You might think that Terrell Owens, the star wide receiver for the Dallas Cowboys, would be a bit leery of the publishing business. After all, this is the man who complained about being misquoted in his own autobiography. But Owens seems attached to the notion of himself as an author. His brand new literary offering, T.O.’s Finding Fitness, features a gigantic cover photo of Owens, mostly naked, proudly displaying his handsome abdominal muscles. Although some passages in the book suggest a new subtlety in T.O.’s oeuvre (“My approach emphasizes more show than tell. The mind understands one thing: Either I can do what I see, or I cannot”), Finding Fitness is mostly about how to attain the physique of a pro football player. One of the chapters is titled “Champion Legs.”
The heavily-ghostwritten celebrity athlete “author” is easy to make fun of, I know. And I should probably show a little love to the NFL and its players—published and otherwise—in the run-up to that sweet confection of commerce and testosterone known as the Super Bowl. But when I see a book like T.O.’s Finding Fitness, or the recent yet long-forgotten Plaxico Burress biography, it makes me pine for the kind of sports writing that posits the athlete as thinker. The touchstone example of this genre is John McPhee’s career-launching work about Bill Bradley, A Sense of Where You Are.
Lately there has been a lot of press about a gifted football player on the Florida State Seminoles who skipped part of a game in order to interview for a Rhodes Scholarship. He’s the first Rhodes Scholar who’s likely to play pro football in decades. But the reason this young man has become such a story is that we don’t really expect athletes of his caliber to be students—even if they’re in college. And what about high school? The relationship between football, education and American manhood is portrayed, often brilliantly, in the NBC series Friday Night Lights, which shows us that school is really just a place you go in the morning before practicing for the big game. Character is forged on the field of play, not in the classroom.
One of the funniest things I’ve read online recently is this attempt to predict the winner of the Super Bowl based on an analysis of different brands of beer. The piece, which appears on Austin Kelley’s literary sports website The Modern Spectator, shows how we can love football by mocking it.
And mocking it can be so easy. Did you know Terrell Owens is also a children’s book author?
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See Also: To Preserve One Life
