Bounty628's Full Review: John Grisham - Playing for Pizza
Every professional athlete has the fear that one day their professional career will come to a screeching halt. We all here about the college students opting out of school early and we think to ourselves and perhaps even out loud what would happen to that athlete should a knee get blown out. Do professional athletes one day return to selling mortgages? Do they landscape lawns and plow driveways? Do they ask if we would like fries with that?
In John Grisham's book Playing for Pizza , the pathetic professional career of lead character Rick Dockery is highlighted. Dockery is a back up quarterback for the Cleveland Browns who earns himself a sudden departure from the NFL thanks in part to a terrible finish in an AFC Championship game coupled with the fact that he has perhaps taken one to many hard hits at the hands of an athlete far more skilled than he.
Dockery, thanks to his agent who has all but given up on him, quickly seeks a new home in the NFL but franchises in effect slam their door in Dockery's face. His NFL career has been hindered with never being quite good enough and always falling short when it counted most. The last straw for almost all teams was the aforementioned AFC Championship loss.
His agent then propositions Dockery with an offer that not all quarterbacks are ever given to even consider. Rather than look in America or even Canada in the CFL nor a new home, Dockery is offered the position of quarterback for the Parma Panthers, in a quasi-amateur Italian football league. Dockery would be one of only three Americans on the Parma team but more importantly would be only one of three Panthers to actually be paid for playing the game.
Upon accepting the terms of this new junket in Italy, Dockery moves to Parma and quickly becomes enveloped into the life of not only an American living in Italy but also as a man out looking to change his life. Dockery’s Italian adventures first lead him to a love a food, then to a love of being able to drive a standard, to next a love of a woman. However, what Dockery perhaps never expected upon agreeing to go to Parma to play football was that he would in fact fall in love with the Panthers and the town that called them home, Parma.
The story brings into focus the different emphasis that the Italian nationalists put upon the American football matches as opposed to their counterparts in the United States. The tales of guys going out every weekend to play against their rivals simply for the pride of the town and the jersey they wear comes across nicely in the book. The love of football as not only a sport but a societal institution runs much deeper than simply collecting a paycheck and looking for the next big endorsement deal as is the case too often in the NFL.
Grisham's book is certainly a work of fiction, however, he bases the story line on his own interaction with and learning about the love of American football in Italy while he himself was visiting the country. What is interesting about this book is that although it is written as a fictional account, it would almost be the feel good story of the year had Rick Dockery perhaps been an American football star of yesteryears that met the same fate in the NFL.
The book is a very fast read and is easy to comprehend with no real intricate or twisting story lines to confuse the main points at hand. Grisham does a fine job, as typical, in ensuring that the audience remains captive to the words on the page and the book keeps the reader interested with just the right balance of football talk and more personality based discussion relative to Dockery's new life in Parma.
The book is certainly not simply a book for football jocks or for only men. The plot and premise of the book is quite well developed and you need not be a sports fanatic to enjoy this book. Grisham brings together the development of those around Dockery when writing the book and by the end of the reading you truly feel as though you were not simply a member of the Parma Panthers huddles but perhaps also a proud resident of Parma proud to wear your replica Panthers jersey around town.
Playing for Pizza is published by Doubleday and was released in September of 2007.
A departure from his acclaimed legal thrillers, Grisham s #1 New York Times bestseller about an American s introduction to Italian football and food i...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.