Review: American Coach (2025)

By Ivan Maisel

By most standards, Frank Leahy might be the most underrated college football coach in history. 

This is someone who compiled a record 107-13-9 as a head coach at Boston College and Notre Dame. If you are wondering, that was the second-best career record when Leahy left coaching, and it's still the second-best career record today - more than 70 years later. He's only behind Knute Rockne, one of the legends of the game despite coaching what must have been an almost completely different sport in the 1920s. 

Leahy played on two national championship teams at Notre Dame under Rochne, and won four more mythical national titles as a head coach at South Bend. (Kids, there was no such thing as a playoff back then. They took a survey to determine the best team in the country, and everyone thought it was a little silly back then too.)

Yet the college football fans of today may know a little about Rockne, thanks in part to a movie with a co-star by the name of Ronald Reagan. ("Win one for the Gipper.") But Leahy's reputation never came close to Rockne's as the years went by. What happened?

Ivan Maisel wanted to know that too. He's one of the veterans of covering college football, and if he didn't know much about Leahy, well, few others did too. So he dove into the subject, and the result is the book "American Coach" - which will fill you smartly in on all of the details. 

For starters, Leahy came out of the Midwest to play football at Notre Dame. He wasn't the best athlete on the team, and he certainly wasn't the biggest. But Leavy worked the hardest and probably studied the game the most. It didn't take long for him to figure out that coaching was the next logical step in his career. Sure enough, he bounced around at three schools during the 1930s, finally landing at Boston College. After two years as an assistant, Leahy moved up to be the head coach of the Eagles. Three he did something remarkable: he won. How about a record of 20-2, in a place that's not exactly the cradle of coaches? 

It caught everyone's attention, including the administration at Notre Dame. There Elmer Layden was doing well as the football coach (47-13-3), but not Rockne-level well. He jumped to become the head of the National Football League, and Leahy was an obvious candidate as a replacement. After going 24-3-3 in the next three years - including a national title - World War II interrupted things and Leahy headed for the Armed Forces.  After the War, he came back and promptly won three national titles in the next four years. High standards were set.

But as Maisel nicely points out, the rules sort of changed in the Fifties. Notre Dame had a boatload of talent before that, as many returning veterans turned up on the South Bend campus after serving their country. The supply eventually ran out by ND standards, and administrators there didn't seem too comfortable with the image of the university being something of a football factory. Leahy did the best he could and still won plenty of games. But Notre Dame wasn't Notre Dame.  

There were other issues going on as well. Leahy was such a driven personality that he started having health problems - and not insignificant ones. . His family took a decided back seat to football in the fall. There's a great story about how some of his eight children and some neighborhood kids started to play a pickup game in the front yard one day. Frank went out to join the kids ... and soon ordered them to start drills. The other kids soon asked to play somewhere else. 

More importantly, Maisel reports that a faked injury scheme that was used when the Fighting Irish were out of timeouts didn't sit well with some of the school leaders. Leahy wasn't exactly fired, but he was given a little push out the door. 

And his coaching career stopped right there. There were flirtations with other colleges and the pro ranks, but nothing came together.  Leahy's health continued to be a problem, and his skills in leading football players didn't translate at all into the business world - where he was taken to the cleaners regularly. Leahy died of heart failure in 1973. He was only 64.

Leahy's legacy was complicated even before he died. Maisel points out that the coach didn't get along with that many of his peers. Perhaps that played a big role in the way Leahy was passed over for several years before his induction into the College Football Hall of Fame. 

The sport of college football has gone through a variety of waves over the years, as changes seem to alter everything every so often. That has involved everything from rules changes to conference alignment to monetary matters. We're going through a big one now, as athletes now receive direct payments and conference lineups seem to change by the week.  

Leahy proved to be a perfect match for a particular place and time in college football, but never had the chance to adapt and thus failed to be one of those coaches who seem to last forever. That makes him a good person to study for those interested in the game's history. What went right, and what went wrong?

"American Coach" may have trouble drawing in readers who aren't too interested in someone who was coaching more than 75 years ago. But Maisel's rich portrait works nicely in explaining what went right and what went wrong. Fans of sports history should find this worth their time.

Four stars

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Review: The Uncommon Life of Danny O'Connell (2024)

By Steve Wiegand

Fate played a bit of a role in how "The Uncommon Life of Danny O'Connell" became a book to be reviewed here. 

I was at a wedding this summer when it came up in conversation that an acquaintance of mine, Maureen Hurley, had a father who spent more than a decade playing major league baseball.  Not only was that a surprise, but the news that a book had been written about his baseball life in 2024 also came up. How did I not hear about this before? 

It was a bit odd to hear about Hurley's family baseball connection. She had worked for many years for Rich Products, which is the owner of the Buffalo Bisons minor league baseball team. (Full disclosure: I work for the Bisons now at some home games.) But her tie to the majors isn't well known in Buffalo. 

I quickly ordered the book the next day, and buzzed through it relatively quickly. I'm happy to report that O'Connell's baseball life is an interesting one and worth a read.

The premise of the book is a little odd. Author Steve Wiegand was a baseball card collector as a child many years ago, and wanted to pay tribute to someone from that era who wasn't a star. Out of several hundred players portrayed in a given year on cardboard, most of them generally are forgotten rather quickly. In terms of the worth of a particular card, such players are lumped together under the title of "commons" for the same price per card - as if anyone who was/is good enough to play in the majors can be considered "common" in terms of athletic ability. You have to be mighty good to play one game at that level. (The baseball card business receives a slightly superficial review along the way here.)

O'Connell played in 1,143 games in the majors, which is impressive by almost any standard. The problem was that often he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Danny never played in an All-Star Game, and never reached the World Series - two of the best outlets for notoriety.

He became a pro baseball player with the Dodgers early in 1946 after high school. Not only did he have to compete with people his own age, but he quickly noticed how many young men were flooding back to the United States after World War II - all looking to get back on the baseball path to success. Still, Danny worked his way up the ladder and reached Brooklyn in 1949, even if he wasn't deemed ready to play in a big-league game that autumn. But soon O'Connell was dealt to Pittsburgh, the Colorado Rockies of that era. While the Pirates weren't contenders, the change of venue gave him a big opportunity - and he capitalized on it. 

O'Connell played enough with the Pirates in 1950 to be a third-place finisher in voting for the Rookie of the Year. Then it was off to the armed forces for a couple of years before returning to Pittsburgh in 1953, where he more or less picked up where he led off. O'Connell was useful, but not a star. Still, a guy like that could be handy, and the Milwaukee Braves gave up six (!) players to acquire him in the offseason. 

The Braves were making progress, but O'Connell often took one step forward and two steps back there. Part of the problem was that his best position was third base, and he wasn't going to beat Eddie Mathews out of that job. Danny headed to second base with mixed results over the course of the next three-plus seasons. Meanwhile, the Braves had developed into a very good team, and they could afford to try to win immediately. Milwaukee traded for future Hall of Famer Red Schoendienst to become the regular second baseman, and O'Connell was off to New York to play for the Giants. 

At least Danny was near his boyhood home for a few months ... before the team moved all the way to San Francisco in 1958. Opportunities for O'Connell were few and far between there, as his playing time slowly disappeared over the course of two years. He spent 1960 in the minors, and in most years he probably would have been done with big league ball at that point. But expansion came to the sport in 1961, and Washington and Los Angeles were looking for warm bodies in their inaugural seasons. O'Connell scratched out two more seasons in the big leagues before retiring. He eventually went into private business, and died in an auto accident in 1969.

What's immediately striking is that a player such as O'Connell leaves footprints behind, which is one of the fun parts about baseball. The most shocking fact in the book is that when the Pirates were shopping O'Connell to the Braves, they almost received a prospect named Henry Aaron straight up for Danny. Supposedly, the cash-poor Pittsburgh team wanted some money to go with Aaron, and the Braves drew the line there. There's no attribution listed for that story, but it certainly would qualify as a great "what if?" in baseball history. O'Connell also scored the first run in the history of the San Francisco Giants, and his infield partner in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1948 was Rocky Bridges - who was the Buffalo Bisons' manager in 1988.

What Wiegand doesn't come out and say explicitly is that O'Connell could have been the poster boy for the type of undervalued player that was described in the book and movie, "Moneyball." Danny was a decent hitter but drew plenty of walks and even reached base via a hit by pitch quite a bit. He seemed to be a solid enough fielder, particularly at third base when he was allowed to play there. 

However, it probably was unreasonable to expect the baseball experts of the 1950s to be able to recognize the "invisible" skills of someone like O'Connell. One of this book's charms is how often a player's intangibles were used at the time in evaluating players, such as making heads-up plays and having a good attitude. O'Connell clearly would have done better today than in the 1950s. 

Wiegand also tells the story of O'Connell's personal life, and supplies plenty of details and context. Baseball players made a decent living in the 1950s, but it wasn't an easy life. Their families either had to move to a new town when a trade came up, or they set up a base camp in one place and saw Daddy in person infrequently in the summer. The author has some fun with the changes in the game along the way, which is nice. 

There are plenty of books out there about baseball in the 1950s, but many of them are about the New York Yankees and Brooklyn Dodgers. "The Uncommon Life of Danny O'Connell" puts some perspective on how the other half lived in those days.  

Four stars

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Review: Madden & Summerall (2025)

By Rich Podolsky

We probably could have seen this coming.

Back in 2021, Rich Podolsky wrote a book called "You Are Looking Live." Football fans who were around in the 1980s know that phrase from Brent Musburger's introduction to "The NFL Today" - the pregame show for CBS' coverage of pro football games in the era. It was an easy decision to write it, since Podolsky had some work experience at CBS and thus knew some of the people in the story - even it had been almost 30 years since the program peaked.

Now comes a book called "Madden & Summerall." It's striking how similar the two books are in many ways, and it's easy to use the same phrases to describe them. 

Any discussion of the book starts with the fact that Podolsky has a premise. He believes quite strongly that John Madden and Pat Summerall are the best football tandem to ever broadcast a game on television, and he doesn't waste much time making that point. That could be a problem  - would you expect anything else from a CBS employee from that era? - but for the fact that Podolsky is probably right. They weren't great friends off the air, but they worked perfectly together when the red light went on. There have been several very good broadcast teams for football since the Madden/Summerall heyday, but it's fair to say that one is still the gold standard. 

Madden was one of the great characters in football and broadcasting history, and his personality made the games more informative and enjoyable. Summerall's part was more subtle, but no less important than Madden. The play-by-play man supplied the basics about the game (down, distance, names) while giving Madden the room to operate in his own unique manner. It all worked extremely well. 

The book supplies short biographies of both men along the way. Madden was an unlikely star, working his way out of nowhere in rising through the coaching ranks. He eventually caught the eye of Oakland Raiders' owner Al Davis, who made him the head coach for 10 great years there. Burned out at that point, Madden retired but needed something else to do. It took longer than you might think for Madden to become something special on the air, but eventually he found his niche. 

Summerall was a much better athlete than most people remember. It's amazing to think that someone who was born with a leg deformity would grow up to be a kicker. Summerall tried a large number of sports, and essentially was a one-man tennis team in high school. He was invited to a tournament in those years (hitchhiking 320 miles to get to Fort Lauderdale for it)  and ended up surprising everyone by reaching the finals - playing someone who ended up in the finals of the U.S. Open. (Accounts differ about who won.)

Summerall ended up with the New York Giants of the NFL, and injuries eventually limited his role to place-kicking. However, the Giants of the late 1950s and early 1960s were immensely popular in New York, and broadcast stations were on the lookout for talent. Summerall followed Frank Gifford and Kyle Rote from the team's roster into the business. Eventually Summerall worked his way into the football broadcasters' rotation at CBS, and made the move from commentator to play-by-play man in the early 1970s. Eventually, Summerall became ever-present working for CBS, popping up at golf tournaments like the Masters. And Madden was ever-present in other ways, whether it was a commercial for Miller Lite and Ace Hardware or the endorsement of an annual football game. 

One of the most interesting parts of the book deals with Summerall's spiral into alcoholism. He had learned how to party on road trips with former partner Tom Brookshier, and kept it up even though he and Madden didn't have similar tastes in how to spend free time. (Madden, famously, gave up flying and took the train or bus to assignments, limiting his free time for such pursuits.) Summerall wound up in the Betty Ford Clinic and sobered up, although his former lifestyle did too much damaged to ever be completely reversed.

"Madden & Summerall" has some fresh stories inside of it, as some new interviews with co-workers and family members supply some good information. The writing style is easy and breezy, as befits a book that just crawls past the 200-page line.  But some of the material about the two men feels a bit like filler, such as the coverage of negotiations involving the move of the NFL broadcasts from CBS to Fox. Since both Madden and Summerall wrote autobiographies (Madden wrote three of them, naturally), it's a little difficult to judge whether the new book contributes much to the conversation about the work of the two men.

It's been about 15 years since Summerall and Madden were big parts of the national broadcast picture, but they are still remembered fondly - especially by Podolsky. "Madden & Summerall" will bring back memories for some and fill in some details for others, and therefore should work for those who want a quick fix on the subject.

Three stars

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Review: Skipper (2025)

By Scott Miller

In a world where so many books are published in the course of the year, a reader never knows when he's going to be pointed in a certain direction ... or why.

Such is the case with Scott Miller's book, 'Skipper," which received some attention shortly after its publication ... for all of the worse possible reasons. 

Miller had been more than around the baseball block a few times when he put together this book. He covered the sport for some daily newspapers and some national websites over the course of 30-plus years.  Miller even did some work for MLB Network Radio.   

In the next to last page of text in "Skipper," Miller writes this: "One thing I do not recommend while in the middle of writing a book is being diagnosed with a life-altering medical condition. You always hear that life can change in an instant and, hoo, boy." In this case, the diagnosis was pancreatic cancer, and you probably know that there's no video review that can change the doctors' call of that particular illness. Sure enough, Miller died five weeks after the book came out. 

Upon Miller's death, Tyler Kepner of the National had these words to way about Miller: "I think he really understood the people within the game. He valued building relationships and just really trying to understand the folks not just as ball players, but as people and as the sort of struggles they go through on a human side."

With all that information floating around, the only thing that seemed like a worthwhile action under the circumstances was to spend $30 on a copy of "Skipper." It became more than just a gesture while reading it.

Miller digs into the revolution that has affected baseball and its managers over the past quarter-century or so. If you've followed the sport at all in that time, you realize how much analytics has changed the way the game has been played. In the "old days," managers used to make decisions about such areas as lineup order and bullpen usage by themselves - mostly on instinct. Now, there's a team of people up in the organization's offices who have looked over the numbers in every way possible, and come up with thoughts on how to utilize the data. 

The book is subtitled "Why Baseball Managers Matter (and Always Will)," and there's plenty of truth to that. Managers still are the major communication point between players and organization, and they are in charge of putting them in the best position for short-term and long-term success. They also speak to the public through the media twice a day, a very important way of communicating with the fans. Managers also have a ton of other duties, including supervising coaches that now number in double digits (four used to be the usual number about 50 years ago.  

It's not like the old days, where the good managers stayed in the job as near-dictators almost forever, even if they switched teams every so often. Tom Lasorda, Sparky Anderson, Dusty Baker and Tony LaRussa piled up the wins over the years, but their kind is disappearing. Terry Francona may be the last of the breed. 

The book, then, focuses on how the managers' job has evolved. To do that, Miller talks to several excellent practitioners of the job about some key moments in their professional careers. Remember Grady Little? He is not-so-fondly remembered in Boston as the manager who left Pedro Martinez on the mound in Game Seven of the 2003 ALCS. Remember Kevin Cash? He's remembered in Tampa Bay (and is still there) as the manager who pulled Blake Snell from the mound in the 2020 World Series. Neither decision worked out well .Maybe you can't win. Both skippers were quite candid in describing their thoughts about those moments in hindsight. Miller gets high marks for getting them to open up. Miller became close with Dave Roberts, who has had almost nothing but success with the Dodgers over the years - but still feels the pressure of being expected to win the World Series almost every year.

Others receive a moment - or a chapter - in the sun. The Boones are practically a family of managers, after serving as a family of players over the years. Tom Kelly overachieved for years with the Twins. Several others, including players and executives, chip in with comments along the way. It's all presented  with plenty of intelligence and logic.

There's a little bit of repetition along the way here, and some of the material strays away a bit from the basic premise of the book. But Miller does offer as good an upclose look to the subject of the changing life of a baseball manager as I've seen. That makes "Skipper" worth the time of a good-sized baseball fan.

Thanks for the book, Scott, and we'll miss you.

Four stars

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Review: Turf Wars (2025)

By DeMaurice Smith

It doesn't take long for DeMaurice Smith to set the tone in his book, "Turf Wars," reviewing his time as the head of the National Football League Players Association. 

Less than a chapter, actually.

You get the idea in the first paragraph of the prologue, when Smith describes the owners as "greedy billionaires who control the league, which makes them some of the lever pullers of our largest society." 

A few paragraphs later, the descriptions continue. "These men do not see the general public as human. They are voters and customers and fans. NFL owners view their own teams' players not as people with families, aspirations, or pride. They are laborers and commodities, nothing more, an army of soldier ants who can and will be replaced by one of the thousands of cheaper options in college football or lower-tier leagues. Owners only pretend to care about a player's remarkable journey to college and the pros."

Those statements bring up a couple of obvious reactions right from the start. Smith covers the 31 owners (the Packers, with their millions of owners, get a pass) with one broad brush stroke there. It's a little difficult to believe that such feelings are so universal through every single owner - even if they are part of the same league. 

Meanwhile, it's a little tough to read, with the anger level quite high. Personally, I think there's plenty of anger out there in our lives as it is. You can turn on a talk show or read a political news release and see that fact demonstrated repeatedly. But plenty of books have been written about the labor relations in sports, and there aren't many moments of good fellowship between sides. 

I was hoping for a little different approach from Smith, who worked in the government's Justice Department as well as for several top law firms. He's a smart guy and a very worthy spokesman for his side of an argument.  

Once Smith gets that venom out of the way, the book changes its tone slightly. The highlights of such publications is usually a description of the collective bargaining agreement between labor and management. Smith led the players through a 132-day lockout in 2011 by the owners, but seems to have outflanked the other side by buying strike insurance for the players. In other words, the labor side could afford to wait for the right deal. Once that little fact came out, an agreement was rather quickly reached.

For the next several chapters, Smith reviews some of the major collisions that took place during his time as a director. In hindsight, some of them seem as if they might have been a little easier to solve. An investigation into Tom Brady and his deflated footballs seems straight-forward enough, but handing out the proper punishment seemed to be a stubbornly elusive goal. You'd think it could have been kept out of the courts.

The Ray Rice case comes up in the detail as well. This one was tough for Smith, who clearly had no stomach for defending someone who hit his fiance in an elevator - and was caught on video tape doing it. But Rice still had rights, and Smith felt bound to defend him. It comes with the territory. 

Then there's the case of Colin Kaepernick, who caused something of a national stir simply by sitting on the bench during the National Anthem. The quarterback is shown to be something of an odd personality, and the story went down some odd hallways. But the biggest of them was when the White House picked up on it, turning Kaepernick into a lightning rod. Later, the pandemic also caused some problems when players disagreed with procedures under difficult circumstances. Aaron Rodgers and Cole Beasley weren't too popular in the NFLPA's offices either. 

Along the road that Smith followed for more than a decade, he made something of a discovery: NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell was showing signs of mellowing. Goodell always had been a loud advocate for his side of the story during his time on that job, but it sounds as if he realized that he and Smith had more in common than he thought. Smith eventually stepped down from his job before his nervous system and liver collapsed from abuse. 

For those on my side of the tracks in Buffalo, there are only a few references to the Bills in here. Smith criticizes the late Ralph Wilson for not spending close to the cap in the late 2000s (78 percent, less than any team but Kansas City). Terry Pegula is barely touched, as he is portrayed as such a minor player in NFL circles than even Goodell doesn't  talk to him often. Pegula does take a couple of shots for what is called a sweetheart stadium deal. To be fair, the Bills are responsible on the project for cost overruns, which are at hundreds of millions at this point and counting. 

Happily, the book isn't all anger. Smith does take a chapter to talk about his family history, which actually is quite interesting and revealing. It's a nice timeout in the discussion.

"Turf Wars" might have a place in your football library if you have a strong interest in the subject of labor relations in pro sports. If that fits your reading interest, great. Just don't expect to see it read by many others on the beach this summer.

Three stars

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