A colorful and captivating account of a college football team’s defeats and glories.
Baskin, with co-author O’Bryant, offers a history of Ohio State University’s football team and its culture.
The chronicle of the famed OSU football franchise begins with a classic “If you build it, they will come” moment, reminiscent of the 1989 film Field of Dreams: “Early in the twentieth century there was an unlikely—but epochal—sports-related moment from which all other such moments derived,” he writes. “It came when a small group of like-minded men with the apparent ability to see into the future devised plans for a stadium so large it would hold three times the largest crowd that had previously seen an Ohio State game.” Baskin follows Ohio State’s story from its primitive beginnings in the spring of 1890 (when it was, as the author puts it, a “Johnny Football-come-lately” when compared to other college teams) through a procession of its greatest founding figures. Readers meet coach Francis Schmidt, “a tall fellow wearing a bow tie” who had “the talent and the stage to go national with his razzle-dazzle.” They note that famed author James Thurber was a fervent Buckeye fan who wrote, “We give place to no man in our ardor for the game as it is played at Ohio State,” adding that football “has more beauty in it than any other competitive game in the world, when played by college athletes.” They introduce coach John Cooper, Ohio State’s “first administrator,” and, most notably, legendary coach Woody Hayes, “a tough guy with an egghead streak.” And always, in the background, there’s the game itself—always changing, becoming bigger business and bigger entertainment.
The authors follow the team’s story all the way to the present day and paint a masterful portrait of Buckeye Nation. The book’s pacing is skillful, refusing the temptation to hurry things along so that they might savor choice anecdotes and bits of dialogue. Their task is immensely aided by Kale’s illustrations, which crop up throughout—languid, sketchy pen-and-ink drawings of key figures that complement the text perfectly. But it’s the authors’ storytelling powers that carry the book and make it inviting reading, even for people who have no knowledge of and little interest in the sport. One key technique that assures this is a regular broadening of its scope from the specific (with many individual games dramatically reconstructed) to the general and even the ideological: “If ever a team had been favored by the gods, it was this one,” they write of the 2002 National Championship, keeping readers hooked into the grand story they’re telling. “The entire season was an old-fashioned movie serial that ended with a cliffhanger every Saturday.” Baskin and O’Bryant don’t shy away from play-by-play specifics, but they always draw readers into the drama and the passion of Ohio State football, and they do so with gusto. Even football newcomers will finish the book wishing that Baskin and O’Bryant would give other Big Ten schools the same terrific treatment.
A colorful and captivating account of a college football team’s defeats and glories.Pub Date: Nov. 25, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-949248-52-4
Page Count: 395
Publisher: Orange Frazer Press
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Basketball fans will enjoy Pippen’s bird’s-eye view of some of the sport’s greatest contests.
The Chicago Bulls stalwart tells all—and then some.
Hall of Famer Pippen opens with a long complaint: Yes, he’s a legend, but he got short shrift in the ESPN documentary about Michael Jordan and the Bulls, The Last Dance. Given that Jordan emerges as someone not quite friend enough to qualify as a frenemy, even though teammates for many years, the maltreatment is understandable. This book, Pippen allows, is his retort to a man who “was determined to prove to the current generation of fans that he was larger-than-life during his day—and still larger than LeBron James, the player many consider his equal, if not superior.” Coming from a hardscrabble little town in Arkansas and playing for a small college, Pippen enjoyed an unlikely rise to NBA stardom. He played alongside and against some of the greats, of whom he writes appreciatively (even Jordan). Readers will gain insight into the lives of characters such as Dennis Rodman, who “possessed an unbelievable basketball IQ,” and into the behind-the-scenes work that led to the Bulls dynasty, which ended only because, Pippen charges, the team’s management was so inept. Looking back on his early years, Pippen advocates paying college athletes. “Don’t give me any of that holier-than-thou student-athlete nonsense,” he writes. “These young men—and women—are athletes first, not students, and make up the labor that generates fortunes for their schools. They are, for lack of a better term, slaves.” The author also writes evenhandedly of the world outside basketball: “No matter how many championships I have won, and millions I have earned, I never forget the color of my skin and that some people in this world hate me just because of that.” Overall, the memoir is closely observed and uncommonly modest, given Pippen’s many successes, and it moves as swiftly as a playoff game.
Basketball fans will enjoy Pippen’s bird’s-eye view of some of the sport’s greatest contests.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982165-19-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
Smart, engaging sportswriting—good reading for organization builders as well as Pats fans.
Prolific writer Benedict has long blended two interests—sports and business—and the Patriots are emblematic of both. Founded in 1959 as the Boston Patriots, the team built a strategic home field between that city and Providence. When original owner Billy Sullivan sold the flailing team in 1988, it was $126 million in the hole, a condition so dire that “Sullivan had to beg the NFL to release emergency funds so he could pay his players.” Victor Kiam, the razor magnate, bought the long since renamed New England Patriots, but rival Robert Kraft bought first the parking lots and then the stadium—and “it rankled Kiam that he bore all the risk as the owner of the team but virtually all of the revenue that the team generated went to Kraft.” Check and mate. Kraft finally took over the team in 1994. Kraft inherited coach Bill Parcells, who in turn brought in star quarterback Drew Bledsoe, “the Patriots’ most prized player.” However, as the book’s nimbly constructed opening recounts, in 2001, Bledsoe got smeared in a hit “so violent that players along the Patriots sideline compared the sound of the collision to a car crash.” After that, it was backup Tom Brady’s team. Gridiron nerds will debate whether Brady is the greatest QB and Bill Belichick the greatest coach the game has ever known, but certainly they’ve had their share of controversy. The infamous “Deflategate” incident of 2015 takes up plenty of space in the late pages of the narrative, and depending on how you read between the lines, Brady was either an accomplice or an unwitting beneficiary. Still, as the author writes, by that point Brady “had started in 223 straight regular-season games,” an enviable record on a team that itself has racked up impressive stats.
Smart, engaging sportswriting—good reading for organization builders as well as Pats fans.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982134-10-5
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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