Publishers Weekly
08/09/2021
Sportswriter Anderson (Chasing the Bear) delivers a spirited account of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ historic Super Bowl–winning 2020 season. He opens with the team’s dogged and successful pursuit to sign Tom Brady as a free agent, offering him “a new challenge” in his illustrious career to carry a team “that hadn’t been to the playoffs in thirteen years” to victory. As Anderson moves through the season itself, his skills as a sportswriter shine, especially in recounting Brady’s determination to work with Bucs coach Bruce Arians—in the face of unforeseeable obstacles brought by the Covid-19 pandemic—to turn the middling team around. Anderson ably paints Brady as a 21st-century example of a player coach—recalling how the 43-year-old athlete rarely slept and was always “the first player in the building.” Woven in are players’ accounts of Brady’s outsize impact, including lighthearted moments, such as one former teammate’s recollection of a “prank war” in which Brady urinated on his practice jersey. Anderson closes with memorable play-by-plays of the team’s defeat of the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LV (which rendered Brady the “oldest starting quarterback” to win a Superbowl MVP award), and, fittingly, scenes of Arians and Brady preparing for the next season. Football fanatics will devour this page-turner. Agent: Michael J. Fetchko, ISM. (Oct.)
From the Publisher
"A spirited account of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ historic Super Bowl–winning 2020 season.…Football fanatics will devour this page-turner.” — Publishers Weekly
“A fly-on-the-wall look at the making of a winning football season….Catnip for Brady, Bucs, and NFL fans.” — Kirkus Reviews
"A full account of this most unpredictable and unlikely of football seasons. Sports fans will enjoy the detail and energy in Anderson’s deeply researched narrative and relish the cloak-and-dagger machinations he reveals. A fascinating previously untold story, which Anderson recounts with a fan’s passion." — Library Journal
Library Journal
10/01/2021
Sportswriter Anderson (Chasing the Bear; The Quarterback Whisperer) takes readers behind the scenes of the clandestine operation that brought megastar quarterback Tom Brady to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 2020, after two decades as a New England Patriot. Well into his 40s, Brady was convinced by Buccaneers coach Bruce Arians to sign with Tampa Bay. Brady and Arians subsequently engineered a storybook season for the lowly Buccaneers, Anderson writes, even as the team faced the unprecedented challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. The book offers a full account of this most unpredictable and unlikely of football seasons. Sports fans will enjoy the detail and energy in Anderson's deeply researched narrative and relish the cloak-and-dagger machinations he reveals. A fascinating previously untold story, which Anderson recounts with a fan's passion. VERDICT Anderson's animated, comprehensive history of the Buccaneers' singularly triumphant season is recommended for sports collections in all public libraries.—Janet Davis, Darien P.L., CT
Kirkus Reviews
2021-09-28
A fly-on-the-wall look at the making of a winning football season.
Tom Brady wanted one thing from the New England Patriots, apart from lots of money: a contract that would extend through his 45th birthday. When the team refused the extension, notes football writer Anderson, Brady exercised free agency. Wanting on top of everything else to live someplace warm, he landed in Tampa. He paired up with a coach who was just as methodical in his demands: Bruce Arians, a veteran coach with an eye to winning an ever elusive championship before age forced him out of the game but who was also quite progressive, hiring women on the coaching staff and eschewing the coaching-by-intimidation methods of old. Anderson works some of the standard can-he-do-it tropes (“the forty-two-year-old Brady wasn’t in his prime, but…he still could make throws outside the numbers, and he had plenty of zip on his fastball”) and get-me-in-there rejoinders (“At one point Brady said, ‘I think we’ve got something. We’ve got a chance to be very special’ ”). Apart from the by-the-numbers moments, though, Anderson digs deep into motivation: Brady left the Pats, he hazards, not just for monetary reasons and sunshine, but also because he wanted to prove that it wasn’t just Bill Belichick’s coaching that made his old team a winner. Proof came in two forms: with the Patriots’ jagged performance after he departed and with Tampa’s thrashing of the Kansas City Chiefs in the 2020 Super Bowl victory. Of course, Arians had a role in the win, too; who wouldn’t be inspired by a pep talk that ended thusly: “We don’t need any heroes. Just do your job. Be smart, fast, and physical. It’s hard to make it to a Super Bowl, so try your best to take it all in and play your ass off”?
Catnip for Brady, Bucs, and NFL fans, though perhaps not likely to convert others to the cause.
