Too Far [Hardcover]

Mike Lupica (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 29, 2004

The biggest thing that's ever happened to the Long Island town of South Shore is its high-school basketball team, blessed with two players of national caliber and the white-hot attention of the media. Not even the death of the team's manager can dampen the enthusiasm for long, but then a kid on the high school paper begins to hear things-stories of brutalities at a team retreat, of hazing that went over the line . . . of murder. But no one wants to know, and at every step, the ranks close against him-the school, the parents, the police, the town fathers. Soon the threats begin, then the physical intimidation, and even after he recruits a fallen-from-grace city newsman named Ben Mitchell to help him, the incidents get uglier-and more dangerous.

"You always kill for a big story," Mitchell tells him. "You don't get killed for one." But it may already be too late. Things may have gone too far.

For years, such top thriller writers as Harlan Coben, Elmore Leonard, and Carl Hiaasen have praised Lupica for his tightly wound plots, rich characters, and dialogue "that is alone worth the price" (Leonard). Now Lupica joins their ranks. Too Far is a major novel of suspense-and a book that makes us all look in our own backyards.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Most of New York Daily News columnist and ESPN commentator Lupica's work, fiction (Red Zone, etc.) and nonfiction (Summer of '98, etc.), is grounded in the world of sports. This thriller/mystery tells of a high school basketball team whose winning season is threatened by the murder of its manager, Bobby Ferraro, and allegations of sadistic initiation rites. Former sportswriter and television commentator Ben Mitchell has quit the business and retired to self-imposed exile in South Fork, his Long Island hometown, after one of his columns exposed a coach's lies about his war record, which led to the coach's suicide. Ben spends his days reading newspapers, watching television and endlessly rehashing his responsibility for the coach's death. When novice sportswriter Sam Perry, a high school senior, shows up with what looks like a sensational story, Ben finds his old reporting juices flowing again. Soon the two of them are crashing around town investigating Ferraro's murder, angering the citizens of South Fork, who want nothing to interfere with their team's climb to the state championship. Real-life news reports of out-of-control hazing by high school sports teams give Lupica's tale a ripped-from-the-headlines thrill, but the slow pace and predictable plot may tire readers not fascinated by the sports angle.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Famed journalist Ben Mitchell has "retired" to his eastern Long Island hometown of South Fork, having exposed L.A. Dodger manager Tom Robards for lying about serving as a marine in Vietnam. Humiliated, Robards has committed suicide. And now Mitchell only wants to be left alone. However, he can't avoid a scandal unfolding before his eyes: South Fork High School might have the best basketball team in the nation, but team manager Bobby Ferraro is dead, and Drew Hudson, a player on the team, has been brutally assaulted but won't say who did it. Was it the athletically gifted but troubled DeShawn "Show" Watkins, who has just transferred from the South Bronx to South Fork? His brother, Antoine, a cop gone bad? Or coach Ken Glass, who will do almost anything to safeguard the upcoming season? Or Detective Commander Hank Bender, whose son could pull a scholarship from a South Fork championship? Sam Perry, a Ben Mitchell wanna-be who's been bird-dogging the story for the local paper, has now come to Mitchell for help. As a mystery novelist, Lupica is a great sportswriter. This is a fairly predictable story, but with dialogue that has some snap and a sports setting that's credible. And count on Lupica's fine reputation to create demand. Alan Moores
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Putnam; 1St Edition edition (December 29, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0399152105
• ISBN-13: 978-0399152108
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,740,507 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Mike Lupica is one of the most prominent sports writers in America. His longevity at the top of his field is based on his experience and insider's knowledge, coupled with a provocative presentation that takes an uncompromising look at the tumultuous world of professional sports. Today he is a syndicated columnist for the New York Daily News, which includes his popular "Shooting from the Lip" column, which appears every Sunday. He began his newspaper career covering the New York Knicks for the New York Post at age 23. He became the youngest columnist ever at a New York paper with the New York Daily News, which he joined in 1977. For more than 30 years, Lupica has added magazines, novels, sports biographies, other non-fiction books on sports, as well as television to his professional resume. For the past fifteen years, he has been a TV anchor for ESPN's The Sports Reporters. He also hosted his own program, The Mike Lupica Show on ESPN2. In 1987, Lupica launched "The Sporting Life" column in Esquire magazine. He has published articles in other magazines, including Sport, World Tennis, Tennis, Golf Digest, Playboy, Sports Illustrated, ESPN: The Magazine, Men's Journal and Parade. He has received numerous honors, including the 2003 Jim Murray Award from the National Football Foundation. Mike Lupica co-wrote autobiographies with Reggie Jackson and Bill Parcells, collaborated with noted author and screenwriter, William Goldman on Wait Till Next Year, and wrote The Summer of '98, Mad as Hell: How Sports Got Away from the Fans and How We Get It Back and Shooting From the Lip, a collection of columns. In addition, he has written a number of novels, including Dead Air, Extra Credits, Limited Partner, Jump, Full Court Press, Red Zone, Too Far and national bestsellers Wild Pitch and Bump and Run. Dead Air was nominated for the Edgar Allen Poe Award for Best First Mystery and became a CBS television move, "Money, Power, Murder" to which Lupica contributed the teleplay. Over the years he has been a regular on the CBS Morning News, Good Morning America and The MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour. On the radio, he has made frequent appearances on Imus in the Morning since the early 1980s. His previous young adult novels, Travel Team, Heat, Miracle on 49th Street, and the summer hit for 2007, Summer Ball, have shot up the New York Times bestseller list. Lupica is also what he describes as a "serial Little League coach," a youth basketball coach, and a soccer coach for his four children, three sons and a daughter. He and his family live in Connecticut.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Mystery In the Town, May 15, 2007

A Kid's Review

This review is from: Too Far (Paperback)

I thought that this was a pretty good book. It is about a high school sportswriter named Sam Perry who is covering the South Fork basketball team who are nationally recognized as a state competitor, but when he hears about the basketball team's manager getting murdered he goes to find Ben Mitchell from the town who has been writing for ESPN for help on the story. Ben and Sam dig in to the story to find any help he can get about the murder. They ask the players and coaches, and anyone else who can give them the needed information. They eventually find out it was a member of the basketball team. This book was kind of predictable from kind of the beginning, so for the whole book you kind of know who it is going to be.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Anal Rule in High School, September 26, 2005

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Too Far (Hardcover)

In TOO FAR veteran sportswriter Mike Lupica has written a thriller from a moral high ground, a plea for tolerance and against sadistic hazing. In the wake of the notorious Mepham High School football scandal, this book comes as a wake up call. It would be fair to say that actually this novel is nothing more than the Mepham case with the names changed and the athletic action switched from the gridiron to the hoops; it's pretty transparent that way. Well, Upton Sinclair wasn't subtle either. Nor is any man on a crusade against sodomy.

Old school print journalist Ben Mitchell gets interested in the death of a high school basketball player on Long Island, whose body has floated ashore. With the help of student reporter Sam Perry, Ben quickly maps out the lay of the land in a perverted, though very starry, b-ball organization. Its pecking order is maintained by a strict system of threats and balances, and a pivotal part of team control lies in systemic anal rape of fellow teammates. In one genuinely creepy scene, the boy reporter is lured to a desolate park in the woods where he is assaulted and sat on, his pants and shorts removed. From behind a broomstick, its handle coated in mineral ice to improve lubrication, enters his rectum as he squirms and cries, just an inch, that's all, enough to show him who's in control. When he agrees to lay off his investigation, his attackers laugh sadistically and promise him that if he doesn't obey their threats to the letter, that broomstick gets shoved in all the way.

It's no idle threat. They've already made their will known by using a basketball summer camp as a rape staging area, pressing a pinecone up the ass of one outnumbered boy, whispering to him "You like to be close to nature, don't you?" The trouble is that this campaign of intimidation can continue indefinitely, since each raped boy would (literally) rather die than have his assault reported, for fear that other boys would say he enjoyed it. Sam is taunted with the nickname, "Broomstick Boy." Others try suicide.

Lupica links this isolated case to a nationwide system of sexual abuse among teammates, citing dozens of real life cases. He suggests provocatively that such abuse is built-in to teams with multiple "stars," since such teams have a radical instability that implodes on itself. Shag and Kobe, he says, dislike each other, because on any team there can be only "one f--ing man." These codes of masculinity may seem outdated, but to the guard with blood dripping out his butt, staining the radiant white of his uniform shorts, it's no laughing matter.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Polluting from the Lip, May 2, 2005

By 

Ekaf (Long Island, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Too Far (Hardcover)

In Mike Lupica's latest novel, "Too Far," we are presented with an interesting concept: the exploration of team pushed to and beyond the limit. The idea of participating on a team is very real to us, as we've all done so before, and we all know what it's like. Lupica's story takes the idea of competition to the extreme, and in the process, loses a base of reality. It would have been a much wiser decision on Lupica's part to explore a high school team plagued with realistic problems that the layperson could relate to. The rampant sensationalism and melodrama that characterize "Too Far" prevent Lupica from doing justice to a good concept. Finally, Lupica is unable to keep his writing strong throughout. Witticisms are disseminated throughout large sections of uninteresting prose and poorly done dialouge. On the whole, one would expect more out of Lupica; this is sub-standard work.