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A 5-Foot-8, 170-Pound, 43-Year-Old Sportswriter Plays in the NFL
Penguin Press
July 2008
On Sale: July 3, 2008
352 pages
ISBN: 1594201781
EAN: 9781594201783
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Sports
Drawing on rare access to an NFL team’s players, coaches
and facilities, the author of The New York Times bestseller
Word Freak trains to become a professional-caliber
placekicker. As he sharpens his skills, he gains surprising
insight into the daunting challenges—physical,
psychological, and intellectual—that pro athletes must
master In Word Freak, Stefan Fatsis infiltrated the insular world
of competitive Scrabble® players, ultimately
achieving “expert” status (comparable to a grandmaster
ranking in chess). Now he infiltrates a strikingly
different subculture—pro football. After more than a year
spent working out with a strength coach and polishing his
craft with a gurulike kicking coach, Fatsis molded his
fortyish body into one that could stand up—barely—to the
rigors of NFL training. And over three months in 2006, he
became a Denver Bronco. He trained with the team and lived
with the players. He was given a locker and uniforms
emblazoned with #9. He was expected to perform all the
drills and regimens required of other kickers. He was
unlike his teammates in some ways—most notably, his
livelihood was not on the line as theirs was. But he became
remarkably like them in many ways: He risked crippling
injury just as they did, he endured the hazing that befalls
all rookies, he gorged on 4,000 daily calories, he slogged
through two-a-day practices in blistering heat. Not since
George Plimpton’s stint as a Detroit Lion more than forty
years ago has a writer tunneled so deeply into the NFL. At first, the players tolerated Fatsis, or treated him like
a mascot, but over time they began to think of him as one
of them. And he began to think like one of them. Like the
other Broncos—like all elite athletes—he learned to perfect
a motion through thousands of repetitions, to play through
pain, to silence the crowd’s roar, to banish self-doubt. While Fatsis honed his mind and drove his body past
exhaustion, he communed with every classic athletic type—
the affable alpha male, the overpaid brat, the youthful
phenom, the savvy veteran—and a welter of bracingly
atypical players as well: a fullback who invokes Aristotle,
a quarterback who embraces yoga, a tight end who takes
creative writing classes in the off-season. Fatsis also
witnessed the hidden machinery of a top-flight football
franchise, from the God-is-in-the-details strategizing of
legendary coach Mike Shanahan to the icy calculation with
which the front office makes or breaks careers. With wry candor and hard-won empathy, A Few Seconds of
Panic unveils the mind of the modern pro athlete and the
workings of a storied sports franchise as no book ever has
before.
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