Balls - Hardcover

Kincaid, Nanci

3.77

275 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1565121783 ISBN 13: 9781565121782

Publisher: Algonquin Books, 1998

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BALLS is the story of a college football coach, his rise, his fall, and his fallback position. You could say BALLS is the story of a coach's kick-off, his first, second, and third downs . . . and his punt. But BALLS is a coach's story that belongs to the coach's wife. To her, and to his mother, his mother-in-law, his daughter, his assistants' wives, his players' mothers and girlfriends, and even his players' grandmothers. It's the women standing behind this handsome football hero who tell the story behind the headlines of Mac Gibbs, Birmingham University coach Catfish Bomar's star quarterback, who married Dixie Carraway, the beautiful homecoming queen. Set in Alabama, home state of the legendary Paul "Bear" Bryant, BALLS is told by fifteen women and one little girl touched by Mac Gibbs's fall from fame as a college quarterback to infamy as head coach of the Birmingham University Black Bears. It's told in those women's voices, from their seats in the stands. They watch the other women, worry when players are slow to get up off the ground, pray when players are carried off on stretchers. They don't care much for the "science" of the game--or its brutality. They see football as it really is--sexy, dirty, sweaty, painful, empowering, corrupt. The story they tell is often funny and not always pretty, as the view from deep inside rarely is. This is a novel that moves with the force of a fourth down charge, and shimmers with the tears of the women waiting outside the locker-room door when the game is lost. The author, twice a head coach's wife, knows whereof she writes so brilliantly. She also knows a lot about love. And BALLS is, above all, a love story.

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Review:

If you link your happiness to the whims of a game, the odds of ever feeling truly satisfied are slim to none. In Balls, Nanci Kincaid reveals the misguided hopes and unfulfilled dreams of women trapped in lives that spiral around the coaches and players of Southern college football. She also exposes a darker side of the sport, where sexist attitudes, racism, and ignorance run as strong and deep as a receiver on a post pattern.

Kincaid creates a large cast of interesting women by switching point of view from one chapter to the next. Her exacting dialogue allows half-joking responses, subtle revelations, and layers of unspoken subtext to shape each character. What happens when the smart, beautiful, rich homecoming princess succumbs to the passion of backseat love and marries the poor star quarterback? Pretty much what you'd expect. "Sometimes I tried to believe the ball was love, truth, or beauty so that I could look at the game, and the men playing it, differently, as if it ... would make the life I was living something worth devoting myself to." But Kincaid has devised a trick play, using stereotype as a trap to lure the reader into an intriguing study of the frailties of human behavior, the restraints on women in a male-dominated culture, and the fascinating ways people change over time as age and experience join to forge wisdom. --George Laney

From the Inside Flap:

She's in love with--and married to--a coach on the rise. He's in love with--and married to--winning the game. Set in Alabama, where football is akin to religion, Balls is the story of a college football coach's fall from grace. Told by the women whose lives he changes, Balls should be required reading for any women who's ever been involved with a man who's involved with sports.

You might say that Balls is the story of a coach's kick-off, his first, second, and third downs...and his punt. But this coach's story belongs to the coach's wife, Dixie Gibbs, and to his mother, his mother-in-law, his daughter, his assistants' wives, his players' mothers, girlfriends, and grandmothers. It's the women standing behind handsome Coach Mac Gibbs who know--and tell--the secrets the sports page headlines leave out.

These women talk straight. They don't care much for the "science" of the game--or its brutality. They wince at the injuries, both physical and spiritual. They swear at the press and bristle at the fickleness of the fans. They see football as it really is--sexy, dirty, sweaty, painful, empowering, tainted. And the spin they put on the whole enterprise is ironic, often funny, and not always pretty, as the view from deep inside rarely is.

This is a novel that moves with the force of a fourth-down charge and shimmers with the tears of the women waiting outside the locker room when the big games are lost. If balls is another word for courage, then often it's the women off the field who come to understand that best. Balls is the novel every football widow will want to read.

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