When Tom Brady entered the 2005 NFL season as lead quarterback for the New England Patriots, the defending Super Bowl champions, he was hailed as the best to ever play the position. And with good reason: he was the youngest quarterback to ever win a Super Bowl; the only quarterback in NFL history to win three Super Bowls before turning twenty-eight; the fourth player in history to win multiple Super Bowl MVP awards. He started the season with a 57-14 record, the best of any NFL quarterback since 1966.
Award-winning sports journalist Charles P. Pierce's Moving the Chains explains how Brady reached the top of his profession andhow he stays there. It is a study in highly honed skills, discipline,and making the most of good fortune, and is shot through with ironies--a sixth-round draft pick turned superstarleading a football dynasty that was once so bedraggled it had to play a home game in Birmingham, Alabama, because no stadium around Boston would have it. It is also about an ordinary man and an ordinaryteam becoming extraordinary. Pierce interviewed Brady's friends, family, coaches, and teammates. He interviewedBrady (notably for Sports Illustrated's 2005 Sportsman of the Year cover article). And then he got theone thing he needed to truly take Brady's measure: 2005 turned out to be the toughest Patriots season in five years.
Charles P. Pierce was born December 28, 1953 in Worcester, MA. Six months earlier, his mother hid in the basement as a massive tornado leveled his future hometown of Shrewsbury, MA The effect of prenatal imprinting is still being debated in medical circles, but a connection does not seem implausible.
He is a 1975 graduate of Marquette University, where he majored in journalism and brewery tours. He was delighted to combine his vocation and his avocation once again when he returned to Milwaukee to cover the trial of Jeffrey Dahmer.
He attended graduate school at Boston College for two days. He is a former forest ranger for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and still ponders the question of what possesses people to go into the woods and throw disposable diapers up into trees.
He began his journalism career writing bowling agate for the Milwaukee papers, and remains justly proud of his ability to spell multi-syllabic, vowel-free Eastern European names. He has written for the alternative press, including Worcester Magazine and the Boston Phoenix, and was a sports columnist for The Boston Herald. He was a feature writer and columnist for the late, lamented sports daily, The National. He has been a writer-at-large for a men's fashion magazine, and his work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the LA Times Magazine, the Nation, the Atlantic and The Chicago Tribune, among others. Although he is no longer a contributor, he remains a devoted reader. He is a frequent contributor to to Eric Alterman's Altercation, the American Prospect and Slate. Charlie appears weekly on National Public Radio's sports program Only A Game and is a regular panelist on NPR's game show, Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me. Since July 1997 he has been a writer at large at Esquire, covering everything from John McCain to the Hubble telescope, with more than a few shooting stars thrown in between. In April 2002, he joined the staff of the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, where he writes political and general interest features.
Charles Pierce is the recipient of numerous professional awards and honors. On several occasions, he was named a finalist for the Associated Press Sports Editor's award for best column writing, and it has been suggested that if only he would wear a tie, they might have let him win. He was a 1996 National Magazine Award finalist for his piece on Alzheimer's disease "In the Country of My Disease," and has expanded the piece into a book Hard to Forget: An Alzheimer's Story for Random House. In 2004, he won a National Headliners Award for his Globe Magazine piece, "Deconstructing Ted". Depending on which year this is, Charlie Pierce has appeared in Best American Sportswriting more times than any other writer, or has tied with Roger Angell for most appearances in Best American Sportswriting, or is sulking in second place and plotting to regain the top spot soon, or has fallen plumb off the court. Charlie's sportswriting has been anthologized in Sports Guy: In Search of Corkball, Warroad Hockey, Hooters Golf, Tiger Woods, and the Big, Big Game. He was awarded third place in the PBWAA Dan S. Blumenthal Memorial Writing Contest. When he won Phone Jeopardy, Alex Trebek sent him a plaque.
Charles Pierce lives in metro Boston with at least some of his three children all of the time, the rusted remains of a malfunctioning Toro lawnmower and his extremely long-suffering wife.
And Charles Pierce says there is not much "I" in Tom Brady either.
In a professional sport with salary parity, logic says that it must be the Pats teamwork that sets them ahead. Bill Bellicheck, based on results, is the best coach in football, and Tom Brady is his team's QB. There are many great head coach - QB pairings in NFL history - Lombardi and Starr, Landry and Staubach, Walsh and Montana among them, and Bellicheck and Brady - despite their relatively brief history together - are now also inextricably linked, 3 championships in 4 years will do that.
Bellicheck figured out long ago that a football game is not about scoring touchdowns - it is about having more points on the board at the end of the game than the other team. He had the best kicker in football in Adam Vinateri, and in Brady has a QB that knows how to move the chains. When the Pats are playing their game, and they usually are, there is an efficiency to their execution, football the way it is meant to be played. Brady seems to stay within his limits of himself and his team while still pushing himself and them.
Sports as life metaphor books rarely work for me, but having read some of Pierce's magazine pieces previously, I was intrigued when I saw the book - and not at all disappointed. Not all sportswriters are writers, but Charles Pierce is. Instead of a fluff PR piece, we get a book about faith, character, family, team, and the human community - if all you want are the stats and the records, use the Google on the internets.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
What Pierce does in Moving the Chains is reveal the heart and soul of football by examining football's consummate team player, Tom Brady. Brady may not be the most talented current quarterback (Peyton Manning gets that honor), or the flashiest (Michael Vick gets that one), or most beloved (that might go to Brett Favre), but on any given Sunday in the post season he'd be the quarterback you'd want leading your team down the field. Pierce does an excellent job examining why this is the case: why on a Sunday in January you'd want Brady, the no-name quarterback from Michigan, leading your team down the field.
In the context of the ups and downs of the injury-plagued '05 season, Pierce dissects Tom Brady. Pierce examines the games and talks with teammates to highlight Brady's strengths and weakness. Pierce interviews old coaches, friends and family to understand how Brady's work ethic and style were formed. Pierce shows us how these early foundations have grown to make Brady the team player --and more importantly, team leader --who can lead a struggling team to the playoffs.
Pierce looks at football through a broad lens, bringing up interesting cultural and philosophical points that make this more than just another sports book. He understands that football is played in a larger cultural context and that one bleeds into another. He also knows that leadership and greatness in one area can exemplify leadership and greatness in others. With Pierce's style and awareness it is easy to extrapolate his observations of leadership in this book to other areas. This book gave me both a better understanding of the game of football and a better understanding of what it takes to lead.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
I like Tom Brady. I like the Patriots. I like Charlie Pierce. I hated this book. Mr. Pierce is a good sportswriter and a delightful panelist on the NPR news quiz show "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me," yet he hits a very sour note with this book. The problem, as other reviewers have mentioned, is that the book reads like it was written on the fly with minimal editorial input. Mr. Pierce casts such a rosy glow on Tom Brady and his family, it quickly becomes cloying. I'm sure that they're all fine people, but we're talking about a football player, not the second coming of the Messiah.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
