Last week I wrote a brief post about football books and wondered why there aren’t more of them, especially compared to baseball. In yesterday’s Baltimore Sun, reporter Childs Walker takes that same idea and runs with it much farther than I did in his comprehensive article. Walker’s impetus for writing the piece is a trio of recently released football books: John Feinstein’s first pro football book, Next Man Up, David Halberstam’s book about Bill Belichick, The Education of a Coach, and Allen Barra’s bio of Bear Bryant, The Last Coach
Walker cites many compelling theories as to why baseball books dominate the sports literature landscape even though football is the more popular sport (at least in terms of TV ratings).
“It’s funny how few good books get written about the passions of people who don’t read books,” Michael Lewis wrote in the New Republic. “There are vast tracts of human experience that, because of the sort of humans having the experience, go ignored by talented writers. Football is one of them.”
Baseball is the older game, having risen to popularity at a time when the written and spoken word were the only ways for many fans to experience players and games. Football, by contrast, found much of its audience through television, and its early history feels cut off.
Walker goes on to run through several football books that are worthy of the mantle “sports literature,” starting with the two books I mentioned last week, George Plimpton’s Paper Lion and Instant Replay by Jerry Kramer, a guard for the Green Bay Packers in the 1960s, and Dick Schaap. Also mentioned are a pair of novels – progenitors of the Oliver Stone film Any Given Sunday, it seems – North Dallas Forty by former Cowboys receiver Peter Gent and Semi-Tough by Sports Illustrated writer Dan Jenkins. And finally several non-fiction books about football: H.G. “Buzz” Bissinger’s book “of a Texas town’s obsession with high school football” in Friday Night Lights (also recently a movie); Mark Bowden’s study of the Philadelphia Eagles, Bringing the Heat; When Pride Still Mattered, David Maraniss’ bio of Vince Lombardi and Mark Kriegel’s bio, Namath. These books all sound like a great way to pass the time for those six days between Sundays.
