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Stefan Fatsis

A Few Seconds of Panic: A Sportswriter Plays in the NFL Paperback – Illustrated, August 4, 2009

by Stefan Fatsis (Author)

4.5 65 ratings

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"An insightful and . . . amusing look at the inner workings of pro football" (The New York Times) from the bestselling author of Word Freak

In Word Freak, Stefan Fatsis invaded the insular world of competitive Scrabble players, ultimately achieving an expert-level ranking. Now, in his new book, he infiltrates a strikingly different subculture-pro football. After more than a year of preparation, Fatsis molded his fortyish body into one that could stand up-barely-to the rigors of NFL training. And for three months he became a placekicker for the Denver Broncos. Making the most of unprecedented access to an NFL team and its players, and drawing on his own personal experience, Fatsis with wry candor and hard-won empathy unveils the mind of the modern pro athlete and the workings of a storied sports franchise as no writer has before.

Print length

350 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Penguin Books
Publication date

August 4, 2009
Reading age

18 years and up
Dimensions

8.4 x 5.48 x 0.82 inches
ISBN-10

0143115472
ISBN-13

978-0143115472
Lexile measure

990L
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Editorial Reviews

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" [Fatsis's] sharp eye for detail and genuine empathy for his teammates make A Few Seconds of Panic exceptional."
-Bob Costas

" Fatsis deftly explores how business permeates every aspect of the NFL. . . . [He] is able to penetrate the players' psyches in a way that few sportswriters have."
-Los Angeles Times

" What [Fatsis] has pulled off with his modern twist on Plimpton's 1966 classic, Paper Lion, is remarkable . . . an unflinching look behind the curtain at America's most popular professional sport and the men who play it."
-Minneapolis Star- Tribune

About the Author

Stefan Fatsis is the bestselling author of Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players and Wild and Outside: How a Renegade Minor League Revived the Spirit of Baseball in America's Heartland. He reported on sports for more than a decade for The Wall Street Journal and talks about sports every week on National Public Radio's All Things Considered. His work also has appeared on the websites Slate and Deadspin. Stefan lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Melissa Block, and their daughter, Chloe.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Books; Reprint edition (August 4, 2009)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 350 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0143115472
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0143115472
Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 990L
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.8 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8.4 x 5.48 x 0.82 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #453,509 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #247 in Sports Essays (Books)
- #719 in Football (Books)
- #13,815 in Memoirs (Books)

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4.5 65 ratings

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T Walker

Dated but still worth reading

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 23, 2023

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The author does a great job of putting you right into an NFL training camp. I really enjoyed the story.

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D. Scott

Fear and Loathing in Denver

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 8, 2013

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I have been fascinated with football kickers ever since I stumbled upon a copy of the book "Kicking the Football Soccer Style" by Pete Gogolak that somehow found its way into the library of my junior high school in the coal fields of southern West Virginia. I spent countless hours studying its pages. Lacking a tee, I used one of my mother's plastic measuring cups to set up game winning kicks in the back yard with my battered green Nerf football. Good times. Fortysomething sportswriter and author Stephan Fatsis makes the fantasy come true in "A Few Seconds of Panic" and kicks alongside Jason Elam during a Denver Broncos' training camp, emulating George Plimpton who first embedded himself as their "last string quarterback" with the Detroit Lions in 1962 and wrote about it in the classic "Paper Lion."

I reviewed Paper Lion, which was enjoyable largely because of its novelty and humor. Plimpton was the first journalist to embed himself with an NFL team, and his self-deprecating humor shone through. Also, Plimpton had the incomparable Alex Karras and his hysterical stories for material. More than 40 years have passed and sportswriter Stefan Fatsis is the first since Plimpton to go behind the scenes and document the NFL of today as a player. Much has changed.

Football is supposed to be fun, but the NFL of today comes across largely as a grim business. As a Denver Bronco, Fatsis encounters firsthand the adversarial relationship between players and management. The 1990's brought free agency to the NFL, which benefited players financially by enabling them to switch teams, selling their talents to the highest bidder. An NFL career is short, and players scramble to make as much money as they can in their few top earning years as a professional athlete. As Fatsis points out, the problem lies in the fact that since "players were less loyal to teams, so teams were less loyal to players." The result has been that players are loyal only to the team who pays them the most, and teams use players like meat, often using them only to secure a win (or to motivate other players to win by threatening the starters' jobs) and ruthlessly discarding them when no longer needed.

Fatsis learning to kick is fun, and it is interesting meeting the players in the locker room and getting to know them. We see firsthand the cold ruthlessness of Mike Shanahan. Chad Mustard is a great Scrabble player (a fact which Fatsis uses to plug his book on competitive Scrabble, Word Freak). We watch as punter Todd Sauerbrun intimidates his competition in training camp and becomes a cancer in the locker room. All-time great kicker Jason Elam talks about his hunting exploits and Christian mission work. We also see how the tragic murder of cornerback Darrent Williams mere hours after the last game of the season effects the team. Far from passionate collegiate athletes, most of the pros presented here are just doing a job, trying to provide for their families, and trying not to get hurt in the process.

The "everyman" angle in this book is fun up to a point, but it seems a bit self-serving after a while. The book also highlights a problem with participatory journalism. As a journalist, Fatsis is hesitant to bite the hand that feeds him. One of the biggest problems faced by the NFL today involves reported rampant drug use. The author broaches the subject only briefly, limiting his observations to Todd Sauerbrun's 4 game suspension for ephedra use.

The book feels light. Fatsis doesn't dig too deeply, and as a result it seems that he is not giving us the full story on the team that allowed him this rare access.

4 people found this helpful

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Mark

a well written inside look at life in the NFL

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 22, 2011

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I enjoyed Stefan Fatsis's book on his insider's experience at an National Football League training camp. Amazingly, the Denver Broncos allowed him to "tryout" as a place kicker and experience their training camp as a player. This book is half about Stephan's personal experience of training, getting in shape, and striving to be respected and accepted by his fellow players. It also gets us to see life in the NFL from the eyes of many of the players on that team, which is by far the best part of this book. It opened my eyes to the difficulty and rewards of playing NFL football. It was poignant at times. I think that Fatsis did need to be part of the team in order to get the access he got to the players, but he spent a little too much time in the book on his own training experience. While, as a middle aged guy who related to his experience, I did enjoy that part of the book, I did wish that there was a little less of that and more on the other players. Fatsis went over the top at times when he talked about "deserving to be there" as a player. He was never close to being an NFL caliber player, and did not "deserve" a chance to kick in a preseason game (a sore point for him), yet he put in a truly serious effort which earned him the respect and camaraderie of the other players. Fatsis is a very good writer, and this is one of the better books on sports out there. I recommend it.

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Douglas S. Miller

Thoroughly enjoyed this book

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 31, 2017

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Thoroughly enjoyed this book. An honest, detailed discussion of what life was like as a not-star in the NFL in the mid-oughts. The constant stress, the fear of being cut, the unrealistic expectations put on the players by coaches, the league, society, and themselves. Football creates a semi-toxic environment for nearly everyone involved, but at the same time, who doesn't wish they could play, just for a little while? Fatsis confronts the conflicts inherent in professional sports head-on. I'm reminded of the line from _North_Dallas_Forty_; "When we say it's a business, you say it's a game, when we say it's a game, you say it's a business!" Highly recommend for anyone interested in football beyond blind fandom.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 12, 2009

Verified Purchase

Half of this book was great and half was kind of annoying. Fatsis never kicks in a preseason game or even a scrimmage. So when he talks about the stress of being a player it feels less than genuine. No one really cares that he makes 5 out of 12 from 30 yds in a training camp practice. That crap is not interesting at all. That interaction with Robert Kraft in the Epilogue ("I'm a Bronco") made me feel bad I read the book. An editor should have stripped that sap out.

On the other hand, the inside perspective on the business of the NFL was very interesting. As I fan I had no idea how much players get jerked around getting signed and released. Fatsis writes very well I just wished he wasn't in this book so much.

One more thing, this book would have been more interesting if it was released in 2007.

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Pleased to meet you

Good story, terrible writer

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 28, 2010

Verified Purchase

There's lots of great details about how an NFL organization works and anyone who reads this book should have a very different understanding of what it's like to play in the NFL. Like being an actor, being an NFL athlete is about far more than your moment in the spotlight. It's mostly about the slog of practice and, unstinting dedication in spite of your body's and your family's needs, and having your career decided by people who don't care about you as a person. But Fatsis is a terrible writer. He's just, he's flat. He's not funny. He doesn't know how to turn a phrase. And his whining about not being able to play in a pre-season game gets a little old. I was really tired of his company well before the end of the book. A good story, but a slog to get through in Fatsis' company.

One person found this helpful

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Steve Mansfield

A real insider's view of the 2006 Denver Broncos

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 24, 2009

Verified Purchase

Stefan Fatsis spent the summer of 2006 in training camp with the Denver Broncos: there aren't many positions that a reasonably athletic 43 year old could even attempt on a gridiron field, so he wisely decided to try out life as a kicker. This excellent and insightful book is the result.

His travails in the highly regimented and hierarchical world of the Broncos organisation give a real insider's view of the locker room, the culture of the sport, and what drives people to put their bodies on the line for that elusive and transitory moment of glory of playing in the NFL.

I don't think it gives the ending away by revealing that the closest he actually comes to playing is the warmups on a pre-season game, but that doesn't detract from the quality of the warts-and-all portrayal he gives of the process.

My only criticism would be that I occasionally lost track of who was who, in amongst all the nicknames and initials. Other than that I'd thoroughly recommend this book to anyone remotely interested in knowing a bit more about the NFL.

3 people found this helpful

Peer Sylvester

Nicht nur für Footballfans

Reviewed in Germany 🇩🇪 on March 30, 2010

Verified Purchase

Stefan Fatsis ist ein Sportreporter und der Autor des hervorragenden "Word Freak", bei dem es in die Welt des professionellen Scrabbles (ja, sowas gibt es) eintaucht. Für "A few seconds of panic" hat er sich eine größere Aufgabe vorgenommen: Als Kicker trainiert er in der Vorsaison bei den Denver Broncos mit. Ganz regulär, als wenn er ein normaler Spieler wäre. Dadurch bekommt er einen einzigartigen Blickwinkel über American Football im allgemeinem und Profisport im besonderen.

Nun bin ich überhaupt kein Footballfan, aber ich fand das Buch dennoch ausgesporchen interessant und gut zu lesen - Fatsis hat eine flotte, witzige Schreibe und schafft es besonders den Leistungsdruck der Athleten und das Seelenleben seiner Mitspieler zu beschreiben, ohne pathetisch zu werden. Ich kenne kein Buch, dass einem die Welt des Profisports so nahebringt wie dieses!
Allerdings werden zumindest rudimentäre Football-Kenntnisse vorrausgesetzt und gerade bei den Positionen kommt man als Laie schnell durcheinander - das ist jedoch kaum die Schuld des Autoren, der ja für den amerikanischen und nicht den deutschen Markt geschrieben hat.

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