Not good. Probably the biggest disappointment since I've started doing this blog. It's not like I had super high expectations, but I like football and I like the early '70s and the combination of the two is a great little slice of American culture that I've always enjoyed (Hunter S. Thompson talking with Nixon about football on the campaign trail is a great example of this). I guess Dan Jenkins is a well-respected sports writer and Semi-Tough was quite successful, critically and commercially. But it sucked. I don't even really get what the point of it is. About three-quarters of the book is the narrator, the star running back for the New York Giants, saying all this stuff that is supposed to be shocking: casual racism, sexism and drug use. Whoopee-doo. Maybe for people in the '70s this was some titillating, shocking revelation. Even if it was, do we need a hundred pages of it, and always in this self-congratulatory tone? The whole thing is narrated before a Super Bowl, though the game itself is an afterthought. The climactic scene seems to be a big party the night before the big game where two women strip naked in front of the party. Whoop-dee doo. Even lamer, the whole thing ends with a weak romance. There was just nothing here and it was boring.
I had kind of wanted to see the movie, but it sounds even stupider.
If you want to read a half-decent book about football in the '70s, go read Jack Tatum's biography "
They Call me Assassin."
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2 comments:
Man, call me old-fashioned but I loved this book. Of course I read it when it came out. And I also enjoyed the sequel. Since I was even more unsophisticated about football then, it might be why I liked it so much.
who wins the super bowl?
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