Punting

An interesting word, that. To people wrapped up in the NFL post-season it means one thing. To those bearing a long pole loitering near an inviting river, it means something completely different.

I rarely pay much attention to football. There’s usually a game on at the YMCA when I go on Sunday afternoons, most frequently the Houston Texans, and I watch with distracted interest for the duration of my workout and then leave with no further interest in how the game turns out. As with most sports, my interest spikes during the playoffs. Hockey is the only game I could watch on a regular basis–if only there were hockey to watch this year.

Football is probably the game that I understand the least. There are some esoteric rules that I don’t yet have a grip on. Something about forward motion during a fumble being allowed except during the last two minutes of the game. Something about punt returns and why they sometimes call for a fair catch and other times don’t. Anything to do with onside punts. (Don’t feel obliged to educate me on these! Some mysteries are better left unsolved.)

For all that, I watched two games back to back yesterday afternoon while reading John Grisham’s The Broker and doing some more editing on Missing Persons. I had less interest in the first game, but I have a certain fondness for the Patriots, so I watched the evening game with more than one eye. I’ll get around to watching Desperate Housewives on tape sometime this week, probably during Lost, since it’s a freakin’ rerun this week.

The Broker turned out to be a good book to read during a football game, since Grisham punted this one. It’s entertaining but superficial. The protagonist is being hunted by the FBI, CIA, Mossad, Saudis, Russians and the Chinese, yet he never seems to be seriously in danger. He’s the typical Grisham resourceful hero who can figure out how to use a high-tech blackberry-type gadget, even though he was barely computer literate before being sent to prison for brokering a deal to sell satellite technology to a foreign community. If I were to do a character sketch of him before the book opens, he would be a vastly unlikable person, but during the context of the novel, he’s pretty cool. The novel, however, is mostly an excuse for Grisham to express his love for northern Italy. I found myself craving tortellini, fresh baked bread dipped in olive oil, and red wine while I read it. It features lots of high-tech stuff, but in the afterword Grisham confesses that he is a technophobe and made it all up. If anything he writes in that vein is correct, he says, it was probably a mistake.

Sometimes Grisham is issue driven, but his book is tourism driven. Not that that’s a bad thing. The book is entertaining, but after his stellar work in The Last Juror, I found it a bit of a disappointment. I’ll probably remember the Patriots game longer than the book, but the two made good Sunday afternoon companions.