Customer Reviews

Fields of Honor: The Golden Age of College Football and the Men Who Created It

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Every coach, college football history fan should read this book. This is a manual for every coach on how to coach and act. The best college football history book I have read. You can learn a lot about how to live life, coach, and work.

This book could have been much better. First, it is full of factual errors (many noted by other reviewers here). Those errors should have been caught before the book was published. Second, Ms. Pont leaned much too heavily on the metaphors she introduced in her chapter titles (e.g., "Irony," "Knowing," "Full Circle," "Luck"), and so hammered the reader with them, under the flimsiest of pretexts, that it at times felt like reading a freshman term paper. That problem might have been resolved with another draft or two. Finally, the book would have felt more structured if the author had focused more tightly on the amazing streak of Miami of Ohio coaches (Gillman, Hayes, Parseghian, Pont, Schembechler, Mallory) and not pursued tangents with other members of the "brotherhood of Ohio coaches."

But I still fully enjoyed the book, because Ms. Pont's affection for her subjects is contagious. And because she seemed to pull warmth out of those subjects that other writers do not necessarily find.

So I recommend the book to anyone who loves college football. But I do wish it were better.

I had been wanting to pick up this book for some time and finally did. It is a far cry from Junction Boys and The Undefeated, mainly because it lacks some detail. Possibly there could have been more of the interaction of the coaches and their players (Woody's Boys is a good example). I was lost at some times about the actual occurrences because it seemed somewhat disjointed at times. I found the twilight section to be somewhat interesting, but could there not been some emphasis on the middle of these coaches careers a little more? The early sense I had of the book was the significance of Miami as the "Cradle of Coaches" but that seemed to be lost in the significance of these individuals being from Ohio. More coaches could have been added - possibly more on Doyt Perry at BG, Dr. Lee Tressell, Earle Bruce (Ohio born and bred), and others. I did not like the use of backward scores (lost to . . . 17-20). To people who follow sports heavily that is a silly way to list the scores. Also the author and publisher might have wanted to check details. Pont writes on page 119 that Ohio State lost to Colorado 27-10 in the 1976 Orange Bowl. I remember that game and it seemed to me that OSU pushed the Buffs all over the field . . . and according to a 2001 OSU football program, Ohio State won that game 27-10. Future re-printings should reflect that correction.