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"The Dark Side of the Game"
by Tim Green (Warner)

Tim Green is that rarity: an ex-jock who is able to convey not only what it feels like to play the game, but has trenchant, funny and smart things to say about a wide variety of off-the-field aspects of the sporting life. A Fox TV analyst, NPR commentator, attorney, novelist (he has written three) and sometime Salon columnist, the former Atlanta Falcon here wanders absorbingly through a potpourri of gridiron-related subjects, including race relations in the NFL, playing with pain, Deion Sanders, referees, Steve Young versus Joe Montana, the best and worst stadiums to play in, and groupies.

The book's title is actually a bit misleading: Green pulls no punches, but he still loves the game passionately, and this book celebrates as much as it exposes. Reading it is like watching an NFL game with an honest, good-humored and urbane companion who also happens to know his subject firsthand.

Some of the more interesting and amusing revelations in "The Dark Side of the Game":

Players don't wear nearly as many pads as fans think. In a cutthroat profession where speed is the coin of the realm and the tiniest advantage can make the difference between being a beloved millionaire hero and an impoverished nobody, players remove as much bulk as possible. Green relates a hilarious tale about the time when, a rookie, he dutifully donned his cup (the hard case that protects the groin), only to be greeted by disbelieving stares from his teammates, who eventually informed him that nobody wore them.

In the course of arguing that Steve Young is a better quarterback than Joe Montana (equally good touch passer, stronger arm, better runner), Green says that when he played for the Falcons the team was under express orders never to knock Montana out of the game. "We knew that if Steve Young was back there at quarterback, we didn't stand a chance."

The intricacies of the NFL rulebook: "I can say without question that after digging through the maze of words and concepts in the NFL rule book, even the most difficult areas of the law were nothing more than first-grade primers by comparison."

Michael Irvin notwithstanding, players don't get laid any more than the rest of the male population. There are, Green says, two kinds of women: groupies, who only fools would sleep with (they carry diseases, they have a tendency to show up unannounced at the player's home, they may entrap the player into fathering a child and then sue for big bucks), and non-groupies, who "have usually been forewarned that football players are one step removed from a lower form of reptile. They have the fervent belief, as do many people, that NFL players have spent the past year sleeping with 365 different groupies. They want nothing to do with them...Don't you feel better now?"

Many players -- including Green himself, a speed rusher who was undersized at 250 -- spend their entire careers desperately trying to gain weight. They stuff themselves religiously on chocolate cake and everything else, trying to get their weight up. Others, like the 49ers' huge, disconcertingly quick tackle Bubba Paris ("Bubba could race you to the mailbox and win, just as long as it wasn't too far. I'm talking ten or twenty yards") spend their entire careers trying to keep their weight down. They are heavily fined for every pound over their limit they go. "Friday night is the real test for the big guys. They know if they go out, each and every drink, and each and every cheeseburger they consume will cost them dearly the next morning. Some of The Fats, the big moneymakers, just say the hell with it. They live the good life and pay hundreds of dollars in weekly fines."

Never shake an active NFL player's hand firmly. He will not be impressed with your machismo but will curse you because his hand is cut to ribbons and you're squeezing it.

The physical and mental grind of the season leads to the "playoff blues." Green writes that a Dallas Cowboy starter told him that, on the plane flying to play the 49ers in a playoff game, a buddy whispered to him, "You know, if we win, we win, but if we lose, we get to go home, so if we lose, we win too." After the Cowboys lost, the player raised his glass on the return trip and quietly toasted, so the coaches wouldn't hear him, "'We lost, here's to the win.' Everyone toasted to that."

Green's comment: "Don't make judgments against anyone, not unless you played yourself. Even the NFL's coaches don't know that ground-up spit-out feeling of being a player, in January, in the NFL. And those guys raising their beer cans weren't disgruntled backup players either. They were the creme de la creme. Tough guys whose fortitude you wouldn't want to challenge. More than anything, the sentiments of players going into the postseason are a testament to just how unbelievably grueling an NFL season is on the guys who are out there, tearing up the turf."