February 2005    

Dream Season: A Professor Joins America's Oldest Semi-Pro Football Team Author: Bob Cowser, Jr. Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press $24.00 (225 P.) ISBN: 0871139235 B&T         YBP Reviewed by Bob Nardini, Senior Vice President & Head Bibliographer If you asked at the Super Bowl for a show of hands on how many had heard of the EFL, there would be more hands in the air at that moment from fans trying to flag down a food vendor than from those who knew anything about the Empire Football League. Even professional football diehards are probably unaware of the world of semi-professional football and will be about as familiar with South African cricket teams as they will be with gridiron units like the Syracuse Vipers, Glens Falls Greenjackets, Capitaland (Albany) Thunder, Montreal Condors, and Vermont Ice Storm. All five were on the 2001 schedule of the Watertown Red and Black, a team active in most years since 1895 in that small northern New York city, a franchise that's played nearly 800 games, winning more often than losing to build a storied legacy among the 500 or so semi-pro teams playing today. Watertown's players, unpaid but supplied with uniforms and most equipment-making them more fortunate than the many semi-pro players who are required to buy their own-practice two nights a week and play games on Saturday nights across their May through September training period and season, balancing football against family obligations and day jobs like short-order cook, prison guard, truck driver, grocery store manager, and soldier at nearby Fort Drum. In 2001 the Red and Black roster also included a professor of English, Bob Cowser, who all season drove an hour each way to play football from Canton, New York, where he lives and teaches at St. Lawrence University. Cowser hadn't played since high school in Tennessee, and Dream Season is his account of taking up the game again at age thirty, getting himself back into shape in the college weight room to mostly ride the bench that year for the Red and Black, but recording a handful of triumphs, such as a sack of the Montreal quarterback while filling in for a game at defensive end. Football and literature seldom intersect-although Cowser does point out that Robert Frost, James Dickey, and Archibald MacLeish all played the game at one time in their lives. The single literary moment that would come to mind for many fans is George Plimpton's Paper Lion, in which he described his attempt to play quarterback at the 1963 training camp of the National Football League's Detroit Lions. That was a football book with barely a trace of autobiography. One wishes that Cowser, whose book includes plenty about his family, his marriage, and himself, had done the same. With a different game plan for the book maybe he would have captured semi-pro football like H.G. Bissinger did high school football in Friday Night Lights. Even so, Cowser's topic was a splendid one, this unornate pastime that's distant cousin to the marketed polish of the NFL, a sub-culture concealed in the fabric of hundreds of small cities across the country. But Cowser writes enough about late-night, beer-soaked bus rides home from away games, grass-stained practices, and fairground fields with aluminum bleachers for a few hundred fans, with nothing in the game for players other than the love of it, to show any fan of the NFL that they know less about football than they think they do. Published by YBP Library Services 999 Maple St., Contoocook, NH 03229 USA v: 800.258.3774   f: 603.746.5628 w: www.ybp.com   e: academia@ybp.com All rights reserved.