Upon Further Review: The Greatest What-Ifs in Sports History

by Mike Pesca Narrated by Various

Overview

From Mike Pesca, host of the popular Slate podcast The Gist, comes the greatest sports minds imagining how the world would change if a play, trade, injury, or referee's call had just gone the other way.

"Intriguing...thought provoking...delightful." --The Washington Post
No announcer ever proclaimed: "Up Rises Frazier!" "Havlicek commits the foul, trying to steal the ball!" or "The Giants Lose the Pennant, The Giants Lose The Pennant!" Such moments are indelibly etched upon the mind of every sports fan. Or rather, they would be, had they happened. Sports are notoriously games of inches, and when we conjure the thought of certain athletes - like Bill Buckner or Scott Norwood - we can't help but apply a mental tape measure to the highlight reels of our minds. Players, coaches, and of course fans, obsess on the play when they ask, "What if?" Upon Further Review is the first book to answer that question.
Upon Further Review is a book of counterfactual sporting scenarios. In its pages the reader will find expertly reported histories, where one small event is flipped on its head, and the resulting ripples are carefully documented, the likes of...

What if the U.S. Boycotted Hitler's Olympics?

What if Bobby Riggs beat Billie Jean King?

What if Bucky Dent popped out at the foot of the Green Monster?

What if Drew Bledsoe never got hurt?

Upon Further Review takes classic arguments conducted over pints in a pub and places them in the hands of dozens of writers, athletes, and historians. From turning points that every sports fan rues or celebrates, to the forgotten would-be inflection points that defined sports, Upon Further Review answers age old questions, and settles the score, even if the score bounced off the crossbar.

Editorial Reviews

JULY 2018 - AudioFile

Author Mike Pesca assembles a cadre of “what-if?” questions from the sports world. Malcolm Gladwell starts things off with a cerebral foreword, which precedes more than 30 stories written in varying styles. Some are potentially history altering—such as Mary Pilon’s “What If Title IX Never Was?”—some are thought provoking and creative—such as Jonathan Hock’s “What If Jerry Tarkanian Had Beaten the NCAA and Liberated College Basketball?”—and some are laugh-out-loud funny—such as Jesse Eisenberg’s “What If I Hadn’t Written That Fan Letter to Dan Majerle in April 1993?” The stories, delivered by multiple narrators, are told with the right tonal inflections. All the narrators hit their marks, with Pesca being the most animated. Not one narrator misses a beat in this entertaining and educational compilation. M.B. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

03/05/2018
In his first book, Pesca, host of The Gist podcast, collects lively and informative essays on possible alternatives to some of the most notable moments in sports history. The entries come from sports columnists, historians, documentarians, and fans, and “propose hypotheticals that sparked the imagination, that opened the door to a hidden history or set off a plausible chain reaction we might not have even considered.” Highlights include Shira Springer’s “What If the United States Had Boycotted Hitler’s Olympics?” in which she presents a convincing case that a boycott would have been better for the 1936 Olympics, immediately setting the sporting event on “a more progressive” course. In “What If Muhammad Ali Had Gotten His Draft Deferment?” Leigh Montville convincingly argues that Ali’s time away from boxing in 1966 “was the most important time of all”—that without his image of “challenging authority,” Ali’s career would have been “perfunctory, simply about boxing.” In one of the best essays, “What If Nat ‘Sweetwater’ Clifton’s Pass Hadn’t Gone Awry?” Claude Johnson takes a look at racism in the early days of professional basketball with Nat Clifton playing in 1948 on the New York Rens, an all-black pro basketball team (Clifton’s errant pass caused the Rens to lose the game, and perhaps a franchise spot on the newly formed NBA). Enlightening and entertaining, Pesca’s collection of hypothetical sports outcomes gives sports fans much food for thought. (May)

From the Publisher

"What if you didn't read UPON FURTHER REVIEW? You'd miss a lot of mind-blowing fun. But why take the chance? Read it. You'll laugh. You'll learn. You'll impress your friends. There hasn't been a sure winner like this book since Mike Tyson beat Buster Douglas."—Jonathan Eig, author of Ali: A Life and Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig

"The inevitable plight of sports fans is longing for what might have been. Retrospective analysis — and wistful reimagining — is what gets them through the night. UPON FURTHER REVIEW teems with such moonlit fantastical — and a ravishing counterfactual revelation: sportswriters, the proud and embittered few, are actually a delightful bunch of goofball romantics."—Nicholas Dawidoff, author of The Catcher Was A Spy and Collision Low Crossers

"Enlightening and entertaining, Pesca's collection of hypothetical sports outcomes gives sports fans much food for thought."—Publishers Weekly

"Intriguing...thought provoking...delightful."—The Washington Post

"This is sports escapism brought to new and entertaining heights."—Kirkus

"A thought-provoking venture into sports' road-not-taken possibilities."—Booklist

JULY 2018 - AudioFile

Author Mike Pesca assembles a cadre of “what-if?” questions from the sports world. Malcolm Gladwell starts things off with a cerebral foreword, which precedes more than 30 stories written in varying styles. Some are potentially history altering—such as Mary Pilon’s “What If Title IX Never Was?”—some are thought provoking and creative—such as Jonathan Hock’s “What If Jerry Tarkanian Had Beaten the NCAA and Liberated College Basketball?”—and some are laugh-out-loud funny—such as Jesse Eisenberg’s “What If I Hadn’t Written That Fan Letter to Dan Majerle in April 1993?” The stories, delivered by multiple narrators, are told with the right tonal inflections. All the narrators hit their marks, with Pesca being the most animated. Not one narrator misses a beat in this entertaining and educational compilation. M.B. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2018-03-06
More than 30 what-if stories that reinvent sports history, and perhaps the greater national history.Former NPR sports reporter Pesca, host of the Slate podcast The Gist, asked his contributors to give the full trajectory of the what-if, not just how one game may have played out had Bill Buckner not booted a routine ground ball or Drew Bledsoe not gotten hurt and given way to Tom Brady. The author wants the bigger picture: how it might have changed the sport, a life, the politics of a nation, or paved over major cultural roadblocks, like racism. That is a tall order for rather short fantasies—roughly five to 10 pages—but a surprising number pull it off. "What If Nixon Had Been Good at Football?" by Julian Zelizer, is a wonderful little psycho-sporting profile that presents Nixon as a confident, honest, comfortable-in-his-own-skin man. "What If Roger Bannister Trained Today?" asks Liam Boylan-Pett. Instead of squeezing in a few hours per week between medical school classes, what if he had followed today's rigorous training regimens? Probably a new world record. What if Muhammad Ali had gotten his draft deferment? What if professional football were invented today? With what we know about head trauma, we might have very different play and players. For those readers who are intimate with a particular event—e.g., what if Billie-Jean King had lost to the huckster Bobby Riggs? What if Brady hadn't stepped in for the injured Bledsoe?—these counterfactual stories may feel thin on the bone. There are, for instance, lots of reasons besides Brady that the New England Patriots are the dynasty they have become, and it does feel like coaches, other players, and the general state of the sport at the time get short shrift. Other notable contributors include Leigh Montville, Jeremy Schaap, Will Leitch, and Mary Pilon.Some quibbles aside, this is sports escapism brought to new and entertaining heights.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170121021
Publisher:	Hachette Audio
Publication date:	05/15/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged

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