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A Few Seconds of Panic: A 5-Foot-8, 170-Pound, 43-Year-Old Sportswriter Plays in the NFL
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List Price:
$25.95
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$16.35
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Manufacturer: Penguin Press HC, The
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 070.449796092
EAN: 9781594201783
ISBN: 1594201781
Label: Penguin Press HC, The
Manufacturer: Penguin Press HC, The
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 352
Publication Date: 2008-07-03
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
Studio: Penguin Press HC, The
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Editorial Reviews:
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Drawing on rare access to an NFL team’s players, coaches and facilities, the author of The New York Times bestseller Word Freak trains to become a professional-caliber placekicker. As he sharpens his skills, he gains surprising insight into the daunting challenges—physical, psychological, and intellectual—that pro athletes must master
In Word Freak, Stefan Fatsis infiltrated the insular world of competitive Scrabble® players, ultimately achieving “expert” status (comparable to a grandmaster ranking in chess). Now he infiltrates a strikingly different subculture—pro football. After more than a year spent working out with a strength coach and polishing his craft with a gurulike kicking coach, Fatsis molded his fortyish body into one that could stand up—barely—to the rigors of NFL training. And over three months in 2006, he became a Denver Bronco. He trained with the team and lived with the players. He was given a locker and uniforms emblazoned with #9. He was expected to perform all the drills and regimens required of other kickers. He was unlike his teammates in some ways—most notably, his livelihood was not on the line as theirs was. But he became remarkably like them in many ways: He risked crippling injury just as they did, he endured the hazing that befalls all rookies, he gorged on 4,000 daily calories, he slogged through two-a-day practices in blistering heat. Not since George Plimpton’s stint as a Detroit Lion more than forty years ago has a writer tunneled so deeply into the NFL.
At first, the players tolerated Fatsis, or treated him like a mascot, but over time they began to think of him as one of them. And he began to think like one of them. Like the other Broncos—like all elite athletes—he learned to perfect a motion through thousands of repetitions, to play through pain, to silence the crowd’s roar, to banish self-doubt.
While Fatsis honed his mind and drove his body past exhaustion, he communed with every classic athletic type—the affable alpha male, the overpaid brat, the youthful phenom, the savvy veteran—and a welter of bracingly atypical players as well: a fullback who invokes Aristotle, a quarterback who embraces yoga, a tight end who takes creative writing classes in the off-season. Fatsis also witnessed the hidden machinery of a top-flight football franchise, from the God-is-in-the-details strategizing of legendary coach Mike Shanahan to the icy calculation with which the front office makes or breaks careers.
With wry candor and hard-won empathy, A Few Seconds of Panic unveils the mind of the modern pro athlete and the workings of a storied sports franchise as no book ever has before.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Fatsis fun for football fans
Comment: Fatsis is living out a midlife fantasy, getting a chance to play in the NFL. He's a sports reporter and manages to talk the Denver Broncos into letting him attend training camp and preseason games as a player. As a soccer player, he's enough of an athlete to be able to learn the mechanics of kicking. He ends up being physically able to handle 45-yard field goals, though he never masters the mental side of the kicking game.
The book interweaves Fatsis' own story and a variety of themes. The main arc of the book takes him from trying to find a team, learning the art of placekicking, training camp, and the preseason. He uses his own story as a point of departure for talking about NFL life in general, from salary caps to playing hurt. Throughout, Fatsis retains a gee-whiz, fan's view of the league, perhaps a bit longer than I would have liked.
Unlike "Word Freak," his previous book on Scrabble, this book never quite transcends the sport. I think you have to be a football fan to enjoy it -- but if you like football, you'll like this book.
Fun as the book is, my final impressions remain the inhumanity of the football business. Remarkably, as Fatsis repeatedly notes, the Broncos have a well-deserved reputation as being a good team to work for, classy and professional. I can only imagine the horror of working for a bad organization.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A few feet over the crossbar
Comment: I enjoyed this book. It was a quick read, and as the 2008 NFL season is winding down, it provided an interesting look at a team that year in and year out is in the thick of the playoff race - the Denver Broncos. Fatsis does a great job touching on a number of different subjects including kicker subculture, coaching approaches to game preparation and roster cuts, the NFL as a bureaucracy, and players who go largely unnoticed from city to city, filling in for injured players and making the league minimum's salary on various practice squads. As a football fan, gaining a better understanding of the off-season, training camp, and the preseason from someone almost entirely on the inside was well worth the time on this page-turner.
The book is a lot about the mechanics and psychology behind kicking, and as an often-overlooked part of football, that's fine. But while Fatsis seemed to assimilate well with Denver's coaching staff, kickers, Quarterbacks, and a handful of other various position players, much of the book focuses on players toward the bottom of the depth chart who don't even make the 53-man roster. His book relied too heavily on a small group of players, leaving me feeling like there were many other personalities and stories that he either left out or did not have access to despite his presence being casually accepted by the majority of the Broncos organization.
This is a story of a 43-year old who becomes a member of a professional team as an experiment, and much credit to Mr. Fatsis for pulling that off in a league that is incredibly controlling of its media exposure. But it is also a story largely about the journeymen of the NFL, as Fatsis tries to uncover why these players, many of whom are injured, neglected by the coaching staff, or unlikely to ever find a steady job playing professional football, still show up to fight for roster spots. I would have liked to see more about the players with more job security (non-kickers) and gotten more of a glimpse into the preparation they go through year after year and what their impressions of the game, league, and team were.
Definitely a great piece of writing and Fatsis' story in this book is just as interesting as that of any of the players.
Customer Rating:
Summary: football freak
Comment: Fatsis is one of my favorite sports journalists. His writing for the WSJ and his commentaries for NPR about the industry of sports are always smart and informative. I loved his last book, Word Freak, which even got me to play scrabble again. In his latest book Fatsis tells the story of joining the Denver Broncos as "rookie" field goal kicker during training camp. We get an insider account of the often brutal business of the NFL, a sub-culture largely closed to outsiders despite the fact that teams play in front of millions each Sunday. Grade: B+
Customer Rating:
Summary: Very good
Comment: I enjoyed the book. Fatsis did a nice job taking me inside several of the players' lives, and what it's really like in an NFL training camp in general. The pages fly by.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Fatsis delivers a gem
Comment: Fatsis takes the reader behind the NFL's glamorous Sunday stage. He gives a peek at what life for the typical NFL player is like -- the monotony and physical pain of constant practice coupled with the vice-like psychological pressure of being reminded with every miscue that you are utterly expendable. He even has the chance to put his performance on show at a training camp practice, getting just a taste of what it's like to have all eyes on you with expectations riding high. The cast of (real-life) characters is wide-ranging and compelling. Highly recommended.
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