BROOKLYN — Good morning. Been a while. Three months, almost to the day. But when I signed off for good from “Football Morning in America” on March 4, I wrote that I���d continue my tradition of the Father’s Day Book List — buy your dad or granddad or husband or bro or uncle a book this year! — before Father’s Day. Here it is.
The holiday is June 16. That gives you time to order these books for the guy or guys in your life — although one is going to be hard to come by. That story in a minute.
I thought I’d tell you what’s been going on in my life for a moment, and give you an opinion or five about the state of the NFL. It’s a mini-, mini-FMIA!
General stuff
- There was a wonderful retirement dinner for me organized by my family — daughters Mary Beth and Laura, wife Ann— in Manhattan Saturday night. My thanks to them for the care and work in putting that together, and to those who came from far and wide to attend. Never knew Mary Beth had party-planning in her blood. She even thought of stickers for the tables — of the Afroed me, of me and Snoop, of me in that Josh Allen missed-handshake incident. Very cool thing: My first editor (Phil Chardis, Manchester, Conn., Journal Inquirer, 1974) sat at the same table as my last editor (Sarah Hughes, NBC Sports, 2024) at the dinner. Fifty years apart.
- Don’t know what I’m going to do with my life yet. I like that. I haven’t missed the job, but of course it’s not September either.
- Coming this year: Our family reunion in July, some trips out West to see the family, and also a round-trip drive across the country and back this fall. Did it once with John Madden, but that one was a sprint. This one will be a 6,500-mile saunter, New York to Seattle on the northern route (I-90 mostly), Seattle to the Bay Area through Oregon and NorCal, and Berkeley to New York on the central route (I-80/70), stopping in Iowa City for a Hawkeye game on the way home. Hoping to see a six-man high school football game along the way too. Send your ideas for our stops and sights on both the northern and central routes to peterkingfmia@gmail.com. Seriously. We’re wide open.
- Saw Paul Skenes’ debut in Pittsburgh, which was cool. The amazing thing was Pirate relievers throwing 13 straight balls to the Cubs in the fifth, and walking in six runs. That is not a misprint. First time that many runs were free-passed home in an inning in the bigs in 66 years.
- We’ve gotten into M*A*S*H reruns. I missed most of the first-runs a half-century ago, but they are TV gold. See if you can find episode 158 from 1978, “Point of View,” a genius show. Just genius. The entire episode is shot from the point of view of a wounded private from San Antonio. His surgery, his rehab, his doc visits, his return home, all from his eyes.
- Re the Caitlin Clark Phenomenon: What cruel human invented the WNBA schedule? Here was one early week in the professional life of Clark, beginning on a Saturday, May 18: at New York (Saturday), Connecticut at home (Monday), at Seattle (Wednesday), at Los Angeles (Friday), at Las Vegas (Saturday). Five cities, five games, one week. The WNBA cheats Clark in this way—and cheats the fans who paid to see peak Clark. In the fifth game, at Vegas, in 29 minutes, Clark scored eight points and turned it over six times. As for the physical treatment: This petty jealousy is natural, and it shall pass.
- Journalism of the Week: Alissa Zhu, Nick Thieme and Jessica Gallagher of the Baltimore Banner (an aggressive online site covering the city), writing in a partnership with the New York Times, about how Baltimore has become the overdose capital of the U.S., with 6,000 deaths over the past six years. Tremendous reporting. Frightening story.
- Graduation Story of the Week: Rachel Treisman of NPR on the unique gift Robert Hale Jr., gave to the graduating class at UMass Dartmouth.
NFL stuff
- Couple of opinions on the 2024 schedule. I’m surprised no one noticed that CBS — which had 10 late Sunday afternoon doubleheader windows to fill—has zero New York Jets games in those national slots. No national Aaron Rodgers games for a network that easily could have two. Hmmm. Left me wondering if CBS asked to avoid the Jets out of fear of Rodgers surviving the season. Or out of fear that he could say some more uncomfortable things to a Tucker Carlson.
- Does how Kansas City‘s schedule falls makes this the toughest repeat task ever? It’s got to be close. Early bye week (week six), so the team plays the last 12 weeks. But that’s not the big deal. This is: In 31 days beginning in Thanksgiving week, KC has six games, and three are short-week games: Sunday to Friday (Carolina, Vegas), Sunday to Saturday (Cleveland, Houston), Saturday to Wednesday (Houston, Pittsburgh). A brutal schedule set-up, at the time of the season the team will be its most fatigued.
- I doubt sincerely it would have fallen that way if the NFL, to get the Netflix money, didn’t have to give Netflix a gift-wrapped Mahomes game under the tree. The NFL, had it given Christmas games to regular networks, wouldn’t have to put its top team on Christmas Day. And KC wouldn’t have been given a ridiculous season-ending slate.
- Good move by the league in increasing the heft of flag football, naming Stephanie Kwok VP/Head of Flag Football. For football to grow, flag football is a must.
- Bill Belichick won’t be good on TV/streaming this fall. He’ll be great.
Bah-humbug stuff
- A bit dated, but the Michael Penix draft pick shocked me. With the Falcons having the worst pass-rush in football over the past three years, and with every defensive player left on the board, and six weeks after guaranteeing a QB $100 million, Atlanta picked a quarterback who probably won’t play till 2026, earliest. I do not know how you make a decision like that.
- Still think the Bears should’ve kept Justin Fields and traded the top overall pick for a bounty. Chicago could have controlled the top of two straight drafts by trading the Caleb Williams pick, and perhaps even had multiple first-rounders in ’24, ’25 and ’26. Williams has great tools. Shouldering the ridiculous expectation of a fan base that hasn’t had a true franchise quarterback in 80 years is a factor here. Add that constant intensity to Williams’ already-huge adjustment to the NFL game. That matters.
- The rush to an 18-game season, just one more example of greed run amok by a greedy league, renders farcical every NFL press release about health and safety. If the league pines so for healthy stars, it wouldn’t ask them to play 65 more snaps a year, just a few years after asking them to play 65 more snaps a year.
- America is great because Harrison Butker can say whatever he wants in a Benedictine College graduation speech. America is also great because the rest of us can say, “Why would Harrison Butker feel that the most important thing in the futures of the majority of women at a Catholic liberal-arts school would be giving birth, being wives, raising families? Does he know these women, who have just spent $141,000 (before financial aid) on their four years of education, well enough to know their foremost goals?”
The books
So I’ve got eight to highlight. I’ve included a link for each — when possible, the link is from Bookshop.org, which promotes local brick-and-mortar bookstores. If you prefer Amazon, that’s fine too. Every book bought is great. Makes us all a bit more literate.
My picks include one (which I’ll begin with) that you won’t be able to buy normally. I hope one of the others would fit the reading habits of the dad in your life.
1. The Last Season of Weeb Ewbank, by Paul Zimmerman (1974, Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Non-fiction.
A week after I wrote my retirement column, I got a book in the mail from column reader Aaron Alexander of San Diego. It was the little-known tome from the late SI master, Paul Zimmerman, “The Last Season of Weeb Ewbank.” So little-known that I didn’t know about it. “His best book,” Michael MacCambridge told me recently. My book buddy, Aaron Alexander, wrote:
“When you read the inscription, you’ll know why I’d like you to have the book. Please consider it a retirement gift.”
The inscription was “To Peter,” with Paul Zimmerman’s autograph. Well, considering I was a senior in high school with no knowledge of Zim at the time, he didn’t mean me. But how wonderful of Mr. Alexander to think of me and send it. Really, really nice.
I devoured this book. Read it in two sittings. So perfectly Zim. It’s 50 years old, and in some ways it feels like it’s even older. Paul writes about Ewbank, but also about the team and the beat. The beat stuff, I found amazing. A half-century ago, the writers could fly on the team plane to road games, interview players and coaches and team medics on the plane, have access to the locker room before games, and go to players’ rooms at training camp just to talk. And in this case, in the 1973 season, the Jets fell apart. Totally disastrous and unexpected 4-10 year. After losing at Miami in week four 31-3 to fall to 1-3, the plane ride back to New York was mayhem. Players ripped seat cushions off seats and started throwing them around like Frisbees. “You ever cover a mutiny?! You got one now!” running back John Riggins yelled to Zim during the craziness. Then Zim interviewed players about it! Linebacker Ralph Baker told him, “This team has lost its mind.”
My favorite snippet was from a press luncheon (teams actually used to have these things) with Ewbank and the local media. Weeb broke the news that this season, 1973, would be his last as coach. Zim brought us into the luncheon, writing about one of the writers asking Ewbank when he made the decision to quit.
“I reached my decision to quit after the soup,” he told us afterward. The soup might had had something to do with it—a bland, tasteless cream of celery. A nice, zippy mulligatawny, for instance, might have kept him on the job.
If you knew the man, you know that is a Paul Zimmerman paragraph. Evermore.
Recently, I was talking to Andy Reid — an admirer of Zim for years — and told him about the book, and he said he’d love to read it. So I sent my copy to him.
Now for the problem. You can’t buy this book like you’d buy any of the others listed here. It’s long since out of print and available only at high prices on eBay or used-book sites. So I’ve got an idea. If you don’t want to pay big for this book, let’s form a community to share it.
I have purchased two of the books. One doesn’t have a cover. If you’d like to read it, I’ll mail these out—if you would commit, after two weeks or less, to send it to the next person on the reading list by priority mail. You cannot keep the book if you agree to be part of this book chain.
So here are the rules:
1. Send your name, address and phone number in an email to peterkingfmia@gmail.com, with WEEB EWBANK in the subject line of the email. I will compile a list of 20 people per book (or however many of you respond) in the order that the emails come in.
2. By the end of the week, I will mail the two books out to the first two people who respond. In the book package will be a list of 19 future recipients of the book. It’s the honor system: You agree to mail the book by priority mail to the next person on the list in two weeks or less.
3. If you apply to be on the book chain, you agree to hold the book for no more than two weeks. Less, preferably.
Okay? Let’s have some fun in this book community, and honor Paul Zimmerman in the process.
2. A Life Impossible: Living with ALS: Finding peace and wisdom within a fragile existence, by Steve Gleason with Jeff Duncan (2024, Knopf). Non-fiction.
If you’re familiar with Steve Gleason, his battle with ALS, and his marriage to Michel Varisco—all have been pretty well publicized—you’ll understand that if Gleason’s going to write a book, it’s going to searing and honest and all there. I mean, all there. Brutal discussions about sex and relationships and the loss of candor and the loss of all physical functions (damn hard for a man who grew up an incredibly physical being) … It’s real life. Awful real life. I read the book in four sittings, but there was a week between the third and fourth readings. That’s because there are times in 284 pages when you think: I need to take a break from the reality of what ALS does to a person and a family. Gleason, of course, can’t do that.
Imagine being robbed of all muscle movement, and your mind still works perfectly. Modern technology can program a computer to allow you to communicate with your eyes; Gleason has sent me texts and emails, writing with his eyes. And while he wrote this book (with the help of New Orleans columnist Duncan), Gleason’s eyes began giving him issues. He had to take frequent breaks and rest his eyes, and get them massaged. Damn! Writing this book defined the word “arduous” for Gleason, but he did it.
I loved the book because it is so real and so hard. If you don’t want to know what ALS does to the person and the family who deal with it, read something else. I love it because I love feeling like I know exactly what it’s like to go through something. And this is a vivid, sock-in-the-jaw telling of living with the disease.
It’s why I disagreed with Buzz Bissinger, the great writer, reviewing the book in the New York Times. He wrote: “I greatly admire ‘A Life Impossible’ — its unflinching honesty and candor — but I’m not sure I am better off for reading it. Sometimes, ignorance is a mercy.”
Ignorance is also not reality. Gleason’s given so much to the fight against ALS. I believe this book will be his most important contribution.
This is the last paragraph of “A Life Impossible:”
“My body will one day fuel the growth of an oak. In the same way, this book is part of my compost.” Perfect.
3. The Unfolding, by A.M. Homes (2023, Penguin Books). Fiction.
Interesting book about the undoing of a man’s life (and his family coping with said undoing) in the seminal events of the presidential election 16 years ago. (I bet it’s written in 65-percent dialog, more dialog than you’ll almost ever see in a book. Interesting to read a book this way.) The book is mindful of America 2024. It’s actually America 2008, in the aftermath of the Obama-McCain battle.
The dad in the book, a wealthy guy who does not want to share the wealth, sees America going down the toilet with the events unfolding in the country post-election. Early on, he says, “I can’t live like this. I can’t spend the next thirty years watching it all come undone.” So he begins to plot a re-taking of the country by America’s 250th anniversary, in 2026.
Sound familiar?
Very well-written, timely, with some humor mixed in. Great story of family chemistry and a man who hates reality in a country he doesn’t recognize.
4. World Class: Purpose, passion and the pursuit of greatness on and off the field, by Grant Wahl. Foreword by Dr. Celine Gounder, edited by Mark Mravic and Alexander Wolff. (2024, Ballantine Books.) Non-fiction.
This book is a tribute to the late, great Grant Wahl, who wrote the first Sports Illustrated story about LeBron James—and, incredibly, that’s probably 20th on his list of important stories in a life cut short by a fatal aortic aneurysm at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.
You’ll read that LeBron story here, plus so many of Wahl’s top magazine pieces. Such great journalism. Such illustrative stories from his career on the soccer beat, like the time Wahl went to Honduras to interview the country’s president about soccer—and got mugged on the way to see the guy. As the former managing editor of the magazine, Chris Stone, put it, Wahl was the Anthony Bourdain of the soccer business, taking readers along for the ride as he toured the earth to show the real of the beautiful game around the world.
If you’re an audiophile, you’ll love this part: In the audiobook, Eric Wahl, the author’s brother, reads Grant’s words. He sounds uncannily like his brother. What a smart concept, getting to hear the written words of this great writer in what sounds like his voice.
5. The Cover Wife, by Dan Fesperman (2021, Knopf.) Fiction.
Truth in Father’s Day advertising: Dan Fesperman and my brother Bob were roommates and best friends at North Carolina in the seventies. They both went into newspaper work. Fesperman worked at the Baltimore Sun, and he worked for a spell as a foreign correspondent in Germany, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Middle East. Over the last 25 years, Fesperman’s written 13 books, mostly thrillers, and won a couple of prestigious awards for them. “The Cover Wife” is his 12th.
I’m always impressed to read a writer with such great depth of knowledge of a subject I know absolutely nothing about. How long must it have taken him to write authoritatively on a female CIA agent stationed in Paris who is summoned to Hamburg to pose as the wife of a little-known American scholar who’d written controversially about the Qaran? All for the CIA to use the writer and the agent to draw out and arrest terrorists. There’s so much more to keep the pages turning, including an FBI agent spying on the CIA and German security agents on the periphery … and the confidence of Fesperman’s writing, the intimate knowledge of the region and the agencies, makes this more than believable. It’s fiction that feels very real.
6. The Lede: Dispatches From a Life in the Press, by Calvin Trillin (2024, Random House. Non-fiction.
Trillin, 88, has covered stories and those who write them for decades, and this is a compilation of some of his best work. (“The Lede,” by the way, is journalism for the opening of a story, the part of the story the author hopes will rope you in so you’ll continue to the end.) As someone who loves reading good writers, I was taken with so many of his pieces in here—the Molly Ivins profile is a gem. I mentioned my favorite story in a February column, the one about a Miami police reporter named Edna Buchanan, and let me share Trillin’s lede here:
“In the newsroom of the Miami Herald, there is some disagreement about which of Edna Buchanan’s first paragraphs stands as the classic Edna lede. I line up with the fried-chicken faction. The fried-chicken story was about a rowdy ex-con named Gary Robinson, who late on a Sunday night lurched drunkenly into a Church’s outlet, shoved his way to the front of the line, and ordered a three-piece box of fried chicken. Persuaded to wait his turn, he reached the counter again five or 10 minutes later, only to be told Church’s had run out of fried chicken. The young woman at the counter suggested that he might like chicken nuggets instead. Robinson responded to the suggestion by slugging her in the head. That set off a chain of events that ended with Robinson’s being shot dead by a security guard. Edna Buchanan covered the homicide for the Herald — there are policemen in Miami who say it wouldn’t be a homicide without her — and the story began with what the fried-chicken faction still regards as the classic Edna lede: ‘Gary Robinson died hungry.’ “
Not bad. Not bad at all.
7. Dogland: Passion, glory, and lots of slobber at the Westminster Dog Show, by Tommy Tomlinson (2024, Avid Reader Press). Non-fiction.
Finally, a book to rival the movie “Best In Show,” the great dog-show movie from 2000. Tommy Tomlinson, who’s a terrific writer, went on the road for three years and chronicles the dog-show set superbly. He focuses on Striker, a Samoyed who travels the country with his handler in an RV named for Betty White. (You mean you’ve got to have real money to travel the country to shows and to get to Westminster? Shocking!)
Tomlinson follows Striker and handler Laura King (no relation) to New York and the big show. Dog-showing is about obsession with these wonderful animals, but it’s also about so many other things. You get lonely out there on the circuit. You wonder, Is that all there is? But for Laura King, it’s about love of the quest and the dog. At Westminster, Striker makes the finals. Best in show. Seven dogs, with a minute or two to get the attention of the judge, and to be better in this weird business of judging dogs. He writes: “They practices their moves, over and over, until Striker’s body has memorized what she wants him to do. ‘So little of what happens in the ring is about what happens in the ring,’ she says. ‘I don’t know if that makes any sense. But you get two or three minutes each time you’re in the ring to be really strongly evaluated. We have to spend twenty-three hours and whatever of the day making sure that those three or four minutes are perfect.’ “
My favorite Tomlinson line, when Striker is poised, just minutes before his moment on national TV, to hit the ring, when human nerves are keen: “Striker looks like he’s waiting for a bus.”
Like dogs? You’ll like this book.
8. George Harrison: The Reluctant Beatle, by Philip Norman (2023, Scribner). Non-fiction.
Norman could have titled this “The forgotten Beatle” too. What do we know about Harrison, who died in 2001? He came from very modest surroundings and left us with “Here Comes the Sun” and “While My Guitar Gently Weeps?” Not a lot. I never knew the Beatle who encouraged the group to limit touring (the band never did it after ending the 1966 American tour at Candlestick Park in San Francisco in August 1966) and pour efforts into studio albums. I never knew of his dark extramarital affairs. And I never knew of the efforts by his bandmates to limit his contributions when the group was most famous.
I think if you’re a Beatles aficionado, you won’t find a lot startling in this book. But there’s a trove of historical stuff about the greatest band that I never knew. It definitely keeps you interested.
