Collision Low Crossers

December 9, 2013
Claiming that professional football "thrive on mystery," Dawidoff (The Catcher Was a Spy) embedded himself with the NFL's New York Jets for the 2011 season in an attempt to demystify the sport. By converging elements of the best sport literatureâanalysis, expose, humorâinto an expansive narrative, he takes readers inside the windowless offices of the Jets' Florham Park, N.J., headquarters and onto sweat-stained practice fields where men become boys and friendships rise and fall. Beginning with the NFL Scouting Combine in February through to the final game of a disappointing season marked by early Super Bowl aspirations and a player lockout, Dawidoff reveals the professional, physical, and human toll a single NFL season takes. Issues of player safety and sexual orientation are covered neatly and quickly so he can get back to an overreliance on Xs and Os. In fact, the book takes its title from a little-known term used by defensive coaches to describe linebackers and other players who make "legal contact with any potential pass receiver⦠crossing the field within five yards of the line of scrimmage." This coveted exploration of the inner workings of an NFL team isn't for casual fans, but it will thrill Jets followers and disciples of the game, ensuring readers won't watch football the same way again. Agent: David McCormick, McCormick & Williams.

Starred review from October 15, 2013
The story of the author's year embedded in the New York Jets football team. Before the 2011 NFL season, the "big, warm-blooded, exuberant" coach of the Jets, Rex Ryan, asked New Yorker and Rolling Stone contributor Dawidoff (The Fly Swatter: Portrait of an Exceptional Character, 2003, etc.) to spend a year with the team. That fact alone says a lot: not only that Ryan trusted the author to make a good job of it--which he absolutely does--but to be so open in what is mostly a closed, secretive society. Unlike most journalists, who are escorted around "like state visitors to Pyongyang," Dawidoff received a locker and the freedom to roam and eavesdrop. In the past 20 years, writes the author, the game had become "the national passion...something graceful, thrilling, dangerous, and concealed in plain sight." Though he touches on the bad press that has recently smeared the game--the concussion issue, the bounty hunting, the closed-mindedness about homosexuality--the author was soon in the game's thrall, both intellectually and emotionally. Dawidoff is a crack writer, saturating the book with the best of a year's worth of anecdotes and lacing it with the backgrounds of coaches and players with an intimacy that begs the question how he got all this sharp and often moving material. Typical is the lovely scene where the young Rex is with his twin brother, Rob (a defensive coordinator in the NFL), and his father, Buddy (a legendary former NFL head coach), as Buddy is explaining to the boys some piece of the game's obscurity, and Rob suddenly realizes: "He's teaching us the family secrets." Dawidoff has a sure hand with the nature of passion, the rancor and weeping joy that characterizes every season in the most popular sport in the country. Insightful, immediate sportswriting. Readers will feel every bit of the team's frustration and elation.

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Starred review from November 1, 2013
Dawidoff, author of a fine biography of baseball catcher and international spy Moe Berg (The Catcher Was a Spy, 1994), here turns to the 2011 New York Jets, who gave him apparently unfettered access to virtually every aspect of the team's day-to-day operations, from the February scouting combine of collegiate talent, through the May draft of college players, the torturous preseason of practices and games, and, finally, to the entire 16-game, regular season schedule and subsequent coaches' postmortem. Head coach Rex Ryan and his staff receive the primary focus, and it's hard not to be impressed by the all-consuming effort they put into coaxing superhuman performances out of their gifted but often mercurial players and also by how narrow the differences are that divide winners from losers in the unsparing, ferociously competitive NFL. The Jets, who'd come just one win shy of reaching the Super Bowl in both 2009 and 2010, lost their magic in 2011, falling to 88 and out of playoff contention, Dawidoff recording every excruciating moment of the team's slide from inside the Jets' facility. This is a superlative insider's portrait of one NFL team (reminiscent of John Feinstein's similar Next Man Up: A Year behind the Lines, 2005, about the Baltimore Ravens), and it's accessible to casual fans and irresistible to NFL geeks.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

June 15, 2013

Dawidoff doesn't play professional football--he's a Pulitzer Prize finalist and best-selling author--but with a locker and an office in the scouting department of the New York Jets, he got a good look at how pro football operates. Originating as a New York Times Magazine cover story; with a 75,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2013

Over the past few years, the New York Jets under blustery coach Rex Ryan have been an overexposed media magnet that repels many fans. Yet Dawidoff's (The Fly Swatter) immersion into the world of football presents a nuanced, thorough account of the team's disappointing 2011 season that demands to be read. His book, which originated as an article in the New York Times Magazine, where he is a contributing writer, is more about the management of an NFL team than about on-the-field heroics. Dawidoff details the exacting, overworked life of the coaches in their pressurized bubble, drawing incisive, compelling profiles of Ryan, defensive coordinator Mike Pettine, and several other assistant coaches, as well as general manager Mike Tannenbaum. Jets players are mostly ancillary here, although the sad sagas of struggling quarterback Mark Sanchez, frustrated wideout Santonio Holmes, and unstable cornerback Antonio Cromartie are a continuing burden for the coaches. The author contends that past family dysfunction in players' lives has significantly molded the strong and often difficult personalities of many of these young athletes. VERDICT This quality piece of embedded analytical journalism relayed with warmth and insight will be enjoyed by football fans.--John Maxymuk, Rutgers Univ. Lib., Camden, NJ

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.