Primers for football are true classics

By Keith A. Cerniglia

Football season is still a month away, but idle time during the dog days of summer can always be well spent with a good book in hand.

My top 10 football books:

10. “Football Physics: The Science of the Game,” by Dr. Timothy Gay. It’s certainly not the lightest book out there, but the author has a way of making scientific laws easy to grasp — and physics more compelling than anyone in high school or college was able to do. Gay explains precisely how Newton’s Second Law of Motion governed William “Refrigerator” Perry’s dominance as an unstoppable mass of atoms — 325 pounds of them — at the goal line. Gay inspects the effect of air drag on a punter’s hang time and range. And he writes that offensive linemen are moving at an average of 8.3 feet per second on the combat zone at the line of scrimmage, more kinetic energy than a half-ton pickup truck. As Gay writes in his preface, his objective is to bring physics out of “the den of nerds and into the light of day.” Mission accomplished.

9. “You're Okay, It’s Just a Bruise: A Sideline Doctor’s Secrets About Pro Football’s Most Outrageous Team,” by Dr. Rob Huizenga. Huizenga served as the Los Angeles Raiders’ team internist from 1983-90, and offers a unique perspective of life on the sidelines. The doctor chronicles his stormy relationship with Raiders owner Al Davis and his own role in calming 290-pound offensive linemen nicknamed “Killer” and “The Grim Reaper.” Huizenga’s book succeeds in the way he shines light into some of the darker corners of the game, a place where professional medicine is secondary to winning and where athletes will compromise long-term health in order to suit up on Sunday.

8. “Fumble: The Browns, Modell and the Move,” by Michael G. Poplar. A must-read for Browns fans, Poplar provides a flood of documented evidence related to the Browns’ exodus from Cleveland to Baltimore in 1995. Poplar is a trustworthy source, having served as owner Art Modell’s vice president and treasurer of the Cleveland Stadium Corporation for 21 years. The book casts aside a lot of the sentimentality that could mar it and instead reads like an authentic historical document, not indicting Modell or Cleveland’s city fathers but allowing the reader to make up his own mind. Above all, Poplar shows how a bottom-line owner, clumsy group of civic leaders and football-mad community make the strangest of bedfellows. No wonder the Browns moved.

7. “Pros and Cons: The Criminals Who Play in the NFL,” by Jeff Benedict and Don Yaeger. The book is as much a study in proper research methodology as anything else. The authors began with a computerized list of the 1,590 players who wore a uniform during the 1996-97 NFL seasons, solicited records from state criminal repositories, performed county-by-county searches of criminal court docket sheets and contacted more than 45 police departments around the country. What emerges — surprising to few — is proof of a clear criminal culture at work in the league. Of those 1,590 players on Benedict and Yaeger’s printout, 509 players had criminal histories. It’s one of the most important books about the NFL in the last decade.

6. “Parcells: A Biography,” by Bill Gutman. Since Vince Lombardi’s death, few have had as marked an impact on the NFL as coach Bill Parcells, who rebuilt four teams from the ground up and led three of those previously woebegone franchises to the conference championship or beyond. Gutman zeroes in on what made Parcells such a force of one during his tenure with the Giants, Patriots and Jets. Even better, the reader is given a glimpse into Parcells the private man as well as the coaching impresario.

5. “God’s Coach: The Hymns, Hype and Hypocrisy of Tom Landry’s Cowboys,” by Skip Bayless. A Cowboys insider for more than 25 years, Bayless whittles away at the mythology surrounding Dallas legendary coach Tom Landry. A great Christian man, Landry was viewed by players Bayless interviewed as cold and aloof, a coach chiefly preoccupied with crafting a public image that would bring fishes and loaves to the Cowboy-obsessed masses. Bayless has an awful habit of inserting himself as a flat character into his work, but this is a good read, if for no other reason than the juicy gossip about the 1970s and early 1980s Cowboys teams.

4. “Finding the Winning Edge,” by Bill Walsh. This is not the typical pablum published by jocks or supercoaches. Walsh’s book is a 545-page treatise on growing and harvesting any organization’s success. Walsh supplies everything from sample team lectures to sample job descriptions and play schematics. He approaches his subject the way Dale Carnegie or Bob Shaw would. He’s not driving at just building something remarkable, but building an empire with communication and meticulous detail as the bedrock. Who else to write such a dissertation on winning than Walsh, who authored four Super Bowl championships in San Francisco?

3. “We Own This Game: A Season in the Adult World of Youth Football,” by Robert Andrew Powell. A New York Times correspondent, Powell spent a year around a dysfunctional Pop Warner program in inner city Miami in 2001. He observed the inner workings of the league and its social dynamics, which included a gang element that wagered on the game as spectators with a purpose. Coaches would openly recruit and poach talent from other parks, stocking rosters with a wanton disregard for rules and fair play. Powell’s book is as startling as it is groundbreaking, and it becomes clear by the conclusion that it’s never going to be just a game — not even among 8-year-old boys.

2. “Friday Night Lights,” by H.G. Bissinger. A former Philadelphia Enquirer news editor, Bissinger spent 1988 tracking the Permian High School Panthers in Odessa, Texas. He has a talent for laying his subjects — including the town — on their side and inspecting the broken parts, making no judgments and presenting people as real and flawed. The movie is quite good, but does not do this masterpiece justice, as movies often won’t. A winner in every way.

1. “Bringing the Heat,” by Mark Bowden. This book is to pro football what “Friday Night Lights” was to the high school game. Bowden writes with an energetic flair and a knack for storytelling that engrosses the reader from cover to cover. Bowden focuses on the 1992 Philadelphia Eagles, a team of eccentrics molded in the image of Buddy Ryan, their former maverick coach. The book opens with a real death and ends with a metaphorical one — the death of a season. Bowden also authored “Black Hawk Down” and “Doctor Death,” so you know you’re going to get something penetrative and hard-hitting. A modern piece of literary genius, in my modest opinion.

Keith A. Cerniglia is a sports writer for The Daily Citizen.