Balls [Hardcover]

Nanci Kincaid (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 1998

BALLS is the story of a college football coach, his rise, his fall, and his fallback position. You could say BALLS is the story of a coach's kick-off, his first, second, and third downs . . . and his punt. But BALLS is a coach's story that belongs to the coach's wife. To her, and to his mother, his mother-in-law, his daughter, his assistants' wives, his players' mothers and girlfriends, and even his players' grandmothers. It's the women standing behind this handsome football hero who tell the story behind the headlines of Mac Gibbs, Birmingham University coach Catfish Bomar's star quarterback, who married Dixie Carraway, the beautiful homecoming queen. Set in Alabama, home state of the legendary Paul "Bear" Bryant, BALLS is told by fifteen women and one little girl touched by Mac Gibbs's fall from fame as a college quarterback to infamy as head coach of the Birmingham University Black Bears. It's told in those women's voices, from their seats in the stands. They watch the other women, worry when players are slow to get up off the ground, pray when players are carried off on stretchers. They don't care much for the "science" of the game--or its brutality. They see football as it really is--sexy, dirty, sweaty, painful, empowering, corrupt. The story they tell is often funny and not always pretty, as the view from deep inside rarely is. This is a novel that moves with the force of a fourth down charge, and shimmers with the tears of the women waiting outside the locker-room door when the game is lost. The author, twice a head coach's wife, knows whereof she writes so brilliantly. She also knows a lot about love. And BALLS is, above all, a love story.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

If you link your happiness to the whims of a game, the odds of ever feeling truly satisfied are slim to none. In Balls, Nanci Kincaid reveals the misguided hopes and unfulfilled dreams of women trapped in lives that spiral around the coaches and players of Southern college football. She also exposes a darker side of the sport, where sexist attitudes, racism, and ignorance run as strong and deep as a receiver on a post pattern.

Kincaid creates a large cast of interesting women by switching point of view from one chapter to the next. Her exacting dialogue allows half-joking responses, subtle revelations, and layers of unspoken subtext to shape each character. What happens when the smart, beautiful, rich homecoming princess succumbs to the passion of backseat love and marries the poor star quarterback? Pretty much what you'd expect. "Sometimes I tried to believe the ball was love, truth, or beauty so that I could look at the game, and the men playing it, differently, as if it ... would make the life I was living something worth devoting myself to." But Kincaid has devised a trick play, using stereotype as a trap to lure the reader into an intriguing study of the frailties of human behavior, the restraints on women in a male-dominated culture, and the fascinating ways people change over time as age and experience join to forge wisdom. --George Laney

From Publishers Weekly

In the same season as Elwood Reid's If I Don't Six (Forecasts, June 29) comes another fictional expose of the college football scene?this time from a woman's point of view. Kincaid describes, with mixed success, the education of a coach's wife in the deep South, where football is a secular religion. Having twice been married to a university football coach, Kincaid knows just how and often why the pigskin bounces, and it shows in the ease with which she handles her 15 female narrators, who view the game from every side but the gridiron itself. Some come on for just a few pages; others, including Dixie Gibbs (the coach's wife), her mother, her mother's maid, her mother-in-law, her daughter and her friends (wives of other coaches or mothers of players) reappear throughout. This structure impedes the story: Is it about Dixie, about her husband Mac, their marriage, the multiple burdens on the family? It is all about these things, in part, but the parts don't cohere. Kincaid takes on rich material: changing racial attitudes on and off the field (the story begins in 1968); a thinly veiled portrait of Alabama's legendary cpack, Paul "Bear" Bryant; an insider's view of recruiting; the relief when "the girl's father dropped the charges"; pastors who yell, "Hit him like you mean it, boy." But it all makes us long for a strong central intelligence. Even if she spreads her voices too thin, however, Kincaid is a master at re-creating the speech and spirit of ebullient Southern women, and the novel achieves a seductive power in the parallel lives of the coaches' wives, each one a hostage to her husband's career. As her 1997 collection of short stories, Pretending the Bed is a Raft, proved, Kincaid is a fresh, promising voice in the serio-comic good ol' girl school, with lots to say about male- and female-bonding, off-the-field competition and troubled marriages. In her chorus-line rendition of A Doll's House at halftime, she hasn't quite found the shape to show her wit and wisdom to their best advantage. Author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 396 pages
• Publisher: Algonquin Books; 1st edition (October 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1565121783
• ISBN-13: 978-1565121782
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,650,557 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Unhappy Life of a Coach's Wife, December 23, 2000

By 

R. Spell "raspell" (Memphis, TN USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Balls: A Novel (Paperback)

This is an interesting book set apart by it's narrative strategy. Each chapter is from the perspective of a different character. Frankly, I found this strategy confusing and difficult to follow. Particularly if you couldn't remember some of the minor characters. That aside, this book does an excellent job of showing what a coach's wife's life is like. Everyone knows coaches work long hours. Kincaid shows the real toll on the family.

What's not fully brought out in the publicity of the book is that it also deals with race relations in the south as well as that area of the country's obsession with college football. This book gives another perspective of the vicious tactics used by boosters when a coach is not performing to their expectations.

What is also interesting is that Ms. Kincaid is married to Dick Tomey, the Arizona coach who recently resigned after great success because the pressures from fans were just too great. Kincaid's biography touches on the fact that she was previously married to another coach who worked at Alabama (clearly the fictional school in the book) and Arkansas State. My guess is she may have formerly been married to Ray Perkins but none of the articles I read gave her first husband's name. If you know, please email me.

In summary, I enjoyed this book and read it in two days. It touches many important points about college athletics and race relations.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars THIS IS ONE NOT TO MISS ~~~~~~~~~ NOT REALLY A SPORTS BOOK ~~, August 9, 2006

By 

Pamela A. Poddany "Book Freak!" (Toledo, Ohio) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Balls: A Novel (Paperback)

Being a fan of Nanci Kincaid, I am working my way thru her books with reluctance ONLY due to the fact I will soon run out of her reading material!

BALLS is a great book. The title may be a little misleading as when I first saw it I thought it would be a total sports book. How wrong! There are sports moments, but the story revolves around the women involved. READ THIS BOOK!!!

This book tells the story of Dixie and Max, childhood sweethearts who marry. Max becomes a college football coach and Dixie is left to tend to the children, home, and, sadly, herself. I loved Dixie and her Southern charm and Southern style. Her girl friends, mother, sisters-in-law, mother-in-law, friends, and daughter all help make the story flow and go.

This book is told in the narrative form, but what was most interesting was the fact that every woman involved in Max's life tells her story. Some of the "chapters" are one-half page long. This made the book so much more interesting and exciting being told from sooooooooooo many points-of-view. However, this form of story-telling DID NOT make the book confusing in the least.

As a NBA fan, I am constantly aware of coaches, their coaching staff, the job changes, the media, the love/hate affair that the public has with them. However, this book is from the WOMEN in their life's perspective and it is so good. When I see a coach standing on the side lines now I will think HIS POOR WIFE! There is SO much social status, politics, and CRAP involved, not to mention the toll it has to take on their personal lives. HATS OFF TO ALL COACHES AND THEIR FAMILIES!!!!!!!!!!

The women telling their stories are smart, wise, rich, poor, black, white, educated, uneducated, happy, sad, you name it -- how Ms. Kincaid was able to make each and every character DIFFERENT and have her own style and voice was amazing to me.

Don't miss this book. It IS good, as are all of Ms. Kincaid's writings -- check them out and read them. You will not be disappointed.

I was startled to see how long it has been since this book has been reviewed. Hopefully, people will find this book, read it, and enjoy it as much as I did!

Thank you! Pam {go PISTONS!!!}

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I live this life, October 9, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Balls: A Novel (Paperback)

My best friend and I are married to two head coaches at a high school brimming with a fanatical winning football tradition. I bought this book for her when it first was published, and told her to highlight sections she thought were realistic. When we got back together to discuss the novel, we had both highlighted the same sentences over and over again. The novel is written by someone who knows how families, and marriages, get sacrificed on the altar of athletics. I can only shudder at the thought of being married to a college coach. High school level is enough for me. The book completely captures the experience of being necessary for the obligatory parts you need to play at banquets and during appearances with darling children in the stands. Way to go, Nanci.