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WHAT
TO GIVE, WHAT TO GET 2001: Begin Your Holiday Shopping With Us
SPORTS
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THE SWEET SEASON: A Sportswriter Rediscovers Football, Family, and a Bit of Faith at Minnesota's St. John's University
by Austin Murphy
HarperCollins
ISBN: 0060195479
Major college football has become a money driven enterprise. College football games, traditionally a Saturday afternoon event, now are played on Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings. A glance at the schedule of most major colleges shows game time as, TBA, to be announced. As money becomes more crucial to major college programs, educational and personal integrity are no longer critical considerations for major schools. Unbeknownst to many college football fans are players, teams, and coaches who play for the love of the sport. Division III NCAA football represents programs where athletic scholarships are forbidden. Athletes in Division III programs may be a step slower or a little smaller than their counterparts who receive scholarships, but they have an equal love for the game.
Austin Murphy covers the major college scene for Sports Illustrated. He has written about important games, players, and teams for 15 years. He has seen the best and worst of Division One football. Covering those games is not as glamorous as one would imagine. Each week, Murphy would follow a hectic schedule that would require him to be on the road from Wednesday through Monday. Married and the father of two small children, he recognized the toll that his work had on the quality of his family life. In 1999 he began a sabbatical from his weekly reporting task and moved to Minnesota to chronicle the season of St. John's University. THE SWEET SEASON is the result of that effort. It is a wonderful story about young and old men sharing a love of sport and a love of life. Perhaps more important, it is a story of personal rejuvenation and rebirth for the author.
The St. John's Johnnies of Collegeville, Minnesota are a powerhouse of Division III football. To a large degree, their success is attributable to an iconoclast of a coach named John Gagliardi. "Gags" began his career at St. John's in 1953. During his tenure, the Johnnies have won three national championships (in Division III, there is an actual national play-off to determine a national champion). Gagliardi is the winningest active coach in college football history with a record of 377-109-11. As this season begins, Gagliardi is only 31 victories short of Eddie Robinson's all-time collegiate win record of 408 victories.
Gagliardi wins with methods that would leave football fans and coaches befuddled. His philosophy includes a list of 74 "NOs," including: no whistles, no playbooks, no hitting during the week, and no cuts from the squad. He disdains calisthenics and serious physical drills. In this modern era of computer programmed offenses and sideline play calling, the Johnnies quarterbacks call their own plays. After all, says Gags, "These guys are a hell of a lot smarter than I am." The Johnnies offense runs plays diagrammed on note cards. They do not tackle or cut block one another in practice. "Visualize yourself doing it," the coach tells his players. "Fantasies don't always have to be about the opposite sex."
No matter how talented the coach, he still must have quality athletes to win. Murphy acknowledges that he came to this project with preconceived notions about the level of athletic skill in Division III. "I didn't think they'd suck, but I didn't know they'd be this quick, talented, or tough," he writes. Don't let the Roman numeral throw you, there's quality football in Division III. But the roster is filled with men who are more than football players. As one of the Johnnies linebackers remarks, "I wanted to go to school to go to school, know what I mean?" Murphy grows to appreciate that there is more to college than practicing football, lifting weights and watching films. He meets young men who are more than football players seeking professional careers. Division III players combine the football season with the total college experience, including classes, part time jobs, and frequent parties. As the season progresses, Murphy, like many men his age, yearns once again for those wonderful college years when life was uncluttered with mortgage payments, preschool problems, and the status of one's 401(k).
The football season spent in Collegeville, Minnesota is about more than football. In many ways the juxtaposition between Division I and Division III football is a mirror of the life of Austin Murphy. Unlike his hectic schedule reporting major college and professional football, Murphy experiences a more idyllic life in Minnesota. For this one season he has his young children and their experiences to share. He shares time with his wife and, for the first time, meets members of her extended family. Through the process, Austin Murphy comes to a realization about the world beyond football. As his life slowed down, it strengthened.
As I write this review, the world is in tumult. America has seen her most basic institutions attacked. While it borders on absurd to write about college football, we all understand that somehow life goes on. None of us will ever forget the events of September 11, 2001, and those events will insure that our lives will never be the same. But a moment will come when those events that make us proud to be Americans will return to our lives. There will come a time when many people will say, "Maybe I'll catch a game." Go see a Division III game. You can find a schedule of games as well as mountains of information about Division III football on www.d3football.com. You will enjoy the experience and you will have Austin Murphy to thank for reminding you that the pure love of the game still exists in many precincts of our nation.
--- Reviewed by Stuart Shiffman
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HOME RUN
edited by George Plimpton
Harcourt
ISBN: 0156011549
The home run is the most dramatic way to send fans into fits of ecstasy or agony. With one swing of the bat, a hero is born, either for the moment or for posterity.
Homer heaven can come on a single swing under spectacular circumstances, such as Bobby Thomson's "shot heard 'round the world" against the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1951; a season-long drive, like Mark McGwire's or Barry Bonds's ascendancy to the single season home run crown; or a lifetime of achievement, such as joining the elite 500-home run club.
Since the dinger, the tater, the bomb, and all the other euphemisms for a home run are so exciting, it follows that some of the most compelling baseball writing concentrates on the four-bagger. George Plimpton has amassed such a collection from some of the most famous scribes --- and not just sports writers --- in the simply titled HOME RUN.
Among the non-sports literati are Bernard Malamud, John Updike, Garrison Keillor, and Don DeLillo. The sportswriter team counts Red Smith, Roger Angell, and Grantland Rice among its roster.
In that Babe Ruth set the standard for parking the pill on the other side of the fence, it is only right that His Majesty leads the way. Keillor, Rice, Paul Gallico, and Robert Creamer (giving us more detail about the slugger's personal life and habits than we probably need to know) all herald various aspects of the Sultan of Swat.
Malamud wrote the improbable story of Roy Hobbs, an out-of-nowhere sensation with a checkered past, in THE NATURAL. Taking a page from Ruthian lore, Hobbs must hit a homer in order to help a critically sick kid recover. Keillor fantasizes about the retired yet still awe-inspiring Ruth making a stopover in his small town. DeLillo, author of the acclaimed UNDERWORLD, mixes fact and fancy as he remembers the aforementioned Thomson blast in "Pafko at the Wall." Updike's nonfiction contribution is the oft-reprinted "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu," a storybook ending to Ted Williams's career.
From the sportswriters, we get Red Smith's take on Thomson's heroism in "Miracle of Coogan's Bluff" and on the three consecutive World Series home runs off the bat of Reggie Jackson. Roger Angell, senior sports editor for The New Yorker, covers the tactile and mental experience of hitting one out of the park in "Homeric Tales." And just so you know it's not always of question of what you do but how you do it, Rick Reilly, a columnist for Sports Illustrated, offers a condensed history of running the bases in style.
Other items in HOME RUN include Plimpton's description of the key figures in Hank Aaron's coronation as the all-time home run king; Robert Peterson on Josh Gibson, the "Babe Ruth of the Negro Leagues;" Sadaharu Oh's on life as the "Japanese Babe Ruth;" Rick Telander on the demons that plagued Roger Maris in 1961, as he approached Ruth's long-standing single-season of 60 home runs; Gregory Corso's poetic tribute to Ted Williams; and Daniel Paisner's story of the fan who caught Mark McGwire's 70th home run in 1998.
HOME RUN delivers on its namesake: This is a marvelous array of compositions from different angles --- humorous, serious and delirious --- on how losing a ball can make so many so happy.
--- Reviewed by Ron Kaplan (ronk23@aol.com)
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WORD FREAK: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble
by Stefan Fatsis
Houghton Mifflin
ISBN: 0618015841
There is a great moment in WORD FREAK when the author, Stefan Fatsis, considers his obsession with Scrabble and wonders if it's healthy. In normal literature, such a moment might be devoted to doomed romance or drug addiction. There's something wonderfully nerdy about the fact that in WORD FREAK it involves a board game.
Fatsis originally planned to write WORD FREAK as a journalistic account of an odd but harmless subculture. Scrabble was then just another board game in his living room; if writing the book would make him a better player, it was a byproduct hardly worth mentioning. But as Fatsis' interest in Scrabble expanded, he found himself spending more and more time playing, entering more tournaments, practicing more, and making more friends than was strictly necessary to write a book. A year into the project, he took a leave of absence from his job as a sports reporter for the Wall Street Journal and joined the Scrabble tour full-time.
In retrospect, Fatsis' decision was not only incredible, but also inevitable. There are few financial or social rewards for Scrabble expertise --- in fact, there are large disincentives on both fronts --- but like all of his Scrabble friends, Fatsis was drawn to the game for reasons he didn't fully understand. It's a contention of WORD FREAK that players tend to find their proper place, and Fatsis was no exception --- as the book progresses, he becomes an expert player. His only explanation for this strange turn of events is that, at a fundamental level, he always was one. Even when he was playing old ladies in the beginner rounds, he had the need to succeed at Scrabble.
If this sounds like a typical underdog story, it shouldn't. Unlike many books about sports, WORD FREAK isn't a series of big defeats followed by larger triumphs. There are exciting matches, but Scrabble is a game that provides the greatest enjoyment only to those who learn it at an expert level. As a spectator, the distinctions between the historic plays and the merely great ones are impossible to grasp. The uniqueness and complexity of the lifestyle that surrounds the game is the story worth following. This is where WORD FREAK succeeds brilliantly: detailing the intricacies of a subculture whose ardor and strangeness make it remote.
Fatsis' knowledge of the Scrabble world is hard earned. He lives the game, which is what allows him to explain its eccentricities to the world. Just hearing the bare statistics of the Scrabble life --- the hours spent practicing, the anagramming parties, the tournaments thousands of miles from home in run-down convention halls --- doesn't convey the depth of the obsession. Nor does it help to merely run through the foibles of the game's stars: the stunted social and professional lives, the strange religious beliefs, the alternative medical therapies. The genius of the top players is too subtle and their personalities too easily caricatured for anyone but a peer to see the beauty beneath the absurdity.
Fatsis works hard to be seen as a typical Scrabble player, but he never quite blends in with his peers. His status as a mainstream reporter covering their world makes him a celebrity, and nearly everyone he meets is eager to help him however they can. Of course, their actions aren't entirely charitable. Scrabble players are religious and atheistic, excitable and stoic; they share almost nothing but a desire to see their game become more popular. They realize that the status of a game determines the status of its players, and they see Fatsis' book as a means to boost Scrabble's standing. Their hope is that Scrabble will one day reach the level of esteem that chess enjoys, because although it's widely known that Bobby Fischer is a little bit weird, a Scrabble player might reply, "At least he's known."
Fatsis is aware of the extra help he receives from the Scrabble world, and he repays it with an ever more fanatical interest in the game. Time after time, he is told to "do the work" if he wants to improve. He does, and he does. Unlike chess, Scrabble has a massive back-catalog of information that must be absorbed before a player can achieve master status. There are hundreds of thousands of Scrabble words in the English language, and playing the game to its full strategic potential means knowing nearly all of them. The only way to learn the lexicon is to memorize it, and Fatsis practices his flash cards on the F train --- words like "spaviet" and "diecious" tend not to come up in day to day conversation.
Early in the book Fatsis decides that WORD FREAK is going to be a personal account rather than a scrupulously fair piece of reporting. Even the stories of the other players are often framed by his quest for their guru-like knowledge. But the inward nature of WORD FREAK is more than just self-gratifying. Fatsis' journey from Scrabble amateur to Scrabble professional is fascinating precisely because it's so personal. His love for Scrabble and his respect for its stars are contagious. Ultimately, WORD FREAK makes the argument that the genius and devotion we honor in more popular pursuits are just as worthy in less popular ones (Scrabble included). That Scrabble experts are neither respected nor rewarded is the central tragedy of WORD FREAK. That they continue anyway is the central triumph.
--- Reviewed by Fred Kovey
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SEABISCUIT: An American Legend
by Laura Hillenbrand
Random House
ISBN: 0375502912
"He had a sad little tail, barely long enough to brush his hocks. His stubby legs were a study in unsound construction, with squarish, asymmetrical 'baseball glove' knees that didn't quite straighten all the way, leaving him in a permanent semicrouch… His gallop was so disorganized that he had a maddening tendency to whack himself in the front ankle with his own hind hoof."
If you are not a fan of horse racing, too young to remember the Depression or unaware of the dietary habits of sailors, you are probably thinking "Seabiscuit? What's a Seabiscuit?" The answer would be both arguably the greatest thoroughbred to set foot on a racetrack since the incomparable Man O' War and the title of Laura Hillenbrand's painstakingly researched and lovingly recounted tale of the scrappy little horse with enough speed, brilliance, and heart to capture the wild adulation of a nation hopelessly mired in the cruel quagmire of the most voracious, unforgiving economic depression it had ever known.
Told in the tradition of the oral biography (it is, after all, about a horse, and as wonderful as Seabiscuit was, he could not speak for himself), Hillenbrand wisely leaves much of the story to be narrated by the men who knew and loved Seabiscuit the best --- his owner Charles Howard, his trainer Tom Smith, and jockey Red Pollard. In turn, the lives of these three men are remembered to Hillenbrand by the men and women who knew and loved them best. In this way, Hillenbrand, a well-established thoroughbred-racing journalist, lets the story of this remarkable horse tell itself, needing only her evocative prose to guide it along. Grounding the story in the people that touched and were touched by Seabiscuit also acts as a safeguard literary device that prevents the book from careening off into the dangerous territory of over-anthropomorphization --- which would be all too easy, given the subject matter.
Many readers today may relegate the Depression to the dusty shelves of history and hard-luck stories told by immigrant grandparents, and regard horse-racing as a foreign world populated by old-money southerners, high-strung, inbred equines, and freakishly short men. However, as the events surrounding Seabiscuit's Cinderella story unfold, Hillenbrand manages to give the reader both a historical perspective into the social and economic forces that shaped the sport of kings in the mid-20th century as well as an informative inside look into the often wretched conditions faced by the brave athletes --- man and horse alike --- who often paid for their success and failures with blood, sweat, and sinew. Hillenbrand encapsulates her history and sporting lessons in the trappings of the kind of rags-to-riches story that is impossible not to relate to, the secret that makes this book a fascinating read for those new to thoroughbred racing or those (the author of this review included) pitifully ignorant of the seminal events of American history.
While the subject may seem unfamiliar to the uninitiated, to the reader living in the era of sports icons such as Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods it is not prohibitively difficult to imagine the kind of cult following, press coverage, and attendant merchandising inspired by this small unassuming horse who reportedly had the appetite, laid back attitude and sleeping habits of a frat boy. Ultimately though, the appeal of Seabiscuit, the appeal that transcends the borders of time, sport, and species, is that he combined in his short stocky cow-pony frame the kind of magical excellence we all strive and wish for with the endearingly Everyman quality that we can all relate to. Seabiscuit emerged as both prince and pauper, a beacon of hope that illuminated the sport of kings in the nation's darkest hour.
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LAST BREATH: Cautionary Tales from the Limits of Human Endurance
by Peter Stark
Ballantine
ISBN: 0345441508
Extreme sports intrigue me. While I confine my personal athletics to swimming and walking, I admire those who scale rock walls, climb high peaks and push themselves through physical endurance tests. My sister is a triathlete, and her descriptions of both her training and her races are something I enjoy living vicariously. Watching the IMAX film, Everest, I was mesmerized by the people who lashed ladders together and then walked across them on crampons, hovering tens of thousands of feet above land. This weekend the New York Marathon will be run. I attended the event one year and was transfixed watching the runner's faces as they crossed the finish line --- most were full of agony and pain, not joy and exaltation. But they still felt the event was exhilarating!
While I will never be among any of these elite groups, the tenacity with which these people drive themselves amazes me. But they are only as strong as what the human body can bear.
LAST BREATH examines what happens to adventurous athletes when the challenges are bigger than their physiological ability. The writing, divided into 11 chapters, chronicles in fictional narrative how the body handles these emergencies and thus responds. It ticks away the clock and counts down how people take their last breath when they are overcome.
Peter Stark is a contributing writer to Outside magazine. In fact, this project began as an article in Outside two years ago called "As Freezing Persons Recollect the Snow." The book examines altitude sickness, hypo and hyperthermia, the bends, avalanche, mountain sickness, and even predators among its 11 topics. My favorite chapters were the ones on malaria, dehydration, and hypothermia. I thought the scurvy chapter was too far-fetched to be included, and thus weak.
What I loved about the book is that you do not need to be a doctor, a scientist, or a forensic specialist to understand Olsen's writing. It is very appealing to the average layperson. There is a superb blend of science, personal anecdote, cautionary advice, and even cure possibilities woven into each story: If he gets a drink right now, he can live. And not every victim dies. As the book progressed I found myself trying to figure out early on who would make it --- and who would not.
I read this book in an afternoon while I was at the beach, and by the end of the day I was beginning to feel like a hypochondriac. As I lay in the sun reading, was I suffering from hyperthermia as the sweat poured from my body onto the concrete around the pool? As I rode my bike and got cottonmouth I wondered if this was the beginning of the second of the six stages of thirst. My children asked for lunch as I finished the chapter on scurvy. I quickly cut up a peach for each of them. (They found it amusing that I told them we could have lunch after I finished reading about scurvy and we could bike after I finished dehydration.)
If you already have enjoyed THE PERFECT STORM, THE HUNGRY OCEAN, and INTO THIN AIR this book is the perfect next read. You will never complete any physical task quite the same way again.
--- Reviewed by Carol Fitzgerald
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A GOLF STORY: Bobby Jones, Augusta National, and the Masters Tournament
by Charles Price
Triumph Books
ISBN: 1892049228
A GOLF STORY by Charles Price is a wonderful contribution and tribute to the great game of golf. A reprint of the 1986 history of the best known golf course and golf tournament in America, it tells not only the story of Augusta National Golf Club and the Masters Golf Tournament, but also the story of Bobby Jones, the man most responsible for Augusta and the Masters. In an era when sports heroes such as Red Grange, Babe Ruth, and Jack Dempsey were household names, Bobby Jones was equal in stature to any sports figure. However, Jones represented athletic achievement in a far different manner than his contemporaries of the roaring '20s --- he was the true amateur. A graduate of Georgia Tech and Emory Law School, Jones was a practicing lawyer in Atlanta, Georgia. After sweeping the major tournaments of his era --- the United States Open, U. S. Amateur, British Open, and British Amateur --- in one year, Jones retired from competitive golf. Along with business partner Clifford Roberts he constructed the Augusta National Golf Club and created a spring tournament in early April. The tournament that became the Masters was initially a stopping off place for professional golfers and sportswriters returning from their winters in Florida. Charles Price loved the Masters and revered Bobby Jones. A GOLF STORY reflects that feeling and reverence towards a hallowed course and a sporting event that any golfer would love to attend.
--- Reviewed by Stuart Shiffman
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