Playing For Pizza by John Grisham
PLAYING FOR PIZZA. [a novel by John Grisham]
Rick Dockery was the American quarterback no one wanted. As a third-string quarterback, he hardly got playing time. And then the opportunity of a lifetime came. He was put in during the AFC Championship Game, Cleveland Browns vs. Denver Broncos, to hold a seventeen point lead. With minutes to go, Rick lost the entire game, with three interceptions in eleven minutes, and a severe concussion to the head. This game made Rick the NFL goat and laughingstock. No one wants him to play for them, and would pay to keep him away.
Except for the Parma Panthers. Not the Carolina Panthers, the Parma Panthers. Parma is a small suburb in northern Italy. [And yes, they do play football in Italy.] The Panthers are willing to offer Rick twenty thousand U.S. dollars to play per year, plus an apartment and a car. Rick decides to take a break from American football and try playing with the Italian team. It can’t hurt, right? It’ll save him from being insulted everyday by “ungrateful” Americans. So he takes the job.
At first, he is skeptical. But as he practices with the team, he sees how much his Italian teammates love him and the game. Not to mention, they are willing to play for free. He also connects with the coach, Coach Russo, and from the talks of Coach Russo, he understands why football is so important to the Italians.
Rick shines as the Parma QB in the first two games. But then, he loses reality, and lets the team down by two games, because he can’t control himself. Coach Russo lets fire into him, shows him that he must play to his potential to show his critics he IS a good quarterback. Rick picks his game up, and makes Parma a team to be reckoned with, winning every game until the conference game against the Bologna Warriors.
The final score against Bologna? 51-27, PARMA PANTHERS. So the Parma Panthers make it to the Italian Super Bowl, for the first time in history, against the strongest and most powerful team in their league, the Bergamo Lions.
Before the game, Rick realizes that this is his new home, and that he would rather be here, with these teammates, than anywhere else in the world. The game was low-scoring, and in the beginning it looked like Bergamo might steal a win. But Rick showed his potential and his love for his team and the game, winning 9-6, by throwing a flawless Hail Mary to his teammate Fabrizio.
Parma would never be the same.
The protagonist in the novel was definitely Rick, because the book was about his struggles as the main character to fit in playing the sport he loved. But the antagonist, in my opinion, could be many people. First, there was Arnie, his agent. Arnie gave up on him, right after Rick lost the Cleveland game, although he tried hard not to show it. Another person with the strong case as Rick’s antagonist was Charley Cray, a journalist. He labeled Rick as the NFL’s goat, as their worst player in history. Even in Parma, Charley was able to find him, and write stories about all of Rick’s flaws, and not his good points in a game. Lastly, the other teams in the Italian leagues could be antagonists, simply because they were trying to beat the Panthers, and they were obstacles Rick had to overcome to win the Super Bowl.
I would definitely recommend this novel because it was detailed and had an amazing plot. It was a page-turner in ways more than one. This book was about more than sports, it was about overcoming struggles, and finding yourself in something that you thought you might have lost, in Rick’s case, he found football in a totally different country.
LINKS:
Parma, Italy. Some of the things in the article were briefly mentioned in the book.
Filed by two13 at September 10th, 2007 under Uncategorized
