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Author: Josh

Under Review: Tim Layden’s Blood, Sweat and Chalk

Published by Josh on December 3, 2010

Here we are, in the heart of football season, as the last of the gold and ochre leaves turn and fall and are covered with the first wisps of snow.  In high schools across the country, champions are being crowned, and at the collegiate and national level, the final, crucial games of the year loom large.  Football is not the national pastime, but it is the national obsession. Here we have a book for the obsessed.

Sports Illustrated’s Tim Layden, in twenty-two article-style chapters, outlines the evolution of football from the birth of the single-wing under Pop Warner to the edge of innovation, the A-11, through interviews and overviews with the men who revolutionized the game.  From Vince Lombardi to Don Coryell, from Buddy Ryan to Dick LeBeau, and with dozens of stops between and beyond, Layden dives into twenty-two of the revolutionary offensive and defensive systems which revolutionized the way football is played for one team and forced change in all the others.

The book is not for the novice, the absolute casual fan, through Layden’s writing is incredibly approachable and inviting.  One should come to it knowing the difference between the 4-3 and the 3-4, should have at least a passing knowledge of the passing game.  It is also not a manual, not a step-by-step breakdown of how to run the Veer or the Triple Option.

What this book is, and what makes it so great, is a sort of genealogy, a history of the offenses and defenses you watch your teams execute every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.  Layden visits the coaches, watches the game film, has the diagrams drawn by the men who first drew them.  He goes to the source, the originators of these systems, even finding, most times, that the sources are obscure, are a panoply of innovation through desperation and an incredible amount of co-option and cooperation, more than one would even imagine for a game that can be so cutthroat, so violent and unforgiving in action.  Layden opens his book with a quotation, by famed Oklahoma coach Barry Switzer, that introduces the ethos that is so peculiar and so prominent throughout his many interviews:

“Aww, hell, that’s the great thing about football coaches.  They’ll kick your ass on Saturday afternoon and then they’ll tell you how they did it.”

Coaching is a fraternity, as Layden discovers, and most coaches are quick to acknowledge that their innovations are mostly polished mirrors of what some other grizzled coach had come up with when he knew his boys were outmatched.  Whether it is the vogue of the Wildcat and its Single Wing roots or the dozens of flavors of Air Coryell, coaches are quick to use anything they can to gain an edge, and quicker still to pass that knowledge along to the next guy who needs a leg up on a stiffer opponent.

If you are intrigued by the Xs and Os of the game, are fascinated by the magic in motion and the cerebral aspect of the game, you cannot go wrong with this book.  It is insightful, inspired, and at times downright hilarious, for the legends Layden looks to are still only men, with turf under their toes and hints of smiles in their eyes.  Their passion bleeds through to the lessons they impart and the young men they feel blessed to tutor.  Pick it up and give it a read.  You’ll never look at the game the same way again.

Lies We Tell Each Other: Why I Won’t Pose For Photos

Published by Josh on October 31, 2010

Sometime in the last several years (my memory is mushy, call it 2005) I decided that I would no longer pose for photographs (meaning, in this case, those huddled group affairs, the “we’re people at a place who can smile” sort of things). In addition, I resolved that I would no longer take posed photographs. Why? Because they are a lie.

“A lie, huh?  That’s pretty strong, there, Josh.  Aren’t you being a little too acerbic?”

No, imaginary counterpoint, I’m not. (And big ups for using a fancy word like acerbic and not just saying asshole. You could have. You’d probably be right.)

Here’s why: When we’re out in public, out enjoying ourselves, we’re in a groove, a moment of pure us-ness. When you ask us to pose for a photograph, we are taken out of that rhythm of honesty and forced to enact a fraud, namely that we’re all smiling and huddled together at some point, primped for a camera. The camera, a stand-in for a narrative eye if there ever was one, acts on the behalf of others, depicting a view they’ve missed but that is captured for them, a moment in time to be later reflected upon. The problem with posed photographs is that these moments never really happened, nor would have happened, outside the intervention of the photographer.

The real advent of this decision came via a wonderful little piece of slipshod technology: the cellphone camera. By removing the indicator of capture, that bulky Nikon, and replacing it with a clever little ubiquitous spy, one can move past the inherent feeling of being captured, of preemptive primping and breath-holding, and allow for moments in time to be cut out of the air for posterity. When you don’t know you’re being watched, you tend to be more honest, and honesty is so much more intriguing than artifice. Not that cellphone photos are ideal, mind you, but their method of capture sure happens to be. They may be dark, they may be grainy, they may be blurred, but they are true.

Now, this isn’t to say that I can’t be cajoled. I’ve appeared in photos that weren’t purely captured moments, because, let’s face it, pretty women make pouty faces that I just can’t say no to. But I still refuse to cooperate fully. I photobomb my own likeness, to assure the audience, though more than likely only myself, that I’m not doing this by choice. I’m acknowledging that I know this is a farce and that I’m willing to play along, but damn it, I don’t have to like it. Am I accused of ruining the occasional photo? Yes. Do I give a flying fuck? Not in the slightest. It isn’t my job to help you lie, dearie, so don’t act so put out when I refuse to.

Here’s what it comes down to, really: pictures should be capturing the truth, raw and real and revelatory. There’s enough fake in the world, and enough fake-makers to populate it. Why be another one?

(A footnote, since I don’t know how to make pretty looking footnotes quite yet: if you are pictured here and object, let me know and I’d be glad to replace your less than flattering photo with a different one. I have others that would work just as well.)

Under Review: Why I Loved Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

Published by Josh on October 23, 2010

Well, see, there are a bunch of reasons. For one, because it is, in fact, a science fictional story and because it is, it is also a story about who we are as seen through another lens. Science fiction, or at least all good science fiction anyway, is an askew view of the normal, a way of looking into things by looking at what they are, are not, could be, could not be but are hoped to be, wanted to be, or even desperately hoped never to be, even as they seem more and more to be that way, at least a little further down the line. They are an extrapolation that points not forwards and not really backwards but at the now and what the now portends.

For another, because it is a time travel story, and to do a time travel story well, as this story most definitely was, one must take some serious forethought into it. Charles Yu has done his homework and shows us that he has without showing us that he did. I know, I know, it’s all a bit roundabout, but it doesn’t make it untrue. The best sorts of speculative stories adhere to Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory. Yu’s just happens to be one whopper of an iceberg. A bow breaker of an idea.

For a third, because in the bends and loops and twists that Charles pulls us through, he arrives at these truths that are so true that we know them to be so, know them to be so obvious that we nod along with them, both in acceptance and also in a little inward sort of anger, anger at ourselves for not having thought them before, or thought them so simply or so eloquently as he has. For instance:

“Life is, to some extent, an extended dialogue with your future self about how exactly you are going to let yourself down over the coming years.”

See what I mean?

But why, beyond all that, did I love this book? Because it is the kind of story I love the most, a story about fathers and sons. My own impetus toward writing has a great deal to do with, and a great stemming outward from, the conception of the father figure and the role that plays in the construction of the son. What motivates the father also tends to motivate his son, in such a way that we want so badly to be what we know to be good in our lives: what our fathers are, or to be what we know to not be good in our lives: what our fathers were. This struggle between two sorts of ideals, two conceptions of who we are as blurred copies of what we came from, drives young men to greatness and ruin, and has for ages and ages. Stories of fathers are stories of triumph writ large upon the tableau of their sons, and the interaction between the two, especially here, most definitely here, echo the same forces that all young men come to deal with at some point in their lives, whether they prefer to or not. We are our father’s sons, either in reflection or in opposition, but that voice drives us in ways we have trouble understanding or accepting. This story was a great example of such.

Pick it up. I highly recommend it.