Customer Reviews

Ruffians : A Novel (Ruffians)

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I watched my 17 yr. old football playing son read this book. He kept trying to put it down and turn on the TV - Boob tube lost, book won. He read it in one day then passed it on to his father. Dad read it in one day because he couldn't put it down. A week later, son Chad is reading this book cover to cover again! Chad then insists that I have to read it and by gosh, I couldn't put it down either. Good thing I was on a coast to coast flight because there would have been no work done that day! Tim Green's characters are real and full of flavor - good guys and bad. Great Read!!! The book offers real people who happen to play football, not just the Monday Night Football versions of the athletes who play America's favorite sport.

After reading the above two books and hearing how great Ruffians was, I tried it. I really enjoyed reading it initially; however as the story progressed, the ending was very predictable and the repetitveness of booze and screwing around became boring. Also, this book is very similar to the movie North Dallas Forty (even though I don't know which came first). Read Outlaws and Letter of the Law which in my opinion are better Tim Green stories.

Perhaps familiar for his NFL service as a defensive lineman for the Atlanta Falcons, a game commentator for Fox Sports, or as the author of the nonfiction book The Dark Side of the Game, Tim Green is becoming an entertaining fiction writer as well. In Ruffians, he begins a formula of focusing on a star NFL player who must make tough choices when facing corruption and scandal involving his NFL team. In this book the player is a highly drafted rookie (a defensive lineman no less) who gets caught between a rock and a hard place when his new franchise is led by an owner who pushes illegal performance-enhancing drugs and a coach who simply wants the players who are performing on the field to get the playing time.

Ruffians by Tim Green also exposed the dark world of professional sports. The world of sex, drugs and alcohol use by professional athletes. The main character in the book, "Clay" seems like a nice normal guy before he enters the pros and gets mixed up with "Max." Let's hope that some of the pros out there don't cheat on their significant others as much as Clay did in this book.

The Ruffians This book is by Tim Green. This is a very realistic book about the NFL. It shows what happens in the NFL and pressures in the NFL. It has a character in it called clay. He is drafted into the NFL.on a expansion team. The coach is being paid to make a championship team in 1 year. He has made a program that will help them succeed. It involves Steroids. Will he except the plan or reject it.

Tim Green's got it all. He played for 8 years in the NFL and he has a law degree. I found his characters believable and the flow of the action is good. That book gave me the creeps at some times. I never thought it could be like that in the NFL, but Tim Green made it believable and now I'm trying to guess which real team could try to pull the same trick the Ruffians tried...

I picked this book up at a garage sale and after a rapid skim thought about getting my 25 cents back. Overall it's very distasteful and unsatisfying, like a room temperature fast-food hamburger and fries. Virtually all the characters are degenerates with few redeeming qualities. I found the main character, Clay, quite repugnant and had little sympathy for his plight. His "friend" Max was a real moral bottom-feeder, as were the team owner, coach as well as Clay's father. As Snoopy would intone, "Blech!"