Dream Season A Professor Joins America's Oldest Semi-Pro Football Team

by Cowser, Jr., Bob

• ISBN13: 9780802142184
• ISBN10: 0802142184
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-09-13
• Publisher: Grove Press

Summary

At age thirty, Bob Cowser, Jr., is a happy husband, father, and English professor in upstate New York. But he senses that something is missing from the good life. He finds himself craving the exhilaration he felt as a young man growing up in sports-crazy Tennessee when he took the field for high school football games. In what is every Monday morning quarterback’s fantasy, Bob Cowser, Jr., revisits his glory days by joining the Watertown Red & Black, the country’s oldest semi-professional football team. Cowser drives the lonely sixty miles to try out for the team in Watertown, a former mill town of soldiers, corrections officers, and blue-collar workers that is a far cry from his leafy campus. As a rookie and an outsider, Cowser must work hard to earn the respect of these hard-edged men, some of them local celebrities. He must also find a way to balance the rigors of practice and game play with the demands of fatherhood, as his wife struggles to cope with a one-year-old son, a career, and a husband on the road. Can Cowser find a way to make the fulfillment of his childhood dream fit into real life as an adult?

Table of Contents

Permission: An Introduction	1	(12)
Coming Out of the Stands	13	(16)
Building the Beast	29	(16)
Committed	45	(18)
Contact	63	(18)
First Team	81	(16)
The Pretender	97	(18)
Carpool Mutiny	115	(22)
In Another Country	137	(22)
Belonging	159	(16)
Bitter End	175	(20)
Dream Season	195	(10)
Epilogue: Boys from Up North	205	(10)
Appendix A	215	(2)
Appendix B	217	(2)
Appendix C	219	(2)
Works Consulted and Suggestions for Further Reading	221	(2)
Acknowledgments	223