THE PERFECT PASS

Nonfiction

The footballingest football book ever

THE PERFECT PASS:
American Genius and the Reinvention of Football
By S. C. Gwynne
271 pp. Scribner

Reviewed by Jack Shakely

I was born and raised in Oklahoma, the state that legendary coach Bennie Owens said had two favorite sports, football and spring football. I am nuts about football. I bleed crimson and cream every autumn Saturday for my beloved Oklahoma Sooners. I thought I could never get enough football.

Until I read The Perfect Pass.

This is the footballingest football book you will ever read outside of the Dallas Cowboys playbook. Even Vince Lombardi’s autobiography has fewer diagrams. It has more x’s and o’s than a game of tic-tac-toe.

Which is surprising, given the book’s author. S. C. Gwynne is the Pulitzer-prize finalist author of the brilliant Empire of the Summer Moon, one of the best nonfiction books ever written about the Plains Indians. He has the writing chops, and he often shows them here. But not often enough.

I thought at first that Gwynne would use football as a backdrop, a canvas to write a human-interest story, and Gwynne hints at as much in the beginning. Here’s Hal Mumme, a hardscrabble West Texas high school football coach who searches for new ways to play football because his boys are not big enough or fast enough to compete in the smash-mouth, run-oriented game then in vogue.  He develops an unconventional, some call wacky, pass-happy offense that wins games, but few friends. He becomes a tempest in a Texas teacup. 

Gwynne also gives us a great history of football, from the early days of Walter Camp and the lethal “flying wedge” formation that actually killed opposing players, through the Notre Dame quarterback who surprised a mighty Army team in 1921 by throwing the ball over the onrushing defenders, thereby inventing the forward pass. We learn about the Carlyle Indian Academy (Jim Thorpe’s school), that threw the football for the same reasons Mumme did—the Indian kids were too small. We see an America that falls in love with its passers while reserving judgment on the (sissy?) pass.

After years of struggling as an assistant coach at the University of Texas, El Paso (a school that Gwynne calls “the French Foreign Legion of major college football”), in 1988 Mumme finally gets a head coaching job at tiny Iowa Wesleyan College, a school whose awful teams often played before a crowd of 100 and once lost a game to the University of Iowa 91-0. But Mumme is free at last to put into practice his radical offense that passed on every down, even fourth down deep in its own territory, threw hail-Mary’s on its own one-yard line, and started winning games—no, started demolishing opponents. 

Curiously, it’s at this point in the book that Gwynne loses interest in Mumme and falls head-over-heels in love with his passing game itself. Gwynne figuratively fills the air with pass diagrams, y-crosses, meshes, sugar huddles, run-and-shoot and bandit offenses. Pages are filled with boxes and explanations of plays. Here is the description of one play on page 144: “Y must run under the Sam, and it is Y who sets the depth of the mesh at six yards from the line of scrimmage. X will cross under Y, so close they can touch hands.” Got that? 

Gwynne reports that Mumme, with his faithful offensive coordinator Mike Lynch, enjoys some success, moving up to Valdosta State College and finally, the University of Kentucky. But even in the volatile world of coaching, Mumme gets fired—a lot. Gwynne gives little explanation. Even Mumme’s divorce earns a single sentence. Gwynne gives a few hints; on more than a couple of occasions, Gwynne writes of Mumme and Lynch “sipping cocktails.” Could alcohol be a factor in why Mumme was summarily fired at Iowa Wesleyan? And Kentucky? And New Mexico State? And a factor in Mike Lynch’s firing at Texas Tech? We’ll never know.

There may be a reason why Wynne pulls his punches. Maybe The Perfect Pass wasn’t written for guys like me, guys who will never step on a gridiron, never throw a tight spiral. Every year there are a million 15-year-old boys who dream of becoming quarterbacks. They will eat this book up, x’s and o’s and y’s and meshes. Maybe Gwynne felt reluctant about presenting them with a hero with feet of clay. Maybe he gave Mumme a perfect pass.