” backfired, Burke correctly notes, rendering it largely “powerless.”
Insightfully assessing a famed coach and his celeb-adjacent squad’s rise and fall.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781538772584
Page Count: -
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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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