Category: Pop

The Art of Winning, by Bill Belichick (Avid Reader Press, 289 pages)

It is challenging to approach Bill Belichick’s new book on its literary merits, considering all the news coverage given its publicity tour (sample from the Washington Post: “Bill Belichick, Jordan Hudson and the making of a PR disaster”). There is also the matter of the acknowledgments.

Let’s just say that when the author thanks 4½ pages of people, and the media focuses on one person he does not thank, it’s fair to wonder if anyone is interested in the actual book, except for maybe Tom Brady, who promises in a cover blurb that The Art of Winning will bring out the best in all of us. And who, besides Robert Kraft, doesn’t want that?

So I began the book with an open mind, right up to the point where Belichick started yelling at me.

I’m not sure whose idea it was to, at the end of each chapter, have two pages of all-caps commands barking at the reader in white type on black pages, but it is shocking the first time you come across it, and each subsequent time it’s just annoying. (Wondering if I was overreacting, I showed a couple of pages to my college-age daughter and said, “Don’t read the words, just tell me how you react to this.” She didn’t know anything about the book or author. “Scared,” she said.)

This effect is not mitigated even when Belichick is screaming at us on the page to “TREAT PEOPLE WITH KINDNESS, RESPECT, AND DIGNITY WHENEVER YOU ARE MAKING A DECISION THAT INVOLVES THEIR LIFE OUTSIDE OF WORK.” Or “HONESTY IS GOOD. THERE IS A PLACE FOR SPEAKING SOFTLY, AND A PLACE FOR SPEAKING FORCEFULLY.”

OK, Yoda.

This is, at times, a book of platitudes, albeit platitudes written down by the winningest coach in football when he was between jobs. We were warned of that by the title, which is not especially original. (See: Amazon.)

That is not to say that there are not interesting stories in the book; there are plenty, including one involving the bromance that developed between Tom Brady and Antonio Brown when the troubled wide receiver was a New England Patriot for 13 days in 2019. Belichick reveals that AB sent TB12 a gift of bison and some sort of special milk that was $500 a bottle and was shipped in from the West. Though nobody apparently was at fault, it got left outside Brady’s locker for a night, and as Belichick tells it, on the eve of a big game, “we were all crying over spoiled milk” and management wound up reimbursing Brown $3,500.

“Think about it this way: Would you spend $3500 to ensure the best person on your team gave their best performance when it mattered most? Would you pay twice that to immediately relieve your star employee of a depressive episode, no matter how head-shaking? Absolutely, and you know it. Your job is not to psychoanalyze. Your job is to put people in a position to win.”

Anybody who followed the Patriots under Belichick for even a few years recognizes the patterns he lays out here. Practice matters. So does consistency. The process is king. (“Every day does not revolve around closing a big deal or scoring a big new client. But those days when the stakes are very high should feel exactly like every other day.”) All this is fine, and yes, might be helpful to some. There are worse self-help books out there, for sure.

It’s just we can’t help thinking, is this really all he’s got for us?

Like a Belichick press conference, even the big stories seem brusque. This is disappointing, especially when he begins with a line like “Falcons fans, you have fair warning. I’m going to talk about 28-3.”

That refers, of course, to the 2017 Super Bowl when the Falcons led by that score in the third quarter. The Pats went on to score 31 unanswered points. Surely, this will be a great story? Nope. It’s one page describing one play; then he’s on to the importance of preparation. (PREPARATION IS NEVER WASTED, REGARDLESS OF OUTCOME.)

Also, he never even tells us what animal or plant that ridiculous $500 milk came from.

He does give us some insight into the men who were influential in his life, including father Steve Belichick, who was also a football coach and a scout and passed on to his son the importance of working every day, not just to get a paycheck or even to win football games, but to improve at everything. (“Am I working toward something? Or am I just working?”)

“I suspect that the quest for improvement is not not quite so ubiquitous in the world outside sports,” Belichick writes, explaining how being laser focused on improvement is the crux of his famous phrase “On to Cincinnati,” which was uttered after a tough loss to the Kansas City Chiefs on Monday Night Football.

To be fair, there are some parts to this book that are genuinely funny, including Belichick’s “free motivation trick” involving Rob Gronkowski: “Whenever you feel lazy, close your eyes and imagine Gronk walking into your office and swatting you aside and taking your job. What’s he doing? How hard is he doing it? Does he seem depressed to be working hard? Or did he just spike your coffee mug on your head after sending that email you were too overwhelmed to type?”

He also tells a couple of revealing Tom Brady stories, which help to explain why Brady was so magnanimous in the blurb.

The Art of Winning is insider baseball, so to speak, in that the Gronkowski story means nothing at all to anyone who knows nothing about Gronk. Many of Belichick’s stories won’t mean much to anybody who doesn’t speak football, and they will appeal even less to anyone who doesn’t love the New England Patriots (meaning much of the country). As inspirational books go, even at its best, it’s self-limiting in its reach. And Jeff Benedict and Michael Holloway have written more engagingly about the Patriots.

So the greatest coach of all time (which actually remains to be seen — we’ll see how he does in North Carolina) isn’t the greatest writer of all time, nor should we expect him to be. It’s just Belichick on paper: Billy GOAT Gruff. C

Homestand, by Will Bardenwerper (Doubleday, 301 pages)

Batavia is a small city in western New York that most people have never heard of, even if they pass it on the New York Thruway on the way to or from a vacation. Like a lot of cities its size, Batavia is remarkable mostly for its reasonably priced homes and comforting sense of community, the latter of which is often derived from sports.

In Homestand, Will Bardenwerper examines what happens when that sense of community is under threat — in Batavia’s case, when the city loses its minor-league baseball team when the MLB decides to scale down its farm teams. It’s a topic that is close to the author’s heart, his warmest childhood memories involving backyard baseball with his brother, under his grandfather’s watch, and his adult experience of being part of a tightly knit Army battalion deployed to Iraq after 9/11.

When he returned home, Bardenwerper writes, “… after those many months living as a member of a small tribe who did everything together, I couldn’t wrap my head around what the ‘real’ world looked like when I returned, face-to-face, real human interactions increasingly giving way to soulless virtual contact.”

Increasingly concerned about how disconnected Americans are becoming from each other, he was also troubled by what was happening economically, with private equity becoming more of a player in everything from housing to baseball. When Major League Baseball restructured the minor leagues in 2021, cutting 40 teams, Bardenwerper saw it through this lens: What the loss of a team would mean for a place like Batavia, where community life was heavily invested in its beloved team, the Muckdogs.

Batavia, however, didn’t go gently into a baseball-less night. It got a new team to play in Dwyer Stadium, one composed of college players who each paid $1,500 for the opportunity to sharpen their skills while enjoying an enthusiastic, ready-made fan base. Bardenwerper decided to join their ranks in the name of journalism, buying a season ticket and traveling from his home in Pennsylvania to embed himself for a season in Muckdogmania.

“I wanted to find out for myself what we, as a country, risked losing, and whether there was any chance it might be saved,” he writes.

Much of the book is structured by games: the Muckdogs versus, say, the Elmira Pioneers, the Syracuse Salt Cats, the Utica Blue Sox and, my personal favorite, Jamestown Tarp Skunks, which honestly makes me want to move to Jamestown, New York, just because, well, Tarp Skunks.

It is an interesting scaffolding for the book, which works except for the fact that, like baseball itself, this narrative lends itself to plodding. Bardenwerper takes us deep into the life of this community and its inhabitants, sometimes deeper that the reader wants to go. We are warned of this at the start of the book, when a list of “Dramatis Personae” tells us that the people we are about to meet include octogenarian season ticket holder Dr. Ross Fanara; Bob Brinks, the popcorn maker at the Elmira stadium’s concessions stand; and Ernie Lawrence, “musician, hospice volunteer, rosary maker.”

Let’s just say that by the end of Homestand you will know a lot about small towns in the Empire State and their inhabitants. And also about why baseball is so important in small-town America.

Coming together to cheer on a team, Bardenwerper writes, makes everyone’s life a bit better at the moment. “The real magic,” he says, is not happening in the diamond, no matter how exciting a game may be, but “found in the bleachers, among the fans.”

This is a romanticized notion of fandom, to be sure; sometimes fans are falling from the stands, ripping balls out of a player’s mitt, throwing things on the field. But to know and love a community is to have spent time in it and gotten to know its people through shared experiences. As a local author (and fellow season ticket holder) that Bardenwerper got to know in the stands, Bill Kauffman, wrote of Batavia, “This is such an unlovely place, yet I love it with all my heart. To visitors, it is a charmless Thruway stop on the Rust Belt’s fringe; to me, it is the stuff of myth and poetry, and of life weighed on the human scale — the only measurement that counts.”

While Homestand is a love letter to community and to baseball, it has its villains: the money counters in MLB, private equity companies that profit at the expense of ordinary Americans, and, increasingly of concern to Bardenwerper, the extraordinarily well-paid professional ballplayer.

At one event in which children with disabilities were playing ball with the Muckdogs, causing everyone around to swell with emotion, Bardenwerper started thinking about how “just a few hundred miles to the southeast, the New York Yankees’ Gerrit Cole would soon go to work to earn his $36 million salary. On this day he would give up nine hits and four runs in a 6-3 loss to the Baltimore Orioles.”

He notes, however, that Cole’s salary was eclipsed by the Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani, who had signed what was then the largest MLB contract: $700 million over 10 years. (Juan Soto of the New York Mets has since signed a deal that gives him $765 million over 15 years.)

Bardenwerper acknowledges that many fans aren’t troubled by athletes making money like this, but says he has come to believe that “the extreme economic inequality personified by Major League Baseball (and all professional sports) was corrosive to a healthy society — and, for me at least, was becoming an almost insurmountable obstacle to my desire to remain a fan.”

The more he gets to know the people of Batavia and the devoted minor-league baseball fans in nearby cities —in Elmira, a man now in his 90s has been sitting in the same seat since 1974 — the more Bardenwerper is troubled by the cost-cutting decisions made by wealthy people who live far away. “Baseball,” he says, “has already begun to resemble yet another extractive industry where dollars are transferred from small towns to big-city owners and investors.”

In some ways, Homeland is a follow-up dirge to a book that Bill Kauffman wrote about Batavia in 2003, Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette: A Mostly Affectionate Account of a Small Town’s Fight to Survive. For a small, unremarkable city, Batavia gets remarked upon a lot. It might yet survive, as might baseball.

The Muckdogs of 2022 can be quite a long season for the casual reader, but Homestand pays off for those who love baseball — and aren’t prone to fidgeting when the game runs long. B+ —Jennifer Graham

How to Be Well, by Amy Larocca (Knopf, 291 pages)

At some undefined point between Helen Gurley Brown and Gwyneth Paltrow, women stopped the pursuit of beauty and replaced it with the pursuit of “wellness.” Wellness is an ill-defined concept, a mixture of good health (mental and physical), good vibes and excellent self-esteem, with the goal of becoming The Best Version of You, as the parlance goes. It is a $5.5 trillion dollar industry according to the Global Wellness Institute, encompassing far more than the pursuit of beauty ever did. (Have you checked the price of collagen peptides lately?)

It is also poorly regulated, and as such, women are subject to a barrage of dubious claims about procedures and products that are said to make them ever more well, while in fact the only certainty is that they will be ever more broke.

Journalist Amy Larocca takes one for the team in How to Be Well, venturing into the wellness space with a skeptical eye and a snarky voice. It’s not a spoiler to say that she was not especially impressed with what she found, given that the subtitle of the book is “Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure at a Time.” In other words, if you already have the sense that the colonics industry — which amounts to recreational irrigation of your colon — may be oversold as a life-changing procedure, if you’ve ever gone to Paltrow’s Goop website for a chuckle, you will love this book. If you are a devotee of all things Goop, it will only make you mad.

Larocca begins with a brief history of how wellness evolved. In 1979, she wrote, Dan Rather, on the TV show 60 Minutes, said “Wellness. That’s a word you don’t hear every day.” He was reporting on the Wellness Resource Center in California, and during the segment, asked clients if the idea wasn’t something akin to a “middle-class cult.” It seems prescient now, given the range of strange offerings in the genre, but it’s mostly mainstream. The wellness aisle at your drugstore, Larocca writes, may contain everything from mouthwash to lip gloss to nasal spray. Wellness also encompasses incense, apple-cider vinegar and goat yoga. “It’s a brew that has the potential to drive you nuts,” she writes.

She takes us from the Harvard-educated Dr. Andrew Weil to Dr. Frank Lipman, wellness guru to the stars, and Dr. Mark Hyman, a popular podcaster and proponent of “functional medicine,” which focuses on the root causes of illness and disease. (Lipman and Hyman, Larocca writes, “share a commitment to fascia rolling, morning sun exposure and a cold rinse at the end of a hot shower.”) She also introduces us to Robin Berzin, the founder of Parsley Health, a booming functional medicine practice with holistic doctors that sells memberships for $225 a month or $99 a month if you’re in-network. Parsley is a medical practice that presents as a spa; as with an airport lounge, members who live near a physical location in New York and Los Angeles can hang out there, even if they don’t have an appointment. The average American talks to a primary-care physician 19 minutes a year, Larocca writes, while Parsley members talk to a physician 200 minutes a year. Similar practices are rising up all over the country — but be careful, as wonderful as they may seem, Larocca notes that some of the physicians aren’t board-certified, which has long been the standard of care.

That’s only one aspect of wellness, however, which Larocca says “is every bit as much about looking better as it is about feeling better.” The essence is in the word “glow.”

“The term is so prevalent that it sometimes feels as if a simple replace-all function has been applied to the entire beauty marketing machine: Alexa, find ‘skinny’ and replace all with ‘strong’; find ‘beauty’ and replace all with ‘glow.’” Glowing can be achieved with exercise, with dry brushing (a kind of exfoliation), with supplements and gummies, with bone broth. There is, essentially, Larocca says, a “Glow Cinematic Universe.”

The author describes herself as a “secular atheist,” which sets her apart from the majority of Americans and also adds a certain acidic overlay when she is talking about things like prayer and meditation as part of wellness routines and fitness classes as “spiritual centers.” She believes that “the gospel of wellness” is replacing religious life, and that might be a good conclusion for anyone who, like the author, admits that “I don’t know many people with organized religious lives” which can also be interpreted as “I don’t know many people who aren’t like me.” By the time we get to her chapter that is simply titled “Cult,” the reader might get the sense that she’s not just talking about crystals and sound baths (meditation in which people are “bathed” in sound waves), but about any person who professes any kind of spiritual belief.

The only wellness practice she seems to respect throughout her journey is simple meditation — closing her eyes and repeating a mantra silently, twice a day, 20 minutes at a time. “… it was great to be so totally, completely still,” she writes. She also practices the 4-7-8 breathing technique to calm herself: breathe in for 4 seconds, hold your breath for 7 seconds, breathe out for 8 seconds. “There are technical reasons why it works: stress is all sympathetic nervous system; slow breathing stimulates the parasympathetic nerves, calming it all down. It’s simple, logical, direct. For me, it works.”

Summarizing her conclusions at the end, Larocca worries that we are replacing one set of disordered behaviors and practices with another set of disordered behaviors and practices. We don’t know the long-term effects of household chemicals on our health, but we also don’t know the long-term effects of the vitamins and supplements we are being sold today, she writes. What she knows to be true is mostly the stuff we already know: “Drink enough water. Sleep as much as you can. Eat big leafy greens instead of things you can’t pronounce.” And so on. But she also acknowledges, “What is most relevant to my health is my socioeconomic status.”

“What no one wants to say is this: what you really need is to be lucky, and what is often meant by ‘lucky’ is rich.” In other words, wellness might not be the cult of the middle class as Dan Rather once postulated, but the cult of the upper class. B —Jennifer Graham