A lovely memoir of a sports-mad kid growing up in Baltimore during
the 1950s - funny and bittersweet. For Washington Post sportswriter
Gildea (The Fighting Irish, 1976), the key events of his childhood
and adolescence are inextricably linked to the fortunes of the
Baltimore Colts football team. So it's only logical that in
reliving those times, he casts a fond glance back on his
relationship with his parents - a doting, slightly overprotective
mother and a pharmacist father, as big a sports fan as his son - as
well as on the Colts of his youth. Gildea writes, "To me the Colts
had been the best reminder since the Brooklyn Dodgers of how
something so simple as a team could arouse emotional attachments.
Then, like the Dodgers from Brooklyn, the Colts were gone." Much of
the book is spent recounting the closeness of those ties. Gildea
recalls a quartet of Colts fans: his father, the poet and humorist
Ogden Nash, a longshoreman named Joey Radomski, and a unique
character named Hurst Loudenslager, called "Loudy." This last
figure looms as an unusual example of a fan who became closer to
the players he idolized than almost anyone but their families. The
text also includes visits with numerous luminaries of the great
late-'50s Colts teams, including Hall of Famers Y.A. Tittle, Johnny
Unitas, Bert Reichichar, and Weeb Ewbank. But the heart of the book
is Gildea's elegy for his own family and for a time that seemed
simpler for sports, for families, and for America. He doesn't
sugarcoat that picture, however, and speaks frankly about the
effects of Baltimore's Jim Crow laws on black Colt players. In its
moving evocation of lost times, this does for pro football what
Roger Kahn's The Boys of Summer did for baseball. (Kirkus Reviews)
"Mr. Gildea's book is at once an elegy and a eulogy... In this
volume, every word is from the heart."-- "New York Times"
"William Gildea's "When the Colts Belonged to Baltimore" is to
football what Roger Kahn's "The Boys of Summer" was to baseball.
It's one of the best reads in a long, long time and should be a
best seller."--Larry King
In this personal and moving book, William Gildea blends
reminiscences of his boyhood in Baltimore with profiles of famous
Colts players such as Johnny Unitas, Lenny Moore, Gino Marchetti,
Raymond Berry, Art Donovan, Y. A. Tittle, and others. Recalling his
relationship with his father and the love they shared for a team,
Gildea evokes the spirit of 1950s America, when professional
athletes were workaday neighbors and community was more than a
political slogan. This is a story, too, about the geography of the
heart: why something so simple as a team can arouse such emotional
attachments, how a group of players with horseshoes on their
helmets could have been part of the generational glue between
parent and child. Written with feeling and insight, this is an
affecting tribute to a team and a time etched in memory.
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