BOOK REVIEW: BRENNAN'S PAEAN AS AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Best Seat In The House

Christine Brennan

A Lisa Drew Book/Scribner

283pp., $26.00

By Al Mattei
Founder, TopOfTheCircle.com

Christine Brennan, the peripatetic sports journalist who has called USA Today, The Washington Post, ESPN, HDNet, and CBS home for the last two decades, exhibits her usual clarity, accuracy, and tell-it-like-it-is style in her sixth book, "Best Seat In The House: A Father, A Daughter, A Journey Through Sports."

Ultimately, though, the tome is two books in one. The very beginning and very end of the book is a tribute to her late father Jim, who would take her to ballgames as a child.

The middle of the book, however, reads as straight autobiography. It's kind of like a sandwich with a thick, fresh focaccia but with a bland spread in the middle.

In the book, Brennan was incredibly effective bringing home memories of being in Toledo in the 1960s, where she was too young to remember protests and the Vietnam War, but marked her existence through attending Michigan games at The Big House, the Detroit Tigers, the Toledo Mud Hens, and her beloved Toledo Rockets football team.

Even back when the Rockets were qualifying for the Tangerine Bowl out of the Mid-America Conference, Brennan learned about American social ills through sport. The Rockets' starting quarterback, Chuck Ealey, was an African-American quarterback before the days of Doug Williams and Randall Cunningham and Daunte Culpeper.

But when Brennan's life and career took off, the book takes off with her. The narrative shifts only back to her father and the rest of the family occasionally, which is understandable given what Brennan did starting in the 1980s, becoming the beat writer for the Washington Redskins in an era when female reporters were just being allowed access to NFL locker rooms, covering major sports stories, and facing issues many columnists did not dare write about.

Occasional calls back to Toledo are the only mentions of her family. I would have liked to have read more about the evolution of that relationship. Instead, we got themed chapters on the Olympics, the 1999 Women's World Cup, the issues surrounding the barring of women from membership at Augusta National Golf Club, and a chapter called Full Circle which acts as a catchall "Where Are They Now?" segment.

The book comes back to the father-daughter focus at the final chapter, in which she loses both her parents. I guess the frenzy of the middle of the book is, in and of itself, a symbol of how career-minded people can often lose focus on family -- especially parents -- until close to the end of their lives.

Ultimately, "Best Seat In The House" lies somewhere between autography and paternal tribute. In trying to do both, it is an easy read, but less powerful than it could have been.