Review: Brady vs. Belichick (2025)

By Gary Myers

A long, long time ago ... the Beatles and the Rolling Stones came across the Atlantic in search of fame and fortune. What's more, they succeeded by any standard. Most music fans enjoyed both bands, while some of them picked a side if asked who they preferred. 

Naturally, there was a way for outsiders to cash in on the argument. The odd magazine popped up on the newsstand entitled "Beatles vs. Rolling Stones." That sounds like there was a big competition between them, which would be an overstatement, even if such publications were an excuse for young fans to cut photographs out and paste them on scrapbooks 

Such magazines came to mind when I saw the title of a football book, "Brady vs. Belichick," and the discussion is still light-hearted but a bit more serious than the musical version 60 years ago. In 20 seasons, the New England Patriots won six NFL championships, played in nine Super Bowls and 13 AFC championship games, and won 17 division titles. That's the greatest run in league history, and there were two major common denominators in that stretch: Quarterback Tom Brady and head coach Bill Belichick. (Owner Bob Kraft also was involved, naturally, but had less direct involvement in the fate of the team on the field.)

But which one deserves the lion's share of the credit for the dynasty? That's the task veteran football writer Gary Myers takes on with this book, which is a rather thankless job. After all, both Brady and Belichick are at worst in the discussion as the greatest person to work at their respective occupations.

To review the situation, Myers essentially writes something of an informal history of the dynasty, jumping through specific episodes of the Patriots' past. With two decades to cover, there's plenty of material available to review.

On the good side, it's been five years since Brady fled to Tampa Bay and ended the relationship with the Patriots. (Tom spent three years with the Bucs before retiring, winning one more Super Bowl along the way.) That means some football people are more open about expressing opinions. Myers talked to some former players, opponents, coaches, etc. in his research. That means there are some good stories and opinions that come out now that are "safe" to discuss. 

Belichick comes off with single-minded devotion toward making the team better each and every day he was the coach. He didn't exactly spare his feelings along the way, often criticizing everyone from Brady all the way to the last man on the roster. It doesn't sound like anyone was too anxious to come to work, even if they liked the end result. It's easy to think of a comment made about Scotty Bowman, who coached the dynastic Montreal Canadiens teams of the 1970s. It was said that the players hated Bowman on 364 days of the year, and liked him after they won the Stanley Cup. 

Brady, meanwhile, was smart enough to realize that he needed to be one of the boys in the locker room no matter how wealthy and famous he became. Brady probably left millions of dollars on the table in his contracts in an attempt to try to have a better team around him. He also won over the offensive lineman by showing respect for their efforts and never thinking he wasn't "one of the boys" at heart. 

Myers winds his way through tales of the dynasty in a leisurely way, jumping around a bit in the process. Perhaps the biggest problem with the book is that the premise expressed in the title is unanswerable. Basketball coach John Wooden once summed up his thoughts on such as things by saying, "No coach can win without talent, but some coaches can't win with it." In other words, it takes coaches and players working together in order to have a chance at something special. The answer to the "Brady or Belichick" question - who was more responsible - depends more on your orientation than anything else, and we know that from page one. I would guess this won't change many minds, either way.  

The Patriots' great run hasn't exactly been underreported over the years, and you can be excused for being a little wary of the subject at the point and not needed to know more. But fans of those teams probably have an insatiable appetite for information and stories about the era, and they'll enjoy the insights offered in  "Brady vs. Belichick"  

Three stars

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Review: Balls of Confusion (2024)

By Bob Kuska

Sometimes you can learn something about a book by looking at the footnotes. 

Exhibit A would be the book, "Balls of Confusion," by Bob Kuska. There are references to interviews that he did in 2008. That was a mere 16 years before the book was actually published. 

With that sort of dedication, it's a credit to the author that he stuck with it so long and figured out a way to get it published ... all right, the first part published. The book covers the first half of the "relationship" between the established National Basketball Association and the upstart American Basketball Association. It looks at the years from 1965 to 1970.  The second part - which should examine the time period from 1970 to 1976 - is said to be coming at some point. There's little doubt that this two-part package is going to be the definite word on the subject of the relationship between the two leagues. 

The discussion starts with one of the basic principles about professional sports leagues. If a national organization has a little success and doesn't expand into new cities, chances are quite good that a rival league will be born. In baseball, for example, the National League had a closely knit group of eight teams as members, and other cities wanted in. Thus, the American League was born. The National Football League had quite a few rivals come and go once it was past its formative years in the 1920s. 

Such was the case for professional basketball. Once it settled down in the post-war period, the National Basketball Association carried the flag for pro hoops nationwide. But by the mid-1960s, there still were only nine teams stretched out across the country. Inevitably, someone would try to fill that vacuum, and the American Basketball Association was born to try to fill that gap in 1967.

The ABA's management and owners hoped that the teams involved would follow a certain path. They would slowly build to the point where a viable group was established, and then it would merge with the more established league. The American Football League followed that gameplan in the 1960s, and succeeded with a merger with the NFL. The catch was that a new league was bound to have a few hiccups along the way, and teams would have to change cities and some good-sized amounts of money would be lost in the process. Two leagues are good for players' salaries of course, due to bidding wars, but not so good for owners' bottom lines. Oh, and the lawyers would find plenty of excuses to pad their totals of billable hours. 

As the book outlines in great detail, that's essentially what happened - particularly during the 1965-1970 time span covered by this book. The NBA expanded a few times in this era, eventually reaching 17 teams for the start of the 1970-71 season, in an effort to remain solvent. In 1970, the NBA and ABA had worked out many of the details of a potential merger, and the end of the basketball wars seemed inevitable. Spoiler alert: It didn't happen right away. 

Kuska collected information from all sorts of sources. He came up with some documents, including extensive numbers of the minutes of the ABA's league meetings. That's rather valuable in a book like this. He also refers to plenty of newspaper stories written at the time as well as interviews with the people involved. There are some good personal nuggets thrown in along the way,  The author uncovers some information here along the way that should be new and interesting to those who followed that era. He also has a little fun in the writing to keep us involved. 

This book had to be written by someone with a love for the sport and that era. It was a long time ago - more than 50 years - and that's going to be ancient history to many. Admittedly such a story will have legal and technical complications along the way; I'm one of the few people who might consider this beach reading. This checks in at almost 500 pages, and it's only part one.  

No, "Balls of Confusion" isn't going to be a best-seller. But in terms of getting an historical record of a pivotal era in basketball out there, this succeeds quite nicely. If you hit the sweet spot of interest, a read is quite rewarding.

Four stars

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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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