Going deep
Were there to be a playoff pitting the literatures of the various sports against each other, baseball would trump boxing, and either would bounce football into the offseason.
I find this ironic, given football’s popularity, the waning interest in baseball, and the near-zero interest in the pugilistic arts. But while there are classic football books, they’ve never been as obviously classic as something like Ring Lardner’s baseball writings, or A.J. Liebling’s “The Sweet Science.” But perhaps this new catchall omnibus work will rack up some yards after the catch for football’s cause, combining as it does enough top-tier excerpts to send you searching for the full books that contain them.
You can read this compendium in any order, and I’d advise you make your selections based on mood, time of the year or whether, say, the Niners and Seahawks are going at it that weekend, or there’s an enviable slate of college football games. I started with Myron Cope’s profile of one Johnny Blood — seriously — from his oral history, “The Game That Was” (1970).
I’d take the over on this being the finest football volume of all time, the gridiron’s answer to baseball’s similarly structured “The Glory of Their Times.” Johnny Blood himself is a Paul Bunyan-esque character, a star who also turns up at training camp on the back of a train, hobo-style.
“I’m a schizophrenic personality. I was born under the sign of Sagittarius, which is half stud and half philosopher. The stud, of course, is the body of a horse, and I was always full of run.” Full of run. Brilliant. We encounter one hard-core guy after another here, but there’s enough attendant pain — of the mind, heart and soul — to stock a dozen Keats sonnets.
Tom Archdeacon’s piece on Cowboys tight end Jackie Smith dropping a potentially Super Bowl-winning touchdown is a master class in empathy. Pat Summerall, whom most people know only as a broadcaster, not as an earlydays NFL-er, turns up in Stuart Leuthner’s “Iron Men” (1988), another oral history, with some Dickensian black humor regarding a former player-hating coach: “This one particular Tuesday he was about half an hour late and when he came in the locker room it was obvious he had a late night. Blurry eyes, stuff dripping out of his mouth. He had everybody’s paychecks wrapped up with a rubber band and threw them across the locker room. He growled, ‘Fight for them, you bastards,’ turned around, and walked out.”
Rick Telander’s profile of Bears’ Hall of Famer Doug Atkins is a gutting slice of tortured domesticity and an indictment of the NFL’s shabby treatment of its former athletes. Atkins details an injury he never had repaired that left his biceps torn in half. Telander asks why, to which Atkins replies, “It’s just a show muscle.”
There is dross here — no one needs to read the purple slop that Grantland Rice was prone to turning out. But nearly everything will knock you off the readerly line of scrimmage, and I suppose what a book like this is most demonstrably challenged with is being something that could appeal to non-football people. Let’s just say we’re splitting some uprights there.
John Schulian’s profile of Charles Philip Bednarik, one of the last of the two-way players, written years after the cheering had ceased, features a bit of logic that I imagine is endemic to football players, but understandable to many. Schulian describes how Bednarik remarked, after a win, that he felt like Paul Revere’s horse. A baffled teammate asks why, to which Bednarik responds, “The horse did all of the work, but Paul Revere got all the credit.”
We have an excerpt from H.G. Bissinger’s “Friday Night Lights,” and while I wish there was more high school football content, you’re better off reading Bissinger’s book in full than in piecemeal fashion.
I’d say the same thing for Frederick Exley’s “A Fan’s Notes,” but Exley was just so good, and he writes so much better than anyone else here — except, and I don’t mean this fatuously, maybe Johnny Blood — that you have to have him. He is the Brady, the Montana, but also a guy who had a devil of a life. The less than four pages of “A Fan’s Notes” on display are pure poesy.
Describing himself and his cheap-seat comrades: “We were Wops and Polacks and Irishmen out of Flatbush, along with one mad dreamer out of the cold, cow country up yonder, and though we may not have had the background, or the education, to weep at Prince Hamlet’s death, we had all tried enough times to pass and kick a ball, we had on our separate rock-strewn sandlots taken enough lumps and bruises, to know that we were viewing something truly fine, something that only comes with years of toil, something very like art.”
That is bringing it, gameday style, and I don’t think you ever have had to view a single quarter to know as much.