To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
This book comes fifteen years after A Farewell to Football and details the first reunion of the Super Bowl I Packers in Green Bay. Kramer discusses what each player at the reunion has done since his football days ended. It’s a wide variety of stories: Max McGee founded the ChiChi’s restaurant chain and then cashed […]
Jerry Kramer wrote this book a little more than a year after Instant Replay. The year after that book, the first year after Lombardi (who retires from coaching at the end of Instant Replay), the Packers cratered and lost more games than they won. Kramer’s Instant Replay became a best seller and he was quite […]
It’s been eleven years since I read this book. I remember I took it with me over a long weekend that my beautiful bride and I took to Kansas City. Funny what happens in eleven years. Now I remember well the name of the book store in Springfield since I pass it several times a […]
I bought this book for a dollar at the cheap bookstore in Springfield (you know, the one on Glenstone. Come on, people, work with me here; the name’s not important, the six for five dollars hardbacks in the very back are). As the football season geared up, I thought this would be a worthy read, […]
I mentioned that I did not watch Ice Pirates with my boys when we wrote Robert Frost’s “Fire and Ice” this spring. However, my oldest boy talked about herpes for some reason today, in passing, as a meme joke of some sort, and the film features a Space Herpe, so it was time. My youngest […]
I just bought Greenlaw’s Seaworthy earlier this month, so I decided to pick up this, her first book, to get on with reading the complete canon. I read her second book, The Lobster Chronicles, in 2009. I thought that book was a little disjointed, but that must have been something of a sophomore slump. The […]
Subtitle: How Joe Namath Ruined Football. Well, no, it wasn’t Joe Namath that ruined football. It was the 1960s and the emergence of expressiveness, of personality over teamwork. Or maybe it was Pete Rozelle who made it a profitable iconic industry instead of a game people could watch and root for their favorite teams of […]
After reading The Cross and the Switchblade, I picked up this book right away because I didn’t imagine a situation where I’d be more primed to read it than right after the first. The effect is a little like reading Jerry Kramer’s books (Instant Replay, A Farewell to Football, and Distant Replay) in short order […]
I started reading this book to get ready for football season. As it was, reading the book took longer to read than I’d anticipated, and it ended up extending into the football season. As a reminder, in this book, the author joins the Detroit Lions training camp as an old rookie quarterback. Supposedly, he’s undercover, […]
This year, I read 104 books, and I’m proud to say they weren’t all genre fiction. As a matter of fact, I’m quite proud of some of the smarter titles I’ve polished off this year, including Existentialism and Thomism; The Gallic and Civil Wars; Discourses, the collection of Aesop, The Brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian […]
Alex Karras was 77 when he passed away today. How did that happen? He was just in his forties thirty years ago. When I was a boy. I never saw him play, but I read of him in Jerry Kramer’s Instant Replay, and I read his book Tuesday Night Football five years ago, and I’ve […]
This book chronicles the week of preparation that the Green Bay Packers the week before the October 7, 1962 game against the (spoiler alert) Detroit Lions from the perspective of head coach Vince Lombardi. The book doesn’t name the opponent, but a little research will yield it. Although a Google search asking who the opponent […]
Last weekend, we hit a couple more garage sales and got a couple more books. Color you shocked, I say (if I can mix metaphors and allusions). Here, we have: Click for full size Instant Replay and Distant Replay by Jerry Kramer. I’ve read the first, but the copy I read didn’t have a dust […]
I finally broke down and bought this book from the Bridgeton Trails branch of the St. Louis County Library for a quarter. If you peruse the poetry sections of used books stores, garage sales, or many new book stores, you find an awful lot of this McKuen guy’s work. I’ve pooh-poohed them because 1. They’re […]
In an article entitled Aaron Rodgers has strong stance on coaching after retirement, the journalist says: He is right, though, there haven’t been many coaches — at least in the NFL — who come from playing backgrounds. Of the 32 current NFL coaches, Tennessee’s Mike Vrabel and Houston’s DeMeco Ryans are the only two who […]
I got this book at the same time that I bought Life After Favre, so I read it soon after the latter book as a palate cleanser. This book is structured a little like Louder than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Heavy Metal. The chapters represent different eras of Lombardi’s coaching career, from high […]