New Patriot book not much different from others | Opinion

Every couple of years there’s a new book released about some combination of the following: Bill Belichick, Tom Brady, Robert Kraft, the New England Patriots. Which new book always promises to be full of new insights or behind-the-scenes access of some kind or another. This is almost never true, in that the insights are almost never new, the observations are usually pretty bland and predictable, and the access is pretty straightforward. The fact of the matter is, Tom Brady and Bill Belichick aren’t really opening up to anybody on a regular basis, emotionally, and when they do, we’ll know exactly when it’s happening (see: Belichick’s partnership with David Halberstam called The Education of a Coach, which was fantastic).

Enter It’s Better to Be Feared by Seth Wickersham, who matriculated at Missouri Journalism, who has done his time writing long ESPN features to a good deal of success, and who has traveled the road from young-and-full-of-promise to older-and-seasoned not unlike Brady himself and along roughly the same timeline.

The book was disappointing.

Here’s why, written in the loose format of the NFL scouting report, part as an homage to the upcoming NFL Draft, and partly just because it was fun to try.

Patriots Player Comp: If this book were a former Patriots player, it would be running back Dion Lewis, in that it is serviceable, but not quite as good as Kevin Faulk or James White. This book purported to be something new/fresh/insightful but was actually just a slightly-worse version of Jeff Benedict’s The Dynasty or an about-the-same/more-politically-preachy version of any Patriots book by Boston journalist Michael Holley.

Strengths: Wickersham did seem to get some unique access to Brady, and those sections were the filet of the book, writing-wise. He was in Brady’s Boston condo, on the roof staring off at MIT and thinking deep existential thoughts with Brady, and even meeting shadowy figure and Brady trainer Alex Guerrero at times. These would have been incredible sections to expand. It was at these moments that the writing was scenic, descriptive, concrete, and I could tell, exciting, to the author.

Weaknesses: This would have worked better – and in fact did work better – as just another Wickersham feature. The demand for these books is part of the problem – as is the fact that suckers like me keep buying them, despite them being all basically the same. While Benedict’s version stands out as the best in the group, this one promised something thematic about the three leaders on the cover (Brady, Belichick, and Kraft) but was just a chronological rehash of the past two decades of Patriots football, with special emphasis given to the old and boring minutiae of the scandals (Spygate and Deflategate).

Also, be ready for some good old-fashioned ESPN social sermonizing in the third act. You’re gonna get the industry-standard anti-Trump treatise (yawns, checks watch) along with lots of now-standard virtue signaling, which I shouldn’t have been at all surprised about but still was, primarily for genre-related reasons (more below). What’s weird is that Missouri used to produce the journalist’s journalist, inasmuch as it was always about the story, the subject, and staying out of the way with your own opinions. But with Twitter leading the charge as our nation’s de facto Managing Editor, perhaps each writer’s proverbial knee must bow and every tongue confess, at the altar of these social issues, in fear of online blowback. This book – a NYT bestseller among all books – may end up standing as Exhibit A in a sort of genre-shifting moment…one where the long form journalistic book experience just kinda always turns into a personal essay in the third act.

I’m reminded of Buzz Bissinger’s classic Friday Night Lights which deftly addressed lots of social issues but never to the point where the audience felt condescended-to or preached-at. Nicholas Dawidoff’s Collision Low Crossers also stands out as the football lover’s football book in that it feels unflinchingly honest but never preachy.

But is anybody going to be mad at a football book’s lack of social sermonizing? I doubt it. And is anybody going to question (or even really think about) whether Wickersham’s personal level of wokeness is up to par, due to a book about the New England Patriots? Again, I doubt it.

Ted Kluck is the author of 30 books and teaches journalism at Union University.

This article originally appeared on Jackson Sun: New Patriot book not much different from others | Opinion