Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0307394131, Hardcover)
In the summer of 2006, the NFL’s most senior general manager, Ernie Accorsi, invited Tom Callahan “inside” the Giants organization to experience a season—Accorsi’s last—from the front office, the locker room, the sidelines, and the tunnel. Tom made no promises, except that he’d bring to the project the same fairness and thoroughness that characterized his acclaimed Unitas biography,
Johnny U. The result is a remarkable book that is at once a chronicle of a tumultuous season and the story of the NFL over the last three and a half decades, told through the eyes of a man who has dedicated his life to football.
The Giants started the season with high expectations, hoping to ride the talent of players like Eli Manning, Jeremy Shockey, and Tiki Barber to the Super Bowl, but the team quickly fell apart due to injuries.
The GM goes far beyond the specifics of a single season, though. In a marriage of two great raconteurs, one lobbing stories and the other neatly catching them, Callahan and Accorsi—writer and subject—show how the pro game (and the league that showcases it) really works, and the peculiar role of today’s general manager, who must be part seer, part accountant, balancing psyches and salary caps.
At its essence,
The GM is the story of the job—of what it means to be the guy who makes the decisions . . . who’s second-guessed by fans and the media . . . who must deal with endless—and sometimes impossible—expectations.
Filled with the vivid anecdotes and storytelling that made
Johnny U a surprise bestseller,
The GM doesn’t just illuminate. It inspires with its portrait of a consummate football-personnel strategist who, over the course of decades, gave everything to the game he loved.
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:01 -0400)
Wikipedia in English
Tom Callahan's writing style is another let-down. He is technically correct in his structure and grammar at all times but his narrative is really weak. There is no underlying theme that holds the book together and it reads as a series of variously interesting anecdotes. Some of the anecdotes are ridiculously underplayed - why does the blockbuster draft deal that took Eli Manning to New York not feature as a major element? All the book reveals is that "Philip Rivers is good, Eli's better."
There are some interesting insights in The GM and I did enjoy the brief interlude with former Cleveland coach Marty Schottenheimer. Still, I wonder why a pick-up game featuring local kids merited a chapter to start the book off.
Callahan and Accorsi both appear to be baseball men. It shows. I have no idea who some of the baseball references are and why should I be expected to? I'm a football fan and I love the game, drop me some football bones. Callahan also writes up in-game drives as if it were baseball and frankly I skipped it quite often. I do read box scores, I seldom read drive charts even when I'm looking up a game. I don't want to read 1-10-C28 Elway Passes Incomplete because it just doesn't tell me anything.
I'm fairly sure that Callahan intended for this book and his account of Accorsi to read as a nostalgic trip through the eyes of a man who has seen it all. Instead, all that is offered up is Accorsi's affection for various quarterbacks through the years. I want to know what the salary cap did to his business, what he thinks of the modern day athlete with their agents and personal advisers, what Accorsi's views are on running a stable and successful franchise. Instead, I get that Tom Coughlin was real strict about people turning up on time.
I have read quite a few books on American Football. This is the most disappointing. Read You're Okay It's Just a Bruise because it is great and then read some other book on the sport because it is bound to be better than this one. (