In my quest for comp titles, The Throwback Special by Chris Bachelder came up. The premise of this relatively short novel is killer: 22 middle-aged men gather every year to recreate "The Throwback Special," the play that ended the career of quarterback Joe Theismann.
For those in need of a refresher, the grisly play happened during a November 1985 Monday Night Football game between the Washington Redskins and the New York Giants. Washington ran a flea flicker, and when running back John Riggins pitched the ball back to Theismann after the handoff, the quarterback was already feeling the heat from the Giants defense. All-World linebacker Lawrence Taylor pulverized Theismann, whose leg snapped in vomit-inducing fashion on national television.
It ended up being the last play of his career. During the hit, Theismann recalled, his leg "snapped like a breadstick." It is one of the grisliest plays in football history. I don't suggest searching for the video online unless you're a psycho with a strong stomach.
With that very specific setup out of the way, The Throwback Special follows a group of men who recreate the play every year. They have very specific rules and pick their roles via an annual draft. Participants, for example, are only allowed to play Lawrence Taylor or Theismann every few years and everyone must serve at some point as an offensive or defensive lineman.
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| Image via Indianapolis Public Library |
Certainly, the premise is interesting. These guys gather once a year and don't really know each other despite all the time they've spent together (it's been going on for 17 years). They watch film, they hold a draft, they order pizza, they swap stories, they lament problems at home and in marriages.
Readers are introduced to a dizzying number of characters in a short span of time, and it's hard to keep up. Admittedly, some of these characters are memorable ("Fat Mike," for example, is an ironically named athletic Adonis and Carl is a barber who doesn't really like cutting hair every year).
The strength of the novel is the characters' collective adherence to tradition and ritual. Life isn't easy and recreating "The Throwback Special" grants them escape and release, at least for the weekend. Bachelder infuses the novel with plenty of dark humor.
But because of the number of characters and the brevity of the narrative, he doesn't have much time to develop these valiant competitors. As a result, we get only sketches of these men and their dedication to the task--stylistically, I suppose readers come to know them just about as well as their fellow participants do over the span of more than a decade and a half.
It won't be for everyone. While football is at the center of the plot, the book doesn't spend much time talking about the game or, really, even the play itself. But you will walk away with one important understanding: Mark May always does his job.
