If I Don't Six : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: An imitation Hemingway description of college football
Review: Elwood Reid's "If I Don't Six," written in a good imitation of Hemingway's spare prose, is the tale of a bright but immature eighteen-year-old's encounter with Big Time college football. His concerns the Big Question,"What shall I do with my life?" Can he endure the rigors of Michigan football to keep a full-ride scholarship as a ticket out of Cleveland, or will he return and begin "loading Hilos into trucks" for a living? Reid's story is less an expose of the rough, physically punishing regimes of an offensive lineman, than it is a tale of his inner struggles and less-than-enlightened behavior. He seems to gravitate toward team members who resembles characters from the film "Animal House." When he joins another team member in stealing items from the team equipment room, his actions are perhaps meant to reveal to us his ambivalent feelings about playing football; instead, what comes across is the considerable self-destructive streak that compromises his "ticket out." Reid's book is not an indictment of college football, however he may have intended it. "If I Don't Six" is yet another coming-of-age novel, another story of a young man's journey toward maturity, complete with the many irrational detours that occur along the way.

Rating:
Summary: An imitation Hemingway description of college football
Review: Elwood Reid's "If I Don't Six," written in a good imitation of Hemingway's spare prose, is the tale of a bright but immature eighteen-year-old's encounter with Big Time college football. His concerns the Big Question,"What shall I do with my life?" Can he endure the rigors of Michigan football to keep a full-ride scholarship as a ticket out of Cleveland, or will he return and begin "loading Hilos into trucks" for a living? Reid's story is less an expose of the rough, physically punishing regimes of an offensive lineman, than it is a tale of his inner struggles and less-than-enlightened behavior. He seems to gravitate toward team members who resembles characters from the film "Animal House." When he joins another team member in stealing items from the team equipment room, his actions are perhaps meant to reveal to us his ambivalent feelings about playing football; instead, what comes across is the considerable self-destructive streak that compromises his "ticket out." Reid's book is not an indictment of college football, however he may have intended it. "If I Don't Six" is yet another coming-of-age novel, another story of a young man's journey toward maturity, complete with the many irrational detours that occur along the way.

Rating:
Summary: Not enough depth about playing div. I college football.
Review: I finished Elwood Reid's novel more than two weeks ago and its events and characters are still very much with me. On the surface the novel is a depiction of big time football at Michigan, and the main character's stoical rejection of its values, but its themes run much deeper than that. Reid captures the male world anywhere, regardless of milieu--high school, sports, or business--a place where the smashing of egos goes on until a hierarchy is determined. The book is wonderfully felt and alive, its scenes tangible, poignant, funny, and terrifying; and in the main character's refusal to be tackled and kept down by the world around him, the novel rises into a kind of heroism as real as it is remarkable.

Rating:
Summary: Realistic?
Review: This book was dissapointing to me for several reasons. The most evident of which was its lack of realism. Coaches constantly were either swearing at or hitting players. Every collision ended in blood, broken bones, etc. Now I am aware that coaches establish discipline and that football is a violent game. But if the game were as this author describes it, who would want to play it? Unfortunately, this author's description is way off base. To be fair, this book is Fiction, so it is the author's right to "liven up" a story in order to make it more entertaining for the reader. But his use of real college teams leads one to believe that the story has a certain element of reality, which this book did not have. I was shocked to see how many of the other reviewers finished this book and believe they now have a better insight on Div. 1 football and men's behavior in general. If you want a real look at life as a Division 1 football player, try Ken Denlinger's (For the Glory). If you want fantasy, I will give you my copy of this book. I don't have a use for it.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting things to know about college football
Review: This book was interesting. I found it very fun to read. The many things that college football players go through at a big time school were funny. Some were gross. It entertained me though. The story itself was a little sketchy here and there, and jumped forward too fast at certain times I thought. I found that there were gaps in the story that left me wondering if more should have been explained about this or that, but each reader should decide that for themselves. If you have ever wondered what an athlete sometimes has to go through at a college, then this may start to enlighten you a little. It's by no means a tell all tale of sports, just one mans view of the collegiate system, a view that I found fun to read.

Rating:
Summary: Very good
Review: This is a book that is well worth your time. The vivid descriptions of the environment -not to mention - the characters that make up the world of big time college football are superb. The prose is almost 'Updikean' at times. The disgusting,but necessary, gross out scene at the party towards the end of the book sums up what this world must be all about. My only minor negative comment is that the boot camp, hard coaches seem to be a little cliche. (it reminded me of one of those hokey 1970s movies starring Robbie Benson). But who knows - the author lived this experience and I didn't, so it could be dead-on accurate.

I read the book based on the rave review in the August issue of Esquire and found it to be worthy of such praise.

Rating:
Summary: introspective, muckraking expose of "big-time" football
Review: This is a disturbing, unsettling novel, one which will not make friends with those who believe in the myth of the All-American boy and the notion that collegiate athletics are populated by "student-athletes." Indeed, If I Don't Six compels the reader to examine not only the financial corruption of collegiate football, but it forces the reader to sadly ponder the corruption of many young men who prostate themselves at the altar of mind-numbingly dumb coaches. Anti-intellectualism and body-breaking comepte for attention in this tightly written and fatalistic novel. As I approached the conclusion, I marveled that the author lived to speak about his experiences, rueful of the enormous costs he has paid.

Rating:
Summary: Readable but repetitive
Review: Working from his own experiences as a Michigan Wolverine, Reid's story of life within a successful university football program presents a downbeat and ugly view of the college game that stands in stark contrast to the player work ethic evident in For The Glory and A Civil War. Reid's namesake hero is Elwood Reilly, an athlete cursed with a brain and a conscience (but also an uncanny self-destructive streak), whose refusal to conform with the animalistic behaviour of the other "fellas" of the team endangers his football scholarship, the only means by which he can escape the grind of daily working-class existence that is slowly destroying his father. Elwood's experience of his teammates' sordid and criminal off-field antics not only strips away college football's idealized pageantry in brutal fashion, but moreover starts him on a path of inward contemplation that leaves him trapped and wondering what else he has in life besides football. Unsurprisingly, If I Don't Six is a very male book; however, the scandalous misadventures of Reilly's teammates quickly become tiresome. All too often as well the book lapses into teen melodrama, particularly when Reilly has to decide between staying with his vapid longtime girlfriend Heather, or instead following his attraction towards the more mysterious and unorthodox Kate. Although highly readable, Reid's novel in the end generates only a passing interest within the reader, and fails to say anything new about the dilemmas of college football or of life in the American Midwest.