Review by New York Times Review
If you have heard of the town, though, it is most likely through the football stars who grew up there, including Mike Ditka, Tony Dorsett and Darrelle Revis. Aliquippa is a recognized factory of football talent, and Price, a longtime member of Sports Illustrated's talented stable of journalists, sees football, with its reliance on an assembly-line-style mode of production - the center snaps, the offensive line protects, the quarterback hands off or passes, the skill players run or catch - as steel production by other means. But football is not his book's main subject; the decline and fall of a specific kind of American life is. With thickets of facts, Price unfurls social history in tandem with the successes and failures of the Aliquippa High Quips, "Sport is where the melt in the pot began," Price writes of the heady prewar days, while in the 1960s the prime symbol of racial discrimination at Aliquippa High - mirrored at the factory, where blacks were underrepresented in management jobs, and in the town's geography, where they were redlined into one district - was the conspicuous dearth of black cheerleaders. Price seems interested in making the town itself the central character at the expense of its residents, although certain voices, including Ditka's, predominate. More consequentially, Price chooses not to grapple extensively with a somewhat stunning paradox: About 25 years ago, the trajectories of Aliquippa and Aliquippa football parted ways. As Aliquippa wound down, the Quips won state championships and produced terrific pros like Revis (a future Hall of Fame cornerback who might be the best of all the players to come out of the town, Ditka and Dorsett included), Ty Law and Sean Gilbert. As jobs dried up, football turned from collective diversion to individual hope. "Once merely the vessel of local pride," Price writes near the end, "football in Aliquippa now assumed deeper resonance, even greater import. It was as if those who remained sensed the worst: This is it. This is what is left. Football is the endgame, the gritty final distillation of the dream that our greatgrandfathers came here to dream, the one systematic and proven process that can still result in a scholarship, a way out for the next generation, maybe big money." If baseball is the national pastime, perhaps football is the national reality. Jessica Luther's UNSPORTSMANLIKE CONDUCT: College Football and the Politics of Rape (Edge of Sports, paper, $15.95) similarly has football both refracting and magnifying a larger American problem. In this case, it is campus sexual assault, about which, she writes, "we are currently having a cultural moment." In an August 2015 Texas Monthly article, Luther did exemplary work exposing a facet of the latest, still developing scandal, in which several Baylor football players were accused and convicted of assault, with athletics and university administration failing to follow legally mandated procedures. Once again, the decline of the communitarian impulse is a prime culprit. It takes a village to allow rape by bigtime college football players to reach epidemic levels: Luther cites a non-exhaustive data set of well over 100 college football sexual assault allegations from 1974 to 2016. She goes through each of this village's denizens - players, coaches, administrators, the N.C.A.A., the media - explaining how all have failed to discourage young men worshiped in small towns for heroic feats on Saturday afternoons from continuing to assert their male prerogatives by violating women on Saturday nights. Relying partly on outside reporting (notably from ESPN and The New York Times), Luther, an Austin, Tex.-based freelance journalist, is the reader's Virgil through a hell in which the team-first ethos leads to a strikingly high proportion of gang-rape allegations among the cases Luther studied. And - noting the prevalence of black athletes on college football and basketball squads - she also illuminates a culture in which the centuries-old alloy of white condescension, paternalism and awe toward athletically gifted young black men lets coaches and others in power cover up allegations, discredit accusers and do anything else to keep suspects of any race on the field. Not to reckon with Luther's book would be an abdication not only of one's moral faculty but also of one's fandom. Luther is a graduate and still a fan of Florida State, which recently won a national championship behind the quarterback Jameis Winston - a Heisman Trophy winner and the subject of a rape accusation. (He denies it, and after an incomplete investigation there was no prosecution. Florida State later settled a lawsuit in the case.) Luther doesn't just want to save future victims; she wants to save college football. "If you didn't keep one eye on him whenever he had the ball, you ran the risk of getting smacked in the face with one of his bullet passes." Such is one of several vivid sentences describing the diminutive point guard Tyrone Bogues, better known as Muggsy, the lead character of Alejandro Danois's the boys of dunbar: a Story of Love, Hope, and Basketball (Simon & Schuster, $26) . One can practically see Bogues, who went on to a long, very successful N.B.A. career (as well as a smaller film career, in the Michael Jordan vehicle "Space Jam"), marshaling the offense, jab-stepping on defense and, in his first two years, leading the varsity Poets of Baltimore's Dunbar High to consecutive undefeated seasons. The Baltimore-based Danois highlights Dunbar's underdog qualities - both in its own city, where the local powerhouse Calvert Hall had won a triple-overtime matchup the prior season, and in the New York-, Philadelphiaand Washington-based pecking order. Danois spoke to enough people to compile an oral history, yet he has the good sense and talent to unspool the narrative with brief, well-timed digressions into quirky stories and characters, even if he sometimes appears credulous in passing along others' memories. Looming above the story of the team and the players is the coach, Bob Wade. A former Poets quarterback who in 1968 started on defense for the Pittsburgh Steelers, Wade could with a word ward off drug dealers and shady college recruiters, both of whom thrived in the early 1980s as Baltimore's Bethlehem Steel and General Motors factories suffered layoffs and N.C.A.A. basketball grew into a big business. At the same time, Danois notes, an old world of crime that had aspired to a certain underworld respectability - however dangerous and destructive - gave way to a "new breed of drug dealer" who "proved to be wantonly reckless and indiscriminately violent." Shootings pock the story like bullet holes in a building's side. Bogues, who was hit by buckshot at the age of 5, makes it out, as do several of his teammates, three of whom also went on to significant N.B.A. careers. Bogues played college ball at Wake Forest after the University of North Carolina's legendary Dean Smith deemed him, at 5 feet 3 inches, too short for the Atlantic Coast Conference. Oops. Smith did a better scouting job on Charlie Scott, who in 1967 became the first black scholarship athlete to wear North Carolina blue and went on to help lead the Tar Heels to the 1969 Final Four. Art Chansky, who has written several books about U.N.C. basketball, returns to the subject in GAME CHANGERS: Dean Smith, Charlie Scott, and the Era That Transformed a Southern College Town (University of North Carolina, $26), painting A.C.C. basketball and Chapel Hill in the mid-1960s as having at once a relatively liberal ethos even as white restaurants maintained different pickup areas for black customers. More than Scott, Smith emerges as the most vivid character: a shy Kansan who was named head coach at 30 and, a few years into his tenure, was at risk of losing his job after several undistinguished seasons. Smith's predecessor, Frank McGuire, had established a talent pipeline known as the "underground railroad" - though it was the exact reverse, shepherding white ethnics from the New York City area down to Tobacco Road - enabling him to beat Wilt Chamberlain's Kansas for the 1957 national title with a starting five made up of four Catholics and the star Lennie Rosenbluth. Smith needed a new way to win, but he also knew the larger import of what he was doing. His father had coached Kansas' first integrated high school basketball team in 1934. He persuaded the Marching Tar Heels band to eliminate "Dixie" from its pregame repertoire. So his presence at Chapel Hill made it easier for the leadership at North Carolina's Laurinburg Institute - the country's oldest all-black boarding school, which traced its founding indirectly to Booker T. Washington - to prod its star player Scott to integrate North Carolina's flagship team rather than that of Davidson, the small private school nearby to which he had initially committed. Chansky's muted tone causes the story to slag, but it is appropriate to his view of Scott's achievement in joining the team - as something significant, but not quite in the Jackie Robinson category. Scott himself remains ambivalent about his role in the university's history. And though Chansky doesn't mention the recent scandal at North Carolina, where fraudulent classes disproportionally stocked with athletes were given through the African and Afro-American Studies Department, one wonders whether it's on his mind when he writes, in the book's closing words, that "the transformation of this Southern college town is not yet complete." "We'll bring you the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat," the sportscaster Dan Rydell says on Aaron Sorkin's sitcom "Sports Night," "and, because we've got soccer highlights, the sheer pointlessness of a 0-0 tie." But at the time Rydell took his dig, Major League Soccer had no ties: Shootouts decided games until 2000, when the league phased them out in response to American fans' tendencies. In Phil West's telling in the united states of SOCCER: MLS and the Rise of American Soccer Fandom (Overlook, $27.95), those tendencies are to be as European as possible, even - especially! - if 0-0 ties result. To the extent that M.L.S. has been successful, it has been, West contends, through adopting global norms. "The movement attached to American soccer is more about learning," he writes, "about belonging, about syncing our steps with others' around the world." This is how you get team names like D.C. United, Real Salt Lake and F.C. Dallas; fans who proudly flaunt team scarves; and games that regularly conclude with no winner. West is a prototypical American soccer fan (yes, he even supports Arsenal). His soccer boosterism will be either endearing or annoying depending on your own prior views, but it gets in the way of a more objective analysis. West is entitled to mock the N.B.A. logo's "featuring the silhouette of a player who was a star a half-century ago." (That player is the great Jerry West, presumably no relative to Phil.) But he sounds oblivious when he approvingly quotes the former star Eric Wynalda saying, "This league was founded by a bunch of N.F.L. guys who were trying to make things more exciting," as though excitement were something sports leagues should avoid. But I am being a bore and should probably spend more time with one of the M.L.S. teams' supporter groups. These grass-roots fan clubs form the heart of the book and are the real story. Last decade, for instance, the Sons of Ben arose to support Philadelphia's getting a franchise it did not then have (it now has the Union), going so far as to attend games in other cities just to make their presence felt. At a New York Red Bulls game, for instance, they jeered, "We've won as many cups as you, and we don't have a team." This is the kind of fandom Americans could get behind. What if Beethoven's Ninth Symphony had come out as the understandably putrid product of a deaf composer rather than as, you know, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony? That almost unbearably sad hypothetical is given realization in DRAMA IN THE BAHAMAS: Muhammad Ali's Last Fight (Sports Publishing, $24.99), the boxing writer Dave Hannigan's tale of how Ali, nearly 40, came to fight Trevor Berbick in December 1981, years after the Greatest's final fight should have taken place. It is almost unbearable to think of Ali, who would struggle for decades with Parkinson's, being battered by a lesser fighter, having already suffered severe kidney damage in the course of a 1977 bout and obviously slurring his speech. The Louisville Lip had even lost the lip: "This was a decaffeinated Ali," Hannigan writes of one prefight news conference. "The voice was the same. The delivery remained almost note perfect. But there was just something missing." "Who killed Davey Moore?" Bob Dylan asks of a dead fighter. The song points to the guilt of all involved, and so does Hannigan, who sketches the enabling of the incompetently crooked promoter James Cornelius; the ineffable Don King; a doctor named Harry Demopoulos, who reported that "Muhammad's blood vessels were those of a young man"; Ali's colorful cornerman Bundini Brown; John Travolta; and of course Ali's backers in the press. But Dylan doesn't directly address the second question articulated in his song's chorus - "Who killed Davey Moore? Why and what's the reason for?" Hannigan's book excels here with well-chosen quotations painting the unique status, even among athletes, of the boxer. As in other sports - not to mention other pursuits, like literature, law or medicine - age and experience do impart advantages. But the aged boxer cannot exploit them. Hannigan quotes the trainer Eddie Futch having watched Ali train: "They see these young fighters and they see their deficiencies and they think they can whip them. But what they don't see is that their own reflexes ain't what they used to be. They see an opening, but they can't deliver the punch. Or they can see a punch coming and they get hit with it when they wouldn't have before." In a way, Hannigan lets Berbick, not Ali, have the last word in his book (spoiler alert: The ending is not happy). "It's different," Berbick says of boxing at one point. "It's not just like any sport. You want to prove you can do what the other man can do. There's a lot of pride and ego involved. It's just something that men have set out to do." MARC TRACY is a college-sports reporter for The Times.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 11, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, is the town in the subtitle, an ethnically mixed, blue-collar community northwest of Pittsburgh, a town dominated through most of its history by the Jones & Laughlin steelworks and for all of its history by football. Aliquippa has been the spawning ground of multiple gridiron heroes, including, quintessentially, Mike Ditka and, later, all-pros Ty Law and Darrelle Revis (Tony Dorsett, from Aliquippa, attended nearby Hopewell High). But Aliquippa's and the steel industry's decline was long and devastating, exacerbated by crack cocaine and its concomitant brutal violence, including attacks against the police. Price, a Sports Illustrated senior writer, tells the town's story all very well, if lengthily and at times melodramatically, starting with J & L's viciously anti-union past; the town's surprising but uneasy early racial integration (there were no black cheerleaders, for example, until late); and the more recent battles, invariably, inevitably, about race. There are also, of course, revealing anecdotes about individual players and the coaches (buying the players sandwiches to assure they would eat at least one meal a day). Good stuff for Friday Night Lights devotees.--Levine, Mark Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Aliquippa High School, in far-western Pennsylvania, has consistently groomed football players for the NFL-including Hall of Famer Mike Ditka, three-time Super Bowl Champion Ty Law, and All-Pro New York Jet Darrelle Revis-and it claimed 16 Western Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic League titles between 1952 and 2015. But, as longtime Sports Illustrated senior writer Price notes in this exhaustive history of Aliquippa's storied football program, basketball and baseball also enjoyed initial success at the school. Like many cities in the region during the 20th century, Aliquippa was a melting pot populated by factory families; in this case, the Jones & Laughlin Steel Company employed a good chunk of the town before falling on hard times and shutting down in 2000. But life in Aliquippa was always influenced by the city's blue-collar history and its high school's football program. Price (Pitching Around Fidel) takes his time detailing the rise of organized local labor unions and the role J&L played in shaping Aliquippa, and football remains on the sidelines for long stretches. When he does focus on the game, the author provides memorable characterizations of cocky English-teacher-turned-football-coach Mike Zmijanac in the 1970s and star defensive lineman Jeff Baldwin in the '80s. Despite straying from the field, though, a more thorough account of any high school athletic program in the country would be tough to find. Agent: Andrew Blauner, Blauner Books Literary. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Price (Pitching Around Fidel) is best known for his work as a writer for Sports Illustrated. In this book, he conveys the history of an immigrant steel town though its changing demographics and a high school football team that has produced such future stars as Mike Ditka, Ty Law, and Darrelle Revis. The author begins with a long, detailed record of the origins of the local steel industry and its conflicting dynamic with organized labor. Once reaching the postwar era, the lives of numerous players and coaches are chronicled, with increasing racial tensions as a backdrop. From the late 1960s onward, the beginnings of the steel industry's decline exacerbated the region's many manifestations of societal dysfunction: drugs, gangs, violence, and corruption. Still, the football team stands as the one source of pride for a town that has been slowly dying for decades. VERDICT While this book is impressively researched and organized, it can be an exhausting read. © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A senior Sports Illustrated writer tells a multigenerational story about Aliquippa, a Pennsylvania steel town, and its legendary high school football team.Heavy industry and football share the same DNA, writes Price (Heart of the Game: Life, Death, and Mercy in Minor League America, 2009, etc.). Both feature a hierarchical management structure; both involve collective striving, with various skills merging to produce the desired result; both depend oneven celebratethe implicit trade of health for money or celebrity. Since the early 1900s, when the JL Steel Company designed and built the town, until today, as surely as the blast furnaces once reliably churned out pig iron, the Quips have won a succession of regional and state championships, producing an astonishing number of football stars, most notably Mike Ditka, Tony Dorsett, Ty Law, and Darrelle Revis. Price thoroughly explores the football saga, focusing on four particularly successful coaches and their teams, but this is no mere sports story. The author produces an artful mix of history, economics, sociology, and athletics. He makes room for sketches of distinguished, nonsports native sons (composer Henry Mancini), a reform-minded governors wife, a JL official who bossed the town, and Aliquippas first black mayor. As he travels through the decades, he packs the narrative with telling episodes: the presidential visits of John F. Kennedy and Jimmy Carter, a landmark Supreme Court labor case slapping down JL, the high school walkouts of the 1960s, protesting the lack of black cheerleaders. Prices especially touching engravings of promise squandered, those chewed up and spit out by Aliquippas tough environment, contrast powerfully with the tales of football triumph. From the rigidly stratified life in the 1920s and 30s during JLs despotic prime, to the brief, postwar golden age, a moment of civic equipoise, to todays company town without a company, where the combination of unemployment, drugs, and crime crushes hope, Prices football story is really that of Americas Rust Belt in poignant miniature. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
