Shane Life

Playing for Pizza
by John Grisham
RATING: 7 out of 10

Remember back in the day when the world clamored over when the next Grisham book would come out and how great it would be? I remember reading A Time to Kill and The Firm years ago and devouring them as I marveled at Grisham’s ability to make legal proceedings accessible and to make lawyers seem a little less…um…lawyer-y. For about 6 years during the late 80’s and early 90’s, he dominated the book world. His books now come a little less often, but are still putting plenty of coin in his pockets.

Grisham has written 16 legal fiction books and 4 non-legal fiction books (as well as a single legal non-fiction book). Playing for Pizza falls into that second non-legal fiction category and focuses on an American football player who has managed one of the single biggest failures registered in the history of the NFL (think Lin Elliott).

Rick Dockery is a typical anti-hero…lazy, physically gifted, a real schmoozer. But he’s also tainted goods. No one in the NFL will sign him so he flies the coop off to Parma, Italy where they play real American football (not that silly stuff we call soccer). Apparently, Italy has a league that allows 3 American players per team (Grisham apparently discovered American football while researching another book in Italy) and the competition is probably equal to that of large-high-school football.

The title of the book comes from the way that most of the players in the league get paid…with pizza and beer. Most of the Italian players are athletic guys who just enjoy the game. Oh, to have players that enjoy the game…

Anyway, you can imagine what happens. But predictability is not the biggest sin of this book…the story itself is interesting and Grisham’s descriptions of the food and the cities of Italy made me miss it very much. The story is light on character development and it just made too many leaps where there were opportunities for great storytelling. The book reads more like a screenplay and, frankly, it will probably be better as a movie. Actors will (hopefully) be able to capture the nuance and subtlety of the characters’ feelings, which was one of the major omissions from the book.

Still, it’s a quick, enjoyable read; it just leaves you wanting a little more. It certainly could have been longer, only clocking in at less than 250 pages, giving Grisham more room to develop the characters, but like I said, it’s something that actors will be able to overcome in a movie (as long as they are decent).