durlingheath's Full Review: John Grisham - Playing for Pizza
Third-string Cleveland Browns quarterback, Rick Dockery, is called to duty in the AFC Championship game. With a 17 - 0 lead over the Denver Broncos with 11 minutes remaining in the fourth quarter, all Rick has to do is burn the final minutes and the Browns are in the Super Bowl. However, Rick tosses three interceptions, the Browns lose 21-17, and Rick's name immediately becomes synonymous Red Sox' Bill Buckner as one of the greatest "goats" in sports history.
Rick is unceremoniously waived and chased out of town by fanatical Browns fans. At the same time, Rick's agent reports that a former cheerleader claims she is carrying Rick's child and her lawyers have hired investigators to serve Rick papers. Nursing a concussion he received on the final play of the game and having no other team interested in him, Rick reluctantly flees to the National Football League...of Italy, where most of the players play for the love of football; love of the game...and pizza.
Rick signs a contract with the Parma Panthers. His contract is paltry compared to his Browns contract, but he is only one of three players on the team who are paid any money at all. The former Iowa Hawkeye, Rick quickly assesses the talent on the team as comparable to a better than average NCAA Division III team. Rick is the only player in the league with NFL experience, in spite of his infamous performance in Cleveland.
Can Rick vindicate himself and his football career in a foreign land? Will he become the leader he has always thought he could be? Will he come to terms with his responsibilities to himself and to others?
`Playing for Pizza' is typical for John Grisham's fiction not related to law, lawyers, briefs, firms, torts, or jurors. It is not terribly difficult to read and is moderately entertaining. It is also obvious that Mr. Grisham has spent at least as much time enjoying the Italian countryside as he has spent writing. Exclusive of the description of Rick Dockery's debacle in the play-off game, the first 100 pages describe Parma, the culture, the food, and the people of Northern Italy. There are only 258 pages in the entire book.
Of course, there is a little romance interspersed through the last three-fifths of the novel. The first involves Gabrielle, an opera singer, who is beautiful but involved with another man. Quite coincidentally, Rick sees Gabrielle at a restaurant shortly after Rick attends the opera `Otello,' and later the two meet and talk. However the relationship is clearly doomed from the start. The second love interest is Livvy, a 21-year old exchange student who loves Italian castles and architecture and who apparently is the product of a rich but dysfunctional family stateside. Rick is grudgingly dragged from castle to castle, but occasionally has a nice Italian meal and copulation with Livvy. Both relationships are interesting, but mostly incidental to the story.
In short, `Playing for Pizza' is a very quick read and the pages are easy to turn. The story is okay, although obviously a little thin. The descriptions and accounts of Italy are nice to read, but add only a little to the story. In all, there is not much here, so it might someday be an okay made-for-television movie.
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
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