Why We Love Football

July 1, 2024
Posnanski follows up his 50 greatest moments in baseball (Why We Love Baseball, 2023) with this entertaining selection of the 100 greatest moments in football. Spanning legendary high-school games to classic college matchups to iconic Super Bowl moments and profiling key players throughout the history of the game, the author counts down the most significant events, including Lynn Swann's 1976 Super Bowl, the Sweetness that was Walter Payton, Peyton Manning leading four different Super Bowl teams under four different coaches, Appalachian State's 2007 upset of Michigan, the origin story of famed NFL filmmakers Ed and Steve Sabol, Doug Flutie's Hail Mary pass against Miami in 1984, and the Beast Quake. Then there's the high-school game featuring Jake Porter, who had a genetic disease that caused learning difficulties and whose teammates would help him tie his shoes and put on his pads. Finally inserted into a game, Jake ended his season with a touchdown, escorted down the field by both teams, while in the stands, fans on both sides shared tears of joy. Posnanski's collection hits its marks.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

July 15, 2024
The author ofWhy We Love Baseballgives us 100 reasons to look forward to football season. Posnanski is a practiced sportswriter, but here, following his top-50 treatment of baseball, he's an enthusiast with an uncommonly broad grasp of football history. He opens with a splendid anecdote about Dick Butkus, renowned for smacking into his opponents hard enough to send them into the next zip code. When Raquel Welch, whom Butkus played alongside when he became an actor, professed wonder that people called Butkus mean, a crewmember replied, "Don't pick up a football." The author, old enough to remember when football was a Sunday-only televised sport, connects to the game at a fan's level, sometimes elevating it to a religion. As he writes, while biblical scholars credit Jesus with somewhere between 37 and 40 miracles, "football, miraculously, has more." One, ranking 14th on Posnanski's 100 list, was the famed "Hail Mary" that Roger Staubach pulled off in December 1975--a pass that, while Staubach didn't necessarily invent (Posnanski inserts a brief history that stretches back three more decades), was a last-ditch, desperate temptation of fate that actually worked. Voil� a miracle, just as when Joe Montana lured an opposing Dallas line into coverage that left his receiver wide open to make a game-closing touchdown after San Francisco came far from behind, all of which Posnanski sets up with the offhand opening, "Joe Montana was on the smaller side, and his arm didn't wow you, and he seemed a little bit frail"--and yet, a miracle, and pick no. 11 of 100. It would spoil the fun to reveal the No. 1 moment, but suffice it to say that those readers who witnessed it will surely share Posnanski's appreciation. A learned but lightly delivered pleasure for fans of the gridiron and its history.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from July 22, 2024
In the ebullient follow-up to 2023’s Why We Love Baseball, journalist Posnanski rolls the highlight reel on the most memorable plays to ever grace the gridiron. The recaps mix the humorous and the heartfelt, describing Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez’s 2012 “butt fumble” as well as a 2002 Ohio high school game in which both teams cooperated to let an intellectually disabled student score a touchdown. Posnanski has a talent for restoring excitement to even the most well-known plays, offering a tense account of how Giants quarterback Eli Manning evaded Patriots defenders, who had engulfed him as if in “a zombie movie scene,” and passed to wide receiver David Tyree, who made an improbable catch in the Giants’ upset win in Super Bowl XLII. Elsewhere, Posnanski recreates the chaos of 1982’s “the Play”—when UC Berkeley made a game-winning touchdown with their opponents’ marching band already on the field, mistakenly believing the game over—and the exhilaration of the “Immaculate Reception,” a 1972 play in which Steelers fullback Franco Harris parlayed an astonishing catch into a touchdown that clinched his team’s win over the Raiders. Brimming with a fan’s enthusiasm and capturing the awe, bemusement, and thrills that the sport inspires, this is another win from Posnanski. Agent: Sloan Harris, CAA.