The Last Headbangers Audiobook By Kevin Cook cover art

The Last Headbangers

NFL Football in the Rowdy, Reckless 70s - The Era that Created Modern Sports

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The Last Headbangers

By: Kevin Cook
Narrated by: Bob Dunsworth
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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. Football Sports History Sports
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I grew up watching these epic battles. It was a wonderful reminder of how football was meant to be played.

Oh the memories

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A terrific overview of the important decade of the 1970s for the NFL. From the Pittsburgh Steelers, Oakland Raiders, Dallas Cowboys, to the rise of the West Coast offense and the beginning of the 1980s. A must-read for NFL fans!

Brilliant and Poignant

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Epic battles, epic personalities and epic moments. It's great to hear the human stories behind the larger than life moments. It's sad to hear about most of the players. There's a touching story at the end with a certain Steeler and a certain Raider that makes for a softer landing than what I had expected for the end of this book.

Bitter Sweet

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All the material is fine, correct and can give you a sense of the era. However you would have to know nothing about the NFL of the 70s to get any real value out of this.

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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This was a well written, well performed and a good story, but there just wasn't anything really new to me. I guess having lived through that time and being aware of all of the happenings described in the book, it just felt worn.

Nothing New for Me

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