Monte Burke
Teoksen Saban: The Making of a Coach tekijä
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Monte Burke is a staff writer at Forbes magazine. He has also written for, The New York Times, Outside, Men's Journal, Town & Country, Garden & Gun, and many other publications. His books includes, 4th and Goal and Sowbelly. He was an editor of the book, Leaper, along with Charles Gaines. He näytä lisää received the Barnes & Noble "Discover Great New Writers" award. He grew up in New Hampshire, Vermont, North Carolina and Alabama, and now lives in Brooklyn with his wife and three daughters. näytä vähemmän
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Saban: The Making of a Coach Tekijä: Monte Burke
Nick Saban is college football's most enigmatic coach. His childhood taught him lessons that he still applies today, and he involves his wife, Terry, in all of his decision making. In this book, Monte Burke details every aspect of Saban's life to give a clear portrait of college football's most puzzling figure.
I've never read any books about football, football coaches, or programs in general. The only two I have ever been interested enough in have been Alabama and Auburn, and my entire life I've grown up with the history and news around those programs. I feel like I already know more than I want to, so why do I need to read a book? But when this popped up on NetGalley I immediately requested it and was hyped when I got approved.
Coach Saban came onto my radar when he was at LSU (Hardmode: SEC West), but I didn't really pay a ton of attention to him until he became Bama's coach back in 2007. Being on campus during the last of the Shula years was rough, so when Coach Saban and Miss Terry arrived there was an amazing atmosphere. And the subsequent recruiting classes were combed over like crazy. I was literally in a class where the teacher interrupted to give us the news when Julio Jones was signed.
Hype was real.
I said all that to say that I have seen so many pre/during/post-game mini-docs on Coach Saban and his past that I did indeed know a lot of it. As a lot of Bama fans likely will. Most of the information in this book was not new to me, but there were a few points that surprised me. Like how involved Miss Terry has been in his career decisions. That woman is amazing! Or the fact that he was a student on campus when the Kent State shooting happened. I had completely forgotten that he was the coach that convinced Ricky Williams to come back to the NFL. And I didn't know much about his time at the Spartans so that was very interesting to read about.
There were a few spots where I felt the writing suffered. For the most part this is written with an unbiased journalistic eye, but there were a few spots where he became overly editorial in his descriptions of people. Uncomfortably close to name-calling, honestly. Also, in the epilogue I didn't feel like we needed five pages of comparisons between Coach Saban and Coach Bryant. I honestly got the gist of it and just skipped to the end of that segment.
All in all, this was an interesting read, even though most of it was going over information that I was already pretty familiar with. Worth it as a casual read to a Bama fan but I don't know that many people who don't already love him would be as interested since it is basically just a detailed breakdown of his resume with a little bit of his life thrown in.
ROLL TIDE ROLL!
Copy courtesy of Simon & Schuster, via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review… (lisätietoja)
Coach Saban came onto my radar when he was at LSU (Hardmode: SEC West), but I didn't really pay a ton of attention to him until he became Bama's coach back in 2007. Being on campus during the last of the Shula years was rough, so when Coach Saban and Miss Terry arrived there was an amazing atmosphere. And the subsequent recruiting classes were combed over like crazy. I was literally in a class where the teacher interrupted to give us the news when Julio Jones was signed.
Hype was real.
I said all that to say that I have seen so many pre/during/post-game mini-docs on Coach Saban and his past that I did indeed know a lot of it. As a lot of Bama fans likely will. Most of the information in this book was not new to me, but there were a few points that surprised me. Like how involved Miss Terry has been in his career decisions. That woman is amazing! Or the fact that he was a student on campus when the Kent State shooting happened. I had completely forgotten that he was the coach that convinced Ricky Williams to come back to the NFL. And I didn't know much about his time at the Spartans so that was very interesting to read about.
There were a few spots where I felt the writing suffered. For the most part this is written with an unbiased journalistic eye, but there were a few spots where he became overly editorial in his descriptions of people. Uncomfortably close to name-calling, honestly. Also, in the epilogue I didn't feel like we needed five pages of comparisons between Coach Saban and Coach Bryant. I honestly got the gist of it and just skipped to the end of that segment.
All in all, this was an interesting read, even though most of it was going over information that I was already pretty familiar with. Worth it as a casual read to a Bama fan but I don't know that many people who don't already love him would be as interested since it is basically just a detailed breakdown of his resume with a little bit of his life thrown in.
ROLL TIDE ROLL!
Copy courtesy of Simon & Schuster, via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review… (lisätietoja)
This is probably the only time I will ever be grateful for the dearth of quality football books offered by my local Brooklyn library branch. Its limited gridiron selections forced me to choose between Monte Burke's lamely-titled and generically-covered 4th and Goal and Michael Strahan's Inside the Helmet. Given that the latter was penned on the heels of a very nasty and financially-destructive divorce settlement, I decided to take a chance on a book that, if its cover was any indication, seemed to be a cliched inspirational chronicle of some kind of football executive. I feared it might even have an appendix about applying the general philosophy espoused by this mysterious executive to the boardroom to help businessmen move cheese and tip points and all of that other stuff. Thankfully the book is actually a fast-paced and engrossing account of a pretty incredible story and is mercifully free from any silly appendixes.
4th and Goal focuses on Joe Moglia, the 2011 coach of the UFL's Omaha Nighthawks and the circuitous path he took to wind up with such a position. Burke opens in 1983 with Moglia serving as Dartmouth's defensive coordinator. Recently separated from his wife and kids, Moglia is living in an unheated storage room within the team's field house. While he will be offered an assistant position with the Miami Hurricanes at the end of the season with the understanding that he would eventually become their defensive coordinator, Moglia resolves himself to leave coaching and pursue a job on Wall Street to better provide for his family. He somehow becomes a ridiculously successful executive at Merrill Lynch and then TD Ameritrade. Moglia was intensely passionate about his coaching pursuits and he forced himself to avoid attending any football games for the sake of his own emotional stability. At age 60, almost thirty years after his career epiphany, Moglia leaves his post as CEO of TD Ameritrade to rekindle his dreams of becoming a college head coach. Several years later he finds himself heading a UFL team and competing against the likes of Marty Schottenheimer, Jim Fassel, and Dennis Green. 4th and Goal chronicles Moglia's hardscrabble youth in New York City and early coaching history, his unlikely Wall Street ascendancy and whirlwind return to coaching, and the Nighthawks' 2011 season.
Moglia's ultimate goal upon leaving TD Ameritrade was to land a college head coaching job. After some understandable trepidation from athletic directors, he took a job as an unpaid coach for the Nebraska, where he was hamstrung by NCAA regulations. Essentially barred from performing any on-field instruction, he still spent long hours with the coaching staff studying film and soaking up everything he could from head coach Bo Pellini and the rest of his staff. After two years with the Cornhuskers where he remained unable to attract any college head coaching offers, he got the Nighthawks head job. Initially recruited for his managerial expertise as someone who could save the cash-strapped team and league (from financial ruin, Moglia eventually demonstrated that he would make a capable coach for the team. Moglia treats his stint with the Nighthawks as one of his final opportunities to prove that he is worthy of a college head coaching job. While I still hate the book's title, it is a rather fitting description of Moglia's circumstances.
Moglia has a great story and his personal narrative could certainly carry a book on its own. The sense of stubborn determination that he brings to coaching and business is just mind-boggling. For someone to parlay sixteen years of coaching football and an economics degree into a job with Merrill Lynch is just mind-boggling. Its not like he started out in the company's mail room or anything either, he persistently dogged anyone tangentially connected with the firm and landed a job as a trader. He additionally impressed his superiors enough to land in a fast-track leadership program for MBAs (Moglia was the only person in the twenty-four person class missing such a degree). I found myself legitimately rooting for Moglia to succeed in his coaching quest and I had to vigilantly avoid googling his name while reading to "spoil" the book by seeing where he ended up. That being said, 4th and Long is full of colorful characters beyond Moglia. UFL rosters were populated with a variety of former college stars and NFL castoffs who will be familiar to anyone who followed football in the early 2000s. The Nighthawks' speed option offense was led by the two-headed attack of former Heisman winner Eric Crouch and troubled Oregon quarterback Jeremiah Masoli. While 2010 Nighthawks Jeff Garcia and Ahman Green did not make the cut in 2011, Moglia did bring in Maurice Clarett (who actually made the team) and Burke recounts Clarett's troubled life after leaving Ohio State. As someone who intensely followed the NFL ten years ago it was cool to see where players like Dominic Rhodes, Angelo Crowell, and Stuart Schweigert ended up (spoiler alert: the UFL).
Burke is a staff writer at Forbes (the book actually grew out of a 2010 feature he wrote on Moglia for the magazine) and the book reads like an extended magazine article. Thankfully there is enough substance in Moglia's story to engage the reader for most of its 271 pages. Many football books that cover one particular season can degrade into a rote game-by-game format that read like a collection of newspaper recounts. Burke is able to avoid this through moving back and forth between on and off-field action. The only I really hit a snag while reading was when Burke delved deeply into Moglia's tenure at Merrill Lynch and TD Ameritrade, but I suppose that is to be expected from a Forbes employee. And as someone who doesn't generally read about finance, Michael Lewis is the only point of comparison I can use on the genre, and I don't think that sets a pretty high bar. On the football side, Burke never goes all Mike Mayock-technical on the reader (which is fine because its not really appropriate for telling this story) but he does offer up cogent explanations of concepts like Nighthawks coordinator Tom Olivadotti's pattern read defense and Burke thankfully never dumbs down his prose to cater to the less football-savvy, which is appreciated given the main audience of the title. The writing can be overdramatic and cheesy at times but as far as football books are concerned Burke shows a mercifully high level of metaphorical restraint and his prose does not detract from the compelling story.
In Sum
4th and Goal features a unique story about a captivating figure and its written in a breezy and entertaining fashion that is ideal for a football fan with a long subway commute. Its probably the second best football book I read this year, narrowly losing out to Warren St. John's Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer.
8/10
Observations/Interesting Things Learned
I was already aware that the Canadian Football League is full of strange happenings, but I did not know that its regular seasons lasts 19 weeks and teams play 18 games.
Bart Andrus, the Nighthawks' offensive coordinator, was once the quarterbacks coach for the Tennessee Titans and tried to convince Jeff Fisher to employ the read option with Steve McNair. Fisher briefly considered it and ran some read option plays for McNair in training camp but ultimately tabled the idea much to the delayed dismay of the late-1990s football watching public.
Drafts for the UFL were held remotely 2 days after the NFL draft with picks being announced on Twitter. Owners and coaches were actually faced with walking the difficult line between picking talented players and those who would not have enough skills to latch on with an NFL franchise.
NFL Europe was used as a testing ground for several proposed innovations such as overtime rules and one-way radio communication for coaches and players. I was not aware the the NFL's European cousin also awarded 4 points for field goals over 50 yards, something that has not yet been imported across the Atlantic.
Maurice Clarett (who according to Sports Illustrated is now playing rugby and is hoping to gain a spot on the 2016 Olympic team) wore the number 13 in memory of the time he jumped out of a second-story window while robbing a house at age fourteen, which left a gash on his head that required 13 stitches.
The card game bourre was incredibly popular and conflict-inducing among Nighthawks players and both qualities apparently extends across the professional sporting universe. Gilbert Arenas' gun-in-the-locker-room stunt in 2009 was triggered by what I imagine was a very contentious game of bourre with Jarvis Crittendon. Wikipedia tells me that in 2011 bourre was behind a fracas between Memphis Grizzlies players O.J. Mayo and Tony Allen on the team plane.… (lisätietoja)
4th and Goal focuses on Joe Moglia, the 2011 coach of the UFL's Omaha Nighthawks and the circuitous path he took to wind up with such a position. Burke opens in 1983 with Moglia serving as Dartmouth's defensive coordinator. Recently separated from his wife and kids, Moglia is living in an unheated storage room within the team's field house. While he will be offered an assistant position with the Miami Hurricanes at the end of the season with the understanding that he would eventually become their defensive coordinator, Moglia resolves himself to leave coaching and pursue a job on Wall Street to better provide for his family. He somehow becomes a ridiculously successful executive at Merrill Lynch and then TD Ameritrade. Moglia was intensely passionate about his coaching pursuits and he forced himself to avoid attending any football games for the sake of his own emotional stability. At age 60, almost thirty years after his career epiphany, Moglia leaves his post as CEO of TD Ameritrade to rekindle his dreams of becoming a college head coach. Several years later he finds himself heading a UFL team and competing against the likes of Marty Schottenheimer, Jim Fassel, and Dennis Green. 4th and Goal chronicles Moglia's hardscrabble youth in New York City and early coaching history, his unlikely Wall Street ascendancy and whirlwind return to coaching, and the Nighthawks' 2011 season.
Moglia's ultimate goal upon leaving TD Ameritrade was to land a college head coaching job. After some understandable trepidation from athletic directors, he took a job as an unpaid coach for the Nebraska, where he was hamstrung by NCAA regulations. Essentially barred from performing any on-field instruction, he still spent long hours with the coaching staff studying film and soaking up everything he could from head coach Bo Pellini and the rest of his staff. After two years with the Cornhuskers where he remained unable to attract any college head coaching offers, he got the Nighthawks head job. Initially recruited for his managerial expertise as someone who could save the cash-strapped team and league (from financial ruin, Moglia eventually demonstrated that he would make a capable coach for the team. Moglia treats his stint with the Nighthawks as one of his final opportunities to prove that he is worthy of a college head coaching job. While I still hate the book's title, it is a rather fitting description of Moglia's circumstances.
Moglia has a great story and his personal narrative could certainly carry a book on its own. The sense of stubborn determination that he brings to coaching and business is just mind-boggling. For someone to parlay sixteen years of coaching football and an economics degree into a job with Merrill Lynch is just mind-boggling. Its not like he started out in the company's mail room or anything either, he persistently dogged anyone tangentially connected with the firm and landed a job as a trader. He additionally impressed his superiors enough to land in a fast-track leadership program for MBAs (Moglia was the only person in the twenty-four person class missing such a degree). I found myself legitimately rooting for Moglia to succeed in his coaching quest and I had to vigilantly avoid googling his name while reading to "spoil" the book by seeing where he ended up. That being said, 4th and Long is full of colorful characters beyond Moglia. UFL rosters were populated with a variety of former college stars and NFL castoffs who will be familiar to anyone who followed football in the early 2000s. The Nighthawks' speed option offense was led by the two-headed attack of former Heisman winner Eric Crouch and troubled Oregon quarterback Jeremiah Masoli. While 2010 Nighthawks Jeff Garcia and Ahman Green did not make the cut in 2011, Moglia did bring in Maurice Clarett (who actually made the team) and Burke recounts Clarett's troubled life after leaving Ohio State. As someone who intensely followed the NFL ten years ago it was cool to see where players like Dominic Rhodes, Angelo Crowell, and Stuart Schweigert ended up (spoiler alert: the UFL).
Burke is a staff writer at Forbes (the book actually grew out of a 2010 feature he wrote on Moglia for the magazine) and the book reads like an extended magazine article. Thankfully there is enough substance in Moglia's story to engage the reader for most of its 271 pages. Many football books that cover one particular season can degrade into a rote game-by-game format that read like a collection of newspaper recounts. Burke is able to avoid this through moving back and forth between on and off-field action. The only I really hit a snag while reading was when Burke delved deeply into Moglia's tenure at Merrill Lynch and TD Ameritrade, but I suppose that is to be expected from a Forbes employee. And as someone who doesn't generally read about finance, Michael Lewis is the only point of comparison I can use on the genre, and I don't think that sets a pretty high bar. On the football side, Burke never goes all Mike Mayock-technical on the reader (which is fine because its not really appropriate for telling this story) but he does offer up cogent explanations of concepts like Nighthawks coordinator Tom Olivadotti's pattern read defense and Burke thankfully never dumbs down his prose to cater to the less football-savvy, which is appreciated given the main audience of the title. The writing can be overdramatic and cheesy at times but as far as football books are concerned Burke shows a mercifully high level of metaphorical restraint and his prose does not detract from the compelling story.
In Sum
4th and Goal features a unique story about a captivating figure and its written in a breezy and entertaining fashion that is ideal for a football fan with a long subway commute. Its probably the second best football book I read this year, narrowly losing out to Warren St. John's Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer.
8/10
Observations/Interesting Things Learned
I was already aware that the Canadian Football League is full of strange happenings, but I did not know that its regular seasons lasts 19 weeks and teams play 18 games.
Bart Andrus, the Nighthawks' offensive coordinator, was once the quarterbacks coach for the Tennessee Titans and tried to convince Jeff Fisher to employ the read option with Steve McNair. Fisher briefly considered it and ran some read option plays for McNair in training camp but ultimately tabled the idea much to the delayed dismay of the late-1990s football watching public.
Drafts for the UFL were held remotely 2 days after the NFL draft with picks being announced on Twitter. Owners and coaches were actually faced with walking the difficult line between picking talented players and those who would not have enough skills to latch on with an NFL franchise.
NFL Europe was used as a testing ground for several proposed innovations such as overtime rules and one-way radio communication for coaches and players. I was not aware the the NFL's European cousin also awarded 4 points for field goals over 50 yards, something that has not yet been imported across the Atlantic.
Maurice Clarett (who according to Sports Illustrated is now playing rugby and is hoping to gain a spot on the 2016 Olympic team) wore the number 13 in memory of the time he jumped out of a second-story window while robbing a house at age fourteen, which left a gash on his head that required 13 stitches.
The card game bourre was incredibly popular and conflict-inducing among Nighthawks players and both qualities apparently extends across the professional sporting universe. Gilbert Arenas' gun-in-the-locker-room stunt in 2009 was triggered by what I imagine was a very contentious game of bourre with Jarvis Crittendon. Wikipedia tells me that in 2011 bourre was behind a fracas between Memphis Grizzlies players O.J. Mayo and Tony Allen on the team plane.… (lisätietoja)
Tilastot
- Teokset
- 4
- Jäseniä
- 108
- Suosituimmuussija
- #179,297
- Arvio (tähdet)
- 3.7
- Kirja-arvosteluja
- 3
- ISBN:t
- 15