Man vs. Football: Dave Meggyesy’s sadly forgotten Out of their League is the greatest sports memoir you’ve never read.
by Bryan Curtis
Cardinals linebacker Dave Meggyesy, who never fit into what Robert Lipsyte called the “jockocracy,” scandalized the NFL with Out of Their League. A poor kid raised by a stern immigrant father, Meggyesy learned a strong work ethic early on: “My father was the sort of man who believed you were old enough to work when you were old enough to walk,” he writes. That grit led Meggyesy to the football field, where a love of the game propelled him — as did a need for his coaches’ approval and the opportunity that only football provided. But he found the sport’s brutality unnatural; he had to whip himself into a frenzy before games to dull the violence of the gridiron.
When Meggyesy signed with the Cardinals in 1963, he believed he would finally be free from the childish care-taking of college ball. But NFL coaches dictated everything from sleep schedules to meals. (“You are property, and property isn’t supposed to think,” he writes.) To maintain order, the coaches developed a knack “for emasculating a player…without quite killing him.” And practices as well as team parties delivered the ugly slap of de facto segregation. “Even in its orgies, the Cardinals team was Jim Crow all the way,” Meggyesy writes. Then there were the fistfuls of amphetamines: “Most NFL trainers do more dealing in these drugs than the average junky.”
Against a backdrop of race riots, Vietnam, and the counterculture revolution, Out of Their League paints a damning portrait of the all-American game. With today’s steroid scandals and the abysmal treatment of retired football players, this book reminds us that, every so often, we need an outsider on the inside to give us an unsanitized view of the traditions we hold dear.
Four More of the Best Sports Memoirs
Ball Four by Jim Bouton
When it came out, Ball Four was viewed mainly as a compendium of Yankees gossip (notably tales like Mickey Mantle stumbling drunk to the plate). But the book is a classic because of Bouton’s insight and pithy writing: “I’ve often thought that the best way to get through professional baseball is never to let on you have an education.”
Meat on the Hoof by Gary Shaw
Shaw’s biting rebuke of the fraudulent world of college football captures life as a Texas Longhorn, where head coach Darrell Royal told Shaw he’d treat him “like a white man” if he played hard (Shaw was white).
Loose Balls by Jayson Williams
Williams rats on fellow players with aplomb: the guy too dim to make it to his hotel room, the guy so cheap he stole electricity, the guy who nearly shot Jets wide receiver Wayne Chrebet. Actually, the latter was Williams himself, in a disturbing bit of foreshadowing: In 2002 he shot and killed his limo driver.
Have a Nice Day! A Tale of Blood and Sweatsocks by Mick Foley
Pro wrestling isn’t exactly a literary sport, but Foley can really write. His vivid descriptions of having his ear torn off in a match and “the pitter-patter of drop after drop of bright red blood hitting the…mats” give even nonfans a new appreciation of his, er, “sport.”
The Worst Sports Memoirs
My Life in Baseball by Ty Cobb
Cobb basically kidnapped his ghostwriter, Al Stump, and forced him to crank out this sanitized salute to a man his teammates detested. After Cobb died, Stump atoned
by writing a more honest portrayal.
Tiki by Tiki Barber
Barber is a fraud — he sold himself as a thoughtful player, yet his thoughts were all about marketing Tiki. “If Tom Coughlin had not remained as head coach…I might still be in a Giants uniform,” he writes, yet he’d been negotiating with networks for months. This book is an odious ode to self.
Bad As I Wanna Be by Dennis Rodman
Rodman was the first athlete to document a romance with Madonna: “She wasn’t an acrobat, but she wasn’t a dead fish either.” There’s an interesting book in here somewhere — Rodman tells of growing up in a Dallas housing project and wishing he were white — but he was too swept up by the Worm to write it.
The Best Worst Memoir
Juiced by Jose Canseco
Admittedly, Jose Canseco’s guide to steroid mixology is completely appalling. He narrates his baseball adventures — shooting up in bathroom stalls and snuggling with “road beef” after away games, for example — without any self-awareness, let alone remorse. But Canseco does what it would take the sport’s overseers years to do: He names names. In a sense, Juiced is the definitive sports memoir of its age, a heartbreaking portrait of the drug-addled state of our national pastime. Other athletes wrote classier books; Canseco, bless him, wrote an honest one.
This article originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Men’s Journal.
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