Books: "The Game" By Peter King

 

The Game

By Peter King

Norton; hardcover; $39.99

Peter King is one of the most recognizable sportswriters in the country, an authority on the NFL like no other. He wrote for Sports Illustrated from 1989 to 2018, including his weekly multiple-page column "Monday Morning Quarterback." He was a fixture on NBC's Sunday Night Football in the 2010s. King has authored five books, including Inside the Helmet. He received the National Sportswriter of the Year award three times, and he currently lives in Brooklyn.

The Game is King's history of the NFL, as told through his columns from each year of his forty-year career, with a current veneer, covering what is now America's popular sport. He tells this story through his unique reporting style, taking us into the worlds of the visionaries, competitors, and unlikely figures, as well as the decisions, that shaped it's remarkable ascent.

"Toward the end of writing this book it occurred to me that I'd covered - sometimes on the periphery, sometimes very much on the inside - the most important 40 years in NFL history," King writes. "When I started, a good bit of the citizenry still adjusted the antennae on their TVs to get a clearer picture of NFL games. When I ended, people walked through airports with heads glued to games streaming on their phones.

"The story of the NFL's rise is also a business story. Again and again, the league has made the right business decisions, whatever other costs those decisions might have entailed. In the early 1990s, led by some young (at the time) and brash owners, the league won a new TV deal with an upstart network that helped change how viewers at home understood and enjoyed the sport. More recently, the league got a movie company like Netflix and a shopping behemoth, Amazon Prime, to fall (and pay lucratively) for pro football. Some of the smartest people in a business grossing $25 billion a year have figured out how to dominate the sport's dead months, to the point that the NFL is arguably more popular in its off-season than Major League Baseball is during its own regular season."

The "upstart network" King was referring to was Fox, when they snagged one of the NFL contracts from CBS ahead of the 1994 season. That is not only a piece of NFL history, but that of American broadcasting, as Fox had to scramble to get affiliates to be in every city.

The first column profiled is one King did from 1984 with someone New York football fans should be familiar with, Boomer Esiason, from when he was rookie with the Cincinnati Bengals. 

That was the first year King was on the Bengals beat for the Cincinnati Enquirer, when that was a team with a premier offense that featured stars like Cris Collinsworth and Anthony Munoz. The most valuable part in here is what King writes about the head coach, Sam Wyche, one of the best in that era.

"Esiason couldn't have known it that day, but Cincinnati was the best place in the NFL for him," King writes. "Lots of head coaches in the NFL then were militaristic types, or heavy-run coaches (Chuck Knox, Forrest Gregg, Mike Ditka, Frank Kush, Les Steckel), and Esiason had chafed under a collegiate version of the tough-guy coach, Jerry Claiborne, for his first two seasons at Maryland. Esiason was a 'why?' guy. Wyche was a teacher...Esiason loved throwing deep and mentally going deep; Wyche challenged his players to think differently, to be able to change on the fly, to adapt at the line of scrimmage. Whereas many coaches had a just-run-the-play-we-called mantra, Wyche taught his quarterbacks to share their likes and dislikes and to feel free to question his decisions if they thought there was a better way."

One of the more entertaining profiles in the book was when King rode with legendary announcer John Madden on his bus, the "Madden Cruiser," cross-country from San Francisco to New York. Madden famously would never fly, preferring to travel on bus around the country in his time with CBS, then FOX, and then when he moved to the main national prime time games, for ABC's "Monday Night Football" and NBC "Sunday Night Football."

Where people know Deion Sanders now as the Head Coach of the Colorado Buffaloes college football team after his storied playing career, where he won Super Bowls with the San Francisco 49ers and Dallas Cowboys, the profile featured in The Game is King wrote about Sanders in 1992, when he was bursting onto the national scene. 

Sanders was playing both baseball and football, for the Atlanta Braves and Atlanta Falcons. To say is was fraught at times is putting it mildly, as the needs of Sanders and those teams was constantly being evaluated, and what he did, in attempt to satisfy all involved, on one weekend will likely never be duplicated.

The chapter on Steve Young, from a column in 1994, is equally entertaining. To King, Young  ." Young's career encapsulates so much pro football history, in many ways. For one, Young was drafted by both the NFL and the upstart USFL, where he chose to play for the Los Angeles Express in 1984 and '85 before the league folded. Then, he played for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and then when they wanted to trade him, his agent, Leigh Steinberg, stepped in, illustrating the rise of the superagent as players had more say over where they could play.

In a sign of how some of these chapters intermix with others, as there is one on legendary Niners Head Coach Steve Walsh, he is featured prominently in Young's chapter. Walsh promised Young he would have a major role with the Niners in 1987, as he thought that Joe Montana's health was on the decline. Instead, Montana ended up playing four more years at full potential, creating one of the weirdest co-existences of quarterbacks in league history. Young finally became the 49ers starter full time in 1993, and won the Super Bowl the following year, with George Siefert as his coach and Mike Shanahan as the offensive coordinator. That Shanahan part is one of many tidbits fans will find interesting, as he is most remembered for leading the Denver Broncos to back-to-back Super Bowls in the late '90s.

One of the things that stands out in the essays in this book is the trust he had with the players and executives, right up to the commissioner of the NFL, was unparalleled. 

"I realize now that I came along at a perfect time, just as the league started expoloding. Today, reporters are mostly walled off from the telling moments. But I got to experience The Real, starting in the mid-'80s: Mike Ditka bemoaning, on the record, how Jim McMahon froze out newbie quarterback Doug Flutie with the champion Chicago Bears; Niners owner Eddie DeBartolo leaping into Ronnie Lott's arms after a signature win; Michael Irvin responding to questions in what he called "my office" - a Dallas strip club; Brett Favre documenting what a quarterback thinks at every second on the play clock as it ticks down to zero...

"I got into the business when you could actually do original things - and when Sports Illustrated, my employer beginning in 1989, provided the kind of entree and opportunity (and travel budget) endangered in today's sportswriting. "Find your own stuff," Paul Zimmerman, the immortal Dr. Z at SI, told me early on...I yearned for the real stories that explained the people and teams I covered. It almost got to be a drug, chasing those tales. The combination of SI opportunity and my inquisitive nature led to me finding myself in cars, on planes, in locker rooms, and on sidelines where the people who made this game told me why they did what they did, who they hated, who they thought highly of, what they dreamed of doing, and more." 

With he breadth and depth of reporting here in this book, there also are plenty of names that will be familiar to most people who pick this book up, as they are still active with the game or have remained relevant, while there are others that will be new, adding another level to your knowledge of the sport.

That's a big reason why The Game should be cherished and treated as an encyclopedic of one of the most entertaining and historic times for professional football.