Football, Fast Friends, and Small Towns: A Memoir Straight from a Broken Oklahoma Heart - Softcover

Love, Steve

Softcover

ISBN 10: 173512270X ISBN 13: 9781735122700

Publisher: Hawk Bookworks, 2020

Synopsis

In this heartfelt memoir, Steve Love, contributor to two Akron Beacon Journal Pulitzer Prizes, shares familiar loves and losses. Nostalgic but never saccharine, Football, Fast Friends, and Small Towns is filled with Americana to which Baby Boomers and subsequent generations can relate. Small towns, whether his own Nowata or the Sallisaw of national champion quarterback Steve Davis, have rhythms and cultures, as common yet as special as the sight of leaves changing colors, the smell of smoke wafting from chimneys, and the sound of players in pads smashing one another under Friday night lights in the fall.

Football isn't the only collision sport found here. A clash between father and son and a small-town teetering on the economic brink strip bare the mythology of place. Yet such places, beloved hometowns, stand. Imperfect, with warts that rose-colored glasses and the distance of adulthood cannot hide, their sweet memories remain. Why do we remember what we do? These eclectic tales of football lost (and found again, if differently), a girl unwillingly left behind, and friends suddenly gone offer answers-or at least hints-to these and other of life's mysteries.

Using award-winning journalistic skills, Love fleshes out stories gone unfinished and finds telling details to all-too-common tragedies. Rich in self-criticism and laced with humor, Football, Fast Friends, and Small Towns is a cool drink of water from Nowata.

About this title

About the Author

Steve Love is from Nowata, Oklahoma, a small town where his heart remains. He is an award-winning journalist and author of five previous books, including The Golden Dream, the story of Gerry Faust, former Notre Dame football coach. He also contributed to two Pulitzer Prizes won by the Akron Beacon Journal. In a 40-year career, he worked for newspapers coast to coast, including the Miami Herald, and has taught creative nonfiction writing. Versatile, he has written metro, feature, book, and editorial opinion, but the majority of his work has come in sports, to which he has returned in this memoir. He and his wife live in Green, Ohio.

Edition details

• Publisher: Hawk Bookworks
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 173512270X
• ISBN 13: 9781735122700
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336