One of this country’s greatest writers, the late George Plimpton, made his name with a series of participatory journalism books, all revolving around professional sports. Plimpton, who was more than 6 feet tall, but couldn’t have weighed more than 150 pounds, did all sorts of things like play golf in the PGA tour (THE BOGEY MAN), pitched baseball (OUT OF MY LEAGUE) and memorably served as a quarterback in an NFL exhibition game (PAPER LION and MAD DUCKS AND BEARS). They are all phenomenal books, and none of them could be written nowadays, because there is no way the unions and the leagues would allow it to occur.
So author Mark St. Amant has done the next best thing: He half-accidentally signed up as a kicker for a semi-pro football team in Boston and then wrote a book about his experiences, titled JUST KICK IT: TALES OF AN UNDERDOG, OVER-AGE, OUT-OF-PLACE, SEMI-PRO FOOTBALL PLAYER. And if you or anyone you know has a love for football, you must buy this book, because it is a tremendous surprise in the overcrowded and heavily clichéd field of sports tomes.
Also the author of COMMITTED: CONFESSIONS OF A FANTASY FOOTBALL JUNKIE, St. Amant has a wonderfully witty, self-depreciating style and is never afraid to let the joke be about him. And it often is. Because he’s a little white guy from a posh neighborhood who signs up with the Boston Panthers, an inner-city team that has a league-wide reputation for being dirty and nasty. And he’s never played football in his life. But he can kick, a side benefit of having played a considerable amount of soccer in his youth.
And so we journey with St. Amant through the year 2004, sharing the joy of victory and the shamefulness of defeat, especially when winning was possible. We watch the team jell and disintegrate, bond around each other and point fingers at one another when things go wrong.
The characters are rich and lively, St. Amant is fun to read and laugh-out-loud funny, and you end up cheering for the Panthers just like your favorite football team. These folks aren’t paid; they really do play for the sheer fun of the game. And that’s something we don’t see very much nowadays. Semi-pro ball isn’t shown on TV and hardly covered at all in the local papers. But it’s still football – football played at an often surprisingly high level by players who care deeply about the game.
That’s a very honorable thing. And St. Amant has done a wonderful service to these men by writing such a good-natured and personable book about them and the sport they love. –Mark Rose
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