A Few Seconds of Panic
A Few Seconds of Panic: A 5-Foot-8, 170-Pound, 43-Year-Old Sportswriter Plays in the NFL Stefan Fatsis,
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
ISBN: 1594201781
DDC: 70.449796092
Edition: Hardcover; 2008-07-03
Summary:
Drawing on rare access to an NFL team’s players, coaches and
facilities, the author of The New York Times bestseller Word Freak
trains to become a professional-caliber placekicker. As he sharpens
his skills, he gains surprising insight into the daunting
challenges—physical, psychological, and intellectual—that pro
athletes must masterIn Word Freak, Stefan Fatsis infiltrated the
insular world of competitive Scrabble® players, ultimately achieving
“expert” status (comparable to a grandmaster ranking in chess). Now
he infiltrates a strikingly different subculture—pro football. After
more than a year spent working out with a strength coach and
polishing his craft with a gurulike kicking coach, Fatsis molded his
fortyish body into one that could stand up—barely—to the rigors of
NFL training. And over three months in 2006, he became a Denver
Bronco. He trained with the team and lived with the players. He was
given a locker and uniforms emblazoned with #9. He was expected to
perform all the drills and regimens required of other kickers. He was
unlike his teammates in some ways—most notably, his livelihood was
not on the line as theirs was. But he became remarkably like them in
many ways: He risked crippling injury just as they did, he endured
the hazing that befalls all rookies, he gorged on 4,000 daily
calories, he slogged through two-a-day practices in blistering heat.
Not since George Plimpton’s stint as a Detroit Lion more than forty
years ago has a writer tunneled so deeply into the NFL. At first, the
players tolerated Fatsis, or treated him like a mascot, but over time
they began to think of him as one of them. And he began to think like
one of them. Like the other Broncos—like all elite athletes—he
learned to perfect a motion through thousands of repetitions, to play
through pain, to silence the crowd’s roar, to banish self-doubt.
While Fatsis honed his mind and drove his body past exhaustion, he
communed with every classic athletic type—the affable alpha male, the
overpaid brat, the youthful phenom, the savvy veteran—and a welter of
bracingly atypical players as well: a fullback who invokes Aristotle,
a quarterback who embraces yoga, a tight end who takes creative
writing classes in the off-season. Fatsis also witnessed the hidden
machinery of a top-flight football franchise, from the
God-is-in-the-details strategizing of legendary coach Mike Shanahan
to the icy calculation with which the front office makes or breaks
careers. With wry candor and hard-won empathy, A Few Seconds of Panic
unveils the mind of the modern pro athlete and the workings of a
storied sports franchise as no book ever has before.
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