I have always been a Mark Bowden fan, and in my opinion he is one of the best investigative reporters of our time. I had never realized he started his career as a sports reporter in Philadelphia. This book is a look at the Philadelphia Eagles during the early 1990's.

=== The Good Stuff ===

* I don't know if they were typical of an NFL team at the time, but the Eagles certainly had their share of characters. Bowden captures the life and times of these guys, and their families, as they navigate life as football stars. The material covered in the book is probably 80% about the players, coaches and owners lives, and only 20% about actual football. This is good because the personal lives are far more interesting.

* In the book, we meet an ordained reverend running a ministry from the defensive line, a star quarterback as interested in GQ as Sports Illustrated, a coach with some unorthodox ideas on motivation, and an owner who expects to be loved by the fans. The personalities and the stories are fascinating. Bowden devotes a good portion of the narrative to capturing the antics of 20 year-old men, treated as football heroes through most of their lives, suddenly having 6-figure paydays. The results are about what you would expect. I don't want to spoil the book, but one brief example. One player built a new house for himself, a large "starter" mansion, and moved into it without taking his live-in girlfriend of several years.

* There is some interesting detail on actually playing football, and for the most part this was interesting. But the highlight of the book are the characters playing and managing the team.

=== The Not-So-Good Stuff ===

* A few of the stories get a bit repetitive. Just about all of the major players seem to have a wife, girlfriend, mistress and a team of "hangers on" in various cities.

=== Summary ===

I enjoyed this book, and had trouble putting it down. I must admit I was born in Pennsylvania, so I have been an Eagles fan for a long time, (at least until the current felon-Quarterback showed up). Still, I think the book is interesting enough that non-Eagles fans will enjoy it...and maybe even non-football fans. The book is a marvelous study of the mix of testosterone, money and fame, and how different people react to that environment.

Well, if you're an Eagles fan, you're tortured enough already, the season being documented was blown back in the early nineties, so at least you can lay off the Peptobismol. But if you're a sports-writing fan of any description, then this is an essential book. The success of "Black Hawk Down" both as a book and a movie, had its precedent in Mark Bowden's earlier work. "Bringing the Heat" utilizes the same dramatic, combative writing style, and moves fluidly through every phase of football, from wives to girlfriends, the press, the fans, the fans booing Santa, offense, defense... every conceivable angle and personal quirk is analyzed. Mr. Bowden is a remarkable judge of character and manages to summate a lifetime in a few paragraphs, a trait of character in a line, and the entire conundrum that is the Philadelphia Eagles in a mere 500 pages.

Let me preface this review with a few things:
1. I am 21, and grew up in Hawaii, over 2,000 miles from the nearest NFL franchise. I grew up with no team allegiance, and barely followed the league at all. Come every February, even through high school, the teams in the Super Bowl were foreign to me.
2. I became a semi-dedicated Eagles fan over the past four years, while I was at school in Philadelphia, where it's hard to live without being infected by the city's fervor for and and obsession over their most prized team (despite the fact that the Phillies are now more of a winner). After a youth spent somehow avoiding profession sports fan-dom, I now follow everything except Nascar.

That being said, this was an excellent, borderline must-read book for those interested in the Eagles, those interested in the NFL, or those interested in professional sports, period. It does not surpass, but rather approaches, the golden standard of all sports writing, Halberstam's "Breaks of the Game."

Bowden captures an excellent vignette of the league and a team in a state of transition; furthermore, I'd go as far to say that he captures the neuroses of the modern professional athlete. From top to bottom, the Eagles during this season were a cast of varied and compelling characters, as Bowden admits in the afterword. From the spacey and self-consumed Cunningham to the angry and intense Joyner and Waters, to the jovial and comparably sane O-line. While some came from middle-class childhoods (in the case of Randall, a youth filled with fame), many came from dirt poor childhoods in the rural South -- Bowden does a good, comprehensive job of examining these player's stories and how they have shaped the men they are today. In the current day, with tortured characters like Michael Vick, Bringing the Heat illuminates the fundamentally different lives many of these men have lead from a conventional person, and Bowden pays careful attention to the consequences that the money they are awarded has on their lives and minds.

Perhaps most enlightening are Bowden's significant words about then-owner Norman Braman, who no doubt bears resemblance to many current owners with his meddlesome and uninformed opinions. A significant portion of the book is dedicated to Braman's and the Eagles' front office dealing with pending contract situations for many of the players, detailing the arcane and unfair pre-free agency system employed by the NFL -- and, in particular for tight end Keith Jackson and defensive end Reggie White, illustrating the beginnings of the NFL's true free agency era.

Even though I was 4 when this book was in the process of being written, I was thoroughly surprised and amused by many names that I recognized, like Mike Golic, now a radio host on ESPN Radio, and Buddy Ryan, father to (formerly Baltimore Ravens) Jets coach Rex Ryan, who seems to ape his father's defense-centric mindset.

Bowden is always mindful of the bigger picture of football in America, whether its the racial prejudices that influence the demographics at each position on the field, or the uneasy informal truce struck by those that play the game (coaches, players) and those that seek to capitalize on the game (owners, press). While in some cases, his analysis may seem obvious and unnecessary, often Bowden educates you on something you may never have suspected existed.

My minor complaints with this outstanding book:
- Simply put -- it's sprawling. Bowden rightly chose a season that seemed to have everything -- off-field tragedy, front office strife, a disconnect between the offensive and defensive teams, larger sweeping changes in the NFL -- and a team that seemed to have every type of personality. In his effort to catalogue everything, the book sometimes feels like it's lost focus, and you'll be stuck in some player's backstory forever. Bowden exaggerates this effect by bookending his story with the Eagles' first round playoff game against the Saints -- for me, even though I enjoyed the 20 or so chapters in between, it seemed like it took forever to find out what happened in the second half. It KILLED me.
- Unless you really want the Kindle edition, I suggest you avoid it. The picture section lacks contrast, and is probably much better in print, and, unlike some books that read in the Kindle's default text, this one is more of a scan quality. In one more memorable instance, an H somehow got bisected, with an entire line being dedicated to the first half of the H and the rest of the letter on the next line, with the rest of the sentence.
- Bowden's a much better writer than he lets on in this book. Somewhere along the line while writing this, he was infected with this weird disease that forced him to write colloquially, reverting into second-person at an alarming frequency while explaining the larger dynamics of American football and NFL culture. It doesn't detract from the reading experience, but I found it annoying and somewhat unnecessary.

Before Black Hawk down Mark Bowden was a Philadelphia Eagle beat writer for the Inquirer during the the crazy, but exciting, Buddy Ryan era in the late Eighties.
Bringing the Heat is a hidden gem in the field of football writing.
It is a great read for Eagle fans and fans of the NFL in the late Eighties.