A Few Seconds Of Panic by Stefan Fatsis

From The Week of January 17, 2010

A Few Seconds Of Panic is Stefan Fatsis' delightfully funny look inside a modern NFL locker room during training camp, the gruelling, summer portion of the NFL year where rosters are set, plays installed, and camaraderie forged for the difficult season ahead. But Mr. Fatsis, a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and currently a contributer to NPR's All Things Considered and Slate's Hangup And Listen, doesn't just want to report on football players; he wants to endure training camp as a player would. And so, in the tradition of Paper Lion, he negotiates himself an invitation to the Denver Broncos' camp under Mike Shanahan, trying out at one of the more marginal positions on a football team, punter.

Though there's never any chance that a 43-year-old sportswriter will ever actually make the regular season roster for the Broncos, his fellow team mates, amused and delighted by Fatsis' attempt to kick his way their world, welcome him their fold. They open up to him in ways they would never open up to a regular reporter. And though the success of this book does not hinge solely on the congeniality of the players he competes and trains with -- his charming descriptions of teaching himself to punt prior to trying out with Denver definitely entertain --, A Few Seconds Of Panic would be much poorer for the Broncos shutting him out, dismissing him as a joke.

It's trendy to cut down professional athletes. They are grotesquely over-remunerated for the jobs they perform. and if we aren't discussing their bloated wages, we're pointing out how much trouble they get into, who has the most DWIs, who beats his wife, who hits the Crack pipe. This ignores, of course, that the owners and administrators of the leagues these athletes work for have traditionally been the ones to scale up their profits, to extort more money from fans through tickets and merchandising, and that players have tried mostly to earn for themselves a fair slice of that greedy pie. The lesson here? That we should never judge people we don't know. Without all the facts, we're forced to make generalizations and generalizations about a group of people are, if not outright wrong, are certainly unnuanced and unfair. The players Mr. Fatsis encounters are three-dimensional, possessing morals and dreams and flaws just like the rest of us. Yes, they are handsomely compensated for playing a game, but then they also possess an uncommon drive to succeed, to be better, a drive which has thrust them up into the stratosphere of success. They are people and I, for one, find that gratifying. As is this book... (4/5 Stars)