Dream Season
A Professor Joins America's Oldest Semi-Pro Football Team
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
A rookie outsider chases his sports-obsessed dream to relive his football glory days in “the ultimate fan book” (The New York Times).
Bob Cowser, Jr. is a happy husband, father, and English professor in upstate New York. Only one thing is missing: the exhilaration he felt as a young man in sports-crazy Tennessee when he took the field for high school football games. In what is every Monday morning quarterback’s fantasy, Bob joins the Watertown Red & Black, the country’s oldest semi-professional football team, hungry to win its first championship in two decades. Over the next five months, and with the hesitant blessing of his wife, Candace, Cowser drives the lonely sixty miles for try-outs in a former mill town of soldiers, corrections officers, and blue-collar workers.
A far cry from his leafy campus, the “Professor,” as his teammates call him, must work hard to earn the respect of these hard-edged men—some of them local celebrities—and the confidence of his coach, a former mill worker who has never used a playbook. Balancing the demands of family and academe with the rigors of practice and game play, Cowser must find a way to fit his childhood dream into his real life as an adult.
“Deserv[ing] to join the ranks of great football books like George Plimpton’s Paper Lion, Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, and William Morris’s The Courting of Marcus Dupree” (Publishers Weekly), Dream Season invites us onto the line of scrimmage for each heartbreaking loss and breathtaking win, into the locker room of a fabled team challenged by a roller-coaster season, and ultimately into the heart of a man with a persevering thirst for glory. “Real, vivid, sensitive, accessible, warm, brutal, and wholly consuming,” this remarkable story reminds us why we love the games we play (Lee Gutkind, author of Forever Fat: Essays by the Godfather).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cowser, an English professor at Saint Lawrence University in upstate New York, offers an affable, unassuming account of his recent experience in his early 30s of playing for the Watertown Red & Black. Aside from describing the physical shock of returning to such a punishing sport (he's been away from it since high school), Cowser also depicts the culture clash as an academic strives to fit in with and earn the respect of a group of blue-collar workers. He tells his story with honesty and humility. For instance, when Cowser scores a huge play, he doesn't receive or even fantasize about the adulation of his teammates. He gets a thump on the pads, a nod and the hint that it's time to move on and get back to the line for another snap. That's enough to make Cowser's style endearing, even if the book doesn't necessarily draw readers into his adventure. After all, there's just so much that guy-to-guy camaraderie and a loosely predictable sports theme can do to be engaging. Though the book does boast a quietly triumphant ending, it's much like the level of football it chronicles: it means a lot to the people who are playing, but lacks the pull to excite a larger audience.