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Title: The Rise And Self-Destruction Of The Greatest Football Team In History: The Chicago Bears And Super Bowl XX
ISBN: 1572437901
Author:
John Mullin
Publicate Date: 2005-09-30
Publish: 2005-09-30
List Price: $22.95
Average Customer Rating: 3.5
Format: Hardcover
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $14.30
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $6.02
Amazon Merchant Price: $18.36
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| Customer Review: |
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1: Super!
There were plenty of tidbits here and there throughout the book to keep me interested. There were some things in here I didnt know about and I felt the book did its job adequately. It's worth a read.
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2: Fell Way Short
I had high hopes for Mullin's book on the 1985 Bears, but I couldn't help but feel disappointed that the book failed to deliver much of anything that hadn't been reported during and following the 1985 season. Not only did this book fail to prove, unequivocally, that these Bears were the best team in professional football history, but also failed to thoroughly reveal the team's "self destruction" in any significant way. While there were a few of interesting behind-the-scenes stories, the book is dissatisfying in terms of being long on common knowledge about the team and short on inside information. John Mullin is a reporter with a major Chicago newspaper and should have more "reach" into the non-public happenings of the team than he demonstrated in the book. Maybe he wasn't able to publish his juiciest findings--did an overly cautious publishing company dump the good stuff? In any event, the book was dismally underachieving in terms of bringing any new information to light.
Additionally, and this is more a matter of personal taste, I found Mullin's style to be a little disjointed. His stories seem to end abruptly, and he jumps immediately into another topic without a decent segue. Some topics are dropped without conclusion and others appear intermittently throughout the book without any rhyme or reason. His writing style was more like reading 200+ pages of USA Today style "snippets" of information than a cohesive tale of a historically great football team.
In the hands of a more capable storyteller, this book may have been a winner, but the lack of new information and poor organization of the material made this one a loser for me. I kept reading in hopes of something to make the task of reading this book worthwhile, but such a moment never materialized.
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3: Bears fans love this book
How could you go wrong for a Christmas present to a Bear's fan? My cousin loves this book and reads it when his beloved team isn't playing.
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4: Definitely not super
This book follows the rise and fall of the 1985 Super Bowl champion Chicago Bears. Unfortunately, it falls way short of the same greatness that they achieved.
While the book does a nice job of revealing some new stories (like the Jay Hilgenberg saga), it doesn't really uncover much of substance regarding the Bears. It does retell a lot of commonly known tales (Walter Payton's disappointment at not scoring in the Super Bowl) and adds a few tidbits to them.
In the end though, this Bears team was fascinating. It was full of characters and stories from top to bottom. This book disappoints in not giving more meat to existing stories and not uncovering enough unknown stories.
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5: The Title Raises Eyebrows
I believe a book on the so-called "greatest football team in history" should be a more scholary effort than what we have here. This is a long ways from what we would get from an author such as David Halberstam who has done books on great teams. Leafing through the book it appears to have been put together in a very short time. I read the book in one sitting, a couple hundred pages with less than the usual amount of information on each page. This "greatest football team in history" may have been great, but it was so for only one year. Several of the things that caused this team to self-destruct are also found in other teams in other sports. The reasons are hardly unique to the 1985 Chicago Bears. The book is entertaining, but it lacks the meat and potatoes a book of this sort is trying to project. I found this book to be of similar quality to "'63: The Story of the 1963 World Champion Chicago Bears." Neither one is destined to become a classic in a sports' library. I enjoy reading books on George Halas and his legacy in pro football with the Bears, but both of these books need someone else to tell the story.
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