The Opening Kickoff-a review

I often tell young people that if they want to learn how to write, read the sports writers, Bob Hammel [who mentored Michael Koryta] and Frank Deford and Gary Smith, and now Dave Revsine.

I usually mean it for fiction writing. Not that sports writers make stuff up, but they have to learn to tell stories in such a way that folks who already know the score still want to read about the game.

However, in the case of Revsine’s THE OPENING KICKOFF: The Tumultuous Birth of a Football Nation, [Lyons Press, 2014] I mean “write like a sports writer” for history, too. He makes me think of Bruce Catton or Shelby Foote writing on the Civil War, not like “history,” with all the dustiness that word induces, but as though it’s a really good novel. Revsine is simply a good story-teller.

Revsine uses so well the story of Pat O’Dea, the famous-then but forgotten-now U of WI kicker, as the red thread that runs through the book.

Revsine’s main historical conclusion is that all the ills that beset modern college football were there almost from the beginning.

Revsine writes just as he talks, as the chief studio anchor on the Big Ten Network, calmly, personally, thoughtfully, and reflectively—every word just the right choice, every word in just the right place. [Anyone who can keep Gary Dinardo and Howard Griffith under control, or almost so, is obviously a personage of considerable gifts.]

This story needed to be about more than O’Dea, so it’s not just a biography. Revisine rightly felt, though, the need to complete the story of O’Dea, beyond his college football years, so the book ends with the longest epilogue in the history of publication. I’m not complaining; the rest of the O’Dea tale is a good story, well told.

If you like football, or college, or history, or just good writing, you can’t go wrong with THE OPENING KICKOFF.

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

Daughter Katie Kennedy’s Learning to Swear in America will be published by J. K. Rowling’s publisher, Bloomsbury Press, in 2015.

My novel, VETS, about four handicapped and homeless Iraqistan veterans who are accused of murdering a VA doctor, will be published by Black Opal Books in 2015.

I tweet as yooper1721.

I also write Christ in Winter: Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter. http://christinwinter.blogspot.com/

Since this is a review of a sports book, I’ll suggest that you take a look at “Frosty & the Babe” http://www.baseball-almanac.com/poetry/frosty_and_the_babe.shtml