Volume 21, Number 1 · February 7, 1974
Running Off-Tackle
By William Phillips
Mad Ducks and Bears
by George Plimpton
Random House, 421 pp., $7.95
Now that football has entered the literary life of this country, it has lost its innocence. We've begun to study it, analyze it, look behind the scene. We now see that it is no longer simply a game, however violent and complicated, but like other kinds of big-time entertainment a mixed bag of fun and business and virtuosity, and full of the folklore of boyish America. We are now sophisticated enough to know that there isn't one thing called football: there is the game on the drawing board and the field; there's the whole entrepreneurial, commercial side; there's the life-style of the players; there's the awe and cynicism of the spectators; there's the inflated industry of sports writing with its façade of 'color' and its pretense of revealing the inside stuff; and finally there's the combination of spectacle and 'fandom' and the intricacies and sublimated violence of war games that seems to pull everything together, particularly on Sunday afternoons.
Review, 1850 words
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