RG3
The Promise
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
He’s been called many things—Heisman Trophy winner, MVP, the savior of the Washington Redskins—but to his millions of fans, Robert Griffin III is known simply as RG3.
Robert Griffin III was a preternaturally gifted athlete from a young age, but in those early days he played nearly every sport except football. He seemed pointed toward stardom, but would it be in basketball or maybe in track, where he qualified for the 2008 U.S. Olympic Trials as a hurdler? As for playing football, Griffin first had to overcome his mother’s objections to the violence and danger by making a “Pinkie Promise” with her that no one would catch him. Eventually, he began to realize that all of his remarkable talents—unrivaled speed, pinpoint accuracy, exceptional intelligence, single-minded drive—combined into a potent force that few quarterbacks could rival. What followed seemed almost destined: a football scholarship to Baylor University, three exceptional seasons capped by winning the Heisman Trophy, and the 2012 draft—where Griffin, as the second overall pick, became the franchise quarterback for one of the oldest and most storied football teams in the country.
In RG3: The Promise, award-winning Washington Post reporter Dave Sheinin provides an in-depth, behind-the-scenes account of Griffin’s phenomenal rookie year—and offers a unique and intimate look inside the transformation one of the NFL’s brightest young stars.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Washington Post sportswriter Sheinin spent most of the 2012 football season covering Robert Griffin III's rookie year as quarterback for the Washington Redskins. This inside access forms the backbone of his excellent look at Griffin, his unbelievable year, and the season-ending knee injury that many feel could have been prevented. Sheinin's look at the positive influence of Griffin's family, as well as a game-by-game analysis of Griffin's season, perfectly captures the quarterback's appeal as a "telegenic, multifaceted, crazy-sock-wearing, Heisman Trophy sporting, sort-of-dorky, sort-of-cool, gunslinging, swashbuckling Texan." While Griffin was received as a savior by Redskins fans, a storied franchise on a downward trajectory since the 1990s, he was also part of a strategy by head coach Mike Shanahan that emphasized Griffin's remarkable throwing arm as well as his running ability the "zone-read" offense, which never before had "been run so effectively by as fast a quarterback as Griffin." Sheinin convincingly explains how running the "zone-read" left Griffin vulnerable to injury. But he concludes that the pressures of being a savior combined with "the culture of football" that emphasizes playing hurt above safety, in the end, made Griffin "both a victim of the NFL culture and, along with his coach, its ultimate expression."
