Last month, idleguy.com served up an assortment of baseball books in PDF form and added them to the idleguy.com library. This month's selections are books with football themes. A list of football-themed movies appears in the sidebar.
In 1967, when Jerry Kramer was a thirty-one-year-old Green Bay Packers offensive lineman, in his tenth year with the team, he decided to keep a diary of the season. "Perhaps, by setting down my daily thoughts and observations," he wrote, "I'll be able to understand precisely what it is that draws me back to professional football."
Working with the renowned journalist Dick Schaap, Kramer recorded his day-to-day experiences as a player with perception, honesty, humor, and startling sensitivity. Little did Kramer know that the 1967 season would be one of the most remarkable in the history of pro football, culminating with the legendary championship game against Dallas now known as the "Ice Bowl," in which Kramer would play a central role.
This fascinating look inside the world of professional football took readers into the locker room to reveal the operation of a professional sports franchise from the inside. From training camp, through the historic Ice Bowl, then into the locker room of Super Bowl II, Kramer provided a captivating player's perspective on pro football's blood, grit, and tears. Kramer's story also provides an insightful portrait of the team's storied leader, Coach Vince Lombardi, and profiles of key players, Bart Starr, Marv Fleming, and Ray Nitschke, among others.
George Plimpton's exploits as a participant in organized professional sports was groundbreaking work, both in a literary sense and in terms of sports reportage. By actually spending time immersed in the preseason camp of the Detroit Lions as the "Last String Quarterback", Plimpton forever changed the manner in which sports figures were represented by the media while bringing fans and critics not only closer to the games, but inside them.
As "Paper Lion" has stood the test of time for over sixty years as a monument to creativity and intellectual curiosity, Plimpton's prose spilled over into the mainstream, inspiring generations of sports writers to grasp the sometimes ugly, but more often jocular depths of professional athletics and the players involved in the pursuit of fame, glory, money, and pride.
Other works by George Plimpton, a regular writer for Sports Illustrated and various periodicals, include pitching to major league hitters in "Out of My League", the 1961 precursor to "Paper Lion", and subsequent works, such as 1968's "The Bogey Man" as a pro golfer, and the 1985 story, "Open Net", in which he trained as a hockey goalie with the Boston Bruins.
Plimpton passed away in 2003 at the ripe young age of 76, but a part of him will live on in the hearts and minds of sports writers and arm-chair quarterbacks forever.
"Billy Lynn's Long Half-Time Walk" is a biting satire set in Texas during America's war in Iraq, exploring the gaping national disconnect between the perception of the war at home and the war abroad. Ben Fountain's remarkable production follows the surviving members of the heroic Bravo Squad through one exhausting stop in their media-intensive "Victory Tour" at Texas Stadium, football mecca of the Dallas Cowboys, their fans, promoters, and cheerleaders.
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, Ben Fountain's debut novel is a penetrating microcosm of George W. Bush's Texas and an increasingly disillusioned Pat Tillman's America through the Iraq and Afghanistan war era. Fountain unfurls fluid prose, biting metaphors, and intense dialogue into an uproarious, edgy satire of "the sheltering womb of all things American -- football, Thanksgiving, television, about eight different kinds of police and security personnel, plus 300 million well-wishing fellow citizens."
Fountain's opus has drawn comparisons to Joseph Heller's "Catch-22" for its bare-knuckled discussion of war, though the football passages at Texas Stadium are a kindred spirit to Hunter S. Thompson's gonzo-journalistic expose of the debauched horsey crowd in "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved".
Made into a hilarious and timeless film starring Burt Reynolds, Kris Kristofferson, and Jill Clayburgh, and once ranked number seven on Sports Illustrated's Top 100 Sports Books of All Time, "Semi-Tough" is Dan Jenkins's masterpiece and considered by many sports and literary critics to be the funniest sports book ever written. The novel follows the outlandish adventures of Billy Clyde Puckett, star running back for the New York Giants, whose team has come to Los Angeles for an epic showdown with the despised "dog-ass" Jets in the Super Bowl.
Faced with a dual challenge to not only run over a bunch of malevolent defensive players, but Billy Clyde was also commissioned by his publisher to keep a journal of the events leading up to, including, and following the game. Infused with Dan Jenkins's non-chalant and irreverent style and replete with cigarettes, whiskey, and wild women, Semi-Tough is an uproarious romp through a perceptually-bygone era of professional sports that still resonates with country boy jargon and unforgiving wit.
Bissinger's novel encaptures life in the fast lane of the Permian Panthers of Odessa - the greatest high school football team in Texas history. Odessa, a town big on dreams, the Panthers embody the pedestrian hopes of the residents of this small, dusty town. Socially and racially divided, its fragile economy follows the treacherous boom-bust path of the oil business, from the uncontrollable unemployment rate in bad times to the syrocketing murder rate in good times.
Regardless of economic and social conditions, every Friday night from September to December, when the local high school Permian Panthers play ball, the West Texas town comes together within the common goal of victory. Bissinger chronicles a dramatic season of the Panthers and illuminates how single-minded devotion to the team shapes the community and alternatively inspires or shatters the moods of the players, coaches and fans. A lasting tribute to youth sports, parenting and small town life, the book was made into a major motion picture starring Billy Bob Thorton and a weekly tevevision series that produced 76 episodes over five seasons from 2006 to 2011.
Instant Replay: The Green Bay Diary of Jerry Kramer by Jerry Kramer (1968)
Paper Lion: Confessions of a Last-String Quarterback by George Plimpton (1966)
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain (2012)
Semi-Tough by Dan Jenkins (1972)
Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream by H.G. Bissinger (1988)
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In Brief, Some Outstanding Football Movies:
Horse Feathers - 1932, Marx Brothers college football comedy
Knute Rockne, All American - 1940, Biographical story of the legendary Notre Dame coach with Ronald Reagan as the Gipper.
Paper Lion - 1968, Adaptation of writer George Plimpton's tryout with Detroit Lions, starring Alan Alda.
Brian's Song - 1971, TV film explores the bond between running backs Brian Piccolo (James Caan) and Gale Sayers (Billy Dee Williams) of the Chicago Bears, as Piccolo's battles cancer.
The Longest Yard - 1974, Comedy starring Burt Reynolds as a convict on his prison football team.
Black Sunday - 1977, Fictional thriller of a terrorist attack at the Super Bowl using the Goodyear Blimp.
Semi-Tough - 1977, Comedy based on Dan Jenkins' pro football novel, starring Burt Reynolds.
Heaven Can Wait - 1978, Award-winning comedy produced, directed and starring Warren Beatty, who mistakenly dies just before he's supposed to play quarterback in the Super Bowl.
North Dallas Forty - 1979, Drama based on novel by former Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Peter Gent, starring Nick Nolte.
Jerry Maguire, 1996, Tom Cruise plays a sports agent who gets fired from his agency and is left with a single client, Arizona Cardinals' wide receiver Rod Tidwell, played by Cuba Gooding Jr.
Any Given Sunday - 1999, Miami coach (Al Pacino) tries to rein in a quarterback (Jamie Foxx) rising in talent and popularity.
Remember the Titans - 2000, Drama based on a true story about a Virginia high school coach, starring Denzel Washington.
Friday Night Lights - 2004, True story about Permian High School's (Odessa, Texas) 1988 football team starring Billy Bob Thornton, adapted from H.G. Bissinger's 1988 novel by the same name.
The Blind Side - 2009, True story about the high school career and recruitment of Michael Oher, starring Sandra Bullock and Tim McGraw.
The U - 2009, Made for TV documentary as a part of ESPN's 30 for 30 series, highlighting the dominance of University of Miami football program in the 1980s and 1990s.
Draft Day - 2014, Drama starring Kevin Costner as the General Manager of the Cleveland Browns in the frantic days before and during the NFL draft.
American Underdog - 2021, The story of NFL MVP and Hall of Fame quarterback Kurt Warner, who went from stocking shelves at a supermarket to becoming an American Football star.
Wikipedia offers an exhaustive list.
