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LeBron James’s Suspicious Hummer, Lombardi’s Magic
Literary Spotlight
Think of John Eisenberg’s “That First Season: How Vince Lombardi Took the Worst Team in the NFL and Set It on the Path to Glory” as an archeological excavation.
Dig inside its pages and you will find evidence of the football empire created by Lombardi and of these ancient warriors in Packer green: Boyd Dowler. Ray Nitschke. Jerry Kramer. Paul Hornung. Jim Taylor. Forrest Gregg. Bart Starr. Max McGee.
Because we know how things turned out, we know those men were the nucleus of what may have been modern football’s greatest team. But no one in 1959 Green Bay knew the Packers were primed for greatness, because no one in Green Bay in the penultimate year of the Eisenhower era knew what magic Lombardi could perform with the raw materials of the gridiron game.
Eisenberg’s story is a breezy and likable look at a coach who was neither and a bunch of football players who were barely a team until Lombardi showed up and crushed their spirits in a successful (if brutal) effort to make their spirits, and their prospects, soar.
The Lombardi ethos was tough. Bad plays made him sick. Dumb plays made him furious. “Lombardi vowed to change the culture,” Eisenberg writes. “If the Packers were ever going to rise above their second-class status, they had to start acting like major leaguers who expected to win.”
They did, and the wins came that season -- the first three games in a row, then five consecutive losses, followed by four consecutive wins. The Packers were on their way to success and Lombardi was on his way to myth and fable.
‘Shooting Stars’
The myth and fable of LeBron James are still in the making, and, with the assistance of “Friday Night Lights” author Buzz Bissinger, they just got a big booster shot. James and Bissinger’s book, “Shooting Stars,” is a sports rarity -- a memoir of a superstar childhood that is redemptive, revealing and readable.
That three-point shot tells the story of James’s Akron youth, from his difficult start as a child who moved a dozen times between the ages of 5 and 8 to his experience on a youth team called the Shooting Stars to his high-school national championship at St. Vincent-St. Mary High School.
His teen years weren’t all a leisurely walk down the court. Trouble started when his mother bought him a Hummer for his birthday, the $50,000 price tag being far more than the family’s net worth. That prompted allegations and investigations into whether he was following the rules of amateurism. These became a distraction, and led to a suspension. He discovered, earlier than most athletes, the price of fame.
The Price of Fame
“Part of me just hungered to be a regular high school kid. I knew I couldn’t be that anymore,” he says. “Celebrity as an 18-year-old? Believe me, it wasn’t worth it.” This is one of many lessons worth learning in a book worth reading.
The sixth game of the 1975 World Series is a contest worth remembering; no Boston Red Sox fan who was alive that autumn will soon forget its exquisite ending. Now Mark Frost has taken that game and woven a book, with the crisp title “Game Six,” that examines a mystical moment in baseball history in which such giant figures as Pete Rose and Luis Tiant played cameo roles.
The hero of that October night’s drama was Carlton Fisk, whose home run in the bottom of the 12th inning evened the series at three games apiece. (The Cincinnati Reds would win the series in the more consequential, but more forgettable, seventh game.) Here is how Frost describes the moment:
“Carlton Fisk didn’t run. He turned sideways and took three abbreviated hops down the first base line, wildly waving his arms at the ball like a kid in a Little League game, urging, willing, begging it to stay fair.”
It did, of course. The Fenway Park organist played Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus. Can we doubt that the angels sang?
“That First Season” is published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (292 pages, $25). “Shooting Stars” is published by the Penguin Press (258 pages, $26.95). “Game Six” is published by Hyperion (406 pages, $26.99).
Dig inside its pages and you will find evidence of the football empire created by Lombardi and of these ancient warriors in Packer green: Boyd Dowler. Ray Nitschke. Jerry Kramer. Paul Hornung. Jim Taylor. Forrest Gregg. Bart Starr. Max McGee.
Because we know how things turned out, we know those men were the nucleus of what may have been modern football’s greatest team. But no one in 1959 Green Bay knew the Packers were primed for greatness, because no one in Green Bay in the penultimate year of the Eisenhower era knew what magic Lombardi could perform with the raw materials of the gridiron game.
Eisenberg’s story is a breezy and likable look at a coach who was neither and a bunch of football players who were barely a team until Lombardi showed up and crushed their spirits in a successful (if brutal) effort to make their spirits, and their prospects, soar.
The Lombardi ethos was tough. Bad plays made him sick. Dumb plays made him furious. “Lombardi vowed to change the culture,” Eisenberg writes. “If the Packers were ever going to rise above their second-class status, they had to start acting like major leaguers who expected to win.”
They did, and the wins came that season -- the first three games in a row, then five consecutive losses, followed by four consecutive wins. The Packers were on their way to success and Lombardi was on his way to myth and fable.
‘Shooting Stars’
The myth and fable of LeBron James are still in the making, and, with the assistance of “Friday Night Lights” author Buzz Bissinger, they just got a big booster shot. James and Bissinger’s book, “Shooting Stars,” is a sports rarity -- a memoir of a superstar childhood that is redemptive, revealing and readable.
That three-point shot tells the story of James’s Akron youth, from his difficult start as a child who moved a dozen times between the ages of 5 and 8 to his experience on a youth team called the Shooting Stars to his high-school national championship at St. Vincent-St. Mary High School.
His teen years weren’t all a leisurely walk down the court. Trouble started when his mother bought him a Hummer for his birthday, the $50,000 price tag being far more than the family’s net worth. That prompted allegations and investigations into whether he was following the rules of amateurism. These became a distraction, and led to a suspension. He discovered, earlier than most athletes, the price of fame.
The Price of Fame
“Part of me just hungered to be a regular high school kid. I knew I couldn’t be that anymore,” he says. “Celebrity as an 18-year-old? Believe me, it wasn’t worth it.” This is one of many lessons worth learning in a book worth reading.
The sixth game of the 1975 World Series is a contest worth remembering; no Boston Red Sox fan who was alive that autumn will soon forget its exquisite ending. Now Mark Frost has taken that game and woven a book, with the crisp title “Game Six,” that examines a mystical moment in baseball history in which such giant figures as Pete Rose and Luis Tiant played cameo roles.
The hero of that October night’s drama was Carlton Fisk, whose home run in the bottom of the 12th inning evened the series at three games apiece. (The Cincinnati Reds would win the series in the more consequential, but more forgettable, seventh game.) Here is how Frost describes the moment:
“Carlton Fisk didn’t run. He turned sideways and took three abbreviated hops down the first base line, wildly waving his arms at the ball like a kid in a Little League game, urging, willing, begging it to stay fair.”
It did, of course. The Fenway Park organist played Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus. Can we doubt that the angels sang?
“That First Season” is published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (292 pages, $25). “Shooting Stars” is published by the Penguin Press (258 pages, $26.95). “Game Six” is published by Hyperion (406 pages, $26.99).
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