WHY WE LOVE FOOTBALL

The author of Why We Love Baseball gives us 100 reasons to look forward to football season.

Posnanski is a practiced sportswriter, but here, following his top-50 treatment of baseball, he’s an enthusiast with an uncommonly broad grasp of football history. He opens with a splendid anecdote about Dick Butkus, renowned for smacking into his opponents hard enough to send them into the next zip code. When Raquel Welch, whom Butkus played alongside when he became an actor, professed wonder that people called Butkus mean, a crewmember replied, “Don’t pick up a football.” The author, old enough to remember when football was a Sunday-only televised sport, connects to the game at a fan’s level, sometimes elevating it to a religion. As he writes, while biblical scholars credit Jesus with somewhere between 37 and 40 miracles, “football, miraculously, has more.” One, ranking 14th on Posnanski’s 100 list, was the famed “Hail Mary” that Roger Staubach pulled off in December 1975—a pass that, while Staubach didn’t necessarily invent it (Posnanski inserts a brief history that stretches back three more decades), was a last-ditch, desperate temptation of fate that actually worked. Voilà: a miracle, just as when Joe Montana lured an opposing Dallas line into coverage that left his receiver wide open to make a game-closing touchdown after San Francisco came far from behind, all of which Posnanski sets up with the offhand opening, “Joe Montana was on the smaller side, and his arm didn’t wow you, and he seemed a little bit frail”—and yet, a miracle, and pick no. 11 of 100. It would spoil the fun to reveal the No. 1 moment, but suffice it to say that those readers who witnessed it will surely share Posnanski’s appreciation.

A learned but lightly delivered pleasure for fans of the gridiron and its history.