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The Caddie Was a Reindeer: And Other Tales of Extreme Recreation | 
 enlarge | Author: Steve Rushin
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
Category: Book
List Price: $23.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 68792
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 255
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.6 x 1.1
ISBN: 0871138786
Dewey Decimal Number: 796
EAN: 9780871138781
ASIN: 0871138786
Publication Date: October 2004
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Condition: Former Library book. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. 100% Money Back Guarantee. Shipped to over one million happy customers! Your purchase benefits world literacy!
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Book Description
For more than a decade, Steve Rushin has been one of our premiere sportswriters, a four-time finalist for the National Magazine Award-most recently in 2004. Publishers Weekly listed his previous book, Road Swing, among the Best Books of 1998. It was also named one of the Top 100 Sports Books of All Time by Sports Illustrated, for which Rushin writes the tremendously popular "Air and Space" column. The Caddie Was a Reindeer collects the best of Rushin's beloved columns and acclaimed features. Rushin takes us on everything from an eating tour of America's baseball stadiums, where the jumbo dog is being replaced by tofu and sushi, to a 180-mph journey through the mountains of Germany, where the world's most treacherous racetrack is now open to anyone insane enough to drive it. When not tossing back pints with the King of Darts in London or participating in "excessive nightclubbing" with World Cup soccer players, Rushin offers his skewed takes on old standbys like baseball, hockey, and football. Enlightening, hilarious, and often unexpectedly heartwarming, The Caddie Was a Reindeer leaves us laughing out loud about the sports we didn't know existed, and reminds us why we love the sports we do.
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| Customer Reviews:
Underrated, overlooked sports classic May 13, 2005
Rushin goes everywhere in pursuit of a story. My favorite (maybe) is "Beers and Shots" which takes you to the heart of dart world in a London pub, where he measures the pressure that Ted Hankey felt while defending his World Darts Championship (a prize worth a quarter of a million dollars) against all comers. Rushin nacechecks Martin Amis' London Fields, which he praises as the "epic darts novel" but for my money he (Rushin) can say just as much in 4,000 words as Amis can say in 90,000. He's funnier too, asserting that "sometimes the healthiest thing a body can do is get out of the sunshine, off the green grassm out of the fresh air and breathe in the opposite--air that is equal parts smoke, tension, and BO. Only then will you rediscover what first drew you, as a child, to games."
Some of his pieces collected here are a little flimsy, like an essay poking fun at some of the outlandish names of athletes, such as "the insuperable Hannibal Navies, whose name always conjures in my head a fleet of amphibious elephants--in bathing cas and nose plugs--swimming ashore at Normandy en route to the Alps." It's kind of cute, but minor, feels like padding in the context of the other, meatier pieces.
His reconstuction of the 1962 Mets is priceless, even to those of us who lived through the horror. He calls it "Bad Beyond Belief" and reading through the shocking details once again you rest a little bit easy, knowing that no team, anywhere, will ever play as badly as our beloved Mets that year. His profiles of Roone Arledgfe and Jim Brown are razor sharp, and his visit to the Topps Factory plays out the dream of every little boy.
You might have read some of these stories before in SPORTS ILLUSTRATED. You'll enjoy them even more in this sharp volume.
There was only one I didn't like, the misguided attempt at South Asian Pacific dialect in Rushin's account of his travels in Bali, called wincingly, "Mr. Stiv's Excellent Adventure." Pointing out how funny foreigners talk must have been a scream back in the days of Bret Harte and Mark Twain but today it goes down like a lead balloon and I'm surprised none of Rushin's editors took him aside for a chat.
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