Finished A Few Bricks Shy of a Load

Finished A Few Bricks Shy of a Load by Roy Blount, Jr. this morning. It's an account of Blount's year embedded with the 1973 Pittsburgh Steelers. I've been meaning to read this book for oh, say 25 years, and now I really wish I had read it earlier. It was superb. Blount really got into the heart of the team, which is to say, it seemed he really understood the players as people. Not supermen, no interchangeable pieces in a football puzzle, but as people like everyone else. He also did a fine job reporting on the ownership of the team, the Rooney family. He swore he didn't want to write a glowing review of the Rooney family, but that he couldn't help it. He felt a little defeated as a journalist that he couldn't find anything significantly mean or rotten about the family. Because Chuck Noll was cool to him, Blount never really was able to talk about the coaching much, but that didn't really matter. This wasn't a book of X's and O's anyway.

Blount covered many other important areas: race, drugs, the toll on the body, and locker room chemistry. All were done with a very fine and detailed touch. It's hard to remember a time in sports when steroids were legal, let alone not worth much of a mention. One of the linemen talked about how steroids helped him bulk up out of college but how his wife made him quit. That's it....one small mention. One has to assume that it was so common that it didn't warrant more attention. He did talk about players using amphetemines to get up for games and how some players didn't like that they couldn't smoke pot on the plane on the way back from road games but that they could drink beer.

It was also weird to read a book that had some Steelers I don't really remember well from my childhood. I had heard of Ray Mansfield being a great center, but I never, ever remember the Steelers without Mike Webster as the starting center...he was still in college. And Jack Lambert wasn't a Steeler in '73, he was a senior at Kent State. That was really bizarre. And stranger still, no Lynn Swann and no John Stallworth. They were still in college too. Four Hall-of-Famers that I grew up know as THE Steelers weren't on the team at the time. Noll had a helluva draft in '74 though, wouldn't you say?

Simply put, I loved this book. If it had just been about any football team, I'd have really liked it, but since it was my hometown team, I loved it.