
The Last Headbangers
NFL Football in the Rowdy, Reckless 70s - The Era that Created Modern Sports
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Narrated by:
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Bob Dunsworth
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By:
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Kevin Cook
About this listen
The inside story of the most colorful decade in NFL history - pro football's raging, hormonal, hairy, druggy, immortal adolescence. Between the Immaculate Reception in 1972 and The Catch in 1982, pro football grew up. In 1972, Steelers star Franco Harris hitchhiked to practice. NFL teams roomed in skanky motels. They played on guts, painkillers, legal steroids, fury, and camaraderie. A decade later, Joe Montana's gleamingly efficient 49ers ushered in a new era: the corporate, scripted, multibillion-dollar NFL we watch today. Kevin Cook's rollicking chronicle of this pivotal decade draws on interviews with legendary players - Harris, Montana, Terry Bradshaw, Roger Staubach, Ken "Snake" Stabler - to re-create their heroics and off-field carousing. He shows coaches John Madden and Bill Walsh outsmarting rivals as Monday Night Football redefined sports' place in American life. Celebrating the game while lamenting the physical toll it took on football's greatest generation, Cook diagrams the NFL's transformation from second-tier sport into national obsession.
©2012 Kevin Cook (P)2013 Audible, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Overall
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Performance
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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Overall
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Performance
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Great history
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Showtime
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Best-selling sportswriter Jeff Pearlman draws from almost 300 interviews to take the first full measure of the Lakers’ epic Showtime era. A dazzling account of one of America’s greatest sports sagas, Showtime is packed with indelible characters, vicious rivalries, and jaw-dropping, behind-the-scenes stories of the players’ decadent Hollywood lifestyles. From the Showtime era’s remarkable rise to its tragic end - marked by Magic Johnson’s 1991 announcement that he had contracted HIV - Showtime is a gripping narrative of sports, celebrity, and 1980s-style excess.
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Offended at the style used to voice black characters.
- By NP on 01-15-22
By: Jeff Pearlman
Oh the memories
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Brilliant and Poignant
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Bitter Sweet
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Really does read like a cliff's notes of 1970s NFL films productions. If you're going to go over the well trod territory of the 1970s Steelers, Raiders, Cowboys and little else, you're going to have to go deeper than this.
DO NOT PURCHASE if you are an actual NFL fan over the age of 30, you will get nothing from this. Might be useful for introducing a spouse or child who is new to the sport to its most celebrated era, but there are better materials.
Re-hashes of the 72-76 Raiders/Steelers playoff games, Super Bowls X & XIII and quotes everyone already knows take you right out of the book since you can call them out along with the narrator. Who was fine, not great.
There's virtually nothing in the nearly ten hour narration that isn't "by the numbers" rehash of things everyone already knows. No depth, no detail. Almost nothing about the other teams of the 70s or games not involving the 3 main franchises. Way more time and energy devoted to things we already know about TV contracts and labor issues that only the uninitiated would possibly not know. So many generic stories which have been told so many times before that it's amazing this got published.
Probably the most disappointing audio book I've ever listened to on this site.
Grade: C/C- if you're a new football fan, D/D- if you're an experience NFL fan.
Probably worth skipping.
For beginners only
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Nothing New for Me
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