Posnanski and the Paterno book

Sounds like Posnaski grew close to Joe and the family during his time with them. Maybe too close to be objective.

Also, why the quoting of "insiders" and "advisers"? Who are these people, and why are they given anonymity?

And, if senile old Joe is surrounded by "insiders" and "advisers" it seems to me that should be something Posnaski should be investigating, and telling us about, not using them as anonymous sources.

Ted Williams son, and Joe DiMaggio's lawyer/adviser were terrible influences on them in their later years. They took advantage of them. So, who were the people surrounding Paterno in his final years?

 

I have no desire to read it and that has nothing to do with the reviews or Pos, who I think is one of the best 3-5 sportswriters out there right now...

I just feel so saturated in Penn State and it's just really hard to read about something that is the nightmare of most parents.

I certainly don't fault anyone for reading it.

 

Yeah, I'd be curious how many times a sports book has hit the top 10 in the last decade. I know Michael Lewis has had a few books there. I know a couple glorified picture books have made it.

 

He was the same on "Today" earlier this week ... Yeah, wishy-washy is a good way to describe him with this.

It almost sounds like if he found JoePa sent an email to Spanier and Curley and cc'd the BOT entitled "Re: Sandusky pounding boys" that read simply: Sweep it Under the Rug, Joe .... Poz' would run out and really try to find a way to allow the Joepa supporters to explain it away, rather than letting the facts fall.

 

Simmons' NBA book made it to the top of the Times bestseller list.

 

It depends what you classify as a sports book. There have been some memoirs (Dungy's Quiet Strength reached No. 1 and was on the list for a long time; Drew Brees's Coming Back Stronger reached No. 3 on NYT and No. 1 on WSJ (actual sales); Kurt and Brenda Warner but it blipped on and was right off) but there haven't been many "sports" books make the top 10. Jim Tressel's Winner's Manual and Joe Gibbs's Game Plan for Life made the "Advice, How-To" list. I think the Michael Phelps memoir reached No. 11 but didn't crack top 10. Dungy's subsequent books were on advice, how-to list top 10.

Found this about the Brees book: The lofty rankings on the various bestseller lists puts Brees’s Coming Back Stronger in elite company as one of the bestselling biographies or autobiographies about an athlete still playing his sport. Its debut at No. 3 on the primary New York Times hardcover nonfiction list was the highest appearance on the list by an active NFL player since Bo Jackson’s Bo Knows Bo reached No. 2 in 1990. Since 1970, it marked only the eighth time that a current athlete in one of the major four sports (NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL) reached at least No. 3 on the list. That list includes Jackson’s Bo Knows Bo (1990); For the Love of The Game: My Story by Michael Jordan with Mark Vancil, editor (1998); Bad as I Wanna Be by Dennis Rodman (1996); Boz by Brian Bosworth (1988) with Rick Reilly; McMahon! by Jim McMahon with Bob Verdi (1986); Balls by Graig Nettles and Peter Golenbock (1984); and Ball Four by Jim Bouton (1970).

 

As was pointed out in the Atlantic review, there have been several Paterno biographies that covered most of the ground on his life prior to the Sandusky scandal. Re-hashing all of the stuff everyone already knows over a couple hundred pages, then hurriedly throwing together a section on what should've been THE story to capitalize on the scandal is quite frankly inexcusable.

And while I acknowledge $750,000 is a lot of coin, I wish Pos would've told the publisher, "Either give me enough time to write a book that actually will serve as the truly definitive biography of Paterno's life, or here's your check back."

But I guess he would've had to want to write that book in the first place.

 

The book actually has a very good chance to be No. 1. It's No. 11 on Amazon right now and Amazon and has been in the top 20-30 for about a week. Last week's top-selling hardcover non-fiction book sold just a tick over 10,000 copies. This book will top that total.

 

One feeling I get from the early chapters is that the worshipful culture around Paterno - or probably any successful college football coach, nay, any celebrity - makes for some fairly banal anecdotes.

Multiple times Posnanski tells the reader that Paterno knew just what to say to a person, just what to do, in any situation. Writing about students gathered around his statute, Posnanski writes, "They would fill the dead spaces with trivia or plaudits or singular memories that, when spoken out loud, do not sound like very much. He had his players wear plain uniforms! He turned down millions of dollars to stay in State College! He built Penn State, often with his own money!"

Then there's this passage:

Murphy's description of Angelo (Paterno, Joe's father) would sound eerily similar to hundreds of stories told when Joe Paterno died, stories about little moments when Joe reached out to a stranger, asked questions, showed he cared, and said just the right thing. Here's just one of those stories: At Paterno's memorial in Harrisburg, a young woman named Kait Sawyer, who had served as a football intern, stood in front of a huge crowd and talked about a cold day in State College when Joe Paterno walked into the football offices. He made sure to catch her eye and say "It's cold out there, heh?" It was nothing profound, but it was a connection, one she would never forget. "He was the legend," she said. ... "And he was talking to me."

The passage is readable because Posnanski is masterful at pacing, but it's pretty empty, no? And it's kind of weird to read that kind of worship from a former intern worked into the narrative as a positive example of Paterno's influence, when a lot of the story now seems to be about how a football coach was permitted to amass a dangerous amount of power precisely because of this kind of empty gushing. Would make you think this is a passage from the initially proposed straight hagiography that ends up staying in the rewrite because of the time crunch if it hadn't been taken from his memorial service.

 

That is a scathing review by Barra. I was most surprised by the beginning -- how little Joe Pos really knows about college football. That seems odd to me but I guess he has always been something of a baseball specialist.

The part about how eastern football was so maligned, that is presented as Posnanski's historical observation but is really just Paterno's complaint. That column that was linked on here some pages back, the reporter who told the Tony Dorsett recruiting story got a phone call from Paterno screaming about how the reporter was ruining eastern football with that kind of reporting.

 

This is right on point.

 

I thought Favre's picture book/bio hit No. 2 in 2003 or so.