True to NFL life

April 26, 2016

Whenever I wonder just how true my upcoming novel “The Penalty for Holding” is about the NFL, I encounter a story that reestablishes my equilibrium.

Such a story is contained in John Branch’s “In Manziel, a Draft Machine’s Human Cost.” It’s a by-now-familiar tale – the rise and fall of a big-time college football star. Johnny Manziel, aka “Johnny Football” – who won the Heisman Trophy as the best college player when he was a freshman quarterback at Texas A&M – was the main event in the 2014 NFL Draft, the 2016 version of which gets underway Thursday, April 28. ...

Art imitates life for NFL-bound Caraun Reid

May 8, 2014

In the Too Funny Department, Caraun Reid – a defensive tackle who graduated from Princeton, sings and plays guitar – may be picked as early as the third round of the NFL Draft. Why is that funny? Because as a novelist struggling to create believable athletic protagonists, I have worried about making them too intellectual and cultural (like me). Then along comes Reid to demonstrate I had nothing to worry about, that God is the best writer and that we shouldn’t be so quick to assume that a jock can’t be a brainiac as well.

But then, I already knew that. In my upcoming novel, “In This Place You Hold Me,” deeply troubled star quarterback Quinton Day Novak attended Stanford where he studied classics. Who’s going to believe this? I thought. Until the Jonathan Martin hazing incident broke, and it turned out, yep, he went to Stanford and majored in classics. You can’t make this stuff up.

Mountain Men: The Sochi downhill and the uphill battle of Michael Sam

February 11, 2014

The Caucasus are a long way from the gridirons of America, but they both yielded big news Sunday, Feb. 9 that spoke to the allure of male power and its limitations.

Matthias Mayer of Austria took gold in the men’s downhill – one of the most glamorous, thrilling and dangerous of Olympic sports – ending a 12-year Austrian drought in the event.

The men’s downhill is two minutes and change of pure testosterone. It’s men against a mountain and a clock. Hemingway couldn’t have scripted a crisper, cleaner, crueler narrative. And while the women ski the same disciplines as the men, I don’t know, they’re not as exciting.

“It’s just in my mind, for lack of a better word, kind of a manly sport,” veteran American skier Marco Sullivan said of the downhill in The New York Times. And it demonstrates what’s so attractive about men – their speed, their power, their abandon, for no one wins the downhill without combining technique with risk-taking. Veer too much to the former and you’ll ski too cautiously. Stray too close to the latter and you’ll crash and burn. (American favorite Bode Miller, anyone?)

The dark-horse winner Mayer said he eliminated his final training runs to conserve power for the race. That comment conveys the truth of power, which is as much about retaining as it is attaining. Read more