Slotback Rhapsody
By Christopher Harris
CreateSpace
Copyright © 2011
266 pages
$12.00 at Amazon.com
$5.99 Kindle

Slotback Rhapsody by Christopher Harris is an intelligent football story not just for sports fans. Harris, who writes for ESPN.com, merges his football knowledge and writing craft to fine effect in this fictional yet insightful depiction of a struggling athlete and the choices he makes to achieve success.

It’s another training camp for determined but diminutive Nick Morrison who has had little success launching his professional football career. This time it’s with equally struggling Detroit—oddly, all team nicknames are conspicuously absent, perhaps for legal or copyright reasons—but he fails again. He’s in his late twenties now and the odds of succeeding are diminishing rapidly. Unless he loads the dice.

He remains in Detroit and strikes up a casual friendship with one of the team’s employees, Gasper, who becomes a connection for Nick to illegal Human Growth Hormone. What’s he got to lose? The stuff works and just in time as injuries create an opening for a slotback with Detroit. While his teammates and coaches notice he’s larger and faster, his intelligence, dogged hard work, and a bit of luck divert suspicion.

While hardly a Tim Tebow, Morrison’s success inspires his mediocre team and turns them into an unlikely playoff candidate. Furthermore, he becomes a fan favourite, a proletarian success story for a proletarian community. He’s easy for the Detroit fans to cheer for but not so much for the reader who knows his secret.

The season progresses and we’re along for the ride with Nick’s episodic observations and experiences on and off the field. Throughout, he remains even-keeled, enjoying but not flaunting his success, acknowledging but not feeling guilty about its cause. That makes Nick a worthy and reliable recorder of events but it also takes away from his impact as a protagonist.

His passivity and generally dour persona makes one question how or why people are drawn to him, other than to serve the story. We are not told his basic beliefs or values, let alone shown them, which makes it hard to relate to Nick. Early on he is shown to be kind, especially to dogs, but it’s not convincing. We really have no hope of knowing what his general motivation for life is, which is perhaps due to his rather detached worldview:

Relentlessness is the coin of this realm (football). To be on the team, you’re either an elite athlete even by professional standards, or you’re relentless. You pound on, the same way the days pound on. The general public, at a grocery store, in a movie theater, in traffic: they’re like phantoms to me now. Their incidental conversations are babble. They hint at lives that seem like secrets. I know I’m the one in the exclusive club, but they’re the ones who seem in on something. When I can see them. Sometimes they’re a blur. If ever by happenstance I run across a teammate away from the facility, I recognize that he feels it too. We are confused instruments at rest. And so finally I’m convinced that much of the world really is illusory. But what’s in this building, in these rooms and on these fields, and what’s waiting for us Sunday: that’s a reality I can’t get around. It’s coming. It’s coming so fast

He’s a gloomy guy by nature. It’s his teammates and coaches, his old girlfriends (particularly Henny), the underworld characters he encounters along the way that color his story. And for a subject matter riddled with cliches, these characters are not typecast. They are unique and interesting, more interesting than Nick in several cases. 

From a plotting standpoint, I felt things went a bit too easily for our underdog whose questionable choices never really carry a threat of significant, life-altering consequence. We see him in trouble but he never faces enough real danger or ultimate accountability to force out his true nature. His primary goal is to make the team, any team, and he does so within the first third of the book. After that, other than Nick’s hoping he doesn’t get caught using HGH, the drama is really more about the team and whether they’ll make the playoffs or not.

Nick’s passion is football and that part of him, the best part, does come out—often rhapsodically as implied by the title—in the frenetic and carefully crafted play-by-play passages and mini-essays about football. This is where the novel shines.

Football is beloved because there’s a scoreboard, because the rules are arcane but perfectly known to millions. Is there any wonder the slowest of slow-motion instant replay has evolved through football broadcasts, where we must know whether this shoe definitively touches the sideline marker or if the ball jiggles brownly in the wanton receiver’s mitts as he hits the turf? It is perfection because everything will be known. Anyone who says the sport is simply a venal substitute for warfare and that it satisfies the modern human’s suppressed bloodlust needs, they’ve either advanced to a higher stage of dealing with life’s unfathomability and should be followed like yogis, or are uncharitable to a fault. The beauty of statistics and formations and (yes, by heavens) instant replay is they let us touch bottom. And of course there is no bottom to life, which is wonderful but awful, and so we pretend: for a few hours, we allow ourselves to be charmed by a common spell. The first time one of my college games was televised—by some regional sports network with a two-camera setup and a tiny production truck—I DVR’d the broadcast and saw myself in instant replay, saw my body frozen in mid-lunge as the talking heads discussed whether the ball in my hands had broken the end zone’s plane. It was sublimity itself.

The creative use of language blends well with the football lingo. The latter can be cryptic and distracting but you don’t need to be a football expert to enjoy it. You do need expertise if you want to dissect every play call, but that’s not at all essential to the story. Indeed, non-fans might appreciate its atmosphere while gaining a decent overview of the football player’s world and a dramatized, albeit not in-depth, portrayal of issues such as HGH and gambling.

Slotback Rhapsody is more of an extended and dramatized report than an actual novel, but one that’s literary, informative, and bolstered by strong writing. Definitely a worthwhile read, and a satisfying one, but also one I think could have taken more risks.

Reviewed by
LK Gardner-Griffie

As a band member in high school every year I would attend band camp. While there are several memories that stand out in my mind from that time, the one thing that I could count on, aside from the inter-school rivalries that flourished, was that at least one night during the week long camp an argument would errupt over which religious denomination was better, Catholic or Protestant. Of course, at band camp the discussion usually included a third denomination of Mormonism thrown in just to keep the discussion lively. When I started reading More Than Dust in the Wind, these discussions came flooding back to me in full force, to the point where I could almost smell the camp fire as it slowly burned down to embers. These heated discussions would invariably take place at night and were usually ended abruptly by the playing of taps, which signaled it was time to go to our cabins.

Lance (Bambi) Masterson is the captain of his college basketball team, Dakota State University, and the story opens in the last few seconds of the game that could send his team back to the locker room for the season, or on to the national championships for Division III colleges in Kansas City, MO. Bambi is able to execute a risky play as the ball leaves his hands just prior to the buzzer and the shot is good. In the aftermath of such an emotional win, Bambi’s first action is to rush to his cheerleader girlfriend, Lisa and propose marriage. Since the cheerleaders are traveling with the team and they have a four hour bus ride home after the game, Bambi and Lisa start to discuss their future together. Things between them begin to disintegrate when Bambi brings up the question of whether he will leave his Catholic church or whether Lisa will leave her Protestant church once they are married. By the end of the bus ride, the two are no longer talking to each other and Lisa gets a ride with one of her friends, refusing to even say good-bye to Bambi or let him know of the change in plans.

During the week as they are getting ready to play in the national championships, Lisa continues to freeze out Bambi and makes herself completely unavailable to him. He figures that he will be able to make her talk to him once they are at the national championships because there won’t be anywhere else for her to go. The cheerleaders will have to stay with the team. What Bambi doesn’t count on is a woman’s capacity for shopping at malls, especially malls that they have never been to before. Of course, that would be some and not all women, as I am a confirmed point and click shopper and can actually break out in a rash if you keep me at a mall for an extended period of time. Bambi’s friend Donnie invites Bambi to attend a Protestant church service since they won their game against the number one team and will be in Kansas City on Sunday. Bambi starts off by negatively comparing the church to his home church and is critical of the way the service is being handled. As the service continues, he experiences a change of heart and feels that the minister is speaking directly to him. By the end of the service, Bambi views the differences between the religions in a very different light as he realizes that the important issue is to put God first and everything else will fall into line.

In his next game, playing some close town rivals for the opportunity to play in the finals, Bambi is injured and the team loses. This is something that earlier would have been a bitter pill for Bambi to swallow and he would have been severely depressed and angry about the outcome. He is oddly calm and can only think about getting the opportunity to talk to Lisa so he can straighten out the argument that has led to this estrangement. Lisa is trying to get to him through the throng of people so that she can help shore him up because of the loss as she has done so many times in the past. She is delighted to learn that he has determined that the Catholic doctrine is not important enough to keep them apart and that he will willingly attend her church with her.

The second book in a series of five, More Than Dust in the Wind takes the reader through 30 years of life with Bambi & Lisa Masterson, through the good times, as well as the bad. Donald James Parker includes those milestones in life that many people go through. The agony of searching for a job and hoping that you find the right one, the loss of a child, the birth of another, career changes, dealing with cancer, and through it all keeping your faith strong. In fact, on many levels, I find parallels in my own life. My husband is in the midst of a career change after having served 20 years in the US Coast Guard, and is currently searching for a job, we lost a child during pregnancy, I lost my father to cancer, and yes, have faced all of these trials daily working to keep my faith strong. Perhaps it is because of these parallels that I felt that Mr. Parker tried to put too much into one book for the length. Thirty years is a lot of time to cover within 208 pages, and because of that there is a feeling of skimming the surface rather than getting into the depth of the characters and situations.

There are a few weaknesses in More Than Dust in the Wind that are challenging to read through. Mr. Parker, in his passion for trying to get his message across, at times becomes a little didactic with his writing in a way that I feel harms the flow of the story. For example, when Lisa and Bambi are debating the Catholicism vs. Protestantism question, there is a five page section of almost pure unadulterated dialog. At this point in the story, the two of them are on a bus filled with exuberant basketball players who just won a very tight game at the last second to put them through to the round of national championship games, and yet there is no discussion of noise, running up and down the aisles, no creaking of the bus, and having been on team buses myself, no description of the smells that can be present. No one’s sock or jock strap went sailing through the air to interrupt the conversation. The dialog was taking place in a vacuum, which causes it to come across as preachy or sermonizing, and the entire conversation felt forced. As a reader, I want to see the confusion on Bambi’s face as he is trying to sort through what Lisa is telling him. I want to feel the cracked vinyl of the bus seat as an uncomfortable silence is forming as neither will back down from their position. I believe that the message that Mr. Parker is trying to convey would come across much better by slowing down the pace and using more description interspersed with action. I also feel that those times throughout the course of the story where the characters were experiencing grief were a little glossed over. My impression was that Mr. Parker did not want to allow his characters to show too much grief as it might come across as lacking in faith. Unfortunately, that caused the situations to come across as not realistic and painted the characters as being lacking in feeling, which I am sure was not the author’s intent. An illustration of this is that when Lisa was hospitalized from being in a car accident, and had just learned that she lost the baby she was carrying, as soon as their tears were dried, Bambi is returning to work so that he can work with his team to get them ready for the game, and is doing so because Lisa insists that she doesn’t need a babysitter.

Being the second book in the series, there are some references to situations which occurred in the first book, which is always the case when dealing with books in a series. There is a need to provide some back story with the subsequent books in the series so that readers who pick up the series in the middle are not out to sea. While Mr. Parker does provide some back story details that give insight to the character of Bambi and some of the situations that have caused him to be the man he is at the start of book 2, some items remain in question. Why does Lance go by the name of Bambi? I understand that it is a nickname, but it is sufficiently outside the normal realm for nicknames, that there should be some explanation as to why the character chooses to be called such an unusual name for a man. Several times during the course of the story, Bambi refers to the Bulldogs of Victory and the Dogs of Victory compact. It is obvious that this is something that is fully explained in the first book of the series, but with the number of references to the compact, there should be a modicum of explanation in the second book as well. There is even a scene where Bambi determines that it is time to explain the compact to his daughter Maria, but does so outside the presence of the reader. Other than those two exceptions, Mr. Parker does a nice job of dropping bits of information into the story which provide the back story information from the first book rather than giving it to us in summary style.

Despite some of the issues with More Than Dust in the Wind, Donald James Parker is a good solid writer. The relating of the basketball games pulls the reader straight into story and the writing flows easily. I especially enjoy his characterization of the relationship between Bambi and his daughter Maria. Their interactions with one another, even down to the corny phrases that can irritate a young teen-age daughter, rings true. One of the things that Mr. Parker does the best is painting the picture of Bambi as a man facing his own mortality, unwilling to give up, but fighting to the bitter end. My own father carried that same attitude toward life and death, and it took cancer 33 years and five iterations to finally bring him down. Even then, he played tennis the week before he died as he simply refused to let the illness get the better of him. Parker builds a nemesis, Angela Hawkins, for Maria to give the counterpoint to her father’s fight against illness. Maria and Angela are considered the best two runners in the state, but Maria loses to Angela year after year, which just strengthens Maria’s resolve to beat her the next time out. The culmination of this rivalry comes at a time when Bambi is so ill, he is no longer able to walk, but continues to support his daughter at the track meets in a wheel chair. The following passage brings tears to my eyes.

The voice over the loudspeaker said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I now direct your attention to the head of the track where Maria Masterson, winner of the 3200-meter and the 1600-meter race in a state record of four minutes and fifty-nine seconds is taking her victory lap. Due to the number of events that we have to run through here in the state meet, we normally do not permit victory laps, but this is a special case. Maria’s father, Lance Masterson, a former all-stater in basketball, an NAIA all-region team selection at Dakota State, and a former high school coach is engaged in a struggle with pancreatic cancer.”
A hush fell over the crowd.
“Maria has the privilege of sharing this victory lap with her father, the man who taught her to run and taught her how to live life to its fullest. Would you please stand and give it up for this dynamic duo?” The crowd stood and roared its approval as Maria pushed her father across the finish line, breaking the tape that the officials had ordered stretched across it. Bambi looked up and saw Angela Hawkins looking on with a scowl on her face. He winked at her. When Maria got past the finish line, she veered off to the right and pushed Bambi off the track and back onto the sidewalk.

Take one look at the book cover for Bob McDonald’s book, Flagrant Foul, and you’d almost mistaken the title as being “The Forester.” Take a chance and read this book about a young reporter getting a chance at the big leagues of sports commentary and there’s no mistake that Bob McDonald is an author who probably spent overtime crafting a fun and inspiring book about one man’s triumph in the spotlight at center court!

I might as well admit it right now. I hate sports. I always have and probably always will. I avoided PE like the plague, and was a band nerd in high school who only went to the games because I had to. I’ve seen the Cards play once in the six years that I’ve lived in St. Louis, and I spent most of that game people watching.

I’ve never sat through one single sports event on television (not counting the Olympics) from beginning to end, but I didn’t let my nonexistent flavor for sports keep me from reading Bob McDonald’s book. Sure, I may not be the right reviewer for distinguishing Bob’s expertise at fouls and free throws. He’s got me beat there! But I do know talented writing when I read it, no matter if it’s in the arts and leisure section or the sports page, and believe me when I say this…Bob McDonald’s got talent that scouts should be looking out for!

The Forester is actually the student newspaper at Forest State University in Cleveland, where our central character, Davis Brown, is covering minor sports from golf to track meets. Right in the beginning, we learn that the lead sports editor has just been kicked out of school but recommended Davis as his replacement. Davis’s Uncle Phil is proud of his nephew, and being a season ticket holder for the University’s basketball team, he’s looking forward to having someone on the inside even though the team hasn’t won anything in 15 years.

Davis is immediately thrown into a whirl wind of sports gossip including the dismissal of an old coach, and a previous sports editor’s attempt at getting rid of the coaches’ replacement who is still in charge of the team today.

Right from the beginning, McDonald treats the reader to a play-by-play look into the college sports world from reporters fighting for a place up front, to locker room antics, player stats, and more. Despite the lack of my very own sports vocabulary, not once was I bored with any of his basketball drama. I thoroughly enjoyed seeing Davis thrown into the world of B-ball reporting and realizing there’s a lot more at stake than good copy everyone will be vying to read in the morning.

Those interested in journalism will also relate well to Davis as he probes for answers to his questions with the players and their not so cooperative coach, Tip Woods, who doesn’t relate well to reporters due to his conflict with the old editor. Davis soon learns that being the lead sports editor is not all it’s cracked up to be. His stress level, and his confidence, quickly builds as the season becomes the ride of his life for both him and the team, and the health of his biggest fan, Uncle Phil, begins to fail.

McDonald has penned a story which, sports fans or not, any reader can relate to. As Davis is swept up in his new responsibilities and has to face criticism from readers, competition, and teammates, his struggle to succeed in his position is evident and will have you rooting for the underdog. The support of Davis’s family, the minor players in this tale, give the story a positive outlook and lots of heart reminding us that well, maybe it’s not all about the game!

I may still not be a sports fan, but I am a fan of Bob McDonald’s fast paced and colorful writing. He knows his craft and theme well, and I look forward to more from him as an author.