A Football Memoir, With Tears
Toward the end of Tom Coughlin’s new memoir about Super Bowl XLII, when his New York Giants defeated the previously unbeaten New England Patriots in arguably the greatest upset in pro-football history, he recalls the immediate aftermath of that 17–14 victory. “The moments afterward are kind of a blur,” he writes. “The confetti rains down, you raise the Lombardi trophy at a midfield podium, and for the next few hours it’s like you’re in a dream world, being taken from one place to the next, carried along by your happiness. It took forever to get to the locker room; I never actually got the opportunity to give that one speech to all the guys where I could say, We are world champions.”
Coughlin’s observation attests to more than his own state of mind. He has also identified the occupational hazard of the usual championship-season memoir by a player or coach: a lack of critical distance from the events. To that understandable myopia can be added another, commercial factor. The typical how-we-won-that-title book is produced in haste so it can be released before the next football (or baseball or basketball or whatever) season, which begins roughly six
