Introducing the Football Canon

Welcome to a new edition of the Blue 58 Book Club!

I’m excited to relaunch this little corner of the Blue 58 podcast experience because it ticks so many boxes of what I love. I love football, I love doing this podcast, I love history, and I love books. Most of the Blue 58 Book Club is going to hit on pretty much all of those at once, so this seems like a no-brainer to add to the podcast rotation.

One of my big goals with Blue 58 specifically and The Power Sweep generally is to help people love football. I’ve gotten a lot out of this sport, and I think a lot of other people can get great things out of it, too, so I want to help them do that. The best way I can think of to do that is to help them love the sport the way that I do, and that involves trying to learn as much about it as possible. And not just the game itself, but the players, moments, and teams that make it special.

To do that, we’re going to start a big project within the Blue 58 Book Club that I’m calling The Football Canon.

What is the Football Canon?

This is based on an old experiment in self-education called the Harvard Classics. In the early 1900s, a man by the name of Charles E. Eliot put together a 50-volume set of written works he thought would give anybody willing to put in the time to read them a great foundation of knowledge.

The goal of the Football Canon will be to do the same, except for general football knowledge and knowledge about the Green Bay Packers. Every month, we’ll look at a book, I’ll give my general thoughts, and throw in whatever audience contributions you’re willing to send my way. And if the book meets what I think is the threshold for inclusion, we’ll include it in our canon of football books that we think everyone should read.

The 3N Test

So how do books get into the Football Canon? Here, too, I’m going to blatantly steal an idea from someone else. I’ve lost his name, but I once saw an art professor online breaking down works of art with what he called the 3N test, the three Ns being novelty, nuance, and narrative. He’d rate each of those three factors on a scale of one to ten, and if the artwork in question had a score of at least 20 points, he considered it good art.

Obviously, there are some problems that come with doing things that way, but I think it’s as good a standard as any, so I’m going to roll with it. Here’s how each of the three factors works.

A book’s “novelty” is its unique perspective or contribution to the overall conversation about football. Here, we’re asking whether or not a book tells a story or explores a facet of football that hasn’t been explored a hundred times already. Does it uncover something hidden, offer rare access, or tackle a neglected topic? If so, it’s likely to score very high in its novelty factor.

A book’s “nuance” is the degree to which it understands its subject. Anyone can point out that there was once a quarterback named Bart Starr for the Packers, but a book with high nuance will give us a thoughtful, layered, and intelligent exploration into Starr’s life, career, and accomplishments, and it will do it with real insight, not through just reciting cliches.

Finally, a book’s narrative is the actual storytelling and the quality of its writing. I’m sure we’ve all read interesting books about interesting things that failed to talk about those interesting things in an interesting way. A book with a high narrative score will accomplish that task.

The starter canon

To get us started on our way to building a football canon, I’ve selected five books (three general football books and two that are Packers-specific) that score highly enough to be included in the canon and give us a chance to launch the project without an empty list.

The first is “America's Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured America” by Michael MacCambridge. If you want a great overview of how the NFL grew from a fly-by-night local organization to the international behemoth it is today, MacCambridge has you covered. He deftly guides readers through the early days of the sport to the hyper-modern, hugely expensive extravaganza of the 21st century.

The second general work is “Paper Lion” by George Plimpton. Plenty of people have done the “normal guy doing a specialized job” thing over the years, but Plimpton was the first to bring that perspective to professional sports, spending a part of the 1966 preseason with the Detroit Lions. The book is good enough on its own to merit inclusion, but I think it’s valuable today as a firsthand look into what life was like for a professional football player in the days when the sport was really just beginning to take off.

Finally, the third general book is “Collision Low Crossers” by Nicholas Dawidoff. While Plimpton spent time with the primordial Detroit Lions, Dawidoff hung out with the relatively modern-day New York Jets, giving us a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the challenges of the Rex Ryan era in New York. What struck me about how this book is how grim most of it is, especially relative to “Paper Lion.” Old school football was a lark in comparison to the often joyless grind of the modern game, and Dawidoff captures that nicely.

For Packers-specific books, I think the obvious choices are the right ones.

You can’t talk about Packers books without mentioning “When Pride Still Mattered” by David Maraniss. This is a gold standard biography, period. It’s just a happy coincidence that it’s about Vince Lombardi. You can’t read this book without your perspective on Lombardi changing in some way. Your appreciation for his football acumen may increase, but you’ll have to wrestle with tough questions about how Lombardi handled his home life; he wasn’t much of a father, if that gives you any kind of indication of what you’re in for. Still, it’s worth reading just to get a more complete picture of what Lombardi was really like, even if you’ll never really get the full measure of a person by reading about them.

And along those same lines, Lombardi’s book “Run to Daylight,” heavily co-written by legendary sportswriter W.C. Heinz, is an indispensable book in any Packers fan’s library. Want to know how hard it is to be an NFL coach? Lombardi gives a day-by-day look at what it’s like to prepare for a game back in the 1960s. Things have only gotten more complex since then, and it’s hard to imagine any modern writer getting the access Heinz got to Lombardi.

What’s next?

With those books in our starter set, here’s where we’re headed next. Three weeks from today, I’ll be dropping my first look at a new football book, and our first title will be “Starr: My Life in Football” by Bart Starr. If you’d like to grab a copy and dive in, you have a few weeks to do so and send any thoughts you might have your way. If you just want to wait for my take on it, you’re more than welcome to do that as well.

So there we have it. The Blue 58 Book Club is off and running. Let’s get to reading, shall we?