Season of Saturdays
From an award-winning sports journalist and college football expert: “A beautifully written mix of memoir and reportage that tracks college ball through fourteen key games, giving depth and meaning to all” (Sports Illustrated), now with a new Afterword about the first ever College Football Playoff.
Every Saturday in the fall, it happens: On college campuses, in bars, at gatherings of fervent alumni, millions come together to watch a sport that inspires a uniquely American brand of passion and outrage. This is college football. Since the first contest in 1869, the game has grown from a stratified offshoot of rugby to a ubiquitous part of our national identity. Right now, as college conferences fracture and grow, as amateur athlete status is called into question, as a playoff system threatens to replace big-money bowl games, we’re in the midst of the most dramatic transitional period in the history of the sport.
Season of Saturdays examines the evolution of college football, including the stories of iconic coaches like Woody Hayes, Joe Paterno, and Knute Rockne; and programs like the USC Trojans, the Michigan Wolverines, and the Alabama Crimson Tide. Michael Weinreb considers the inherent violence of the game, its early seeds of big-business greed, and its impact on institutions of higher learning. He explains why college football endures, often despite itself. Filtered through journalism and research, as well as the author’s own recollections as a fan, Weinreb celebrates some of the greatest games of all time while revealing their larger significance.
Read excerpts:
Grantland: “The Ballad of Reggie Bush” (Texas 41, USC 38, 2006 Rose Bowl)
Rolling Stone: “Get Behind Me Saban” (Auburn 34, Alabama 28, 2013 Iron Bowl)
SBNation: “My Blue Heaven” (Boise State 43, Oklahoma 42, 2007 Fiesta Bowl)
Listen to my interview with Kai Ryssdal on NPR’s Marketplace
“Season of Saturdays is simply an unforgettable read. It is a deeply moving portrait of America’s greatest game, exquisitely written by Michael Weinreb. The reader is captured and captivated from the first line and it holds all the way to the index at the end. I could go on but I am thinking about starting Season of Saturdays again – I liked it that much.’’–Paul Finebaum, ESPN radio/TV personality
“A passionate defense of college football… entertaining and enlightening for both rabid fans and newbies.”–Kirkus Reviews (full review here)
“A discursive, informative, sardonic, and often hilarious account of a sport attended by 50 million colorfully dressed fans every year. The book is being published at a time when the game is, as it often has been, in transition and under considerable scrutiny…questions of race, corruption, amateurism, trickery, hypocrisy, and hyper-aggressiveness are integral components of this absorbing book.”—Booklist
“Beautifully written mix of memoir and reportage that tracks college ball through 14 key games, giving depth and meaning to all.”–Sports Illustrated
“[A] beautiful meditation….well-researched….studded with sharply distilled character sketches….an intimate and deeply personal rumination on the sport’s meaning.”—Boston Globe
“This surely is one of the most enjoyable books of the college football season.”—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Snappy and well-written.”—The Oregonian
“A must-read for the college fan.”–The St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“A poetically written history of the college game.”—Diane Roberts, Tampa Bay Times
“College football is a confounding sport with an arcane history at the intersection of higher education, the twilight of adolescence, and semi-professional football, all institutions of questionable integrity. The mix is captured and explained beautifully in Michael Weinreb’s new book Season of Saturdays….required reading.”—The Washington Free Beacon
“This book is really two books, interwoven into one. The first is an entertaining history of America’s most interesting game, described by someone who knows. The second is the story of a man trying to work through his deepest fears and insecurities by sitting on the couch and watching TV (and — in all likelihood — caring too much about what he sees). But the reason the first book matters is because the second book explains most people who love college football.”— Chuck Klosterman, author of I Wear The Black Hat
“It is, simply, the best college football history written in the last 50 years. It is history as history should be written and told, a very human story of coaches, players and events, some funny, some serious, some tragic and some ironic, that shaped the game we play and love today.”—David Housel, longtime Auburn athletic director.
“Michael Weinreb journeys through the black and white college football world of the nostalgia junkie and the cynical critic and finds both of them wrong: college football, like America, is a culture of troubling, electrifying gray. This is our story.”–Wright Thompson, senior writer, ESPN
“No sport explains America quite like college football, and no writer explains college football with more passion and insight than Michael Weinreb. Season of Saturdays is both fun and insightful, and belongs on the shelf of anybody who loves the sport.”–Michael Rosenberg, author of War as They Knew It
Bigger Than the Game
A mesmerizing look at sports in the 1980s – when athletes became superstars, mavericks replaced heroes, and sports moved to the forefront of American culture.
In the 1980s America sent to the White House an actor and ex-jock who fervently believed in the power of personal mythology, and Americans turned to sports to find their heroes. There was Bo Jackson, the man so strong he could break a baseball bat over his knee, the man whose athletic talents ran so deep that he starred in two sports while becoming a marketing pioneer. There was Jim McMahon, the Punky QB leading his Chicago Bears to Super Bowl glory while tending to his shades, his faux-hawk, and his can of beer. There was Brian Bosworth, terrorizing quarterbacks and averring that the NCAA stood for National Communists Against Athletes. And there was Len Bias, the best college basketball player in America and future of America’s best pro team, off to celebrate his selection as the number two pick in the NBA Draft and the power and money that would soon be his.
In Bigger Than the Game, award-winning author Michael Weinreb explores the era when athletes evolved from humble and honest to brash and branded. Weinreb explains how these players lived their lives in America’s living room, thanks to a new outfit called ESPN and the 24- hour news cycle that came of age in the (apostrophe?) 80s. They starred in music videos and in ad campaigns that promised they could do anything. They spurned their coaches, defied expectations, and were loved for it. In an era of “Just Say No,” they said yes to just about everything.
An enthralling portrait of a fascinating period and its larger-than- life personalities, Bigger Than the Game recounts how excess, media, and the lust for fame changed American sports forever.
“In this lively and smart blend of essay and reporting, Weinreb details with conviction how seismic shifts in society and pop culture–soon-to-be behemoths Nike and ESPN were just hitting their strides–forever changed the conditions for attaining fame in sports, paving the way for the media-savvy athletes we know and (sometimes) love today.”–Publishers Weekly
“Weinreb does a fine job showing the symbiotic relationship between those athletes and the unfettered capitalism encouraged during the Reagan years.”–Booklist
“Weinreb brilliantly pinpoints the moment in the mid-1980s when sports changed forever.”–Dan Wetzel, Yahoo!
“Weinreb is to be applauded for recognizing in the landscape of the ’80s — whether he’s talking about sports, politics, or ESPN — ‘a full-on embrace of American excess at its most excessive.'”–Bill Littlefield, The Boston Globe
The Kings of New York
Left to right: Eliot Weiss, Oscar Santana, Shawn Martinez, Sal Bercys, Ilya Kotlyanskiy, Nile Smith, Alex Lenderman, Dalphe Morantus, Willy Edgard.
Winner of the Quill Award for Best Sports Book of 2007
New York Times Editors’ Choice
Publishers Weekly Best Breakout Book of 2007
Amazon.com Editors’ Pick: Top 10 Nonfiction Books of 2007
Named One of the Best Books of 2007 by The Christian Science Monitor, Metro (UK), The Sunday Tribune (Ireland), and PBS Frontline/World.
“In this thrilling, vigorously reported, deeply empathic book, Michael Weinreb…brings to vivid life a contemporary chess world suffused with its own updated version of nerd machismo.”
–The New York Times Book Review
“Fascinating… [GAME OF KINGS] does for high school chess what Buzz Bissinger’s 1991 bestseller, Friday Night Lights, did for high school football.” –USA Today
“Writing with the deft, propulsive style of a young Frank Deford, Michael Weinreb has captured both the intellectual insanity — and the curious normalcy — of what it’s like to be a teenaged super-genius.” —Chuck Klosterman, author of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs
Brooklyn’s Edward R. Murrow High School is one of New York’s public education success stories: a charter school that serves a diverse neighborhood of immigrants and minorities and ranks among the nation’s best high schools. At Murrow, there are no sports teams except for an unconventional group of kids that make up the school’s powerhouse chess team.
An award-winning, critically-acclaimed sports book as unconventional as the chess kids it features, GAME OF KINGS: A Year Among the Oddballs and Geniuses Who Make Up America’s Top High School Chess Team by sportswriter Michael Weinreb follows the members of the Murrow chess team through an entire season—from cash games in Washington Square Park to the SuperNationals in Nashville, where the scrappy team goes up against the country’s best. Along the way, Weinreb chronicles their lives so far, their rise toward maturity and adulthood, and their discovery of new and different worlds, all through their participation in (and at times, addiction to) a sport that has long been stigmatized as a refuge for hyper-intelligent social misfits.
Within the idiosyncratic team he discovers the calculus teacher (and former semipro hockey player) who guides the savants while struggling to find funding for his team; an aspiring rapper and tournament hustler who plays with cutthroat instinct; the team’s lone girl, a shy Ukrainian immigrant; the Puerto Rican teen from the rough neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant who plays ingenious opening gambit named “The Orangutan;” and the Lithuanian immigrant and team star whose chess rating is climbing toward grandmaster status.
An inspiration to aspiring geniuses and students everywhere, GAME OF KINGS illuminates an inner-city school whose chess team succeeds against all odds.
New York Magazine profile of Murrow High School.
New York Times newsbrief about Murrow’s 2006 national championship
New York Times, 1993: Soviet Collapse Is Chess Bonanza in Brooklyn
Gothamist: All Hail the Chess Kings at Murrow
New York Magazine: The Murrow chess team shows up in the approval matrix
More Reviews:
A terrific read…Weinreb melds history lessons with thumbnail sketches of an unusual cast of characters: the young players themselves, the adult talent who nurtured their love of chess, and the different donors who – for various reasons of their own – have kept these programs afloat. The result is a book that reads like a Robert Altman film – quick cuts of quirky, intertwined story lines.–Marjorie Kehe, The Christian Science Monitor
Word for sentence, sentence for paragraph, paragraph for page, (Kings) is one of the most readable books about chess ever written.-Dr. Frank Brady, Chess Life magazine
Weinreb makes several choices that work well for a year-in-the-life account….All this is supported by well-chosen detail, intelligence and terrific writing. Weinreb clearly develops an affection for the eclectic members of the team, and because of the skill he brings to his project, so will his readers.–Publishers Weekly (starred review)
A fascinating subculture sensitively brought to light, along with some troubling questions.–Kirkus Reviews
The book’s strength lies in Weinreb’s detailed exploration into the uncharmed lives of a motley bunch of immigrant, hip-hop-listening child geniuses who rely on this curious sub-culture as a means of expression and distraction.—UK Observer Sport Monthly
The Kings of New York by Michael Weinreb is much the best book in the Sportsbooks in-tray at the moment, and I would rather write about a good book that may or may not be about sport than a book which is definitely about sport but which is also definitely pants.—UK Telegraph
Weinreb writes well, in the way that many American sportswriters do: a muscular and highbrow style, driven by the drama of the event without sacrificing a sardonic, wise-guy tone. It is a template for good, manly prose and, in Weinreb’s hands, makes for a smart and stylish read.—UK Telegraph
Weinreb finds plenty of drama in how the inner city team achieved hitherto unparalleled success over the past decade, despite a serious lack of funding.—Metro (UK)
Fascinating.—Word of Sport (UK)
Michael Weinreb 