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Football

Sports Illustrated's 1999 Book Review

Double Reverse | When Pride Still Mattered | Best Shots | The Junction Boys | Red Grange and the Rise of Modern Football | Rockne of Notre Dame

Double Reverse
By Tim Green
Warner Books, $24.00

In this grim, violent potboiler by Green, a sportscaster and former Atlanta Falcons defensive lineman, the heroine, lawyer-agent Madison McCall, says, it's hard to find "someone who can play in the NFL or the NBA who's still a decent human being."

Here, too, a footwear executive is cast as Mephistopheles. This time it's Kurt Lunden of Zeus Shoes. To plug his new line of Killer shoes he needs a spokesman who embodies "sex, drugs, perversion, profanity and irreverence ..." He finds that spokesman in Trane Jones, an unstoppable running back who wakes up with a dead woman in a blood-soaked bed before the reader gets past page 5. Sucked into the ensuing evil machinations is Clark Cromwell, a Fundamentalist Christian fullback who is only marginally brighter than Slo-Mo Finsternick. Can this simple-minded lug survive the swirl of corruption that sucks him ever downward? You won't much care.

But you might care that Green and Reilly, two very different authors, both of whom know the backstage realities of pro sports, apparently see the NBA and the NFL as Sodom and Gomorrah, respectively. And Madison McCall leaves us with this warning: "It's getting worse."

-- Charles Hirshberg
Issue date: Nov. 15, 1999

When Pride Still Mattered, By David Maraniss Simon & Schuster

When Pride Still Mattered
By David Maraniss
Simon & Schuster, $27.50

This profile of legendary football coach Vince Lombardi, which forges a near-perfect synthesis of fine writing and fascinating material, may be the best sports biography ever published. In Lombardi, author Maraniss has a subject worthy of the considerable research and narrative skills he demonstrated in a controversial 1996 biography of President Clinton.

St. Vincent was surely no Slick Willy. In his private life Lombardi was, in the vernacular of his time, a square: He wore hats and galoshes and rain slickers, the latter made of translucent plastic, and played golf and gin rummy and cried and screamed and smoked and sweated and watched Tom and Jerry cartoons and laughed so hard that tears squirted out of his eyes like windshield-wiper spray. He fell asleep in the recliner in his den and snored away until supper.

This is the same man who was the very symbol of the tyrannical coach obsessed beyond reason with winning. He was the genius who took a Green Bay Packers team of perennial losers and whipped it by the sheer force of his will into the holy terror that won five NFL championships, including the first two Super Bowls, in his nine years at the helm. He was the master of all he surveyed, and in heavily Catholic Green Bay he was called the Pope.

Actually, he was a good deal more complicated than that. And he didn't coin the famous line that is always credited to him: "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing." Maraniss traces that chestnut back to former Vanderbilt and UCLA coach Red Sanders, who first used it, possibly in jest, in the mid-1930s when he was coaching at Columbia (Tenn.) Military Academy. Lombardi did, of course, believe that winning was the only thing, but not at the cost of cheating or dirty play, which he forbade. In fact, at the start of his career he was so uncertain of the worthiness of coaching that he sought somehow to elevate his job to something approaching the priesthood or the law. Maraniss calls him the "philosopher-coach."

Lombardi was a mass of contradictions. He was an avowed believer in family, but while he busied himself making a family of his team, he sorely neglected his wife, who suffered from depression and alcohol addiction, and their son and daughter. He could be abusive and dictatorial, but he was so painfully shy that, as Maraniss writes, "he had to screw up his courage every day to be a public figure." He was a tyrant without a trace of bigotry regarding race, religion or sexual preference. He loved his players, but he could motivate them by browbeating them to the point at which they temporarily despised him. Then he'd win back their love. "The players understood," said Packers guard Jerry Kramer. "This is one beautiful man."

Lombardi died of cancer at 57 in 1970, possibly, Maraniss suggests, at the right time: "He was in danger of being reduced to a convenient symbol by then, his philosophy misused by all sides in the political debates of that war-torn era. The establishment had turned him into stone even while he was alive, hoisting him up as a monument to righteousness, patriotism and free enterprise. Counterculturists smashed him as a relic of old-line authoritarianism and a dangerous win-at-all-costs philosophy. Both were wrong."

Issue date: Sept. 6, 1999

Best Shots:
The Greatest NFL Photography of the Century
DK Publishing, Inc., $30

There are more than 100 photos, some dating to the 1930s, in this handsome collection. A few are classics: Y.A. Tittle, kneeling helmetless in exhaustion, blood streaming from his bald head; Chuck Bednarik pumping his fist in triumph over an unconscious Frank Gifford; Jim Taylor carrying the ball behind a wall of blockers on Lombardi's patented Packers sweep.

Issue date: Sept. 6, 1999

The Junction Boys
By Jim Dent
St. Martin's Press, $24.95

In this engaging book Dent recounts the year 1954, when new coach Bear Bryant put Texas A&M football players through an excruciating preseason. From an original squad of 115, only 35 stayed with the program, including future coaches Gene Stallings and Jack Pardee. All of which must prove something.

Issue date: Aug. 23, 1999

Red Grange and the Rise of Modern Football
By John M. Carroll
University of Illinois Press, $25.95

For much of this century the most famous of all football heroes was a self-effacing Midwesterner named Harold (Red) Grange. He was "a streak of fire, a breath of flame," wrote Grantland Rice. Author Carroll, a professor of history at Lamar University in Texas, seeks to explain the phenomenon of Grange, who came along in the Roaring '20s, the so-called Golden Age of Sports.

Grange could play, as witness his stunning five-touchdown performance against a top Michigan team on Oct. 18, 1924, the day he became an instant legend. Carroll's problem is that Grange was not very interesting off the field. Summing up his own career, the Galloping Ghost concluded, "I could run, and that was the basis of any success I ever had."

Issue date: Aug. 23, 1999

Rockne of Notre Dame
By Ray Robinson
Oxford University Press, $27.50

Robinson has no such difficulty bringing Knute Rockne to life, since the Notre Dame coach, another ornament of the Golden Age, had personality to burn. It helps that Robinson is an entertaining writer who revels in the irony of a Norwegian immigrant perpetuating the fame of the Fighting Irish.

Robinson has fun with the Rockne myths, particularly the famous Gipper oration. Who knows, or cares, what George Gipp's actual last words were; what matters is that when Rockne tearfully recited them to his team at halftime of the 1928 Army game at Yankee Stadium, he "created Notre Dame's most enduring legend, enhancing the reputation of all parties concerned -- Notre Dame, Gipp, Rockne and even Ronald Reagan."

Issue date: Aug. 23, 1999

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