Nose To Nose – Joe Klecko, Joe Fields & Greg Logan, 1989 ★★★

Trench Warfare with Jets

Touchdowns may be its public brand, yet American football is ultimately more defined by brute force, broken bodies, and the battle of attrition that goes on at the line of scrimmage. And in the long run, no one beats Father Time.

That’s the version of the game experienced by professional linemen as related in Nose To Nose, the story of two such linemen who each played for over a decade on the same team, the New York Jets.

The Blind Side: Evolution Of A Game – Michael Lewis, 2009 ★★★

A Left Tackle Is a Terrible Thing to Waste

There seems nothing Michael Lewis does not know about his subjects. His way of writing about them is simultaneously zippy and deep, not an easy trick as any writer can tell you.

Of course, he goes on a bit sometimes, and every now and then he pulls a quip out of left field, but overall, he’s very engaging even when discussing data-driven topics like the bond market in Liar’s Poker and the tech boom in The New New Thing. Even when he writes about more accessible subjects, he seems to prefer a complicated approach. Moneyball is a sabermetrics treatise about a small-market baseball team struggling to maintain its relevance in the free-agency era.

In the book being discussed today, Lewis looks at pro football from the perspective of perhaps the most overlooked player on the field, the left tackle.

Boys Will Be Boys – Jeff Pearlman, 2008 ★★★½

Rise and Fall of an NFL Juggernaut

In his acknowledgements for Boys Will Be Boys, author Jeff Pearlman thanks a number of people for their cooperation, including 146 current or former members of the Dallas Cowboys organization. He then thanks others, including his young son, whom I suspect was a toddler at the time.

At the end of his mention of the young lad came a word that caught me short at first, before realizing it summed up the entire spirit of the book. The word is “fish!”

Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be Cowboys, and Daddies should pay that some mind, too. Not if those Cowboys are like the crowd featured in Boys Will Be Boys.