Collision Low Crossers: A Year Inside the Turbulent World of NFL Football (2013), a non-fiction book by American journalist Nicholas Dawidoff, describes the season (2011-12) Dawidoff spent embedded with the New York Jets. The book was nominated for the PEN/ESPN Award for literary sportswriting. Dawidoff opens his account by explaining why he wanted to embed with an NFL team. Although he is an experienced sportswriter, his beat is baseball. He follows football and enjoys it, but he is not a fan. What intrigues him most about the sport is its essential mysteriousness, the fact that much of what is essential to this hugely popular sport—the coaching, the tactics, the play-decisions—is hidden in plain sight. Another key factor is the Jets’ charismatic coach Rex Ryan. When Ryan makes Dawidoff the remarkable offer of universal behind-the-scenes access to the Jets, Dawidoff trusts him. Ryan is as good as his word. Dawidoff is given a locker, security credentials, and a desk in the team’s scouting department. He is free to sit in on meetings and coaching sessions, and to interview players and coaches. He is even given the chance to call some defensive plays during a pre-season game. The book centers on interlocking portraits of the Jets’ principal coaches and players. From the outset, Dawidoff is struck by the zealous dedication of the coaching staff. He suggests that these coaches almost fear not working, “because working all the time was the only salve for the anxiety-driven nature of the job.” Eighteen-hour days are common. Coaches regularly sleep in their offices, miss family events, and skip holidays. Many, former pros, learned this all-or-nothing approach as players. The Jets’ defensive backs coach, Dennis Thurman, tells Dawidoff that he earned his spot in the Dallas Cowboys by sheer hard work. At his first training camp, he was pitted against 26 other defensive backs, but “Nobody outworked me.” Dawidoff also learns that many of these coaches are paid surprisingly little. Defensive coordinator Mike Pettine tells him that when he began his pro coaching career as a video analyst for the Ravens, he earned a lot less than he had coaching high-school football. To make ends meet without alarming his wife, Pettine secretly began cashing out his 401(k). The heart of the book is Rex Ryan himself. Dawidoff admits to being seduced by Ryan’s bombastic charm. The head coach is presented as big-hearted and emotionally impulsive. He throws “ice-cream socials” in his office. To convince Hawaiian offensive tackle Wayne Hunter to re-sign with the Jets, Ryan gets a Hawaiian tattoo (the ploy succeeds). Dawidoff argues that Ryan genuinely sees football as “a game of familial love.” This may well be rooted, Dawidoff suggests, in his own childhood, as the son of legendary NFL coach Buddy Ryan. During one conversation with Dawidoff, Ryan recalls his father imparting some football technicalities to him and his brother and thinking, “He’s teaching us the family secrets.” Nor is Ryan’s “familial” approach to the game merely a matter of sentiment. Dawidoff shows Ryan refusing to play injured players, where other coaches might put the team’s success ahead of player welfare. He even finds Ryan discouraging recovering players from throwing themselves back into the game too soon. Ryan is a father-figure to many of his team, and he unabashedly espouses a code of honorable manhood that embraces hard work and suffering. He calls his players “Mighty Men,” and his highest compliment is to say of someone, “That’s a MAN!” Dawidoff portrays Ryan’s players as similarly consumed by the game, despite its brutal and exploitative culture, which the players are fully aware of. The average pro career lasts less than four years. Dawidoff reports that the players joke that N.F.L. stands for “Not For Long.” Dawidoff’s relations with the players are sometimes fraught. He spends a lot of time with the quarterbacks, who give him the nickname “Bookworm,” quickly abbreviated to just “Worm.” Ryan assures him, “When guys poke at you, it’s because they like you.” Certainly, Dawidoff finds that the culture of ridicule runs deep in the locker room. Players paste bumper stickers on each other’s cars, choosing slogans like “I Stop for Gay Bars.” Dawidoff can find no-one who thinks this is homophobic. On the other hand, Dawidoff reports that the Jets’ players seem remarkably comfortable with questions of race. White coaches refer to the slowness of their white players as “Caucasianitis,” while the black linebackers call themselves “lineblackers.” Dawidoff portrays the team’s racial humor as inclusive and friendly. As the season goes on, it becomes clear that the Jets are not going to make the playoffs, despite making the A.F.C. championship game in the previous two seasons. Dawidoff reports on the growing discord in the team, which focuses on the young quarterback Mark Sanchez. A rift grows between him and receiver Santonio Holmes. Dawidoff shows that both men are young, vulnerable, and seeking affirmation in a brutal game—one which, in the end, only one team can win.

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Nicholas Dawidoff

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Collision Low Crossers

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