blevins's review against another edition
4.0
Nearly FIVE stars and I am very stingy w/ my FIVE stars! What held it back was it was a little short--I thought more profiles of some of the players/coaches would have made the book fuller. Still, a very good addition to the Mark Bowden canon. They guy knows how to write long form non-fiction journalism.
I was a huge Baltimore Colt fan as a kid and rooted for them until they moved to Indy in the middle of the night. Bert Jones was my hero in the 1970s. A big part of following them even then was the lore of this 1958 championship game so I wasn't a stranger to a lot of the players and events but I sure enjoyed reading about the game.
It was truly the breakthrough moment for the sport when the players and the times were so much more innocent and "normal"--this was before salaries and massive media attention turned the athletes into people who exist outside the normal realms of day to day society. These guys all had jobs in the off season, barely trained and would hang out with the fans all over town. As one players puts it--we may not have been paid as much as today or train as hard but don't tell me players today have as much fun as we did...
Great book if you aren't familiar w/ the particulars--or even if you are like me.
I was a huge Baltimore Colt fan as a kid and rooted for them until they moved to Indy in the middle of the night. Bert Jones was my hero in the 1970s. A big part of following them even then was the lore of this 1958 championship game so I wasn't a stranger to a lot of the players and events but I sure enjoyed reading about the game.
It was truly the breakthrough moment for the sport when the players and the times were so much more innocent and "normal"--this was before salaries and massive media attention turned the athletes into people who exist outside the normal realms of day to day society. These guys all had jobs in the off season, barely trained and would hang out with the fans all over town. As one players puts it--we may not have been paid as much as today or train as hard but don't tell me players today have as much fun as we did...
Great book if you aren't familiar w/ the particulars--or even if you are like me.
michaelnlibrarian's review against another edition
3.0
I read this in a day - not a very heavy reading experience.
This one game had already had at least one book written about it some years ago and on the library new books' shelf there was a newish book about this game by Frank Gifford, who played in it. (I'm not going to read Gifford's book but one wonders what he would say since (a) the Giants lost, and (b) Gifford fumbled three or four times.)
In addition to focusing on the drama of the particular game, Bowden describes what makes this game a watershed in television's relationship with the NFL and the resulting change in the status of the players (among other things).
There is a fair amount about Sam Huff who now is one of the announcers for the Redskins games. And I'm old enough that I saw Unitas play on TV, so it didn't seem like ancient history (although the black and white photographs make it look that way).
This one game had already had at least one book written about it some years ago and on the library new books' shelf there was a newish book about this game by Frank Gifford, who played in it. (I'm not going to read Gifford's book but one wonders what he would say since (a) the Giants lost, and (b) Gifford fumbled three or four times.)
In addition to focusing on the drama of the particular game, Bowden describes what makes this game a watershed in television's relationship with the NFL and the resulting change in the status of the players (among other things).
There is a fair amount about Sam Huff who now is one of the announcers for the Redskins games. And I'm old enough that I saw Unitas play on TV, so it didn't seem like ancient history (although the black and white photographs make it look that way).
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