Review: You Are Looking Live (2021)

By Rich Podolsky

It doesn't take much for a football fan to return to the 1970s. The phrase "you are looking live" ought to do it.

That was the phrase that Brent Musburger often used to begin a CBS sports broadcast in that era. The words also served as an introduction to something of a new era in TV production, since it was relatively early to show several live scenes, one after another, in a broadcast. Musburger and Company did it on "The NFL Today," which established the template for the form in that time period. You really had to watch the show if you are a pro football follower in those days. 

Rich Podolsky takes a look back at those days with something of a history of the show, entitled, of course, "You Are Looking Live!"

Watching football had become something of a national obsession by the 1970s, and CBS was interested in expanding the amount of programming devoted to the game. To do that, it had to put together some sort of compelling show that would force people to turn on their televisions at 12:30 p.m. instead of 1 p.m.

The cast of characters was crucial. Musburger was at the center of the action. From a technical standpoint, what CBS tried to do was close to insane in terms of complexity by Seventies standards. Not only did he handle it smoothly, but he added a touch of urgency to the proceedings. Irv Cross was a former NFL player who knew the game and was a polished broadcaster. He's not remembered as a trailblazer among African Americans broadcasters, but he should be. 

Phyllis George, a former Miss America, blazed a trail in her own right. She showed that women could be a good-sized part of a successful broadcast. George did interviews that didn't have an X and O in sight. That was a time when some men refused to believe that a woman had a place on any sort of sports broadcast, and would complain about it loudly to anyone who would listen. I can't imagine what George's Twitter feed might have looked like back in those days - but it would have been ugly. Finally, there was Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder, a gambling expert given legitimacy by his mere presence. He also added an air of unpredictability, since you never knew what he might say. They all filled 30 minutes of programming nicely, and accomplished the goal of attracting an audience.

A couple of things are rather obvious about this book right from the start. It's rather thin at 200 pages or so. Therefore, it's going to be a quick read - which is fine for a subject like this. Podolsky in the introduction talks about how working on "The NFL Today" was the best five years of his professional life. That's something of a double-edged sword. He knows most of the principals involved in the show, on and off the air, and that allows him good access to those involved who are still around to talk about it. (Cross, George and Snyder have died in recent years.) But it also means that it's tough for him to be objective about the show, the people involved in it, and its impact. The author does talk to some people who competed against the show, and their comments are instructive.

At least Podolsky covers the major issues that come up during the course of the show's run. Snyder was the biggest problem for all concerned, occasionally doing something that embarrassed the network. The cast changed a bit as the years went by, and it wasn't as interesting. The pregame shows on CBS and Fox now last for an hour, and they aren't exactly Must See TV in my house. The lesson of "less is more" comes up, at least as compared to the original version.

"You Are Looking Live" isn't going to stay on the bookshelf forever. But if Podolsky set out to write a quick, relatively interesting read, he has succeeded nicely. Just make sure you're old enough to remember the original show before getting out your credit card.

Three stars

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Review: Wish It Lasted Forever (2021)

By Dan Shaughnessy

Dan Shaughnessy can be a tough sportswriter some times.

That's a little more rare than you might think. Criticism of sports figures has become increasingly rare, particularly in an age where athletes can go on their own outlets of social media - or, better yet, pop up on a team's ever-cheerleading site - in order to get a point across to the public. 

Shaughnessy, a columnist for the Boston Globe, often isn't like that. He'll say what he thinks, and worries about the damage later on. It's not a way to be popular, but it's probably necessary. An objective viewpoint can be an important counterpoint these days.

Yet, in the book "Wish It Lasted Forever," Shaughnessy comes across as downright happy and occasionally apologetic. This may surprise his regular readers in New England, who are used to crusty. 

The biggest reason that Dan is happy in this book is that he was more or less in the right place in the right time. He covered the Boston Celtics during the early 1980s. If there was a better assignment for a sportswriter to have in those days, it doesn't really come to mind.

First of all, the Celtics were good. Really good. They had Larry Bird on their side, at his peak. Robert Parish, Kevin McHale and Dennis Johnson were around for much of that time as well, and K.C. Jones and Red Auerbach are in the picture as well. Bill Walton even shows up for a too-brief appearance, and provides the title in talking about what is is like to play on a team like the 1985-86 Celtics. No matter what happened, this bunch was not going to lose too many games. Losses lead to unhappy people on a team; ask those who cover the Buffalo Sabres these days. The game stories start to read alike. Shaughnessy's biggest question in a given year was, will the Celtics win the NBA championship again?

What's more, this is a very interesting group of guys.  Bird comes off as having a very sharp mind, McHale and Walton are funny, Parish is silent (as opposed to his wife), Ainge is intelligent, Cedric Maxwell is charismatic. The group got along well. Shaughnessy was not a member of the band - there's always a wall up between the two sides - but he went to practices and games with the Celtics almost every day for months. Dan also traveled with the team, taking the same planes and riding the buses. It's a great seat, and Shaughnessy certainly enjoyed the vantage point. There's a really fun story about how Bird and Shaughnessy wound up in a free-throw shooting contest.

It's not all easy of course. One time Bird apparently got into a bar room fight and hurt his hand. Shaughnessy found confirmation of the story and found a eyewitness. The reporter told his boss that someone else should write the story because Bird would cut off access indefinitely, but was told to do it anyway. The story was written, and even teammates confirmed it later, but Shaughnessy did indeed pay a price. 

The author also made the wise decision to reach back to the list of people from that era and ask them today about what happened back then. It does supply some good perspective into events. 

The publisher has played up the fact that the book is something of a printed version of "The Last Dance," about Michael Jordan's Chicago Bulls. Based on "Wish It Lasted Forever," it seems like being around Larry Bird's Boston Celtics was a heck of a lot more fun. Celtics' fans will love this, and most sports fans should enjoy it.

Four stars

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Review: Year of the Rocket (2021)

By Paul Woods

Books about the Canadian Football League don't pop up on this blog very often, and for a very good reason - I live in the United States.

"Year of the Rocket," written by Paul Woods, is the exception.

Raghib "Rocket" Ismael's career is quite a story, at least at the beginning.  He was raised in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and went to Notre Dame to play football. The Rocket may not have been the best pure player in the country, but he certainly made things happen. His blinding speed made him a threat to score a touchdown whenever he had the ball in his hand. Ismael finished second in the Heisman Trophy balloting that year, and certainly figured to go high in the first round of the 1991 draft. 

However, Bruce McNall had other ideas. He thought he saw a back-door method into the National Football League by buyig the Toronto Argonauts of CFL. If the NFL wanted to expand to Toronto someday - and really, why wouldn't they? - the owner of the Argos might have the edge in winning that franchise. But the CFL team would have to become much more relevant than it was at the time.

So McNall, the owner of the Los Angeles Kings, decided to take a shot at making this all work. To do that, he enlisted Wayne Gretzky, who was playing for the Kings at the time, and John Candy, an actor/comedian from Ontario. They put up a little money, and bought the Argonauts. Then the group essentially bribed Ismael to skip the NFL and play in Toronto. The rookie received $4.5 million per year for four years, making his annual salary larger than the rest of the team's income. 

But it didn't work for a couple of reasons. The Rocket was supposed to serve as a spokesman for the team in its attempt to gain attention, and he really wasn't the least bit ready for such responsibilities. Candy tried to fill in for Ismael in a sense, and worked hard to make the Argos go. But the other problem was that McNall was a crook - a go-to-jail-for-financial fraud crook. His sports empire was made out of paper. The Argos hemorrhaged money, and even a championship didn't help. The team, and McNall, ran out of cash rather quickly, and the experiment ended when the franchise was sold. By the way, McNall says in the book that he never could figure out how to get the NFL to add a team in Toronto as long as Buffalo's Bills were just down the highway.

Woods worked for about four years putting all of this together. Some of the principals wouldn't talk about it, even today, and others like Candy had died. But most of the other key personalities were more than happy to speak about this era of Canadian football. In hindsight, most treat it as something of a dream where they look back and say, "Did all of this really happen?"

Clearly Candy is the star of the show here. He was a huge football fan, and it was his childhood dream come true to own the Argos. Candy was full of ideas, and was willing to do almost anything - well, except for investing more than $1 million - to make it work. What's more, John had a ton of fun doing it - as the stories show. There are plenty of other people who were a smaller part of the story who turn up in the book to provide facts and perspective.

If there's a downside to the book, at least for Americans, it's that the Argos' football story needs to be told along the way. Almost all of the names besides the Rocket on the roster and coaching staff will be unfamiliar to U.S. readers. Therefore, it's tough to draw people in to read about a quarterback battle during Toronto's 1991 season. 

Even so, 'Year of the Rocket" goes by as quickly as a punt return for a touchdown, as it checks in at less than 200 pages. No, the cast will attract a very specialized audience. If you qualify, you will be entertained.

Four stars

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Review: Where Tomorrows Aren't Promised (2021)

By Carmelo Anthony with D. Watkins     

At its heart, "Where Tomorrows Aren't Promised" isn't about basketball.

It's more about sociology and urban studies than any other category. The book will be in the sports section of the bookstore, because the author has been one of the best basketball players on the planet. Just don't expect a recap of his achievements here. There's more at stake.

Carmelo Anthony has been a sensation ever since he burst on the national scene in 2002. Rapid fans of high school basketball, especially in the Baltimore-Washington corridor, had heard about him. Carmelo is the type of unique name that is simply fun to say and hard to forget. When he helped Syracuse University win the national championship in 2003, just about everyone in the sport had heard about him, and had seen what a special player he was.

This is the first part of the story, from birth to the NBA draft, and it's an interesting one. Anthony began life in New York City in one of the toughest sections of that town. He didn't even know his father, who died when he was an infant. Carmelo moved to Baltimore at the age of eight or so, with his mom and, at least toward him, generally angry stepfather. The family settles into a neighborhood there that's more of a place to survive than to thrive.

The people there do their best to move from day to day, but it's not easy. Families are far from traditional. The neighborhood economy has little to offer, particularly when it comes to jobs. That forces people to dive underground into drugs and other social ills. Guns are plentiful, and deaths are almost expected at some point.   

Anthony was lucky. His mother did whatever she needed to do to keep Carmelo in line and happy. If a relative or a friend needed a place to eat or sleep, the Anthonys would make room for him or her. Somehow. They might sleep in a closet, but they'd be warm and dry. As a child, Carmelo really didn't know how it all worked, but he certainly appreciated the effort.

The transition toward maturity wasn't without its bumps, of course. Anthony was on the edge of trouble at times. It's sometimes a balancing act between following the rules of the streets as well as the laws of the community. But among the many people that come out of such places, Carmelo had an advantage - he was good at basketball. That got him a ticket into a private school, allowing Anthony to see how the other half lived. But there were cultural clashes on the way.

Anthony spent the summer between his junior and senior years of high school in summer school, working off a string of detentions and raising his grades a bit. That actually hurt his visibility in the basketball world a bit, since he missed most of the summer camps and competitions where reputations are made. Anthony was urged by the Syracuse coaches to get out of Baltimore at that point, and he spent his final year of high school at Oak Hill Academy in Virginia. There he played on a team filled the stars, and was ready for the big time when he walked in the proverbial front door of Syracuse University.

The key to the story is that it is "authentic." It's a serious, straight-ahead story of the ups and downs of his experiences. The fact that it's coming from one person doesn't hurt the story at all. These are his experiences; it's up to the read to make generalizations from there. Certainly some people are going to feel like going on-line and looking up some phrases in the Urban Dictionary. It won't hurt, and you might learn something. The story moves along quite well as Anthony tells the story with the power of simplicity.

"Where Tomorrows Aren't Promised" is hardly a conventional memoir.  But, it works. The publication should hold your interest throughout. The book is another sunk basket in the second half of a life that's had a lot of them.

Four stars

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Review: Ice Bowl (2021)

By Ed Gruver

Almost a year after the birth of the Super Bowl, the Ice Bowl was born.

That became the unofficial nickname of the NFL Championship game of the 1967 season. It was played in Green Bay between the Packers and Dallas Cowboys. The winner would go to the Super Bowl, which made its debut on the American sporting scene a year before. It matched the AFL and NFL champions.

Why Ice Bowl? Well, it was cold. Frightfully cold. The temperature at kickoff was minus-15 degrees. It didn't get any warmer as the day went on. Since it was the coldest NFL game ever, the images from that game became memorable. Green Bay picked up a reputation as an ice box on that day, and it lingers to this day. 

Naturally, the game led to the production of a few books over the years. One of them was "Ice Bowl," by Ed Gruver. It seems to have originally been published in 1998. Now it's back for something of an encore run. 

Gruver wrote the book in a brisk (pardon the accidental pun), easy-to-read way. After setting up the day of the game, the author dives into the history behind the game. That essentially begins with the arrival of the respective coaches in the Ice Bowl, Green Bay's Vince Lombardi and Dallas' Tom Landry. The two had been coordinators with the New York Giants in the 1950s, and it's hard to believe the Giants let both of them go. They both won a lot of games as head coaches. 

By 1967, the Packers had established themselves as the gold standard for football. They had won NFL titles in 1961, 1962, 1965 and 1966. So 1967 would make it three in a row, which is rare air. Green Bay was getting old, and Lombardi was about ready to leave coaching, so there was a sense of urgency. The Cowboys had only started playing in 1960. After a slow start, Landry had put together a powerful roster. Their ascension to the top almost seemed inevitable. Almost, because the Packers were in the way.

Eventually, we get to the 1967 season, and the teams begin a march toward another showdown. They both took some detours, but they reached the NFL championship game. No one wanted a game played below zero, if only because skill took a back seat under those conditions. But as football coach Chuck Knox used to say, you have to play the hand you're dealt. 

Gruver gets to the game in the final few chapters, and the story picks up in intensity. He nicely mixes descriptions of each play with comments from those involved. Toward the end, the story has the added benefit of the play-by-play of the game as delivered by the Packers' radio network. So you'll learn a lot about what did happen, what the participants were thinking at the time, and what might have happened.

There are a couple of issues with the book, one old and one new. The old concerns the weather. Should the NFL have played the game, no matter how memorable it turned out to be? I think you could make an argument that playing at that temperature was unfair to players and fans as well as downright dangerous. It would be interesting to find out if any lessons were learned from the experience. 

In addition, this is a reprint of a book from almost a couple of decades ago. There isn't any need to do much updating most of the time here. Still, the last chapter had some references to participants that obviously are out of date - some of them have died, for example. It wouldn't have taken much work to revise those few portions. Otherwise, readers might be tempted to go to the library or used book store and look for an original copy of the book.

Even so, "Ice Bowl" was written to offer a review and perspective of a famous football game. That hasn't changed now. It still works as a review of a game for the ages.

Four stars

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