Amazon.com Review
Jack Molloy goes by the name of Jammer at the Vegas casino where he hosts muckamucks and sports stars for debauched evenings in Sin City. When arranging escorts (code word: nannies) for married men, he assures his clients of airtight evenings--safe from wives or pressure. Hookups happen in the deluxe penthouse, and Molloy orchestrates everything down to the last detail: "The only guys working the floor would be from my own Casino Host staff. Jammers in training, I called them. I'd also have alibis set up in advance, around the golf and the gambling and the fight, even a log I could produce if I had to."
The casino is called Amazing Grace, and Jack feels saved working there: his job is fantastically easy and he makes great money. But his brilliant career is cut short when his father dies. Dad was one of the richest men in the country, and owner of the New York Hawks football team. Although father and son have been estranged for years, ownership of the team is left to Jack in the will. So Jack leaves his role as Jammer and becomes an owner in the NFL.
Unsurprisingly, corruption in the NFL makes Vegas look like church. This is a world of serious lowlifes: crooked managers, players who know how to pass any drug test no matter how blotto they are, a prima donna quarterback with an endless rap sheet. Jack tries to navigate and watch his back, and when he's in need, he calls on his Vegas cronies. Mike Lupica (best known as a columnist for the New York Daily News) is a swift, funny, and eminently macho writer. Various characters in Bump and Run bring to mind Oliver Stone's Any Given Sunday. But where Stone makes football into a symbol of the American soul, Lupica--even as he indicts the surreal world of big sports business--never loses track of the fact that it's only an absurd, neck-breaking pageant. --Ellen Williams
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
High-profile sportswriter Lupica goes for the gold with this quip-fueled romp through the private offices, secret clubs and luxury boxes of the NFL. Jack "the Jammer" Molloy's lifeDas a Las Vegas casino's "go-to guy"Dis interrupted when his father suffers a fatal heart attack and stuns the sports world, to say nothing of Jack's evil twin siblings, by leaving the New York Hawks to his ne'er-do-well elder son. The NFL team is a potential contender, and in spite of the objections of nearly everyone, including Liz Bolton, the Hawks' president, Jack takes the team's helm with the understanding that the world of big-time sports is no different from high-rolling Vegas; it all revolves around money, sex, image and leverage. As the team marches its uneven way toward the Super Bowl, Jack maintains control by applying "Vegas ways"Dblackmail, physical threats, bribery and sexual coercionDto whatever problems arise. Although he possesses the moral compass of a drunken frat jock, Jack is an endearing hero whose first-person narrative is crisp and idiomatically trendy. The brutal revelations about what goes on behind the game are hilarious but slightly disturbing, for the reader senses that beneath the satire and broadly drawn characters there is something more than a thin layer of truth, that somehow there is no hyperbole here. Reminiscent of Peter Gent's North Dallas Forty and Dan Jenkins's Semi-Tough, this is a deliciously wicked tale of contemporary professional sports and the people who, for better or worse, run the game. (Nov.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
