dr z

A series of things worth your time in the absence of sports.

Paul Zimmerman's, AKA Dr. Z, New Thinking Man's Guide To Pro Football is not the best book in history. Neither is it the worst named. But this space is willing to wager that it would place top ten in a good book : bad name ratio competition. Throw in the cover, which is a football helmet/brain divided into areas labeled with a jumble of football phrases ("player to be named later", "skill positions"), inanities ("D (DEE-FENSE)"), and non sequiturs ("interest-free loan," "no-cut")…

…and we are rapidly approaching a world record for most disservice done by a publisher to an author.

In any case, the NTMGTPF is a 1984 book that is a modernized version of the original 1971 edition that goes over football position-by-position, from the quarterbacks to the linebackers to the special teams lunatics to the officials and press. I do not read sports books I do not have to for the same reason dentists don't hop into bed and start poking at their spouse's teeth, but when I picked up NTMGTPF I quickly found out it was something different.

I got into reading about sports in the mid-to-late 1990s, and writing about them a decade after that. One of the great early kerfuffles in the now-defunct Newspaper-Blog War Of The Aughts (losers: everyone) was newspapermen and women rattling on about bloggers in their underwear typing from mom's basement, and how they could never know the vital heartbeat of sports reporting that came only from being in a locker room.

[After THE JUMP: Vince Lombardi asks a delicate question, undelicately]