Whever I’ve passionate about something, from football to sex, I read a heap of books on the topic.
About 15 years ago, pro football lost me, and therefore I am out of step with millions of Americans, if one believes the weekly TV ratings. Maybe it was the four-hour games that ran the same two commercials on every change of possession. Maybe it was expansion to Jacksonville (the Jaguars) and Charlotte (the Panthers), whose teams seem to have the same teal turbo-cat logos on their helmets and so appeared to be more marketing strategies than football teams. Maybe it was the lack of a sonorous voice like that of Ray Scott — a minimalist announcer, unlike today’s bombastic entertainers — who could ennoble a late-afternoon game from the Los Angeles Coliseum by describing an arching touchdown pass from the Rams’ John Hadl to Harold Jackson with the simple “This is Jackson,” followed only by the roar of the crowd.
Or maybe it was the dearth of good books illuminating the game, filling out characters and teams and making you care about individuals as well as outcomes. Of just nine books about pro football on Sports Illustrated’s 2002 list of the top 100 sports books of all time, all but one were published between 1965 and 1974, and the one exception was David Maraniss’s “When Pride Still Mattered” (1999), a biography of Vince Lombardi, who coached during that golden era. As it happens, those years also coincided with my adolescence, when I was a member of the Sports Illustrated Book Club and happily devoured now-canonical works like “Semi-Tough,” “Paper Lion,” “About Three Bricks Shy of a Load,” “Instant Replay” and “A Fan’s Notes” — not to mention ones that didn’t make the list, like Gale Sayers’s “I Am Third” and Bernie Parrish’s “They Call It a Game.”
