Football Books

I love football. And it is a great time to be a football in Kansas with the Jayhawks having an undefeated season! Our high school football team is also undefeated. We are playing tonight for the State semi-finals. Needless to say, lots of people of thinking football!

I have read several good football books lately. Right now I am really enjoying Playing for Pizza by John Grisham. I have always enjoyed Grisham’s crime novels like The Firm and The Client, so I was worried that I wouldn’t like his straying from what he does well. But so far, it is really fun. It is about Rick Dockery who is a third string quarterback for the Cleveland Browns. However, in the game before the Super Bowl, Rick finds himself in the game and panics. He blows a 17 point lead in less than 11 minutes and the citizens of Cleveland run him out of town. Rick ends up in the hospital with a concussion from a huge hit on his last interception and Browns fans storm the hospital trying to find him. The description is really funny. Rick decides that isn’t ready to give up the dream of playing professional football yet, so he begs his agent to find somewhere he can play. And that is when he finds himself in Parma, Italy playing for pizza! Actually he gets paid unlike many of the other players on his team who play for the love of the game—and pizza.

The amazing part of this book was that a league like this really exists in Italy. They are a bunch of guys playing American football in a place where football usually means soccer, where hundreds of thousands of people show up to watch the World Cup, and where they can only have 3 Americans per team. And one is almost always the quarterback. I am anxious to see what happens to Rick. The book is humorous and the football scenes are well written—I can almost feel the hits as I read.

We have received several new nonfiction football books this past month. The Blind Side: evolution of a game by Michael Lewis is waiting for me to finish Playing for Pizza. It is the story of University of Mississippi football player Michael Oher and it explores the rising salaries of the offensive left tackle in the NFL. I guess that the blind side in football is the left side of a right handed quarterback where defensive linemen can inflict serious damage without being seen. So one key to a safe and effective passer is a good offensive left tackle—one of the more unglamorous jobs in football. In the book, Oher goes from being raised by a crack-addicted homeless mother to being adopted by a wealthy family. It is a fascinating story even without the football.

Another book that I have been browsing when I have time is The Physics of Football: Discover the Science of Bone-Crushing Hits, Soaring Field Goals, and Awe-Inspiring Passes by Timothy Gay. It is really interesting as it looks at the science behind hang time and sweet spots and turf. I have just read sections of it, but it really makes me think. Of course, that’s just my being nerdy again.

One more book I want to mention is another that I just pick up when I have time. It is called The Football Game I’ll Never Forget: 100 Stars’ Stories. It has 100 of the greatest football players of all times writing about the games that they remember most. It has chapters by Joe Montana, Frank Gifford, and Brian Sipe. It is a fun, colorful book of football history.