LeBron has made “The Decision.” Baseball is into the dog days of summer. The World Cup has flopped to a finish. Fortunately, this means we are just days away from…
…the 2010-2011 NFL football season (woohoo!). Most teams will open their training camps over the next few days, and for the first time ever, the New Orleans Saints will open the season as the defending Super Bowl Champions.
Now, the Saints open camp on July 29th, but we’ve still got a month and a half before a real game (and 3 weeks until the preseason exhibition games begin) — and if you find yourself waiting just a little impatiently, you can fill your football appetite with a couple new books:
Home Team, by the Saints’ head coach Sean Payton, recounts the synchronized rebuilding of New Orleans and the Saints post-Katrina. Sports exist as artificial, contrived conflicts, but a team can take on significance because it stands as a symbol for the fans, for its home city, particularly for a city beleaguered like New Orleans was after the storm. Payton was perfectly positioned to see how the city, struggling with the rebuilding effort, and weary from years and years of poor Saints teams, latched onto the team as proof that New Orleans could thrive.
The perfect companion book is Drew Brees’ Coming Back Stronger. Brees’ book covers the same time period as Payton’s (as you’d expect), but with the added personal dimension of Brees’ own career struggles. Brees is now mentioned along with Manning and Brady as the best QBs in the league, so it’s easy to forget that during his time with the Chargers, he was widely regarded as an accurate, but weak-armed game-manager who could be trusted to hit tight ends and running backs, but couldn’t win the big game for you — and that was before he suffered a devastating shoulder injury that many predicted would sap what little arm strength he had. Brees’ story of rebuilding his own career dovetails perfectly with the Saints’ rise to the the championship.
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