UNBREAKABLE

A blustering, often tedious self-help book by the Fox Sports NFL insider.

“Stand the fuck out!” shouts Glazer, who seeks to address issues of self-doubt and existential angst. What he offers is mostly a locker-room harangue—perhaps useful if you’re an NFL pro, less so if you’re an ordinary mortal. Much of the material is unobjectionable enough—e.g., “Be the last one standing,” meaning that one shouldn’t ever give up in the arena of trying to impress someone such as a prospective client or boss with one’s dedication and brilliance. That’s all well and good, if a bit off point. More in keeping with the subtitle are Glazer’s recollections of starting off in the sports business, which found him often so poor that he had to beg a ride to the stadium. “Sometimes I needed a free meal,” he allows. “Always, I needed to know people had my back.” The quid pro quo there is that one needs to have others’ backs as well, which leads Glazer to insist on the importance of both loyalty and cultivating relationships. In that regard, aspiring journalists may gain insight from his welcome self-evaluation as someone who can’t outplay his subjects but who can certainly befriend them and, through those friendships, learn about what happens in the huddle. Sometimes Glazer can be cloying: As a motivational speaker and coach, it seems he likes nothing better than to induce tears. He also enjoys profanity-laced exhortation, as when he told a badly wounded, depressed combat veteran, “Here is what I want you to do: from now on, when you are walking down the street, I want you to hold your head high and look at every fucking person you see out there and say to yourself, ‘I ain’t like the rest of you motherfuckers’….You saved American POWs. You ain’t like everybody else.”

For readers seeking a pep talk in the place of more thoughtful psychological analysis.