Surely enjoyable for a readership among academy grads and fans of sports history. Of less service as a window onto WWII.
Are we running out of WWII stories?
Certainly some of the premises are getting a little thin, and this is a case in point. The setup is just right for Sports Illustrated reporter Anderson (The Proving Ground, 2001, etc.): On November 29, 1941, the Army-Navy game proved to be one of the most thrilling matches ever waged between Annapolis and West Point, with 100,000 spectators (including Eleanor Roosevelt) in the stands. By the end of the game, writes Anderson, “the undermanned Cadet players had fought as hard as Vikings, but the Midshipmen prevailed 14–6.” Nine days later the US was at war with the Axis, and Anderson’s Rockwellian evocations of prewar military life (“Just the name of the naval academy sounded glamorous to him; it conveyed some magical faraway place where everyone was smart and strong”) give way to the hard realities of combat in episodes starring four of the game’s players, now commissioned officers. Anderson’s account of the game itself is first-class, and the lessons to be drawn vis-à-vis football and war will be familiar to anyone who’s been inside a locker room: “We were officers in the war,” one officer recalls, “but really, we were just kids in our early twenties. But most of us were put in charge of hundreds of soldiers. It’s much easier to deal with that kind of responsibility once you’ve had the experience of playing football in front of 100,000 people.” Anderson’s war tales are pretty well done, too, though there’s a been-there-done-that quality that will make some readers wish he had done a Seabiscuit and stuck to the game and others of its kind during the war years—as he notes, and most interestingly, the 1944 bout alone raised $58 million in war bonds, while for other reasons “never in the history of the Army-Navy game had the two service academies played each other with so much on the line.”
Surely enjoyable for a readership among academy grads and fans of sports history. Of less service as a window onto WWII.Pub Date: Dec. 12, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-30887-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
A new convert to the game of football, Oppenheimer (Private Demons, 1988) decided to observe, record, and analyze the daily activity of her son's 1988 Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School team. Like the team's season, the results are mixed. Toby, senior offensive lineman in only his second year, didn't like the idea: ``What seventeen-year-old wants his mother hanging around a locker room?'' The BCC Barons and head coach Pete White, meanwhile, felt there was reason for optimism despite going 5-5 in 1987, their best record in years. ``Win 8 in '88 and go to state!'' was the battle cry. The talent at this ethnically diverse, affluent suburban school included a 300-lb. center, a 5'-6'' Korean linebacker, a swift Jamaican running back, and an assortment of blacks, Asians, and white kids more inclined toward soccer. It wasn't always a comfortable mix. As Oppenheimer follows their progress, she scrutinizes their attitudes toward one another and the coaches, toward winning and losing, their sex lives, and their use of drugs and alcohol. Fighting off her own anxieties—``Zen and the art of football parenting''—about her son, she rarely inserts herself in the picture but allows the boys to speak in their own, often inarticulate, tiresome way: But I'm, like, okay, so I go, and he goes.... There's a disappointing opening game; a racist coach (``black kids...were more arrogant, tougher, meaner''); a bitter, injury-rife, one-point loss to rival Einstein; the boys' cockiness following the homecoming victory; and, finally, the season-ending trouncing at the hands of ``mammoth, untouchable, abandon-all-hope'' Gaithersburg. The annual banquet, despite the 4-6 record, would toast individual achievements and look toward next year. At times self-conscious and shrill (the locker room, ``a place for the ancient rites of grabass'') and at other times perceptive, but Oppenheimer never quite puts it all together. Rather like missing the point after.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-671-68754-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1991
An engaging journey through, as poet Merrill puts it, ``the enchanted lands of soccer.'' When, in 1990, the US team qualified for the World Cup for the first time in 40 years, Merrill (an avid amateur soccer player) followed the team through preliminary games stateside and then to Italy for the month-long tournament. The Americans were 500-1 underdogs, given little chance to do more than make a brave showing, especially with Bob Gansler at the helm, a coach so conservative and defense-oriented that his own players had sworn to scrap his game plan. In the opening game, Merrill says, Czechoslovakia ``outclassed'' the US in ``skill, speed, strength, tactics, and creativity,'' but in the second game—largely through the play of New Jersey goalie Tony Meola—the Americans scored a moral victory against heavily favored Italy, to whom they lost by only one goal. The third game, though, against Austria, was an ugly loss marred by ineptness and fighting. As Merrill progresses through the World Cup play (finally won by West Germany in a brutal match against defending champion Argentina, signaling the imminent downfall of superstar player Diego Maradona, whose drug and prostitution connections would bring him to disgrace and banishment), he offers lovely and knowing passages on the art, architecture, and ambience of Italy's cities and provides deep historical background and understanding of the game of soccer itself. Of particular interest are his insights into why ``the world's most popular game'' has never caught on in sports-mad America. The rarity of goals, Merrill contends, has ``doomed'' soccer in a country ``hooked on instant gratification'': Americans want to see lots of scoring but, ``like poetry and jazz, soccer is a subtle art, a game of nuance.'' An intelligent and literate work that could broaden American interest in soccer in time for our 1994 hosting—for the first time ever—of the World Cup.
Pub Date: Nov. 10, 1993
ISBN: 0-8050-2771-8
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1993
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