Brooks on Books: Football books with attitude

"Namath" by Mark Kriegel and "Long Bomb" by Brett Forrest are two outstanding pro football books, each well-written and packed with vivid details. author Each might put off some readers, though, with his style. Both Kriegel and Forrest assume kind of a tough guy, or at least tough journalist, posture, writing as a streetwise observer who tells it like it is. Neither man is afraid to drop an f-bomb or an s-bomb every now and then, either.

This kind of approach can be tiresome in the hands of the wrong author, but Kriegel and Forrest pull it off with great success. Kriegel's bio, "Namath" sports a bunch of negative reviews on Amazon, with some chiding it for trashing Broadway Joe. I suspect a lot of the bad feedback is due to the writing style and the profanity.

The book itself can hardly be called a hatchet job. Yes, Namath comes off as emotionally distant, a little egocentric, and--as Kriegel constantly calls him--"a hustler." But he doesn't always mean "hustler" in a negative way, and he points out how so many other people and institutions in Namath's life are also part of the hustle. More importantly, "Namath" the book relates with overwhelming force how talented Namath the quarterback was, how charismatic he was, and how flat-out physically tough he was. The reader gets a sense of sadness at how Namath was apparently scarred by the nasty dissolution of his parents' marriage when he was youth, but ultimately Namath finds happiness in the narrative of his life as a devoted, loving dad seemingly at peace with himself.

The lingering sadness you get from "Namath" has nothing to do with the subject's alcohol use, womanizing, or associations with gamblers (actually, those are all fun topics), but rather with the "What might have been?" aspect of the Hall of Fame career. After hurting himself at Alabama, Namath was never the same, and he became a pro superstar and legendary Super Bowl guarantee-man (and victor) on battered knees, ankles, and just about everything else. Kriegel's biography helps you appreciate how Joe overcame all the injuries to become a winner. It's overall a flattering portrait of the football immortal, and better yet, it's an insightful, compelling read.

"Long Bomb" is subtitled "How the XFL Became TV's Biggest Fiasco," and though you might be trying to forget Vince McMahon and Dick Ebersol's 2001 disaster of a football league, it's worth going through all the gory details in this funny, incisive breakdown of the whole deal. The XFL embarrassed not just the WWF (now WWE) and NBC, but it seemed to irk the whole "respectable" sports community and established media. Forrest explains how the league might have had a decent idea or two, but it overreached through a combination of hubris, impulsiveness, and good old-fashioned incompetence.

There are plenty of examples of the incompetence, and Forrest pulls no punches in describing them. The first sentence begins, "The hacks who write the World Wrestling Federation..." Later he describes WWE executive Linda McMahon:

"She was friendly. She was humble. She was gracious. She was full of shit. Not completely full of shit. But there was enough of a cubic-zirconia twinkle in her eye, a static HAL lamp, a register: POWER ON."

That passage sums up Forrest's approach and style pretty well. He's tough, even a little mean sometimes, and he offers up a no-BS stance from a guy willing and probably eager to call out divas like McMahon, NBC Sports honcho Ebersol, and even peripheral figures in the saga like Lorne Michaels (who throws a hissy fit at NBC when week 2's game runs over and delays "Saturday Night Live," forcing changes to ensure no overruns). This isn't a detached, dignified straight telling of a sports/media/business story. You will be aware of the author on just about every page of this book, although the longer it goes, the less prominent the style is. Forrest is talented enough to pull this off, though, and I'd gladly read more of his books (unfortunately, there aren't any, according to Amazon).

Forrest had zero cooperation from some of the principles in the creation and operation of the league, but he had great access to the Las Vegas Outlaws team during that inaugural (and only) season, and he gets telling profiles of players like the notorious He Hate Me, AKA Rod Smart. He skillfully weaves these profiles and sharply observed accounts of the games and the telecasts into the broader narrative of the rise and fall of the XFL.

Well, actually, it's more like the Fall and Plunge of the XFL, but Forrest does point out some wasted opportunities. The league did draw a strong first-week audience. There were some talented people involved behind the scenes. There were fans willing to watch non-NFL football, and some of the TV economics might have made sense under different circumstances.

Under the actual circumstances, though, the XFL was doomed almost from the get-go. "Long Bomb" is a funny and pungent account of a notorious flop, and even if you've tried to forget it, it's worth revisiting in this book.