 Bissinger’s first sports tome in 15 years is another bestseller. |
Quietly, Buzz Bissinger is a lightning rod for controversy. In Friday Night Lights he examined life in the small Texas town of Odessa and its relationship to high school football.
Along the way he investigated Odessa's archaic racial attitudes and how football had replaced education in importance at Permian High School, making him, for a time, a pariah in the eyes of the good citizens of Odessa. His new book, Three Nights in August: Strategy, Heartbreak, and Joy Inside the Mind of a Manager, just published by Houghton Mifflin and rapidly climbing the New York Times bestseller list, unwittingly finds Bissinger's subject, manager Tony La Russa of the St. Louis Cardinals, right in the middle of the burgeoning steroid scandal that has rocked baseball this spring.
When former slugger Jose Canseco named names in Juice—including the one-time single-season homerun king Mark McGwire—La Russa, who managed both of them, was quick to jump to McGwire's defense. "I don't know if [their relationship] blurred La Russa's judgement," says Bissinger thoughtfully via phone from his home in Philadelphia. "I think he's convinced that McGwire didn't do steroids. I don't agree with that. I found McGwire's testimony before congress to be depressing and sad, and the only conclusion you could draw was that he had obviously taken some sort of substance." Written before the scandal broke, the few pages Bissinger devoted to steroids in Three Nightsseemed to catch La Russa in denial about both the extent of steroid use in the game and McGwire's own involvement in it.
Their disagreement over McGwire may be the only one they had as they collaborated on Three Nights in August, a look at a crucial three-game series between the Cardinals and the Chicago Cubs. La Russa is not your average baseball manager—he has a law degree—and his innovative method of managing has drawn raves from many. Others think him obsessive and accuse him of micromanaging—he once used five hurlers to throw eight pitches—in essence, taking the fun out of the game by not letting the players play.
"Tony came to me," says Bissinger, "because he was an admirer of Friday Night Lights and my voice and style of writing. I said, 'Tony, for it to work, for me to put my imprint on this book beyond the traditional collaboration, I need access.' " La Russa took Bissinger into his confidence and allowed him unprecedented entrée to the Cardinals clubhouse. The resulting book brings the reader not only inside the clubhouse, but inside La Russa's life, in baseball and out. "Tony was enormously forthcoming about himself, about his personal life, the effects of baseball on his marriage," says Bissinger. "In a sense the book is about all managers, it's about the timeless beauty of baseball."
Harry Gerard ("For better or worse, I am a Buzz!") Bissinger was born in New York City in 1954 and attended the University of Pennsylvania. After stints on newspapers in Norfork and St. Paul he landed on the Philadelphia Inquirer. In 1987 he was a co-recipient with two other reporters of a Pulitzer Prize for a series on the Philadelphia court system. After covering the mayor's race in 1987, he became an editor at the Inquirer "which, I guess, was the kiss of death or the boon to my career."
It turned out to be boon when he decided to go off on his own and write a book. "I kept thinking about this idea of high school sports and high school football," he recalls, "and the impact it can have in America. So I quit the paper and moved down to Odessa, Texas, in July of '88.
"It was beautiful culture shock," recalls Bissinger, "because I think that's the best part of being a reporter. I've always felt that newspapers are really wrong when they insist on reporters having previous experience when they switch to a new beat. I think culture shock is great. It was unbelievably stimulating. For me it was like being in a Third World country. It was experiencing different people, different sensations, different mood, different atmosphere, and I just soaked it up."
The result was Friday Night Lights, first published in 1990 by Addison-Wesley. The book's success allowed Bissinger to get off the newsman treadmill for good, travel a bit, and even try his hand at writing for television. Friday Night Lightswent on to become a classic, and the basis of a feature length film.
Although hailed nationally, Bissinger received a cold reception from the citizens of Odessa as he exposed their racial attitudes to the world. "There aren't many outsiders who spend a lot of time in Odessa," he says, "and as an outsider I had a perspective on it that very few people in town shared. Everything in the book was accurate." Bissinger says the town has changed over time, and he thinks the book had something to do with it, "based on what the people told me." Bissinger says Odessa was forced to "look at itself in the mirror." His portrait of La Russa, combined with the ongoing steroids scandal involving many of the manager's ex-players, may force a similar inspection.
