America’s Game: The Epic Story of How Professional Soccer Captured a Nation by Michael MacCambridge

The first three weeks of this year, I had a brief and cursory, but more intimate than usual, look at the National Football League’s hiring process and practices. I concluded that the owners were two-faced slugs with no character; head coaches stabbing in the back; the self-absorbed and egocentric players; and fans thought they knew the game better than the entire NFL organization.

According to Michael MacCambridge, I am right! The book he meticulously researched, America’s Game: The Epic Story of How Professional Soccer Captured a Nation is a close look at the history of football from the end of World War II to the present. Like Anya Seton, another author who uses extensive research for her stories, MacCambridge begins slowly, almost painstakingly, in the first two-thirds of the book, stating facts, figures, and events in somewhat chronological order until about 1970, some 25 years. . She tends to go back, jump forward, and then back again within chapters. The pace picks up considerably towards the end of the book, covering more than 30 years in the last third.

I understand the need to build a foundation for the book, but it seems that MacCambridge skipped important football events and information from the post-1970 era. Of all the great managerial achievements, Tom Landry is only mentioned a few times. But he fared better than other greats like Mike Ditka, whose name appears only once as a possessive; or Bill Cowher, mentioned twice in the context of an unwritten rule not to sleep in the office. Instead, MacCambridge favors numerous quotes from lesser coaches like Brian Billick.

Deion Sanders (portrayed as the start of a new era in the NFL, which is the era of the self-absorbed, self-absorbed player) got almost as much publicity as Roger Staubach, which is very annoying to me. Staubach has always been one of my heroes, on and off the pitch. neon deion will NEVER be it the legend or the man that Staubach is.

america game it is not written for the casual football fan. MacCambridge assumes that the reader has much more than a basic education in the sport. I’m not one of those readers, and I’m not familiar with terms like: “pass down and inside”, “1-2 pass attack”, “shallow drag routes”, or hit the receiver “in an outlet pattern “. “.

I don’t have the name of every owner, head coach and general manager memorized. MacCambridge’s tendency to return to a person, identified only by the last name pages after he last addressed her, made rereading necessary and enjoyment of the book more difficult. Who is Thomas (p. 351)? I had to refer to index to find a person mentioned on the last page to find the last reference to him in the Foreword. He also chronicled the games using only the names of the players and not the teams. More reading to find out who won that one.

Another aspect of MacCambridge’s writing that makes this a difficult read is his flair for the dramatic. When Frank Borman, in orbit on Gemini 7 in 1965, told Tommy Nobis to “sign with the Oilers,” MacCambridge called it an “interstellar” bidding war. Being in orbit above the earth hardly qualifies as interplanetary, let alone interstellar. He describes a Jets-Colts game as a “harmonic convergence of elements”; and a discussion of the Property Trust had a “Spanish Civil War” feel.

Some sentences just didn’t make sense at all. For example,

“On the field, the verification system allowed the quarterback to hear a different play at the line of scrimmage if the defensive formation threatened the one called in the group.” (p. 201)

Hey? Listen? I know what the award means, but it could have been worded much more clearly.

He described the midnight convoy of Irsay’s Colts defection from Baltimore as “outlined in radiating lights…” Baltimore radiated the Colts when they left?

Despite these obstacles, the book offers several funny moments in the form of very sincere quotes from players and coaches.

But there are so many cases of two-sided ownership: Rosenbloom moving the Rams from Los Angeles to Anaheim against NFL orders or Irsay trading Elway for Denver without consulting Coach Accorsi.

How about backstabbing trainers? Bill Walsh discovered that the reason he had been passed over for the top spot was that his own head coach, Bill Johnson, had been badmouthing him to numerous interested teams. Al Davis and Jerry Jones, ’nuff said.

Kudos to MacCambridge, though, because he addresses those fans, who think they know the game better than anyone else involved in the NFL, very diplomatically:

“So one had the great conundrum of pro football’s popularity: Fans, without access to the team’s playbook, scouting reports, game plans and game movies, don’t really have the tools to fully understand your team’s actions and responses. (p. 412)

Play!

The best part of the book for a former cowboy fan like myself was the statement that I have known for decades that cowboy fans are good. MacCambridge has documented quotes from Staubach and facts related to Jones’s selfishness, among other statistics, to clearly illustrate this.

If you are a die-hard and know-it-all about football, you will still find this interesting reading. For the rest of us, it gives us a little better idea of ​​the confusing world of football. But at least when we finish reading it, we are fully aware of the fact that we don’t know everything.

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Not today

June 26, 2022