Sunday October 28, 2007
Just forget the football
Review by SHARMILA NAIR
A legal thriller master writes about playing football but wins our reviewer over with everything else but football.
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By John Grisham
Publisher: Doubleday; 258 pages
(ISBN: 978-0385525008)
BEFORE picking up Playing for Pizza, I had only read two of John Grisham’s non-legal novels, A Painted House and Skipping Christmas. I must confess that, although the books were good, I had wished at least 70 times that I’d wake up to find out that he hadn’t written them at all.
Now, don’t get me wrong, Grisham is quite talented at switching from high-octane legal thriller vein to more mundane mode and writing interestingly about stuff we take for granted.
But reading a Grisham minus the due process drama is like eating non-fat chocolate cake – it’s chocolate but not real chocolate, and you’ll never feel the same satisfaction in the end. Know what I mean?
So, obviously, I approached Playing for Pizza which much trepidation. But I was asked to review it, so I pushed aside my initial apprehension and tried the novel.
First of all, it’s an easy book to read, as it took me fewer than eight hours and only two “You’re going to go blind if you keep reading like that” comments from my mother to finish it.
And when I finally had, I’d learned two things: first, Italy is the place to go to before I die, and, second, American football is a difficult game to read about.
(Thanks to Astro’s ESPN and the like, you probably realise, of course, I’m not talking about the “football” that most Malaysians mean when that word is used – the Americans, being Americans, just had to be different and develop their own version that involves carrying the ball....)
The story revolves around NFL (National Football League) Hall-of-Shame inductee Rick Dockery who, from the author’s description, seems like a good-looking guy with the luck of a straight man in a gay bar....
After a disastrous game that leaves him physically broken and mentally defeated, Dockery wakes up from a 24-hour coma only to face a mob of angry Cleveland Brown fans and several death threats.
We then follow our fallen hero to la bella Italy, where he is (under)paid to play American football for the Parma Panthers. In a land where American football is almost unheard of, and with a team that looks forward more to the after-practise pizza session than the game itself, Dockery finds himself leading the reluctant Panthers towards winning the Italian Super Bowl title, for which the team has never – ever – even qualified.
And this is when the trouble starts, for the average non-American reader, anyway. Grisham, unfortunately, thinks that all his readers are well versed with the terms and technicalities of this very American sport – doesn’t the man know that the “beautiful game” is what the rest of the world plays, not the American version?
Halfway through the book, I was tempted to put it down and Google the football terms that the author uses, to my mind, excessively, just so that I could get a clearer picture of what the heck he’s talking about. What is a 50-yard penalty? Or bootleg? Or flipped and faked?
All this unnecessary detail about the game – the man describes every move, every throw, every fall, ad nauseam – can make following the storyline very frustrating.
Perhaps, I thought to myself, after the umpteenth description of a great goal kick, this book isn’t suitable for non-sports fans? So I asked my friend, a sports fanatic, if he could explain to me the game of football.
He started with Manchester United, then stopped with shrug and a “Dunno”, when I added the word American in front of “football”.
If a die hard fan of all things sporting couldn’t tell me what American football was all about, then how was I, a bookworm, a sitcom junkie and a 60kph type of driver, ever going to follow the game just by reading about it?
And that is when I realised the secret to thoroughly enjoying this book: whenever Grisham dissected game play, I’d skim through quickly because I learnt that re-reading the paragraph seven times wouldn’t bring clarity, anyway.
Once you do that, you can settle in to enjoy the man’s writing. Grisham does a wonderful job of bringing Italy to life, evocatively describing the pastas, wines, cheeses, places and, even more beautifully, its people.
He is excellent at illustrating the Italian way of life just through words – so much so that, once, I could have sworn I could smell the fresh aroma of the coffee he was writing about (okay, I guess it could have been my mother brewing a cup in the kitchen).
Even with nary a courtroom scene, Playing for Pizza has almost everything it takes to be a good John Grisham novel, once you ignore the irritating football commentaries.
It’s obvious that the author offers this book with a dash of love and a whole lot of camaraderie, so Playing for Pizza is well worth reading. But don’t say that I didn’t warn you about the football lessons, capiche?
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