Pumped-Up Volumes

SPORTS BOOKS!

by E. James Beale

Considering the three things I enjoy most in the world — sports, getting free stuff and telling people what to think — you're absolutely insane if you thought I wouldn't parlay this whole "Book Quarterly" thing into an excuse to read every sports book I could snatch from City Paper's office, consume them in a bout of Red-Bull-fueled all-nighters reminiscent of college finals week, and bang out a few highlights for your reading pleasure. And here, without further ado, are three sports-related recommendations for your fall reading fix:

Sielski's tribute to the men who play high school football reads as two books. The first covers the 1998 Suburban One Football League season, shown thrown the eyes of Bryan Buckley and Colby Umbrell, senior captions of Central Bucks East and Central Bucks West high schools, respectively. The second takes our two protagonists to the Iraq war — from which only one of them returns.

While the storyline isn't Hollywood-perfect — you'd like the two to have more than a passing knowledge of each other in high school, and you'd like them to form a connection in Iraq — it's told with enough gravitas to carry you through to the end. Sielski spends half the book capturing the life-or-death feel the games held for small-town Pennsylvania (just own it, Doylestown), then spends the second half either reminding us that those games aren't the most important thing in the world, or perhaps that they're not so insignificant after all.

Sielski devotes two chapters to Buckley and Umbrell's military training. Both of them, we read, used the lessons they learned on the gridiron to motivate themselves in difficult moments, and as a touchstone of the success that can come from hard work. Ultimately, Fading Echoes shows both what Friday night football means to a community and how it can mold the men who play it. That makes it a must-read. Buy it.

Take a look at that notation up there — "736 pages" — then understand that I got the book a full two days before I had to figure out what I was going to write about it. And this was during the preoccupying Phillies playoff series, the Birds back from a bye week and the girlfriend in from out of town. So, 736 pages, 250,000-some-odd words and 357 "why aren't you paying attention to me?" glares later, here's my official takeaway: Fuck you, Sports Guy, I couldn't put your fucking book down.

I blitzed through every page, every footnote and even the sectioned bibliography at the end. The Book reads less like an elongated column and more like a master's thesis. It has a broad question (How did basketball become basketball?), a narrow focus (the best 96 players who've ever lived), at least 1,000 footnotes and, like any good paper, is full of "look what I learned" bits that Simmons has never liked editing out anyway.

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It's not perfect. The Book occasionally rambles and loses focus. Simmons' biases can become overwhelming, and his sincere belief that the four most knowledgeable basketball men in the history of the world are David Halberstam, Red Auerbach, Bill Russell and himself can be a bit grating. But in the end those are small complaints, and this is a large book. So read it. Just give yourself more than 48 hours.

Go ahead, judge this book by its cover. After digesting this telling of the Global Icon's formative years, I'm convinced the glossy back-and-gold wrap has the most to say.

The front cover is split in halves: The top a picture of LeBron's state championship team; the bottom the title and names of the authors. The back, all advance praise, contains attaboys from Jay-Z, John Grisham and Warren Buffett, among others.

The story is supposed to be about how James, then a sophomore in high school, now the NBA MVP, won in high school. Of course, if you've paid any attention to the hoops world over the years, it's a story you've already heard. Rather than deal with that, and perhaps address the myriad issues that an adolescent who has groupies before a learner's permit must have faced, King James spends his (co-writer's) time telling us about his four bestest buddies.

As far as memoirs go, it's not the worst. Bissinger can write for days, and James' success story is truly impressive. But you knew all that when you glanced at the cover. So study that glossy front, put this one back on the rack and save yourself some beer money.