A compelling look at a legend and an era.
Comprehensive and interesting portrait of one of baseball’s most successful managers.
Born Cornelius McGillicuddy in East Brookfield, Mass., Connie Mack (1862–1956) devoted his life to the fledgling sport of professional baseball. Despite a slender frame, Mack excelled as a catcher, his defensive skills more than compensating for his less-than-stellar abilities with the bat. He was capable enough to move from a local amateur team to a salaried spot with the Meriden team in the Connecticut State League. He played for the Washington Nationals of the National League and experimented with a Player’s League before taking his first executive post as manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Fired by the Pirates, he moved to the Milwaukee Brewers and assumed a leadership role in every level of club management, from scouting to scheduling to in-game decisions, experience that would aid him later in his career. Hailed as an innovator, Mack employed such revolutionary tactics as the use of multiple pitchers during a game. His skills eventually took him to the Philadelphia Athletics, a team he led to five World Series victories. (In all of baseball history, only the Yankees, Red Sox and Cardinals have ever surpassed this total.) Veteran baseball historian Macht (Roberto Clemente, 2001, etc.) paints an interesting portrait of the sport at the turn of the 20th century, dispelling the myth that players endured the season’s marathon length and frequent, potentially crippling injuries only because they so loved the game. Then as now, he points out, money motivated them as much as anything else. Macht capably traces the evolution of baseball’s rules and customs over the years, while also revealing that the players’ behavior (for better or worse) closely approximated that of the athletes today. Some 700 pages take us only to 1914, but the book is so detailed that it makes fascinating reading despite its length.
A compelling look at a legend and an era.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8032-3263-1
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
The former internist for the NFL's Los Angeles Raiders tells it like it is in this engaging muckraker's guide to the business of pro football. For over 30 years, the Raiders have been the outlaws of their sport. Huizenga, who was with the team from 1983 to 1990, chronicles how this game devours its young. The NFL proudly boasts that football features the biggest, fastest, and toughest athletes in the world. But, according to Huizenga, many players are emotionally immature, overgrown galoots who gladly abuse themselves by ingesting performance-enhancing and painkilling drugs while ignoring the obvious consequences—a fact underscored by offensive linemen Charley Hannah's assertion, made to Huizenga and some teammates over dinner one night: ``We're making too much money, we're having too much of a good time. They're going to have to drag me off the freaking field kicking and screaming.'' Much of Huizenga's memoir revolves around his relationships with players, including stars Marcus Allen (whose unwillingness to risk serious injury landed him in team owner Al Davis's doghouse), the late Lyle Alzado (one of the game's most notorious steroid abusers), and Bo Jackson (who sustained an injury that ended his football career and now plays baseball for the California Angels). However, the most inflammatory passages are reserved for Huizenga's many clashes with Davis and his incompetent team orthopedist, Dr. Robert Rosenfeld, whose frequent dismissal of potentially crippling injuries provides the book's title. Huizenga illustrates why Davis is a pariah among the NFL's owners; his mantra, ``Just win, baby,'' embodies his crass indifference to players' physical and emotional pain. While occasionally melodramatic, Huizenga keeps his vituperation in check, often allowing Davis's appalling actions to speak for themselves. Although many of Huizenga's revelations are old news, juicy gossip about the Raiders always gets tongues wagging. Fans looking for something to pass the time between autumn Sundays could do a lot worse than read this no-punches-pulled tell- all. (First printing of 60,000; author tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-11353-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
Expanding the Harper's piece that won a National Magazine Award, Frey deepens his devastating indictment of big-time college basketball's recruiting circus and the long shot at redemption it offers four talented New York City high school players. The flirtations of college coaches who promise TV exposure and a shot at the NBA might seem merely pathetic: One coach makes his play with inept card tricks; another signs a fawning letter to a recruit ``Health, Happine$$ and Hundred$.'' But for the young men Frey follows through their senior year at Abraham Lincoln High School, home is the projects of Coney Island, an end of the line literally, because it's a subway terminus, and metaphorically, because young black men seeking their fortunes have two options: drug-dealing or basketball. In a neighborhood where gang members rain beer bottles and taunts on players on the court and where turf wars lend an air of necessity to the style of basketball called ``run-and-gun,'' the father-figure pitches and broken promises of college coaches (many of whom have six-figure salaries and million- dollar endorsement deals with sneaker companies) are nothing less than abject. Harper's contributing editor Frey dishes the inside dope—the slave-market atmosphere of summer basketball camps, the corrupting influence of companies like Nike, the winks and nods with which coaches skirt the ``byzantine'' NCAA recruiting rules. And he does it without self-righteousness, simply letting coaches skewer themselves. Eventually the NCAA (which fares no better under Frey's blistering scrutiny) banned him from recruiting sessions. But what gives the book its powerful emotional punch is the bond between the players and the community of family, fans, and local coaches who support them—and between Frey and the kids. He captures—in lean, lyrical prose—the psychological drama and physical beauty of the game, and the joy it brings those who play it and see it played at its best. A heartbreaking, gritty piece of work.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-395-59770-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
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