Sportswriter Peter King remembers Super Bowl XIX. He was at the 1985 matchup between the Miami Dolphins and San Francisco 49ers held, he recalls, “at well-worn, six-decade-old Stanford Stadium, with its splintery wooden bleachers. For the halftime show, I watched from the press box as performers from a nearby US Air Force base did a 12-minute show called ‘World of Children’s Dreams,’ with peppy children’s songs and skits.”
Four decades later, King writes, “Politicians go batcrap about a Latino artist, Bad Bunny, doing a Super Bowl halftime show as 126 million people tune in for it.” Annual media rights for games have ballooned into the billions of dollars. How, he wonders, “did the earthquake occur?” The author’s entertaining book, The Game (Norton, Oct. 13), has many answers, and he explores them in a fun format: Each chapter is devoted to a year, beginning in 1984 and stretching to 2023, when he wrote his last weekly column on America’s most popular sport. There’s plenty more catnip: King carves out his Mount Rushmore of “the most significant 100 people in the history of the game” and includes the best games he’s seen, as well as his peeves (one is the “tush push”).
For those who can’t get enough of the business side of football, there’s The Playbook: The Hidden Forces Shaping Winners and Losers in the Modern NFL (Mariner Books, Sept. 8). “For the first three decades of the NFL’s existence, the business model of professional football was essentially the same as the business model of a circus,” write Jonathan Clegg and Joshua Robinson. “Teams played each other according to a chaotically rendered schedule, barnstormed when they needed to, and packed up and changed cities when they inevitably ran out of money.” The hard salary cap and TV deals “reset the market for talent, supercharged the game’s competitive balance, and created the economics of pro football as we understand it today.”
Three other solid books focus on personalities, specifically quarterbacks. Lars Anderson’s Brady: An American Story and the Price of Greatness (Celadon Books, Sept. 29) chronicles the evolution of the NFL’s greatest quarterback of all time (so say King and Anderson—and millions of Patriots fans).
In Looking for Terry: A Memoir (Harper Select/HarperCollins, Oct. 13), Terry Bradshaw revisits his time as a popular player and sports analyst. “My life has been blessed by a fifteen-ounce, eleven-inch-long, spheroid-shaped ball,” he writes. “Football enabled me to build my reputation. Football led to my success in business and horses. Football allowed me to sing at the Grand Ole Opry and run naked through the park with William Shatner!”
Football also afforded Colin Kaepernick many opportunities, as he writes in The Perilous Fight (Legacy Lit/Hachette, Sept. 15). Though he was banished from the sport after “taking a knee” during the national anthem to protest the police shootings of Black men, he continues to address racism in America. “My success has given me a perch to see how it manifests in so many different places, at the highest echelons of American society,” he writes. “I’ve gotten to snatch back the curtain to see the Wizard of Oz at the controls.”
John McMurtrie is the nonfiction editor.
