Tuesday Night Football: A Novel

Lazlo learns to talk by watching television and turns his talent for creating slogans into a profitable career by writing his own jingles until he is recruited as a sports commentator for Tuesday Night Football

Karras ( Even Big Guys Cry ) spent a year as commentator on ABC's Monday Night Football before moving into acting, and that experience, to judge by his new book, left him scarred for life. Tuesday is the ostensibly comic tale of Lazlo Horvath, "the happiest man in the world," who finds himself thrust into the television booth for the midweek sports broadcast after a childhood of misadventures. Horvath, an accordion virtuoso, is an uneasy amalgam of the protagonists of Being There , The Tin Drum and Candide , an easy-going innocent at sea in a world of sharks. In telling his story, Karras and scriptwriter Graham pile cliche on cliche (television is "nothing less than an Aladdin's lamp"). Obviously striving for the lightness of fantasy, they instead burden the narrative with leaden asides.Because Lazlo's world is composed primarily of television commercials--he styles himself "the Jingle King"--the book often reads like a laundry list of product tie-ins. (For example, a scene in which Karl Madden appears is a virtual reprise of the actor's commercial for American Express.) When it isn't plugging brand names, the novel offers rather stale observations on subjects ranging from sexism at the TV networks to the mistreatment of Native Americans.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Former NFL All-Pro, actor, and reclining-chair spokesman Karras and his screenwriting collaborator gently send up football, television, and Karras's old cohorts from his Monday Night Football broadcasting incarnation. No football knowledge is needed to enjoy this bit of nonsense about an irresistibly nice accordion player who is drafted into service as a commentator for network football broadcasts. Some knowledge is expected, however, of the excesses of television and of the reputations of ABC's real-life Monday Night Football team during Karras's enlistment. The amiable accordionist in this amusing story is Lazlo Horvath, only child of expatriate Hungarian circus stars, whose boyhood was spent absorbing televised commercials for playback in later years. The squeeze-box and boob- tube skills have paid off in Horvath's career as a motel and casino entertainer. And those same skills have come to the attention of staggeringly rich conglomerateur Pineas Higgins, who thinks that Lazlo is the only person who can pump life into the sagging ratings of the Tuesday night football broadcasts that Higgins sponsors. Lazlo, who never says no, is accordingly flown to Chicago, where he joins verbose, bewigged Haywood Grueller and irresistibly priapic Lance Allgood, his new partners in broadcasting. Grueller, Allgood, and Yanya, the show's gorgeous and stupendously capable producer, try like crazy to bottle up Lazlo, who plans to use his air time singing jingles, but Grueller's ex-wife, disguised as Julia Child, sabotages the game and Lazlo must save the day. Nobody gets hurt, except for a loathsome little producer; everybody has fun; and the silliness ends before it can get tiresome. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Lazlo, son of Hungarian immigrants, grows up in front of American TV. He seeks only to make people happy. After memorizing all of the jingles on TV, he learns to play the accordion. He is dubbed America's Jingle King and pursued by the sponsor of Tuesday Night Football to raise that program's ratings. At once Lazlo is thrust into the mad world of professional football, TV production, and advertising. While Lazlo's story has something of a folklore quality in its simplicity, the laughs that are supposed to be there are few and far between. This novel by ex-football player Karras, commentator for Monday Night Football , star of the TV show Webster , and author of Even Big Guys Cry , and scriptwriter Graham is scheduled to be made into a film. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/91.
- Rob ert H. Donahugh, formerly with Youngs town & Mahoning Cty. P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.