From a kid playing backyard games with family (girls included), I grew up as football itself grew from a brawling, often ponderous grind into an explosive, even balletic, spectacle—and the most popular sport in the U.S. Family fate also placed me at Long Beach Poly High, which has sent more players to the NFL than any other, and where I played. Thirty years later, as a sportswriter and author, fate again put the first-ever championship game in my sights—months before anyone realized it—and I spent a year following 177 kids around the country, their coaches, and their families.
Perpetual sports amateur Plimpton once said of golf, “The smaller the ball, the better the book,” but ironically wrote a terrific bestseller in 1966 that fed America’s new and insatiable appetite about the NFL when he talked his way onto the Detroit Lions as a rather elderly, Yale-educated rookie quarterback.
What began as a PR stunt turned into a moving appreciation of the men, coaches, and sport when the Lions decided to take him seriously—albeit only as far as the preseason.
George Plimptons classic Paper Lion set the bar for participatory sports journalism, as the author shares his experiences in training camp, trying out as a quarterback for the NFLs Detroit Lions, and eventually, playing in a preseason exhibition game. Displaying his characteristic wit and insight, Paper Lion was met with both critical and commercial success, and inspired a movie starring Alan Alda. The late
A perfect counterpart to Plimpton’s book, Jerry Kramer’s gritty account of gridiron trench warfare arrived two years later and is considered the first “adult” book about football for its inside look at a season that culminated in an NFL championship. It may read like Neanderthal times, but it’s almost more fascinating than today’s game.
This book fed America’s hunger for a story about what goes on in the locker rooms and playing fields—particularly those of legendary coach Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers.
A sports classic, Jerry Kramer and Dick Schaap's Instant Replay takes readers inside the 1967 season of the Green Bay Packers, following that storied team from training camp to their dramatic victory in Super Bowl II.
Candid and often amusing, Jerry Kramer describes from a player’s perspective a bygone era of sports, filled with blood, grit, and tears. No game better exemplifies this period than the classic “Ice Bowl” conference championship game between the Packers and the Dallas Cowboys, which Kramer, who made the crucial block in the climactic play, describes in thrilling detail. We also get a rare and…
Take a first-class literary talent who’s a master of language with a soul as dark as Dostoyevsky’s and lock him in a room with the New York Giants on the television and a well-stocked bar—that’s one way of describing this monster book about deep, obsessive fandom.
It’s not just a great sports book—it’s great, period, if disturbing as hell. Like all monster talents, Exley is ultimately almost pitied for what the gods and his Giants put him through.
The narrator of this tale is the ultimate unreconstructed male. his primary concerns are booze, sex and the New York Giants. But things go very wrong for him - he drinks too much, he's impotent, and the Giants start to lose. So we follow his trail, through failed marriages, to mental hospital.
A college basketball player signed to play football for the Dallas Cowboys, Gent was no PR stunt, and his 1973 novel captured the anything-goes era that got the ‘Boys crowned America’s Team.
It’s a tale of games on and off the field, which means sex, nightclubbing, cheerleaders, racial friction, and drugs, both recreational and, more seriously, prescribed for debilitating injuries. Yes, the movie is pretty great, but don’t miss out on this one.
National Bestseller: The “powerful novel” about the hidden side of pro football, written by a former NFL player (Newsweek). On the field, the men who play football are gladiators, titans, and every other kind of cliché. But when they leave the locker room they are only men. Peter Gent’s classic novel looks at the seedy underbelly of the pro game, chronicling eight days in the life of Phil Elliott, an aging receiver for the Texas team. Running on a mixture of painkillers and cortisone as he tries to keep his fading legs strong, Elliott tries to get every ounce of…
There is no competition for the greatest book about high school football—and Buzz Bissinger’s year in the cauldron of oil-town Odessa, Texas, and its live-or-die-by-the-pigskin ethos deserves top ranking about football, period.
It’s like Platoon in the way it gets into the heads and hearts of average high school kids burdened with the passions, sins, and follies of society before they quite understand what they’ve signed on for—though their fathers and mothers and grandfathers all knew, and let them do it anyway.
The classic, best-selling story of life in the football-driven town of Odessa, Texas, with a new afterword that looks at the players and the town ten years later.. Return once again to the timeless account of the Permian Panthers of Odessa--the winningest high-school football team in Texas history. Odessa is not known to be a town big on dreams, but the Panthers help keep the hopes and dreams of this small, dusty town going. Socially and racially divided, its fragile economy follows the treacherous boom-bust path of the oil business. In bad times, the unemployment rate barrels out of control;…
This book closely follows the two best high school teams, both ranked No. 1 in the country in 2001, as pollsters, television networks, and athletic directors scramble to put on a first-ever championship. Suburban Catholic De La Salle, known for a fanatical 4-year training regimen and a legendarily monastic coach, Bob Ladouceur, is riding an unrivaled 111-game win streak; inner city Long Beach Poly, home of Snoop Dogg, Billie Jean King, and Cameron Diaz, has sent more players to the NFL than any other high school.
Hyped to the skies, the media circus starts in gross caricature—“Catholics v. Convicts” is a common tagline—but after the 9/11 Twin Tower attacks, the game becomes a national inspiration and rallying point, uniting both sides. Afterward, high school football—and sports—will never be the same.
