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6 new sports books for good holiday reading

Here are excerpts from six new sports books.

4. 'Parcells: A Football Life,' by Bill Parcells and Nunyo Demasio

  • By Ross Atkin

Straight-talking Bill Parcells proved to have a Midas coaching touch while guiding the New York Giants to two Super Bowl victories and helping to revive the fortunes of the Patriots, Jets, and Cowboys. He entered the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2013. 

“Drew Bledsoe’s predraft visit to Patriots headquarters had given him an early glimpse of Parcells’s mind games, stridency, and demanding style. Now the testy head coach refused to use the term that reporters were attaching to Bledsoe, ‘franchise quarterback,’ insisting that the former Cougar needed to earn it. Despite Bledsoe’s great potential, Parcells bristled at the twenty-one-year-old’s being anointed an elite quarterback before he had acquired the flimsiest body of NFL work....

“The head coach believed that how the quarterback responded to adulation would determine his future. At rookie camp a few weeks after the draft, Parcells warned Bledsoe, ‘Just remember one thing: I don’t want a celebrity quarterback on my team. I hate celebrity quarterbacks. You understand?’ He gave Bledsoe his criterion for an ideal quarterback: constantly guiding the offense into the end zone while caring more about winning than individual statistics.”

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

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