I have a personal connection to "The Play," the wild ending to the 1982 Big Game referenced by this book's title. I was a Cal student at the time and I had money riding on the game through a bet with my brother. We were listening to the game on the radio outside of the shopping mall, and Jim confidently went back inside after Stanford scored their late field goal. I heard the mayhem of the final play on the radio, then excitedly rushed back inside to taunt my brother and collect on the bet.
That explains why my parents gave me Five Laterals and a Trombone for Christmas.
Despite the sensationalist title and the madcap climax, Five Laterals and a Trombone is a thoughtful piece of sports journalism. It covers quite a bit of ground in providing context for The Play: there are chapters about the Cal-Stanford rivalry (since 1892), the coaches, the Axe, the bands, the major players (especially John Elway), the season leading up to the Big Game, and of course the exciting game itself. It provides surprisingly clear, concise explanations of college football strategy for a book that builds to a desperate, completely improvised finish.
The author is a political journalist rather than a sports writer, but he nails the flat, merely serviceable prose of the genre. (His connection to the story is that he was a trombone player at Stanford who graduated the year before the game.) The narrative is disjointed because it pauses to provide background for the players and makes room for unusual perspectives such as the Memorial Stadium maintenance worker in position to collect the goal post pads at the end of the game.
Would the touchdown have counted in these days of replay review? Hard to say. To me the only question is whether the third recipient Dwight Garner was down before he tossed the ball, but we don't have the footage to know for sure.
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