IRVING TITANS

The author sent me a copy of his novel to review:

I wasn’t entirely entertained by this (sort of) continuation of Peter Gent’s North Dallas Forty (1973) and parody of the The Dallas Cowboys. My main complaint is with the pragmatism of the novel. Certainly the author could have balanced realism with fiction in a more sensible way. Some of my questions are...Would any player stay with the team if bandied about in training camp by the owner, Ruben Weitzman (Jerry Jones) or head coach Marshall Jankowski (Jimmy Johnson)? Obviously the answer is no. Listen, I spent 13 weeks in Parris Island as a U.S. Marine and it wasn’t as tough as this supposed training camp. Would any player be immediately cut if they protested anything? Of course not. Would a football groupie wield the kind of power Charlene had over everybody on the team including the owner and the press? Would any player take the crap dished out by coach Swanson (even if he was 6’ 8” and 385 lbs)? I don’t think so. My guess is that the hundred or so players that the Irving team had at training camp would have left and the players union would have Weitzman and Jankowski up on some serious charges. We all like a football comedy; such as, The Longest Yard (1974), Heaven Can Wait (1978), or Semi-Tough (1977) but make it semi-real. This was a clumsy effort at a parody. I’m sure Mr. Dawson is an aspiring writer and gentleman but do it proper...write something somewhat original. I see flashes of talent throughout the novel, so like Nike says, “Just do it!”

Okay, enough lambasting already. What’s the novel about? It’s 1989 and the Irving Titans (Dallas Cowboys) have lost their luster. The owner Bum Reason (Bum Bright) has gone broke during the Savings & Loan crisis. He sells the team to Ruben Weitzman (Jerry Jones), who hires Marshall Jankowski (Jimmy Johnson) as his head coach after firing Coach Osborn (Tom Landry). A little on the hackneyed side wouldn’t you think? Anyway, the story is told by the semi washed up QB of the Titans, Jimmy Stone (I’m not sure who he is, maybe Danny White) after the Titans suffer a lackluster season in 1988. Jimmy is torn between two beautiful woman: Charlene Rivers, who makes $750,000 a year by framing almost everybody involved in the NFL, and a cocktail waitress named Nicole Anderson (does anybody care who Jimmy winds up with?). Anyway, the team is sent to a desolate and hot training camp to be terrorized by a bunch of cussing blowhard coaches. They have a new draft pick QB named Sammy Holmes (Troy Aikman?) in camp along with a new tight end named Larry Dresden (Jay Novacek?). They go 1-15 in 1989, but management is encouraged. They make a unbelievable trade before the 1990 season starts. They trade their star running back, Drew Krowsky (Herschel Walker) to the Minnesota Vikings for 13 Ist round picks. Yea, right. Do you think that trade was possible after the owner told the world that he wanted to get rid of his running back after the 1989 season ended? NOT!

The real trade was: Dallas sent Walker and four picks (between 1990-1991) to the Vikings for five players, three 1st round picks, three 2nd round picks, one third round pick and one sixth round pick (between 1990-1993). Quite a trade, but not as good as the Irving Titan’s trade. This novel is filled with nonsensical scenarios and that was the main reason that I couldn’t warm up to this novel. You will have to buy your own copy of this novel to find out what happens to the Irving Titans and all it’s characters after the big trade. Was it a bad novel? Not really, but there was little that the reader could hang his hat on. Just one harebrained chapter after another with very little comedy. I don’t want to be a wet blanket (this review is idiom heaven)... but come on. Yes, the author shows some talent, but give me something more veritable to read, not something that seemed simulated to me. I’m trying to be fair in my review of Mr. Dawson’s novel because I think he can do better. He could have written an indigenous novel, but choose to continue a old one. I have to give his work a neutral rating. 

RATING: 2 out of 5 stars

Comment: Sports books and novels have always interested me. I found a site (talkingbooks.dpi.wi.gov/tab_sports) that list Sports Illustrated's favorite sports books. Who else can be better to ask…”What sports book should I read?” Two of the novels on the list are already mentioned in my first paragraph (I'm not telling which ones, ha). Anyway here are a few of the books that are high up the list of 100: 

The Sweet Science. By A.J. Liebling (1956). Pound-for-pound the top boxing writer of all time, Liebling is at his bare-knuckled best here, bobbing and weaving between superb reporting and evocative prose. The fistic figures depicted in this timeless collection of New Yorker essays range from champs such as Rocky Marciano and Sugar Ray Robinson to endearing palookas and eccentric cornermen on the fringes of the squared circle. Liebling's writing is efficient yet stylish, acerbic yet soft and sympathetic. ("The sweet science, like an old rap or the memory of love, follows its victims everywhere.") He leavens these flourishes with an eye for detail worthy of Henry James. The one-two combination allows him to convey how boxing can at once be so repugnant and so alluring.

The Boys of Summer. By Roger Kahn (1971). A baseball book the same way Moby Dick is a fishing book, this account of the early-'50s Brooklyn Dodgers is, by turns, a novelistic tale of conflict and change, a tribute, a civic history, a piece of nostalgia and, finally, a tragedy, as the franchise's 1958 move to Los Angeles takes the soul of Brooklyn with it. Kahn writes eloquently about the memorable games and the Dodgers' penchant for choking-"Wait Till Next Year" is their motto-but the most poignant passages revisit the Boys in autumn. An auto accident has rendered catcher Roy Campanella a quadriplegic. Dignified trailblazer Jackie Robinson is mourning the death of his son. Sure-handed third baseman Billy Cox is tending bar. No book is better at showing how sports is not just games. [New York Times bestseller] 

Ball Four. By Jim Bouton (1970). Though a declining knuckleballer, Bouton threw nothing but fastballs in his diary of the 1969 season. Pulling back the curtain on the seriocomic world of the big leagues, he writes honestly and hilariously about baseball's vices and virtues. At a time when the sport was still a secular religion, it was an act of heresy to portray players "pounding the Ol' Budweiser," "chasin' skirts" or "poppin' greenies." (And that was during games.) Bouton's most egregious act of sacrilege-his biting observations about former teammate Mickey Mantle-led to his banishment from the "Yankee family." But beyond the controversy, Ball Four was, finally, a love story. Bouton writes, "You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time." [New York Times bestseller] 

Friday Night Lights . By H. G. Bissinger (1990). Schoolboy football knits together the West Texas town of Odessa in the late 1980s. But as Permian High grows into a dynasty, the locals' sense of proportion blows away like a tumbleweed. A brilliant look at how Friday-night lights can lead a town into darkness. [New York Times bestseller] 

Paper Lion . By George Plimpton (1965). No one today does what the fearless Plimpton once did with regularity. Here, in his first Walter Mitty-esque effort, the author of the equally brilliant Shadow Box and The Bogey Man infiltrates the Detroit training camp as a quarterback with no arm, no legs and no shot. [New York Times bestseller][Made into a movie] 

The Natural . By Bernard Malamud (1952). The movie was a Mawkish Rocky-in-flannels, but the novel is a darker, more subtle tale of phenom Roy Hobbs, who loses his prime years to a youthful indiscretion, then gets a second chance. TIME called the novel (which ends differently from the film) "preposterously readable."[New York Times bestseller][Made into a movie]

Readers, you can’t go wrong reading any of the above books.