$19.05 hardcover or $7.99 kindle on Amazon: http://j.mp/Falk40Years

So I'm in my car in U.S. 23 traffic after the BYU game, listening to the WTKA postgame show, and trying to wrap my head around if Michigan could possibly be this good, when my phone rings with an unidentified 734 number. On the other end is this deep rhotic voice, the kind you only get from Midwestern farmers' sons whose vocal chords have been ravaged by a lifetime of shouting through the cold. Bo had that. My father had that. My phone hasn't heard it since.

"Hello? Is this Seth? This is Jon Falk."

Short of Harbaugh, Beilein, Red, Lloyd, Mo, or Obama I don't think there's any name that voice could have given that could possibly make me geek out harder. Every other car on U.S. 23 is now in tremendous peril.

I mean, I had emailed him during the week because we were giving away his new book, Forty Years in the Big House, for Guess the Score, and my phone number is on my email signature, but I kind of expected an underling or maybe a publisher's intern to handle that sort of stuff.

I forgot the thing about Big Jon is he handles stuff. And after we'd figured out how to get me the giveaway copy, I remembered there's the other thing he does. We start sharing stories.

[After the jump: a review, and some stories, but no spoilers]

How Things Didn't Go Wrong

My last book review for this space was on Bacon's book, the one about how a hundred things had to go wrong for all the wrong of the Brandon era to occur. Starting from Bo's Lasting Lessons there are a lot of things that went right or went wrong in the last four decades of Michigan football. But that's not the complete story. There are a lot of things in that time that simply didn't go wrong.

In fact, when you consider how many mishaps are just bound to happen when any large body of humans are allowed to function for 40 years, there are a rather extraordinary number of things that worked out completely fine. Ohio State's greatest punter didn't affect the 1976 Michigan game. The 2012 Sugar Bowl had zero uniform malfunctions. Jim Harbaugh, Tom Brady, and Denard Robinson were part of no other locker rooms between Michigan's and the NFL's. So many more disasters and teaching moments never occurred because Michigan had itself a guy they occurred to first, and could handle everything.

You should already know this, but Jon Falk is a living legend. He is a founder of the professional association they have for equipment managers, and while plenty of teams will have a similar handles-everything/locker room coach person who's become part of team lore, I don't even think it's controversial to claim Michigan's Falk is the archetype. Every program except Michigan has something go awry, and every time their fans will bemoan the fact that this doesn't happen elsewhere, and when they are challenged to name one school that actually has all of its stuff together, the only correct answer is the program Jon Falk was in charge of from 1974 to his (100% voluntary) retirement after 2014.

But he's more than utterly capable. And this part's hard to define. Falk's writer-helper for this book is Dan Ewald, the old newspaper man and longtime PR director for the Detroit Tigers. Ewald tries to say this without saying this at multiple times. He pulls out quotes from Charles Woodson and Alan Trammell and others that don't exactly hit the mark. Jim Actual Harbaugh captured it best in the foreword he wrote. Here's my stab: When Brady Hoke said "This is Michigan, fergodsakes," a recognizable bit of what he meant by "Michigan" is Jon Falk.

A Conversation

When Endzone came out earlier this season, it seemed every coffee house in southeast Michigan had at least one slack-jawed reader in the window. The facial expression you'll make while reading 40 Years in the Big House is a smile. Not the devilish smile like when you read Harbaughffense UFRs, nor the pleasant one you paint on your face when you're going through photo albums.

Actually for the first 50 pages or so you're going to have a wry grin. Like the conversation I had with Jon on the drive home from BYU, the book starts out kind of all over the place as you get to know him. It repeats a lot of acceptable phrases, and hammers the motivational points with a persistence Bo used to drill "The Team" into his players' heads.

This bit starts the same way every stranger's conversation with Falk probably begins: him answering questions about Bo. Then it gets into Yost-ian origins of the "Material Man" position that spread from Michigan to every athletic program in the country. Finally we meet Jon, whom we follow from the Falk Farm, to Bo and post-Bo Miami, and finally to a makeshift apartment in the Michigan golf course building. People and players come and go with the rapidity of old memories, interspersed with bits of wisdom like how you know a locker room is right when you can leave a $100 bill in your locker and know to your soul it'll be there when you come back.

And somewhere around this point—for me it was when he started talking about Butch Woolfolk's pads—you're going to crack a smile. A big wide one, like that stupid one you couldn't get off your face the first time you and your future spouse realized the talking wall that's always there isn't there. Because as every player to come through Michigan's locker room since the mid-'70s will swear to you, once you get ol' Jon warmed up, there isn't a more genuine soul on the planet to talk to.

Remember That?

From page ~60 on it's the stories, a few of which you didn't know (example: Carr used the narrative of a Mt. Everest Climbing story for all of 1997's locker room speeches), but if you're the type who's put in time with the Maize and Blue, most of the tales will be shared, just from a different perspective.

This is what you should get out of a book with Falk. I'll admit I went in thinking it would be just a load of information from the guy who sat at the heart of every Michigan team from early Bo to Hoke's last year, but that's not what every player from Leach to Gardner invariably stopped by Falk's locker room for. They came to have a conversation with Falk, to dredge up their memories and smile about them.

Like he tells one about 1976, when the Freep's Joe Falls had predicted Michigan to win in Columbus 21-0; Michigan won 22-0 and Bo says to Jon "You see? Those sportswriters don't know anything!" There are charming stories about the famous videotaping incident, A.C., Barry Larkin, the day a sitting President of the United States booted Falk out of his own apartment for a weekend, why there's an Anthony Thomas Room in Schembechler Hall, Remy Hamilton's one-of-a-kind t-shirt, and why Bo was being quite literal when he said Iowa painting their locker room pink didn't have any affect on the outcome.

I think you'll find you bring as much to this conversation as Jon does. If you remember how we beat Wisconsin in 2001, you'll grin when he brings up Brandon Williams. If you remember how we lost there in 1993 too, you'll laugh when he says "so that's how you win at Wisconsin!"

The last chapter is kind of a radio segment, where every year of Falk's legendary Michigan career is called out and he remembers a thing or two about it. I think it's the best part.

And There Are Tears

If they ever tested what effect talking to Jon Falk on the phone has on drivers, I'm positive it would be illegal. Case in point: by the time I was battling the late-cutters for a position in the line to get from M-14 to northbound 275 I had no memory of driving the intervening distance, nor what time it was. We'd gotten on to our farmer fathers and then how much Bo loved his players, and right before my head was badly needed to avoid hitting a fearless, queuing-averse Ford F150, that head was filled with the most evocative image of Bo Schembechler in his tiny office in his Hall, tears on his weathered cheeks, on the phone with Touchdown Billy Taylor, whose life he was about to save.

After that story there were tears on mine as well, and Big Jon said "I think we'd better get off and let you drive." And I said okay and we did the pleasantries of disengaging that beings of infinite capacity have picked up to deal with the tragedy of living in finite time, and we hung up in time for me to take a breath then hit the brakes and not hit the F150.

And I read the book, which is also too short, and a bit meandering. But if you're a Michigan guy, and you don't have the kind of aptitudes that could get you into the actual locker room, I recommend you pick up a copy of Forty Years in the Big House, and sit down for a bit with Big Jon.