Tee'sReads          

 
The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game
By Michael Lewis
W.W. Norton & Co. (Cover: $24.95; Amazon: $13.72)

It's been a long time since a book kept me up through one night and woke me at 3 a.m. the next, pestering me to pick it back up until it was finished. But that's the kind of effect Michael Lewis has.

I almost wrote "Michael Lewis' stories," but that leaves out equally compelling parts of what he does so well book after book.

Sure enough, he tells great stories. A stingier reviewer might say he prob'ly gets his stories handed to him -- after all, he's Michael Lewis of "Moneyball"/"Liar's Poker"/"The New New Thing" fame; people are likely standing at his doorstep like pilgrims at Mecca, waiting to hand him great stories. Even if they are, reading one of his books -- say, "Coach: Lessons on the Game of Life" -- you understand very quickly that his other gifts are what make those stories fly.

The story in "Blind Side," the one that kept me up, is about Michael Oher, at 6'4" and 335 pounds, the biggest Black Cinderella there will ever be in the cannon of sports literature.

Oher (pronounced "oar") is a case study maybe even too extreme for Jonathan Kozol's "Savage Inequalities." When we meet him first, Oher strikes others in his hometown Memphis as a mere cipher -- practically mute, (somehow) melting into the background of life, and likely doomed in a way you imagine Ethiopians in refugee camps are doomed. He'd been on his own since age 10, foraging for food and shelter wherever he could scrounge it up, wearing the same raggedy pair of shorts, a tee shirt and sneakers for god knows how long, and steering as clear of school as he had of Memphis' seriously overburdened social services. The son of an absent (and, later, murdered) father and an alcoholic, drug-addicted mother, and brother to more than 11 brothers and sisters (even Lewis loses count), Michael Oher somehow still had an angel perched on his shoulder.

Not that this angel goes easy on him.

After being plunked down in a snooty white Christian high school on the "right" side of Memphis, in a strange moment of serendipity that smacks of FATE, Oher soon bumps into a rather enlightened school booster, Sean Tuohy. Tuohy and his family end up taking the homeless boy in and, later, adopting him. It's not all rosy, though. Oher is so woefully uneducated, ignorant of what we take as mundane facts of life -- such as why people he's meeting for the first time act so friendly -- that you half-wonder how he's going to make it. He's like an urban Kasper Hauser -- raised in isolated captivity, but landing, in a daze, in the unsuspecting embrace of a concerned and committed family. But, somehow, with a combination of his innocence and everyone's hard work and patience (and nearly two years of studying throughout his days and nights), he does make it.

Oher's life changes so dramatically that you want to just bawl for all the kids in Memphis and everywhere whose lives might also be turned around with such money, guidance and love. (Late in the story, when Oher has already been transformed and moved on to play for Ole Miss, his tutor begins working with some of his teammates -- since she's been moved to Oxford right along with her prize student. One of those tutees thrives under her constant mothering, prompting from this tough, teenaged defensive end a tearful outburst, "Nobody ever loved me till you." oh!)

Oher's story is cast, with a light touch, as one of Destiny, given Lewis' titular subject -- how the understanding about the position of left tackle in the NFL evolved and is now considered, with quarterback, the most important job on the team. It's no X's and O's explanation, as Lewis uses the narratives of several significant figures to tell the story of that metamorphosis -- men like Bill Walsh, whose inventive short-pass offensive attack made protecting the QB's back a No. 1 priority; early prototypes at the slot, like Anthony Munoz, John Ayers, Steve Wallace and Will Wolford; and, perhaps along with (former Buckeye great) Orlando Pace, the current epitome of the pass-rush-stopping "freak of nature," Jonathan Ogden. Along the way we hear great insights from a variety of NFL and college FB insiders such as Lawrence Taylor, Bill Parcells, Bill Polian, etc. -- definitely one of the bennies Lewis gets from his connections and rep that lesser writers would have to kill for.

One of Lewis' talents is his ability to handle the metaphoric arc of his stories without using them like an LT axe over the head. (A gripe that might be coming out of my frustration with the bad writing I'm forced to endure here at J-School....) "The Blind Side" is written in such a "talking" style, its sentences showing such a confidence and comfort with language and nuance, it's no wonder I'm up in the middle of the night feeling so tickled. One of Lewis' best qualities, and the reason sports strikes me as his natural subject matter, is that his writing is always in service of the story. To reference a literary figure beloved by Lewis' Oxford, Mississippi subjects, Lewis has killed his darlin's. No showing off. No posturing. The story's the thing.

"The Blind Side" is well worth the night-and-a-half I stayed up to read it.

 
She’s Got Next: A Story of Getting In, Staying Open and Taking a Shot
By Melissa King
Mariner Books (Cover: $13; Amazon: $10.40)


Melissa King’s small, quiet memoir about playing pick-up basketball has got to be a hard sell compared to the more masculine sports books currently muscling their way onto the literary scene. With the likes of Lance Armstrong, Boris Becker, golf’s Peter Jacobsen and Louis vs. Schmeling taking up shelf space, King probably won’t get much of a chance to compete. But I imagine by now, after years of trying to get into decent street games almost always ruled by men, she’s sorta used to that.

And, anyway, King’s MO is to clear out of the way of better games. "I know I’m just an average type of player," she writes in "She’s Got Next." "I don’t even wear that great of shoes or flashy sports clothes, because I never want what I’m wearing to be better than I am. I mean, I don’t want to look like I don’t know how good I’m not." Still, that doesn’t keep her from challenging on plenty of courts where the old, the young, and the short-on-talent gather to play some hoops and test themselves on a near-daily basis. All too often they don’t measure up, but once in a while a game rises above the usual hustle-n-grind and the frailties of each player, and it’s these moments that drive King to return again and again to the rec centers and playgrounds wherever she is. Ultimately, for a time, it’s what she lives for – and why she’s written the book.

And King has been living this way for quite a while, looks like. "Next" is an outgrowth of an essay she wrote in 1999 for the Chicago Reader – a piece that eventually caught the attention of volume editor Richard Ford for the year’s Best American Sports Writing collection. At 27, fed up with her dead-end job at home in Nowhereville, Arkansas, King begins her pick-up journey by literally picking up and moving to Chicago. No reason really, except ennui. And what could be further from blahs and despair of an Arkansan lower-middleclass upbringing and culture than the vibrant, colorful and sometimes dangerous streets of the Windy City? King finds a job working in a natural foods store, but her main job quickly becomes scouting the city for games.

"I’d get up on Saturday mornings knowing my apartment needed to be cleaned or something, but then I’d find myself in my car, cruising for a game," she writes early on. "I’d start shooting around, tell myself I was only going to stay for a few games, but more often than not it was close to dinner time before I went home." The same routine rules her workdays, too, though night games are often limited to women’s rec leagues or two-on-two games with rec center staffers.

While the episodes of games in various places, whether Chicago or Los Angeles or Arkansas, and the drama of people thrown together willy-nilly make for somewhat interesting reading, King has – to put as she might – somewhat of a bigger intention. This is her journey, after all, according to the book’s subtitle. She’s jumped out of the necrotic slumber she’d slipped into at home and into a life full of various choices and different people and situations. And King does "stay open," as being open for her means finding a way of life designed by her, not by social norms and cultural constraints.

To this end, King interacts with all sorts of people on the basketball courts she visits that playas wouldn’t bother with. She lets herself get sucked into a game with a drunk old guy she calls "Park Dude," whom she eyeballs cautiously when young girls come in and join them. She shoots around with brash 10-year-old boys who’re still too small to get into games with teenagers, and she tries to tempt prepubescent girls into taking the game seriously when all they want to know is whether some nasty boy likes them. She joins a women’s league in which players won’t call fouls, fully expecting players to police themselves – even when some participants don’t know how to play the game. At some point it struck me that King learns how not to live as often as she gets in games that are not transcendent – that is, most of the time. As rare as a game in which she shoots lights-out are those moments when she finds a life-nugget she can use.

Not that she doesn’t keep looking. But as far as the reader is concerned, King doesn’t look far enough outside the next 94 feet to see where all that learning might take her. Rarely do we get a glimpse of her other lives in the 10 to 12 years we’re invited to follow her through. Once she moves to Chicago, she tells us in the most obscured way that she’s got a job in a natural foods store – but we don’t hear enough about this job to even put a title to it. Has she made worthwhile friends there? Does she socialize with her co-workers? How has what she’s taken from the playing court related to the choices she makes on the job? And what about her family back in Arkansas? She mentions that she used to play hoops in her driveway with her dad and brother – the brother appears once King moves back to Arkansas from Illinois, but leaves again all too quickly, and her father never steps on the stage. Are we to assume he’s dead? And where is a mother?

King’s secondary obsession, after her drive to play, is figuring out who she is as a woman, and how that relates to finding a man – a feat far more difficult than finding a good game. At third and closing in quick (tick, tock) is King’s attentiveness to children. Though she never says so, she wants them desperately -- so much so she takes girls under her wing throughout the book, though they slip all too easily away, quick as an errant pass. Finally, near the book’s end, once she’s found a boyfriend (who’s not interested a whit in basketball), King stops playing and starts coaching 4th-grade girls. And, sure, the story of her team’s season is interesting, with its requisite personalities, dysfunctions, and small victories.

But what I find more interesting is all King’s not telling us while she’s yak, yak, yakking about basketball. Here’s a book in which basketball is King’s metaphor for other parts of her life, and yet the symbol is all we get, not what’s being held up to scrutiny. Readers are left to make what they will of King’s life.

For what it’s worth, I saw King’s basketball as a way for her to avoid coming to terms with her life off the court. Why the dodge, I don’t have the first clue. But, step by serendipitous step, life ends up coming to her: She finds a nice and smart man, then a "good marketing job" (which she doesn’t tell us she finds meaningful, something she’d earlier said was important to her) then by the end of the book she has a son. And with each successive step, King moves further away from the hoop – so far in fact that she no longer feels hunger for the game, only nostalgia. At some point in "Next," you get the feeling you’ve been watching the wrong game while the real game was being played on another channel.

For all King’s talents as an observer and short-story teller, as well as her gift for capturing the locutions of urban and Southern dialects, she hasn’t got the narrative here to hold up the theme. Now that she’s finally got "Next" out of her system, I hope she’ll take her sweet writing chops and use them to tell others’ stories – because it strikes me that in this so-called memoir, King was always less interested in telling us about her life than in showing us the life she saw in others.
 

 
Sunday Money: Speed! Lust! Madness! Death! A Hot Lap Around America with NASCAR
by Jeff MacGregor
HarperCollins (cover: $25.95; Amazon: $17.13)

Sportswriters have long found readers fascinated by disquisitions on various sports and the cultures that grow up around them. Perhaps originating from George Plimpton's 1964 "Paper Lion," in which the most famous jock wannabe gave us an insider's view of professional football, the genre has taken on some worthy and riveting subjects.


It's also taken off like reality TV. Whether the topic is the cult of prep football (Bissinger's "Friday Night Lights"), the hyping of high school hoops (Frey's "The Last Shot"), or the cutting edge of baseball management (Lewis' "Moneyball"), we are endlessly curious about the inner workings of the sports we follow and how those sports reflect back on us.

In "Sunday Money," Jeff MacGregor has tried to pull off a similar documentary-style feat -- and with an equally deserving and compelling topic, NASCAR racing. But while the ride the author takes us on is a whirlwind of keen and often hilarious observations, MacGregor ends up braking too often to rubberneck at scenes unrelated and irrelevant to his primary destination.

The promise of "Sunday Money" is tantalizing. Just what is the allure of NASCAR? I want to know. What is the purpose of driving 500 laps or miles or whatever, when races might hold one's attention longer if they were shorter? And how is it that today's stock-car drivers, maybe one or two generations away from hill-country shade-tree mechanics, are suddenly Madison Avenue sexpots calling themselves athletes? Who are these fans, swooning over the Dukes-of-Hazzard, good-ole-boy jive of drivers who in reality belong less to the ranks of the modern Confederacy than to the upper echelons of corporate shillery? And, finally, how is it that the dead Dale Earnhardt so quickly displaced the dead Elvis Presley as the favorite son of Deep-South sentimentalists? Really, I want to know.

To some degree, MacGregor knows what his readers want -- at least part of it anyway. And he delivers in spades the snarky assessment we crave of some of the dumber aspects of NASCAR and the characters who inhabit this exhaust-fogged, burnt-rubber-scented "sport." For instance, he takes a closer look at the "bad math" that "explains" how NASCAR has become America's #2 sport. And he nails the looks and manners of several of racing's demigods -- for instance, describing Richard Petty this way: "Richard Petty is a set of teeth coming at you. Big white teeth." And MacGregor is spot-on in portraying the women who prance through the teams' garage, called "Pit Lizards," naked in their ambition to attract the attention of someone, anyone rich. Also, he captures the very tedium even fans feel in watching just one entire race, let alone closely following NASCAR's stultifyingly long season.

Thing is, while apt, entertaining and sometimes even literary in his essayistic appraisals, these NASCAR snapshots have a way of ending up more like murals. They just take up too much space. MacGregor's physical description of Petty expands over two pages. Another two he spends sizing up a singular female race fan, an aging Dolly-Parton-type bleach blond, who may have been glamorous 30 years ago deep in the backwoods of Tennessee, but who now only seems a worn-out caricature. Throughout "Sunday Money," MacGregor literally has to interrupt his own reveries about his NASCAR-trailing travels and his and his wife's trevails in owning a motorhome to tell us, in stingy McNugget-sized bites, the history of NASCAR racing. It's hard to think a writer could go overboard in describing the excesses of NASCAR, but MacGregor's exuberance spills onto whatever is in his sights, which in "Sunday Money" isn't limited to the subject at hand. The book seems more like a thinly-veiled paean to Tom Wolfe's hyper-caffeinated style than an insightful and amusing ethnography of a season at the races.

Which is exactly why I still don't know whether races consist of laps or miles or whatever. And why I'm still clueless about how the Cup championship points system works (or, I gather from additional reading, why it doesn't). Further, the dust jacket promises profiles of the lives of drivers -- but here we really do get only snapshots. For example, MacGregor skulks around Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s garage stall as well as his hometown, waiting for a Junior sighting, but he never gets anywhere. This may be because, as he admits early on, he doesn't have the Super-Sized Credentials that would get him into the main Media Centers; he sports creds that allow him to gather only "literary color." Nor do the drivers, who have second full-time jobs as Fortune 500 face men, seem inclined to do yet another interview. Most frustratingly, this book is basically three years old: MacGregor has followed the 2002 season, and updates some of the changes in the interim with one- to two-sentence quick hits in his epilogue. I might as well pluck "Ball Four" off the shelf again to see what today's MLB is all about.

MacGregor really is telling us the truth in the first chapter when he writes, "This is a book about our year on the road, my wife and me, chasing NASCAR. In a motorhome." NASCAR is only part of the picture. Readers aren't introduced to team owners until page 96, and for the most part these heavies disappear, never to be seen nor heard from again. MacGregor mentions drivers early on, but they don't see the spotlight until owners exit stage-right. And because MacGregor's mostly following his own capricious and wandering reactions throughout, we don't get a fully-blown narrative sense of any of the drivers or their teams or the season. Only a snapshot of Daytona or Talladega here, a portrait-in-miniature of Tony Stewart there, then MacGregor and his wife manuever their unwieldy teal moho "Homer" on the road again.

What I missed most here, though, was a deeper look inside NASCAR fandom. MacGregor points out that NASCAR fans are attracted to the sort of old-school, spit-in-yer-eye Southern whiskey-runner ideal that went out of fashion in the 1970s. But he doesn't dig in to find out why they cling so tightly to this long-dead cultural icon. Are stock-car racing fans like middle-aged white men who still rock out to "Stairway to Heaven" and "Thunderstruck"? Holding on to a white-shrouded past they've known long enough now to finally feel comfortable with? Afraid of change, and thus terrified by a contemporary and, shall we say, more colorful pop culture? I want to know who these people are and why they are the way they are. NASCAR nation has come to be known by a different descriptor in another arena of American life -- as Red-Staters, and MacGregor had a perfect opportunity to decode for us at least one perhaps telling aspect of their values -- why they prefer this particular and particularizing sporting entertainment. Instead the author seems satisfied by what his eyes tell him, not all that unlike casual fans who are mesmerized by the dazzling colors of a racecar, but haven't got the sustained curiosity to check out what's under the hood.

Usually I finish books in this genre feeling like an insider and wanting to look firsthand into whatever subject I'd witnessed only vicariously through reading. With "Sunday Money," though, I found myself wanting to know more simply because, for all its bloated musings, the book didn't provide ample substance. Reading MacGregor's flights of fancy was like gorging myself on candy-store treats when what I was really in the mood for was a light lunch.
 

 
Lance Armstrong’s War: One Man’s Battle Against Fate, Fame, Love, Death, Scandal, and a Few Other Rivals on the Road to the Tour de France
By Daniel Coyle
HarperCollins (cover: $25.95; Amazon: $15.57)

The cover design of Daniel Coyle’s new book is perfect. Lance Armstrong in profile, his helmet on and Oakleys shading his eyes, and an earbud in place. Riding in a storm, rain dripping from that sharp nose and chin, breathing hard. But for his effort, inscrutable.



Because the Tour de France lasts only three weeks per year – and it’s in, well, France -- we don’t see as much of Armstrong as we do other American sports icons, like Barry Bonds or Tiger Woods. And what we do see of him is either filtered or only the teeniest bit of pure Lance – that is, the man on his bike, dancing on his pedals and breaking everybody’s balls on steep climbs and in time trials.

The filtered version, of course, rules. We’ve come to know this Lance through his endorsements – especially in a number of compelling Nike ads (also here and here) – as well as through his two memoirs (both best sellers), the celebrity-pages pics of him with Sheryl Crow, and his cancer foundation, which is responsible for lassoing the wrists of more than 30 million adoring fans with yellow rubber LiveStrong bracelets.

Pure Lance is harder to pin down. He’s a world-class athlete whose enlarged heart, superior lung capacity, limited lactate build-up and sheer determination in the face of opposition seem to know no bounds. This Lance beat testicular cancer, a disease which had spread to the extent that it would have killed mere mortals. And this Lance has since won seven Tours de France.

We know Lance Armstrong as one of the best athletes of all time, as an inspirational philanthropist, and as the Regular Joe he generally presents himself to be, but Daniel Coyle was interested in a more distilled picture. As all cyclists must appreciate, Coyle wanted the streamlined version, less burdened by the weight of Armstrong’s renown. Coyle wanted to know what made Lance tick – and to find out, he followed Armstrong for 15 months, through the Texan’s training for the 2004 Tour de France and Lance’s record sixth win.

What he found wasn’t so much what makes Lance tick as what ticks him off. Like Achilles in the "Iliad," Armstrong is all or nothing. Total devotion to his sport, and a zeal to win that is unmatched. Utter contempt for his rivals and enemies. Absolute fury at whosoever is fool enough to question or doubt him. Thus the subtitle of Coyle’s book, though breathtaking in its length and breadth, is as perfect in its way as the cover photo.

Nope, sorry, hate to tell ya, but Lance Armstrong isn’t Prince Charming. He calls his rivals "fucking chumps," even after having made them eat his dust in last year’s Tour. It’s as if winning isn’t good enough – Lance has to make them pay for ever thinking they had a chance against him. And rivals are not the only sworn enemies. Armstrong has left a bike trail of broken friendships and professional relationships in his wake that makes one wonder how he’s remained untouched through seven years at the top of the cycling world. How has he not alienated someone with power enough to hurt him?

Not that some haven’t tried. The former assistant/mechanic, Mike Anderson, who claims he saw steroids in Armstrong’s bathroom cabinet. Lance’s ex-masseuse, Emma O’Reilly, who claimed she’d once taxied EPO to Lance and disposed of used syringes. Lance’s former hero, three-time Tour winner Greg LeMond, went public because his intuition tells him that Armstrong dopes. The Irish reporter David Walsh, once a fan of Armstrong, became famous as the author of "L.A. Confidentiel: Les secrets de Lance Armstrong," which uses an array of circumstantial evidence to implicate the Texan for doping. And SCA Promotions, the underwriter for half of a $10 million bonus Lance was to have received for winning his sixth Tour, later refused to pay up, citing the company’s own investigation of doping allegations. All of whom, as well as bevies of others, such as the French press, have entered the legions of what Lance himself likes to call "trolls" – those whom he believes are out to destroy him.

Coyle gives a fair hearing to both Anderson and Walsh in "War," though I didn’t find either especially compelling. More interesting is the season-long struggle Lance engages with his own teammate, Floyd Landis. The ever irascible Landis is having some growing pangs, the natural progression for a cyclist with his all-around talent. He is at pains to knuckle under to his team leader’s whims, which is exactly what a domestique must do if he rides for U.S. Postal. (Lance’s team changed sponsors, to the Discovery Channel, at the end of the 2004 season.) But Armstrong’s whims have a cruel streak when it comes to Landis, whom he once considered a close friend, but whom he also understands is challenging his supremacy. Postal had experienced the holes caused by other team members leaving to try their wings as the leaders of other teams – notably, Tyler Hamilton, Roberto Heras, and Levi Leipheimer; however, none was indispensable. But because of Landis’ central role on the team, his chafing under Lance’s rule rubbed both ways – even if the Tough Guy Lance Armstrong was loath to admit it.

Coyle seems only to see Lance with his thumb on Landis, pressing until Floyd squeaks. And just as he gives the benefit of the doubt to Landis in "War," Coyle also feels for the Tour’s top-ranked second-placer, Jan Ullrich, and Basque homeboy Iban Mayo and whoever else fails to go to the extreme physical, mental and emotional lengths to which Armstrong will go to win the world’s most grueling race.

At the end of Coyle’s 15-month study, his subject asks him, "How do you like me now?" A dangerous question for someone aiming to get beyond hero-worship.

Coyle wants to be fair, and his book aptly and eloquently characterizes Armstrong’s considerable charm, wit and allure as well as his fanaticism about training and take-no-prisoners competitive drive. But it’s the Machiavellian quality of Lance’s management style and racing strategies that knock the writer off-kilter. Coyle seems to keep expecting to find the innocence and wonder in Lance that we tend to presume of our heroes. In another work by this author, "Hardball: A Season in the Projects," Coyle penned a vivid and compassionate story of a group of adolescent baseball players living in Chicago’s worst neighborhood. One would think the boys in this profile have no illusions about life, having spent their lives amidst crack addicts and violent crime, but Coyle finds in them an awe in their sport and its heroes as well as a belief in themselves beyond their immediate means that are refreshing and uplifting. In Lance Armstrong, he finds a man at the top of his game whose naivety is long gone – and Coyle himself doesn’t seem to know what sort of emotional adjustment to make as a result.

Now that we know, what do we do? Shall we continue to admire Lance? Be happy for him in his accomplishments? Inspired by his story? Or, conversely, curse his guile and callousness, and feel disenchanted? I’m not sure a crystalline version of either position is appropriate. Despite his seemingly superhuman physical makeup, Lance Armstrong is just a man – flawed, perhaps in spectacular ways, but also striving to connect with humanity, his own included.

Coyle’s book, while provocatively insightful and written with the best literary flair, is just one chapter in the trajectory of Armstrong’s extraordinary life. What will Lance do now that his superhuman powers are of little use? What new experiences will he have, and what new feelings and ideas will follow? What wonderment will capture him, this worldly man who may think he’s seen everything? At this point, we can only hope a writer as observant and skillful as Coyle will be around to chronicle those changes, whether or not he loses his faith as a result.
 

 
The Rivals: Chris Evert vs. Martina Navratilova: Their Epic Duels and Extraordinary Friendship
By Johnette Howard
Broadway Books (cover: $24.95; Amazon: $16.47)

Venus vs. Serena? Anticlimactic to the point of painfully boring. Clijsters vs. Henin-Hardenne? Not feisty enough. Anyone vs. Davenport? Please. The Williams sisters vs. Sharapova? Still too early to tell.



In 1999, when Venus Williams started her climb to the top of women’s tennis, she and Martina Hingis looked as if they might offer a rivalry to savor. The diminutive Swiss’ tart tongue paired with her geometrically pinpoint baseline game versus the Amazonian Venus, with her aloof manner and extraordinary power, was a dream matchup for WTA officials and fans alike. And the snarkiness of both the players and their loony-tunes parents in the locker room and the press just fanned the flames. But once Venus won Wimbledon in 2000, Hingis had pretty much faded into the background, a victim of injury and the explosive power that’s now de rigueur on the women’s side. Still, the two, along with Serena Williams and Anna Kournikova, made for some good, albeit brief, tennis theater.

Oh, how desperate we are for something even the least little bit resembling the titanic 11-year clash between Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova!

Newsday columnist Johnette Howard returns us to that era in her new book about the long-time No. 1s and their disparate lives. The duel profile itself mirrors a tennis match, going back and forth as if across a net to look back at Evert, then Navratilova, and back again. Though Martina holds a 43-37 edge over Chrissie in their on-court battles, Evert wins their face-off in the book, as Howard admits in her acknowledgements to having had more access to the now laidback wife and mother than to Navratilova, who – at 48 – is still busy playing doubles on tour.

Still, Howard provides a valuable review of women’s tennis at the beginning of both the Open era and Title IX. And it’s a pungent time, as reporters then didn’t hesitate to ask a player if she’d worn a bra and Arthur Ashe revealed his misogyny rather than the famous humanity we’re so familiar with when asked to help the cause. Early on, we see Billie Jean King arguing, cajoling and wheedling her way to creating the Virginia Slims Tour, the first pro women’s circuit, and to winning bigger paychecks for women players. Though King and her allies increasingly came to be seen as pushy harridans – and insufficiently feminine to boot – they paved the way for the first amply-paid women’s tennis superstar: Chris Evert.

Evert, a reserved blond Floridian from a middleclass Catholic family, broke through to the semifinals at 16 in her 1971 U.S. Open debut. From there through the 12 seasons she spent at either No. 1 or No. 2 in the world, she played her quiet and determined all-American ingénue role to the hilt. And America fell in love.

To Evert’s "Ice Maiden" Navratilova played the spasmodic and mannish foil. Martina turned pro in 1975, the same year she defected from Communist Czechoslovakia. Soon after, she came out about her homosexuality. Navratilova was anything but reserved. Her personality as well as her attacking serve-and-volley game served as the perfect cross-court contrast to the cool Evert’s metronomic baseline precision. And in their time, an era in which female athletes’ won their first real release from the strictures of traditional gender discrimination, Evert and Navratilova played out this freedom both on the court and off.

It’s the behind-the-scenes tales of these tennis champions’ careers and lives during that time which make for the most interesting reading here. Howard wants to wedge into this equation the idea that Evert and Navratilova had an "extraordinary friendship," but I’m not convinced. Sure, they were friendly – they were long-time colleagues and competitors who shared locker rooms and hotel rooms and even doubles courts. But there’s no mistaking the psychic distance between the two, whether that’s a measure of their dissimilar backgrounds and personalities or a result of 18 years of trying everything physically, strategically and emotionally possible to beat each other into submission. Certainly the two weren’t the wicked adversaries the press painted them to be – but neither were they bosom buddies. They were professional athletes at the top of their games, each with a lot to lose if the other took her down.

"No matter how catty we get with each other in private or public," Martina said after Evert retired in 1989, "I still have a closeness with her that I will never have with another human being because of what we went through together, on and off the court."

"Closeness" may be a necessary quality for friendship, but given such familiarity, the intimacy of friendship doesn’t always follow.

Howard’s portraits of each player work much better. She finds the early Evert just as condescending as you might imagine. Chrissie’d always had an edge there, an itch to prove she was one-up. For example, Howard describes three occasions when Evert patted Navratilova on the head like a child, ostensibly as a gesture of good will. Imagine if Ali patted Frazier on the head after "Smokin’ Joe" put him on his rear. Imagine Palmer patting Nicklaus, or Bird Magic. Even in the short-lived rivalry between Martina Hingis and Venus Williams, had the "Swiss Miss" been so patronizing, Venus would have slapped her silly. Chrissie got away with it because Martina read such gestures as supportive rather than demeaning – and near-hysteric that she was at the time, she needed all the support she could get. Evert proved callous in other ways as well, such as repeatedly calling John Lloyd "gutless" when his tennis career hit the skids after their marriage.

But the picture softens as Evert ages. The 50-year-old wife and mother of three now talks about feeling relieved to let go of the arrogance and selfishness she believed she once needed to be the world’s No. 1 tennis player. Still, Evert expresses disappointment in her waning renown, and worries that someday she won't be sufficiently recognizable to get a table at a good restaurant. Whatever the years have taken from Evert, her acerbic wit remains.

We don’t get a sense one way or the other about Martina’s growth. In fact, as Howard tells it, Navratilova hasn’t changed a bit.

"Unlike Evert, who grew over time into the person she became, Navratilova created a dramatic sense of herself from the start. And she stuck to it – no matter what."

The biggest difference, Howard points out, is that the career of a woman who once defeated opponents so badly she was accused of being "unfair" has "lasted long enough for her to feel the appreciation" of fans everywhere. Not only is Navratilova arguably the best female tennis player of all time, but she’s become something of a social heroine. Navratilova never shied away from the political tumult she wrought from her desire to live by her own rules. And just as people worldwide have come to worship Muhammad Ali for his brilliance in the ring but also for his struggle outside of it after taking an unpopular stand, they have also taken to Martina.

If Howard’s book accomplishes anything outside of making us nostalgic for great rivalries between singular tennis players, it’s to remind us that not so long ago, female athletes could never have expected to reach the heights these two women have found.
 

 
In opening "Without Apology: Girls, Women and the Desire to Fight" with Joyce Carol Oates' rant against women fighters in "On Boxing," Leah Hagar Cohen gets right to the heart of the matter -- there's a squeamishness in our culture about physically demonstrative women which reads female boxers as "monstrous." As a boxing aficionado, a jock and a woman, I'd dismissed Oates' misguided proclamation years ago: How dare a weasely little pipsqueak of a woman writer think she can settle for all time that women’s instinct to express themselves physically paired with their natural aggression is aberrant?



Cohen, herself an admitted pipsqueak, delves deeper into Oates’ charge in "Without Apology" in two ways. First she profiles a group of adolescent girls from Boston’s inner-city and their female boxing coach – and follows their training for most of a year. Also, Cohen chronicles how she succumbs to the visceral hunger to test herself in the ring.

The second half of this equation would seem to have been done before, with Kate Sekules' "The Boxer's Heart," in which the author comes to admire the craft of boxing, then also takes up the sport for its physical challenges and release. Sekules' book is good, but in boxing she never allows herself that release -- rather, she never unleashes herself. And ultimately the reader can't make out the whys of Sekules' angst about that holding back, mostly because the writer herself never figures it out; instead, she gives up, hoping her appreciation of boxing will be enough to sustain her.

Cohen never gives up. Which is surprising because she tells us from the outset that she's spent her life avoiding sports and competitive exertions just as she intellectualizes away her body's need to exist and assert itself in the world. Cohen draws herself here as a disappearing act; she tells us she avoids confrontation, starves in the vain hope that her carnal and emotional needs will dissipate, and prides herself on her civilized, fainting-violet view of the world. We see the rationalizations of a wimp at work.

We discover over the course of her awakening, though, that Cohen is one tough cookie. The way she deadeyes her subject matter -- not just boxing, but the myth of women's inherent fragility -- shows her depth of insight and her willingness to work through rough patches. Cohen digs deep to understand her prickly teenaged fighters and their coach’s quiet ferocity, and each of these women’s hard-boiled need to fight. But this writer makes her bones in owning up to middleclass women’s dispossession of their animal selves, though perhaps she didn't know this until she surprised herself by climbing into the squared circle and putting up her dukes. In doing so, Cohen accomplishes something Sekules couldn’t push through to, something most women refuse even to consider for fear of upsetting the gender-role status quo.

The girls Cohen follows aren’t so determined. One by one they fall away from boxing, as one suspects they might from the beginning. The Rodriguez girls – Jacinta, who’s 15; Sefina, 12; and Candi, 10 – are far more interested either in being kids or in acting as the feminine nurturers to whoever’s having a bad day at the gym. Jacinta’s best friend, Nikki, whose high spirits and deep reservoir of fury could be the perfect combination for a fighter, nonetheless quails in the two sanctioned fights she gets. With a helpless but abusive mother as well as her own budding lesbianism piloting the ship, Nikki can’t find her way to take boxing seriously. By the end, all of the girls drift away, though one could argue none had been fully there from the start. The girls’ trainer, Raphi, loses her fire too, transferring her energies as a coach into motherhood and her increasingly troubled marriage.

Cohen and the reader want more from these women, and are disappointed when their boxing stories crumble under the slightest pressure. Though it doesn’t help the storytelling aspect of “Without Apology,” women’s boxing is still in its infancy, and without the facilities, structure, training and sparring opportunities necessary to sustain it, young women like the Rodriguez sisters will have a hard time hanging in there. Cohen also knows that, ultimately, women must find their own paths to being alive and vital. And just as we see the Rodriguez girls and Raphi tethering themselves to traditional feminine roles, both Nikki and Cohen herself bravely strike out in search of how much more they can be. “Each time I return to the gym,” she writes, “it’s as though I recover substance, ferocity, vigor.” Truly this is a woman’s work, and it’s never done.

Cohen’s writing itself is a joy. This is a book at once light on its feet but still cogent, measured and deliberate. A novelist and author of two nonfiction books, Cohen writes about boxing as if instinctually, her prose perfectly paced and always packing the right punch. Also, she's as observant a student of the human psychology of power and weakness as Angelo Dundee or Cus D'Amato, however more tempered her reactions are to it. And just as Cohen is being seduced into the fight game, so are we captivated by this woman’s reach into the furthest recesses of herself for what it means to be human.
 

 
It’s been four weeks since the opening of Ron Howard’s supposed summer ringer “Cinderella Man,” and once again it’s not looking good for James J. Braddock.

The movie version of the life of the world heavyweight champ from 1935-37 has grossed just under $50 million, and currently sits at No. 10 at the box office. But just to give an idea of the film’s poor showing this summer, “The Longest Yard” – an inferior remake of the 1974 classic, and the only other sports-related movie in the top 25 films – opened one week earlier and has taken in nearly three times as much.

In this feel-good “Rocky”-type picture about a hard-luck Schmoe who rises, then falls, then rises to the top, starring the über-manly Russell Crowe as Braddock and the menschy Paul Giamatti as his manager, Joe Gould, the casting was a stroke of genius. But the movie’s too perfect in its way, too predictable – though Braddock’s story thrilled millions struggling through the Great Depression, today’s popular culture is not so inspired by oversimplified Horatio Alger tales.

Where the film of Braddock’s life fails, three of the four recently released biographies of the New Jersey heavyweight complicate the matter – and, in doing so, are interesting and worthwhile reading. (Marc Cerasini’s “Cinderella Man” won’t be discussed here, as it is a novelization based on the screenplay, and I’m not sure a book can get less interesting and worthwhile than that.) Jim Hague came out with “Braddock: The Rise of the Cinderella Man” (Chamberlain Bros.) on April 5, followed by Jeremy Schaap’s hardback, “Cinderella Man: James J. Braddock, Max Baer, and the Greatest Upset in Boxing History” (Houghton Mifflin), in late April. Two weeks after the film opened came “Cinderella Man: The James J. Braddock Story” from boxing historian and the founder of Cyber Boxing Zone, Michael C. DeLisa, who was also tapped as the film’s historical consultant.

Each writer’s take on Braddock’s life has its own respective influences. DeLisa first became curious about the Depression-era slugger upon his death in 1974. In a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette profile, DeLisa told how what he calls his “obsessive compulsive disorder” was thrown into overdrive by the twice-told tales in Braddock’s obit – so much so that he contacted Braddock’s widow on a fact-finding mission that would eventually lead him to publish the myth-busting version of Braddock’s life.



Hague, a New Jersey-based sportswriter for 22 years, was a Newark Star-Ledger reporter in the late 1990s, focusing his energies on the Knicks and the Nets; he now writes for the Reporter in North Bergen, the hometown of James J. Braddock. Chamberlain Bros. commissioned Hague to write Braddock’s bio after an executive editor there read an article of his about the making of the movie.

Schaap was approached in much the same way – in May 2004, his agent urged him to retell the Braddock story to coincide with the release of the movie. Schaap is the host of ESPN’s “Outside the Lines” and, of course, is the son of the late Dick Schaap. In a recent New York Times feature, Schaap tells of the influence of his father on his own career, and it’s clear from reading his book how keen that influence is.

As one can surmise from its title, Schaap’s book includes a sizable portrait of Max Baer – only Schaap gives as much space to the man Braddock took the title from, and his co-starring role on this fight card makes for entertaining reading. But entertainment isn’t all it’s cracked up to be – especially when it’s at the expense of truth. One has to appreciate that Schaap went to the trouble to provide research notes here (neither Hague nor DeLisa did), but what becomes evident as a result is that the author depended almost wholly on newspaper accounts of his subjects. Not a great idea, as that era of sports writing wasn’t known for sticking to the facts. Really, the “GeeWhiz” reporters of the 1920s and ‘30s, following in the footsteps of Grantland Rice, were more interested in selling newspapers and peddling influence than in telling the truth. (For a revelatory look at sportswriters of that time, read Murray Sperber’s “Onward to Victory: The Crises that Shaped College Sports.”)

There is, for example, the story of how the teenaged Braddock came to boxing. Most biographies, including Schaap’s, picture Jimmy Braddock in a street brawl with his brother Joe, then a solid amateur boxer, after the former wore a new sweater of Joe’s without permission. After fighting him for “nearly an hour” (in rounds?), Joe realized what a great puncher his kid brother was, and voilá! DeLisa, though, waves off such stories as apocryphal, pointing out that hanging around as his older brother worked his way to a state welterweight championship in 1923 was probably all the influence Braddock needed to enter the fight game. Schaap indulges all these stories without discrimination, as if we need that hyperbole, that manufacturing of a heroic epic, in order to continue reading a book-length treatment about one fairly obscure athlete’s long struggle and too-brief triumph. Quite frankly, we don’t – the facts of Braddock’s life and times are plenty engrossing and inspiring. As the self-described “old plot-maker” Damon Runyon once wrote, “Truth in Braddock’s case is much stranger than fiction.”

All three bios lean heavily on the ropes of the episodic style to tell the story – not surprising for a biography of an undistinguished boxer. Hague settles into that mode a little too comfortably, though he has a good eye for details in his paperback. This bio gives us great little nuggets we don’t get elsewhere – for instance, that Braddock was forced to train in a tiny dressing room above a tavern because he couldn’t afford the accommodations at his old training grounds, Joe Jeanette’s gym.



Still, Hague’s Braddock, like Schaap’s, is just a little too good to be believable. In “Braddock,” our stalwart heavyweight would rather work on the docks and collect relief checks than accept money from the likes of Owney Madden, an East coast mobster with whom Joe Gould played palsy-walsy. (Madden barely merits mention in Schaap’s book, and then only as the prime mover behind the Italian heavyweight Primo Carnera.) But Madden played a bigger role in Braddock’s life than readers are led to believe. DeLisa outlines how Gould sold a share of his interest in Braddock to an associate of Madden – and though Braddock claimed ignorance of Gould’s more shady dealings, it stretches the limits of credulity to declare he was “too honest” to take advantage of such an alliance. Madden and those he worked with certainly had a hand in some matchmaking for Braddock, and even put him in the position, in 1931, of meeting Al Capone.

The blackest mark against Gould and Braddock – which all three accounts testify to – was the fishy deal that got Joe Louis into the ring with Braddock. As Hague tells it, Gould and his fighter avoided a title defense against Max Schmeling because Gould was Jewish, and they didn’t want to chance handing over the title to a rumored Nazi. The more pedestrian truth was that a Braddock-Schmeling battle promised not only a Jewish boycott, but severely curtailed ticket sales. Braddock needed one last big payday, and meeting the first black boxer to challenge for the heavyweight title since Jack Johnson was financially preferable to an embargoed match-up with the No. 1 contender. To sweeten the deal, Braddock and Louis camps shook hands on a pledge that entitled the “Cinderella Man” to half of the fight’s gate and had the Brown Bomber’s manager, Mike Jacobs, paying Gould and Braddock 10 percent of his promotional profits from Louis over 10 years. It was essentially an admission of impending defeat as well as an ethically dubious business arrangement. And who was giving his blessing in the wings? The ubiquitous Owney Madden.



DeLisa has by far provided the keenest insights into Braddock’s life, though even he admits he wasn’t able to be completely thorough. (He told the Post-Gazette that while Mae Braddock shared a good bit of her understanding of her husband with him in their correspondence, she died before he could quiz her as assiduously as he later wanted to.) The primary sources DeLisa was able to track down enrich this biography beyond the rehashing of white-washed secondary sources we get elsewhere, and this alone makes DeLisa the heavyweight here. But his storytelling skills are more refined as well, and the knowledgeable reader can sense immediately DeLisa’s experience as a boxing writer. There is no substitute for a deliberative writer who knows his beat.

With the final comeback of James J. Braddock, we are likely to see even more books written about unsung fighters – and so much the better. One fascinating theme in Braddock’s story and time that remained unexplored in the above books – but merits a closer look – is the role of race during and at the tail-end of the Great Depression. Braddock himself seemed wholly unfazed by the issue of facing black boxers, as he trained under them (Joe Jeanette) as well as fought some of the better ones (John Henry Lewis, Joe Louis) throughout his career. Until he became champ, Braddock wasn’t in a position to turn away a bout with a black fighter, given his desperate financial straits. But after taking the heavyweight crown from Baer, Braddock remained immune to the notion that race should keep a worthy opponent out of the ring. He fought any and all comers.

Along with economics, what other factors finally led to the first modern championship bout in which the champ accepted on his merits a black challenger? In terms of race and American sports, the Braddock-Louis title fight stands out as a watershed moment. And I, for one, can’t wait to read more about it.