Long Bomb: How the Xfl Became TV's Biggest Fiasco

A joint venture of NBC Sports and World Wrestling Federation impresario and ""bumpkin billionaire"" Vince McMahon, the XFL-with its candid locker room cameras, WWF-style bad attitude and faster, looser, meaner brand of football-was supposed to revolutionize the way America watched sports. Instead, the league crashed and burned over the course of a single, calamitous season. Journalist Forrest's behind-the-scenes book chronicles that downfall in sharp, often witty prose, paying special attention to larger-than-life personalities: from blustery egotists like McMahon and ex-wrestler/Minnesota governor/XFL commentator Jesse Ventura, to the cockily self-deluded jocks, most of them NFL rejects, who saw the XFL as their last, best hope for making it. Interspersing their stories with accounts of bungled telecasts and on-field chaos, Forrest too often lets slip his obvious disdain, taking passing potshots at the ""TV creeps"" and ""advertising hoodlums"" of the NFL establishment and tossing off such incidental insults as ""beyond alopecia, Jesse Ventura shared precious little with Howard Cosell."" But if the author displays a little too much of his own XFL-type attitude, it does not cloud his generally clear-eyed account of Mr. McMahon's failed enterprise, in all its monumental folly.