Recommendation: A Few Seconds of Panic

My first experience reading a Stefan Fatsis book was truly enlightening. I picked up Word Freak on a whim or on a recommendation of a friend. I love words, I rarely play Scrabble, but I am compulsively competitive. Fatsis looked at this world of freaks and geeks and not just wrote his way in, but also played his way in. I was charmed.

When A Few Seconds of Panic came out, I had almost decided to give it a pass. Not my thing. I do not care about professional sports at all. But after hearing Scott Simon interview Fatsis I was intrigued. Like Word Freak Fatsis did not merely write about the NFL, he became a part of it.

Full disclaimer: my own upbringing taught me the basics of football from the sidelines. Friday Night Lights could have been about my town, minus the Texas-ness of it all. In college, I chose a school that had a weak sports program, nor did any of the schools near my alma mater field a football team at all. My antipathy towards football is, in actuality, more of an abhorrence. Yet this book was fully engaging to me.

What surprised me about this book was the nuanced and even-handed way Fatsis addresses professional athletics. He shows the pre-season training camp as grueling and the general player as a hardworking journeyman with only a few years shot at a career with pay that is not as great as billed. The portrait is extremely sympathetic.

For your students who are convinced that they will be a professional athlete, their minds will be blown by this account. Athletes are shown to be intelligent, hardworking, talented, and, for the majority, vulnerable to the vagaries of the marketplace. For the record, another way to blow their minds around this topic is to share the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook for Athletes and Sports Competitors. According to the BLS they will make on average $40,000 a year and there are fewer than 15,000 of them in the US. By comparison, High school teachers make an average $55,000 and there are 955,000 jobs according to the same data. Let them sit with that. High school teachers on average make more than professional athletes. Of course, the highest paid athletes make significantly more than the highest paid high school teachers.

For a taste of the book, check out the first chapter which is available at NYT.