Fumbled Effort Ex-Football Player Tim Green Has Some Thoughtful Things To Say About The Sport, But He Doesn’t Say Quite Enough

“The Dark Side of the Game: My Life in the NFL” By Tim Green (Warner, $19.95)

Tim Green is a guy’s guy, a guy who has spent a good part of his life in locker rooms and on football fields, a guy conversant in the low-grade banter of jocks. He is also a lawyer, a novelist, a reader of Dickens and Tolstoy. There is nothing unusual in someone’s being the sum of his contradictions, but you have to think the latter Tim Green - the one who is not just another guy - would be the more interesting of the two.

Unfortunately, we don’t meet much of that Green in “The Dark Side of the Game: My Life in the NFL,” the former Atlanta Falcons defensive end’s personal tour of a sport as regimented as the military and as corporate as IBM. Instead, we get an ex-jock who occasionally has thoughtful things to say - on racism in pro football, on Deion Sanders, on players’ use of drugs - but would just as soon engage in banal chatter about bulging thighs, blitzing linebackers and blinding speed.

You expect this from most ex-jocks, mouths disconnected from a brain, yammering on for the bellies on the bar stools. But Green is not the ordinary ex-jock, and the import of his book is a cultural one: that pro football today is as much a livestock exposition as a sport. The subject begs for satire and the sportswriters either don’t see it or have bought into the NFL’s self- important image. Green may not have a gift for satire, but he at least sees how degrading the sport’s trappings are. They begin with something called the combines, where college players hoping to be drafted by a pro team are assembled and examined as minutely as show hogs:

“Imagine being told to strip to your shorts. You stand in a line of other men, also almost naked. The floor is cold. It’s concrete. Your feet are clammy. You can smell the pungent sour odor of your own armpits; it’s that nervous smell. The line advances slowly toward the front of the room where, one by one, the men are weighed and measured with the cold efficiency of a slaughterhouse. Sloppy-looking overweight men in their forties and fifties sit stuffed into high school desk chairs jotting furiously as the lab-coated technicians bark out the exact heights and weights of their subjects. You wonder about your own height and weight and how two more inches and 20 more pounds could be worth millions of dollars to you right now, but it’s too late for that. Your craftier counterparts have been shooting up steroids for months to ensure not only the absolute maximum body weight, but strength and speed as well.”

On couches across America there are sloppy-looking overweight men - and some just paunchy - who will not catch Green’s tone of contempt. They are the passive audience the NFL, beginning with former Commissioner Pete Rozelle in the 1960s, has made into a congregation of believers. For them, the phrase “in the NFL” connotes something sacred.

Indeed, Green uses the phrase often himself. He has the strange notion that reporters and players are “in it together,” as though journalism owed fealty to the NFL. Once a jock always a jock perhaps. Still, he is an intelligent man who had loved football as a boy, loved it the way many boys have but happened to play it better than most. He won a scholarship to Syracuse University, where he was an all-American and a first-round draft choice by the Falcons.

He played eight years for the Falcons, but was smart enough to know that pro football is an imaginary world, glamorous only from the outside. Green has seen enough of this fantasy to know the dark side, and he details much of it. But he tries to cover too much ground - there are 71 chapters in a book of only 266 pages - and seems not to have known whether he was writing for the Sunday coach potato or a public that wants to see pro football put into a larger perspective. The result is a book that is an awkward, and ultimately disappointing, mix of old war stories and legitimate grievances against the sport.

There is another problem: The book reads as if it were dictated. In the first sentence of his acknowledgments, Green writes: “I would like to thank my editor, Rick Wolff, for his tireless work on this book.” Tireless? By the evidence of the book - blurred focus, mangled syntax, misused words - Rick Wolff didn’t break a sweat.

All of this does Green’s readers a disservice, but does him one as well. He had something worth saying, and he didn’t say it. Or he didn’t say enough.

What he says most poignantly is that the dream he once had of playing pro football was not the reality he knew. But there are dreams that die hard. For all the disillusion he met with, Green never steps onto a field without dreaming it again. You can only wonder why.