Forty essays and ten game-day speeches on brotherhood, masculinity, and the practice of becoming
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📥 Free Sampler: Prologue, Introduction, Ache of August
🎧 Listen to the “The Ache of August” as narrated Eleven Labs
🎧 Plus: Listen to a podcast overview of FOOTBALL IS… as narrated by Google’s NotbookLM
BACK COVER
Nineteen boys circle around like it’s a schoolyard showdown. The air is thick with “Fight Club” energy—raw, visceral, violent. They’re raucously cheering as one by one, their brothers step forward.
I’m hollering commands. They’re lifting, driving, flipping the one-man sled. One of my slimmer defensive backs struggles, and I bark, “Do it again!” I run alongside him, shouting, pushing, and when he finally flips the sled, we erupt—together.
As they run for water, the professor in me cuts through the adrenaline: What is it about this game—of clashes and hits—that becomes a place of nourishment?
Football Is... is a poetic, fiercely honest collection of forty personal essays and ten game-day speeches drawn from a lifetime of playing and coaching this game. Written by a former Division III captain who returned to the field after decades in academia, this book explores football not as sport, but as rite of passage, brotherhood, and mythic journey.
From football fields in small-town Ohio to the practice turf at Freeman High School in Virginia, these pages capture the sacred space between plays where character is forged and boys become men. This isn’t about X’s and O’s or championships—it’s about the inner transformation that happens when you step onto the field carrying your community’s hopes.
Who’s Football Is… for?
Whether you’re on the sideline, in the stands, or 25 years removed from the game, this book is a homecoming. Football Is… is for those who were shaped by the game:
It’s for former players who feel the ache each August.
For coaches who still believe in teaching boys to become men.
For fathers who hand down old helmets and older stories.
For sons still trying to earn the nickname.
For teammates who haven’t spoken in years but would still bleed for each other.
What two books would Football Is… sit between on a shelf?
Football Is… sits somewhere between Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art and H.G. Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights. Like The War of Art, it’s part philosophy, part personal reckoning—a meditation on discipline, failure, and identity. Like Friday Night Lights, it’s rooted in the rawness of high school football—the mythology, the ache, the brotherhood. It doesn’t just ask what the game gives us. It asks what the game does to us, for us, and through us.
Football Is… is for anyone who has stood under Friday night lights seeking something transcendent. It’s for anyone who knows football was never just about football. It was about belonging, initiation, pain, ritual, and becoming.
If you’ve ever felt the August ache, carried the weight of your team’s expectations, or wondered why a game can shape a life—this book is for you. Because football is brutal and beautiful. Muddy and mythic. Above all, love.