A Sportscaster’s Guide to Watching Football
By Mark Oristano
Synergy Books
August 2009
160pp

Here is the blurb from the publisher:

Want to know what everyone is cheering about? Learn to enjoy and understand the game with the football fanatic in your life. This book is the ultimate football guide for the novice fan. You’ll get answers to such complex questions as:

What is that yellow line on the field, and why does it keep moving?
What down is it, and why do I care?
What is a T Formation?
Whats the difference between a running back and a tight end?
What are Special Teams, and what makes them special?

Laced with hilarious and insightful anecdotes from Mark Oristano’s career as a pro football sportscaster, A Sportscasters Guide to Watching Football will turn you into a football-watching pro, or at least let you fake it.

The Short of It:

Short, yet packed with useful information. This is the guide for those that want to know more about the game yet don’t have a lot of time in front of the TV to figure it all out.

The Rest of It:

When I was asked to review this book I jumped at the chance. Sometimes books just end up in your hands at the right time, you know? The Hub has always been incredibly frustrated by my lack of knowledge in the area of football. When I watch football, I comment on the outfits (uniforms) and during the Superbowl, I choose a team to root for simply by asking who the underdog is. I always root for the underdog. This lack of information began in my high school days. I was on pep squad and during all the games I ran from one end of the field to the other with absolutely no idea what the heck I was doing or why. I just followed the others but felt incredibly silly at times.

However, those days are over! Well, not quite over but after reading A Sportscaster’s Guide to Watching Football, I feel as if I can at least follow the game now. Mark Oristano spent 30 years as a professional sports broadcaster so he certainly knows the game, but what impressed me with this book is that he tells me what I need to know in layman’s terms yet provides all of the vocabulary necessary to talk like pro.

The book is peppered with tips. Here’s an example:

If you’ve been watching football, you’ve probably been watching the football. I’m going to give you an order here: DON’T WATCH THE BALL. I know it sounds odd, since the ball is the whole point of the game, but the ball doesn’t tell you what’s going on.

So true.

The book is also peppered with sections titled Cool Things to Say During Game:

To really make the point, when the two-minute time-out commercial break is over, as your team comes up to the line of scrimmage, and your QB goes under center, swirl your drink, make that ice noise, and say, “Work the sideline, baby!”

See what I mean? Useful stuff. Since I knew nothing about the game, any info is really better than none, so feedback from me may not be that useful in determining if this is the book for you, so I had The Hub read it. You’ll be happy to know that he gave it his seal of approval!

With it being so easy to read and it being so short, I think a lot of folks might enjoy this and it would make a great stocking stuffer.

Source: Thanks to Phenix and Phenix Literary Publicists for sending me this review copy.