North Dallas Forty

North Dallas Forty #1

by Peter Gent

This book is a fictional account of eight harrowing days in the life of a professional football player.

Genres: Sports, Fiction, Football, Novels, Humor, Drugs, Media Tie In

314 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

George Davis Peter Gent was a Michigan State University basketball player and National Football League wide receiver turned novelist.

After leaving professional football, Gent wrote several novels dealing with the sport. His first and most famous book, a semi-autobiographical novel entitled North Dallas Forty, was published in 1973. Its main characters, a quarterback and a wide receiver, are widely considered to be based on Don Meredith and Gent, respectively. The novel was one of the first to examine the NFL's hypocrisy regarding drug use.

Gent made his home in Texas for many years, where he was friends with many of that state's significant creative minds of the day, including Larry L. King, Billy Lee Brammer, Gary Cartwright, Bud Shrake, Jerry Jeff Walker, and Dan Jenkins. They called themselves the Mad Dogs.

Gent also explored the corruption in modern professional sports in a sequel volume entitled "North Dallas After 40", published in 1989, and in two unrelated football novels — "Texas Celebrity Turkey Trot" (1979) and "The Franchise" (1983).

Gent also wrote a novel about college basketball entitled " The Conquering Heroes" (1994). Bill Walton’s cover blurb states that the book is the "North Dallas Forty of college basketball. But it’s much more, it’s about a whole generation of kids who came of age in an America that I grew up in."

Gent resided in Bangor, Michigan at the time of his death from a pulmonary disease on September 30, 2011,and was working on a novel.

Reviews

[Jeffrey Keeten · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I never saw a guy having so much fun and crying at the same time."

Drugs, sex, exploitation, and alcohol provide the octane for 8 days in the life of Phil Elliott an aging wide receiver for a Dallas professional football team. Hunter S. Thompson would have been holding his hand up by day four saying take me out coach. I might have lasted two days. Elliott not only lasts the entire span, but shows up to football practice every day and plays a professional game by day seven. If anyone is looking to write a dissertation on drug use in the early 1970s this book would be a great place to start.


Nick Nolte plays Phil Elliott in the 1979 movie

Nursing the aches and pains of an athlete quickly reaching his past due date Elliott relies heavily on legal and illegal drugs to keep his body and mind working. As Phil says to a trainer on the team. "I may have ten more years left in me if I could just master the chemistry of this game." He wasn't talking about the chemistry of the work place like the rest of us worry about. He was constantly experimenting with the proper dosages of a cornucopia of drugs to try and get through each day.

Phil can feel the end coming every time he straps on his cleats, every time he has another meaningless one night stand, and every time he wakes up feeling worse than when he went to sleep. He is in a constant state of survival. In fact Phil talks about that fact with the quarterback's girlfriend of the moment.

"He played a great game," she said, disappointed but not surprised by the thought that Maxwell was despondent.

"We didn't win," I pointed out.

"Does it matter that much?"

"To him it does."

"Not to you?" She seemed surprised.

"A little, I suppose. Mostly I'm just trying to survive." I was a little embarrassed by the drama in my statement.

"I'm just trying to get the job," I explained. "He worries about getting it done right, or what he things is right."

I paused for a minute and watched her fooling absently with is hair. "You really like him, don't you?" I observed.

"I really do," she said, keeping her eyes on Maxwell. There was a tone of hopelessness in her voice.

"Why?"

"Because he's a man," she said. "What I thought all men were supposed to be like."

"What about me?" I asked with mock indignity.

"You," she said, turning to look at me and smiling wryly. "You. You're what men really are. Like you said, just trying to survive."


Dust Jacket cover of the Hardcover edition

Even though Elliott is always worried about retaining his spot on the team he can't keep his head down in fact he keeps getting into trouble with management due to his hijinks and his disrespectful tone. What Elliott wants is more control over his life and with no union and no real security except how well he played on Sunday he finds himself questioning if management even sees him as a human being.

"I'm too used to seeing myself on a list-six-foot-four-inch two-hundred-fifteen-pound flankerback, right alongside the six and seven-eighths helmets and the size thirteen shoes. No, man, I not only feel like a piece of equipment. I know I'm a piece of equipment."

I know it has become almost fashionable to be anti-union, but the only reason that we can feel comfortable getting rid of our unions is because they've done an excellent job making us all feel secure. In the process we forget what made us secure in the first place. Phil Elliott didn't really know it, but what he wanted was a union, something to offset the god like powers of NFL owners.


Peter Gent

Peter Gent never played a down of college football. He was an outstanding basketball player for the Michigan State University. He turned down a pro NBA career (head scratching moment) and decided to show up to the Dallas Cowboys training camp when he heard they were offering $500 to anyone who showed up. Due to his athleticism he did make the team and contributed for a couple of years, but due to an accumulation of injuries his career was cut short. He passed away September 30th, 2011 from pulmonary disease.

I laughed out loud. I cringed. I felt Phil's fear and I wanted to put a restraining hand on his arm from time to time, but then nothing ever changes if someone isn't pushing the envelope trying to make not only the owners, but the players realize there is room for change. I was surprised at the profound impact this book had on me. Yes, it is a book about football, but actually very little football occurs. This book is more about the search for something more, for a life with meaning.

[Jayakrishnan · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I was depending on Maxwell to protect me from severe physical harm. There was no protection against emotional damage. That was an occupational hazard."

I know nothing about American sports. I guess North Dallas Forty is to American football what The Godfather or Goodfellas were to American Mafioso/Gangsters.

Darkly funny. Blackly comic. The dark underbelly of American sport. I do not want to use these clichés. So the writer Peter Gent was an ex-football player. I have always felt that when ex-gangsters or rock stars or sports superstars tell their life story there is a tendency to be ostentatious. To flaunt their "dark lives" which is enjoyed by middle class readers like myself.

It must be said that Philip Elliot, the protagonist in this novel is a real pussy who is regularly ordered around by his superior teammates and treated like shit by the team management. The character is a well-read, idealistic and romantic man who finds himself amidst the hard-drinking, whoring and drug imbibing animals who play American football. When Philip meets Charlotte, a woman who owns and runs a farm, he longs to escape from the macho football world and settle down with her on the farm. The novel is divided into eight sections, capturing eight days in the life of Elliott.

But it was apparent that he had not experienced the one thing that makes a professional football player—intense and constant fear. But how many people, aside from combat soldiers, advertising executives and actors, experience that kind of fear? Football players aren’t people, who leave home to try and play football. They are football players, who come home to try and play people.

The book is full of commentary like the above. Elliot partakes in the hard-boozing and womanizing escapades. But he is full of sorrow and fear.

I got Maxwell into my car, returned the Cadillac to the lot, and drove him home. The ride to his house was punctuated by several stops for his stomach to disgorge itself of what seemed like gallons of a reddish-brown whiskey-smelling foam. By the time we had reached the rows of thirty-five-thousand-dollar boxes in far north Dallas, he was feeling much better and invited me to stop by his apartment for a joint.

It is fucking funny. The book begins with a really wild dove and duck hunting trip in which Elliot feels all lost and scared among the three alpha male team mates he is with and they know he is scared of them. It is revealed later that during a brawl with another team, Elliot had stayed in the dressing room, merely watching.

For me, the stand out scene of the novel - when Charlotte, the farm girl dismembers the testicles off a calf with Elliot and her black lover watching. I liked this book a lot. Apart from boxing movies, American art related to its sport is something I have never really delved into. And I never really saw the ending coming.

[Kemper · Rating 4 out of 5]

Treasure of the Rubbermaids 13: Are You Ready For Some Football Under the Friday Night Lights On Any Given Sunday?

The on-going discoveries of priceless books and comics found in a stack of Rubbermaid containers previously stored and forgotten at my parent’s house and untouched for almost 20 years. Thanks to my father dumping them back on me, I now spend my spare time unearthing lost treasures from their plastic depths.

This book had crossed my mind several times over the past year before and during the NFL lockout while I heard many fans moan and wail about how it was greedy players ruining the game. I always disagreed with that, and Peter Gent’s novel has been a big influence on my thinking about it for years. You’ve got about 1600 guys on earth capable of playing at that level who generate tens of billion of dollars for a handful of owners, so it only seemed fair that they get a decent slice of that pie. While you’ll sometimes hear grumblings about ‘billionaires versus millionaires’, some people seem to think the players should go out and wreck their bodies for minimum wage and simple love of the game. Anyone who has romantic notions along those lines should read this book immediately.

Gent died recently and that gave me the nudge to dig this out of the Rubbermaids and reread it. He played for the Dallas Cowboys for several years in the late ‘60s, and this fictionalized account of a player named Phil Elliot was obviously modeled on his time there. Elliot is a talented receiver, but he’s injury prone. After just a few years in the league, he already needs huge doses of painkillers and hours in the therapy room just to get on the practice field.

Even more than his injuries, Elliot’s resistance to blindly follow the team’s mandates has gotten him in the doghouse with his coach and general manager. As a quasi-hippie with a love of marijuana and a habit of making smart ass comments, many of his fellow teammates don’t like him much either. Playing for the princely sum of $16,000 a year and routinely screwed over by the corporate side of the team, Elliot realizes he’s not a person to management, he’s a piece of equipment that’s rapidly in need of replacement. If he wasn’t a good drinking buddy and favorite receiver of the team’s star quarterback, he’d already have been cut or traded. Elliot copes with the pain and stress by indulging in heavy drinking, drug abuse and casual sex all while marveling at the hypocrisy and self-deception practiced by the team’s coaches and management. Phil‘s humor and compassion make a stark counter point to the serious violent world he works in.

Despite the injuries, the team’s bullshit and the insanely violent nature of many of his teammates, Elliot still loves playing and lives for those pure moments of athletic achievement where he can make a tough catch and fears the day when he won’t be able to compete any more.

You don’t have to be a football fan to enjoy this book. The broader theme of an individual being crushed by a system that can’t stand individuality is universal. Phil could have been a coal miner or a cop or a teacher or a cube farmer, and his plight would still be just as familiar to anyone who has held a job where the people in charge piss down your back and then insist that you say it’s raining. But for those interested in the football aspect of it, you’ll get the impression that nothing much has changed since it’s publication almost 40 years ago.

Oh, and the movie version with Nick Nolte is pretty faithful to the book although the novel ends on a much darker note than the film.

[Beer Bolwijn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was put onto this book by Hunter Thompson, who mentioned it in an article:

"Just before talking to Burgin, in fact, I read a savage novel called North Dallas Forty, by ex-Cowboy flanker Pete Gent, and it had cranked up my interest in both Dallas and the Cowboys enough so that I was right on the brink of dumping Oakland and heading for Texas."


To my surprise, I found this book to be very moving, quirky, perceptive, grim and focused, with plenty of little scattered observations on Dallas around 1970. I love it because there's a tremendous sense of dystopia. Orwell's 1984 is great and all, I prefer to read about actual existing dystopiae. This is one of those books where you get that feeling of hopelessness in a world of extreme capitalism, racism and physical abuse.

The atmosphere of fear and pain, the sense of detachment from one's broken body, the constant abuse of uppers and downers, the team going out at night, the dialogues and idiosyncracies of pro-football; this book was a joy to read and I finished it in a few days.

[James Aylott · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my “Tales of Whiskey Tango from Misery Towers” blurb reviews punted out my book channeled, “the spirit of bawdy classics like North Dallas Forty.” I had never heard of this novel, but I was intrigued and set myself the task of reading it. Upon completing Peter Gent’s 1979 book I was blown away by just how good it is. Brutal, breathtaking, and incredible were my feelings as I turned the final page. I would love to know how much of the novel was Gent’s and how much was from a hotshot editing team. Did all the novels in the 70s go overboard with the descriptions or is Gent merely a kindred spirit in the lewd department? I could never quite figure out if my blurb review was good or bad; It depended if I was looking at the glass half full or half empty. If nothing else I am forever thankful for the reviewer directing me to a literary classic that I would never have found myself. The final chapter of North Dallas Forty will be in my nightmares for quite some time.

[Jonathan Maas · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Classic on Par With Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness

Yes - you heard me. This book is that good.

I opened North Dallas Forty with an open mind, thinking it would just be a quality title from the 70s.

It was more than just a quality title. Peter Gent, former Dallas Cowboy, writes with the authority that only a player can.

The injuries. The business. The women. The drugs. The fear. The constant need to survive.

You realize through Gent that this is not a game, this is not a high school team. You survive, you survive and you survive. Way after that is winning.

Winning does not help heal your body. Winning does nothing if you are cut afterwards.

You survive, and that's it.

But what a tale, and what a main character



Gent's Phil Elliott is a great protagonist. He's got great hands. He's an aging athlete. He reads a lot. He is beyond anti-social when it comes to anyone besides his love interest and his quarterback friend.

But oh is he anti-social when it comes to the equally anti-social management.

But wow does he provide insight.

On athletic friendships brought by competition

Our friendship was based on a mutual respect and envy of each other’s particular football skills and would end when either of us left the game. Competition needs an arena or it just degenerates into unbridled hatred.

Phil on his Quarterback Friend Who Talks to Youth Groups

“You sure are bitter,” Maxwell said. “What harm can it do?” “I don’t care, man. Go ahead, influence people.” I deepened my voice to affect an imitation. “Hi, kids. Seth Maxwell here to give you a little good influence. Don’t get your kicks doping. Get out on the ol’ gridiron and hurt somebody. It’s cleaner and more fun.”

Phil on Competition

“That’s why they love football, man,” I said, nodding toward Andy’s apartment. “Easy to understand. Win or lose. Simple. Direct. Not nearly so confusing as their lives. Have you noticed that nothing is quite so aggravating to a football fan as a tie?”

Phil Trying to Fit in to Society

At the end of the meeting they passed around pencils and paper and asked everyone to list people they thought might be Communists, use drugs, or otherwise act suspicious. I was afraid to hand in a blank sheet of paper, so I listed my wife.

In short - this book is incredible, but be warned

It pulls zero punches. Football is a horrible game, and through Phil's experiences, you can see the horrors that often surround us all.



You heard of this guy? Everyone is calling Le'Veon Bell names because he is negotiating a contract.

Read North Dallas Forty, and you'll start rooting for the Bells of the world. Make what you can or retire. There is no real middle ground in this game.

[David Keaton · Rating 4 out of 5]

A ridiculously ambitious novel from a former Dallas Cowboys wide receiver (!) who I will always picture as Nick Nolte, in spite of the strange, wizard-like author photo on the back cover. This book is basically responsible for Any Given Sunday decades later, and, in fact, was made into its own deeply odd movie adaptation way back when. That movie lacks one important detail, however. Yes, I'm talking about the gory, action-packed, racially charged bloodbath of a conclusion. Wait, the what? Yeah, don't remember all those murders in the movie, do you? It's all more than a bit scatterbrained, and definitely a product of the '70s, but like I said, it sure is ambitious. Phil Elliot, the book's drugged-out/pain-addled hero, nobly endures the parties, hero worship, and senseless brawling from a fairly smug distance, giving us our cake and smashing our face into it, too. And the writing is a bit ragged (the prose reminded me of Ben Hamper's Rivethead narration, another "accidental" blue-collar writer), but it's not a hindrance. I've always said that I'll take sports movies over actual sports every time, so maybe I'll try another sports book one day. It could also be that I'm sick of "good" books, and sometimes this feels not only like a first book, but like a book from a guy who will never write another. But it's an honest, messy, beautiful disaster and full of bloody noses that are earned.

[Deacon Tom (Feeling Better) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dated

This was rather famous book some decades ago. If my memory is correct, it was the first NFL tell-all. With today's 24 hour new cycle and the internet, it is mild by comparison.

I really did not enjoy ir

[Sojyung · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked up Peter Gent's "North Dallas Forty" after Dr. Z (the formr Sports Illustrated columnist)'s recommendation. Always in the elusive hunt for a good football book, I excitedly hunted down a copy of the book which my favorite sports writer described in glowing terms.

It's not that Gent is a bad writer. In fact, his writing is impressive at times, showing conscious styling and acute literary sense. I genuinely admired how he structured the book so that the development, climax, and dénouement are presented as a week in the life of a football player, climaxing with battle Sunday and concluding with the painful Monday after. And, without any argument, the greatest strength of Gent's book is its portrayal of America in the 1960s. He deftly describes racial tension, drug culture, and counter-culture through the lens of the NFL, leaving the reader stunned by its raw honesty.

But with all that said, the narrator of "North Dallas Forty," a Philip Elliot modeled after Gent himself, is insufferable. Elliot/Gent is like the boy in high school who, after reading a Vonnegut or a Bukowski, insists that he's a writer, but also swears that he's as rebellious and badass as anyone else. And in this respect, other than some moments of excellent writing, Elliot/Gent sounds like any other hack who thinks lacing expletives with (laughably) profound thoughts is good rebellious literature.

Elliot/Gent describes nearly everyone as being dumb, vapid, cruel, and unredeemable. His portrayal of women is even more degrading, as all of them, in addition to being stupid and dull, are sex-crazed insecure shrews. Only four people escape this judgment-- himself, his quarterback, Charlotte (the grossly idealized woman with whom he falls in love with), and David, the man with whom Charlotte might also been sleeping (I'll leave it for you to decide if the vain homoerotic overtones of this were intentional). But sadly to say, he himself doesn't come off any more interesting.

All in all, I found this book incredibly difficult to get through, and I only willed myself to finish because of 1) masochism and 2) respect for Dr.Z. Not worth you're time-- unless you're 15, just discovered the Ramones, and really love both Bukowski and Ken Stabler sort of football figures.

[Brian Carr]

Classic!

[John Devlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

A roman a clef of the late 60's in the NFL. Gent's story details the drugs, the women, and the endless pain that follows these men through their gridiron battles. Now, more a period piece, North Dallas depicts Texas and its prejudices against blacks and drugs as reflexively as it shines a light on the cavalcade of pain killers from codeine to novocain to the ubiquitous use of Amphetamines. Certainly, much has changed in the NFL as regards racism and drug use, but I was left to wonder about the pain these men endure for their Sundays of religious bliss. In Gent's time the constant injuries are forefront to the story, and now w/ men so much larger, and as reports are beginning to show taking even more damage, I can't help but wonder what the gladiators of today are undergoing to play and what they'll have to undergo just to survive their life after football.

[Allen · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was very interesting seeing what the pro-football NFL players have to endure to keep playing. For a good deal of the book it just looked like lots of drugs, girls, drinking and parties. But as the book gets into a lot of detail during one of the games and what happens after that it’s all very exciting.

I saw the movie based on this book many years ago. Now I have to watch it and compare it to the book. Mac Davis and Nick Nolte were fantastic in it, I do remember that.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

The cover of this 1973 Signet paperback gives the impression that Peter Gent's novel is going to be a somber and mournful look at the twilight of a professional football player's career, perhaps some heartland elegy similar in tone to a movie like The Last Picture Show, when the story's tone is in fact wildly irreverent, raunchy and hilarious.

I wasn't completely surprised- I'd seen the 1978 movie after all, which seems to me more-or-less spiritually faithful (Gent has one of the screenwriting credits)- but the book, as is often the case, pushes buttons on a different level. Let's say that I don't think then-NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle could have appreciated very much the depictions of rampant drug use, the suggestion of obviously Communist sympathies on the part of the main character (including but not limited to his picking his nose and mouthing the words during the National Anthem), how many asides there are about molesting llamas at the zoo and Dallas businessmen who want to watch while you have sex with their wives, or that- despite how much heterosexual sex goes on in its pages- I can easily imagine the book being hailed today as a thinly-veiled gay classic.

I was having trouble characterizing North Dallas 40 to a friend over the weekend; and after listening to my inadequate description, he concluded, "So, it's an exposé of the NFL?" But the connotations of that word- journalistic rigor, sober analysis, a work in service of justice and transparency- would be very misleading in the context of a novel that's so anarchic in spirit, and which I have to consider one of the funniest I've ever read.

Which isn't to say that it completely lacks the poignant and elegiac qualities suggested by the cover. At its heart, I think, is the friendship between narrator Phil Elliott (receiver for a professional Dallas football team conspicuously not named the Cowboys, and widely understood to be a stand-in for Gent himself, who- as anyone who reads a few pages of this book will immediately understand- was a former player), getting older and getting by in the league on painkillers, and his well-established, charismatic quarterback Seth Maxwell (widely understood to be based on Cowboys quarterback Dan Meredith), both of whom have very different outlooks on the game they play for a living- outlooks that are not offered up as easily summarized talking points, but which emerge gradually, somewhat opaquely and seemingly organically over the course of the novel, which is to say over the course of a week of pot-smoking, parties, drinking, practice, aches and pains. To attempt a summary, though, Maxwell is committed to the business of winning and to at least paying lip-service to the hallowed ideas of team and organization, while Elliott looks at winning or losing "as someone else's benefit, distantly removed from my daily struggles for existence." As far as mainstream American sports culture goes, no more sacrilegious words were ever spoken. But they are nevertheless two guys with a bond that can only be created by working day-in and day-out together in a unique and brutal corner of reality, which seems to suffice for friendship up until the last moment in the novel that we see Maxwell, driving off on the highway on a note I found hauntingly ambiguous.

Gent clearly enjoyed what I think he might have called the pure aspects of the sport. This is not a novel written by someone who hated the game of football itself; and in one of the few interviews with him I could find, he talks about how being on the field made him feel alive in a way that nothing else did. But the book also fits into what seems to me a distinctly 70s rejection of dehumanizing institutions, and a corresponding championing of the individual who's a bit of a smartass and a bit of a non-conformist. "Exposé", again, is very much the wrong word, even though I wouldn't be surprised to hear that the book revealed a lot- for example the sheer quantity of painkillers, speed, pot, and numbing shots of all kinds that these guys were taking, the brutally realistic depictions of literally not being able to get out of bed in the morning, of not being able to sleep more than a couple of hours at a time- that hadn't been public knowledge before. But "exposé" puts you in mind of a piece of writing whose primary goal is to reveal shocking facts and perhaps to change things going forward. Whereas North Dallas 40 takes what might be shocking to the public as old news, is interested more in allowing us to hang out with its characters than in polemicizing, and I think what's truly subversive about it is that tone of irreverence. Irreverence, not frivolity. It's actually an uncompromising irreverence that refuses to regard prayer, the flag, teamwork, America's mission in Vietnam, and football on Sundays as in any way sacred. Elliott's way of fighting back- either cynical or realistic, depending on your outlook- seems based on the unspoken conviction that the only way to do that is by smoking pot, being friendly with his black teammates, and not taking any of the shibboleths offered by team or country too seriously. By not believing. And I can understand the depiction of the character, especially since he is pretty clearly an authorial stand-in, at times coming off as a little self-aggrandizing to some readers, but I think that's why the contrast with Maxwell- who keeps warning Elliott that you need to pay lip-service, that you need to compromise with the world just a little, that otherwise you're courting your own doom- is so important to the book and so gripping, and also because it's a debate that some of us have with ourselves every day.

"...the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Aaamen."

The supplicants rose to their feet and broke into a long animal roar, preparing for battle, as the Monsignor had so eloquently put it.

"Let's kill those cocksuckers!" Tony Douglas screamed, leaping up from his knees. He caught himself and glanced sideways at the Monsignor, who was standing near him. "Sorry, Monsignor."

"That's all right, Tony", the Monsignor replied. "I know how you feel."

The above is from a passage late in the novel, right before the Dallas not-Cowboys play a game against the Giants in New York. And while on one hand I think it demonstrates Gent's great comic timing, it also speaks to the idea that there is a violence to this game, a brutality, that we clearly feel the need to consecrate and thereby obscure through piety and patriotism. The pre-game prayer and the singing of the National Anthem are rituals through which we sanctify the violence we're about to witness, which inevitably causes the reader to consider the much more irreversible acts of violence that are excused in the public consciousness as long as they're committed by us, or by a country with a flag we've been taught to think of as friendly.

The Dallas newspapers had become almost camp. The banner headline read: CIA BELIEVES VIET CONG TRYING TO EMBARRASS U.S. It seemed a safe assumption.

At times I was reminded of Thompson's Hell's Angels- maybe in part because I just reread it, but also because Gent, like Thompson, takes one harrowing and unique corner of American life and suggests its connection to the whole. Without ever getting heavy-handed about it, he allows Elliott to observe, for example, that the Dallas football team's offices are located in the same building as team owner Conrad Hunter's original electronics firm and source of most of his wealth, a firm that "manufactured aircraft and missile-guidance systems for the Defense Department, supplying the largest portion of systems in use in Southeast Asia." There is a very different ending to this book than there is in the movie; an ending that you could, if you were inclined, glibly describe as a 70s movie ending...but that would be to deny that Gent made any meaningful choice, when in fact I think the ending is very intentional. It's a culmination; and I think there must have been quite a few contemporaneous readers who, even by the time they got to the big Dallas-New York game in the penultimate chapter, wouldn't have been able to help visualizing the plays of the game interspersed with images of Vietnam. Even today, as I finished the book, it was impossible to escape the conclusion that the entertainment we enjoy and the wars we wage have more in common than we often like to think, fueled by the same money and in some sense part of the same mission.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed this fictional account of the final eight days of a professional football player's career with a Dallas professional football team. The characters, if not the story line (who knows?), are based on the real Dallas Cowboys, for whom Gent played, its players, coaches, and owners of the mid-1960s. Phillip Elliot (Peter Gent), the protagonist through whose eyes the story is narrated is too independent, publicly profane, and cynical to fit the Dallas team's corporate mold and is eventually cast out not because he doesn't have the ability, but because he mocks and threatens the hypocritical facade of convention the team corporate management believes in. While the Dallas management talks about football as a game, they go about it as a business. While they strongly abjure use of marijuana, an illegal substance, they readily use stronger drugs just to get their players on the field every Sunday. And while they say players are valued members of and contributors to the "team," the players are really little more than equipment - machinery kept together with drugs, chemicals and modern medicine until they reach a point of deterioration at which they can no long perform well, when they are cut, discarded - scrapped.

The book can be read as not only a portrait of the professional football lifestyle circa 1960s, with its Christian, well-mannered facade overlying an unruly, decadent lifestyle, but as a parable inditing the 1960s (and later?) corporations in general, in which individualism is stifled to attain conformity to at least the appearance of the corporate values espoused while cynically treating employees as just another physical asset, to be reorganized or down-sized out, when they are no longer valued.

In many ways the book is dated, portraying racial and ethnic bigotry and sexism that no longer exists in the overt, publicly accepted ways exhibited in the book. But nonetheless it does correctly portray attitudes and language of that era and those attitudes do still underlie more than a little current public discourse. And the corporate, ownership attitudes while different in degree are not today that much different in kind. By the way, the 1979 movie version, starring Nick Nolte, is fairly faithful to the book's story line.

[G Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

eye opening. and the ending of the book hit like a 1 ton brick.

[Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

I saw the movie made from this book years ago and that ignited my interest in reading the original story. There are ways that the book is better and ways the movie is better. Both are about 8 days in the life of a professional football player, a receiver. Most of the actions depicted in the book also show up in the movie, although the tone is much more light-hearted in the movie.

Although I've never played pro football, this book certainly had the feeling of authenticity. That being said, there were moments where the very nature of all that detail slowed the pace of the work down. It was interesting reading but not a page turner. In this way, I thought the movie was a bit better in its pacing.

On the other side, the ending here is so much more powerful than the movie ending. I can see why the movie makers altered it. The book ending quite likely would not have played well to the general audience. I much prefer the novel ending, though and it really hit hard. The power of it pushes the novel well out in front of the movie. I was set to give the book 3 stars but the ending pushed it up another star. I think pretty much anyone who likes football would find it interesting.

[Kevin Shay · Rating 5 out of 5]

A sports classic, probably the most ground-breaking sports book of its generation. Mr. Gent changed the face of pro sports with this book, forcing owners to deal with issues like using painkillers to make players perform hurt.
I grew up with the Cowboys and in later years, emailed Mr. Gent a few times about various issues before he passed away too young. He was passionate about a lot of things, including politics and film. He was not your average jock type.

[Jake · Rating 4 out of 5]

Peter Gent's jarring Roman a clef about playing for the late-60s Dallas Cowboys still holds up well today. A no-holds-barred account on the violent life of an NFL athlete, it gives the reader pause for reflection that even in 2011, the players in the league are playing under less than optimal circumstances with their bodies as their only commodities.

[Rebecca Campbell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Better than I thought it would be.

[Kurt Reichenbaugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just act like you belong. It was the advice my older brother had given me to get into bars before my twenty-first birthday. It was the only thing he ever said that made sense. An All-American in high school and college, he graduated with honors and became a successful high school coach. Last spring he quit his job, left his wife and three girls and ran off with the senior-class valedictorian. She came back after three weeks. No one has heard from him since.

I first read this book about professional football in 10th grade and it became one of my favorite books. I was at an impressionable age, 16 at the time. Books about rebellious protagonists who will ultimately lose against authority resonated with me, as I would imagine they would with most teenagers. There is no honor. There is no loyalty and, in the end, your friends will not stick up for you when it's your ass hauled before the power structure. And the book is raunchy as hell. 70s novels seem to be way raunchier than we remember them to be. I don't think most of this novel would be given a pass today. There are too many racist and sexist passages in it to find an audience now. The characters all act out to an extreme that stretches credibility. Massive quantities of drugs and alcohol are ingested. Vice is rampant. Violence is ever-present. And the ending provides a complete 180 turn into an extremely dark resolution. There was a movie produced from it starring Nick Nolte as Phil Elliott, the lead protagonist, and Mac Davis as Dallas quarterback Seth Maxwell. The movie poster depicts a comedy vibe, full of sexy juvenile hi-jinx. Nothing like the book. I saw the movie after having read the book and was not surprised that so much from the novel wasn't translated in the Hollywood version. A few passages about the "faceless" business interest of sports over the respect for athletes were there, but beyond that it's a mostly forgettable movie. The book hits way harder.

With all of its flaws I still love this book for its early impact on me as a reader. Reading it again now, over forty years after having read it the first time, there were passages that I've never forgotten. And there were scenes and characters that were new to me. Things I didn't see or understand the first time. Decades removed I had forgotten how much of the Vietnam war shadowed the plot, for example. And how much professional sports has changed since the author, Peter Gent, played football. As far as recommending it to anyone now, I suppose I could, but not without a caveat that the content has aged badly. Much of the ugly racist and sexist content in this novel made me uncomfortable. It's a product of its time. It's not a pretty depiction of the culture and attitudes of those ugly decades. I'm still going to keep my old battered mass market paperback edition of it.

[Esteban Stipnieks · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book had a subversive reputation I later read that in the movie version there was talk of Don Meridith playing the quarter back..... which would have been well too tasty. I knew of this book I think he did a radio interview 1984 or so about the Franchise. The book lived up to its hype reading it I could see why any male living in the DFW would have preferred gettng caught with Playboy or Hustler between the mattress and box spring than this book the butt whupping would have been less severe for the porn than being caught with the book which makes hamburgers out of the sacred cow of the cowboys. The book is loaded with moments of absurd laughter and lines that make you laugh and cry at the same time. As a Christian yeah I have philosphical disagreements with Peter Gent ..... but he is brutally onest about football I know several former college football players and others.... Classic line a nubile coed is asking the main character what he does for a living he replies I am a folk hero. The book and movie diverge the book is more violent more drug riddled than the movie ......at times more surreal.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

North Dallas Forty was slightly different with some of the pitfall of sports. Even though, the movie did touch drug use and promiscuous behavior by players. The book made both issues more Prevalent in the movie did. There was key points in the movie that were not in the book. Phil Elliot’s relationship in the movie painted him as a monotheistic individual the book painted him much more loose when it came to women. The movie made it look as though North Dallas Forty was about a fictional league. The book made it clear that the league was the National Football League as forth naming the league and players in the league such as Tarkington with the New York team. The book did use fictional characters for the Dallas Cowboys fictional team. Team nicknames were never used. A lot of the Characters on the fictional Dallas team could easily be identified. The attributes of the head coach, B. A., of static driven, cold, Christian and others could easily be seen as the same as the Cowboys’ legend Tom Landry. One of the key endings of the movie where Elliot after being released from the team refused to catch a ball thrown by Maxwell is missing from the book. The book was worth reading and enjoyable.

[Randall Russell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this book to be somewhat entertaining, and interesting as an artifact of the early 60s. However, I thought that the endless scenes of drug use, partying and sexual antics (not sure whether they're accurate or not), became repetitious by the end of the book. One item in the book that particularly struck me, and will stay with me, is that the main character negotiates a 3-year contract for $13,000 per year. Contrast that with Tom Brady driving a $3 million Bugatti Veyron (among other supercars), and you have an indication of just how much the NFL (and sports in general) has changed (not necesssarrily for the better) in the intervening 60 years. I also felt like the characterization (or lack thereof) and the overall plot and pacing of the book could definitely have been better. I also don't particularly care for books about real organizations like the Dallas Cowboys and the NFL that use fictional characters to represent real-life people, and then you can play the game of who represents which real-life person. So, overall, I'd only recommend this book to someone interested in sports in general and the NFL in the early 1960s in particular.

[Jim Krotzman · Rating 4 out of 5]

North Dallas Forty by Peter Gent is a novelized equivalent of baseball's non-fiction Ball Four by Jim Bouton. Protagonist Phil Elliott tells the story of the Dallas Cowboys of the 60s who party, drink, use drugs, womanize, endure terrible pain, suffer racism, and feel fear. Phil "finally realizes that opponents & teammates alike are his adversaries, & he must deal & dispense with them all. He is on his way to understanding the spirit that underlies the business of competitive sport. There is no team, no loyalty, no camaraderie; there is only him, alone. Phil is much more intelligent than most of the players in the league. He realizes that for him winning is not everything or the only thing. Playing the game well is important to him. “And even if all the reasons for playing, were a mass of fictions & personal contradictions, the thrill of playing was no less real & that thrill is indescribable. Doing something better than anyone else in front of millions of people. It is the highest I have ever been.”

[Jeff Berger · Rating 3 out of 5]

Peter Gent must have really had it in for the NFL. A former wide receiver for the Dallas Cowboys, he wrote this best seller about a team suspiciously like the early 70s version of America’s Team, with thinly-veiled versions of Coach Tom Landry, Quarterback Dandy Don Meredith, and himself represented. Gent was a talented writer, and his book does a good job exposing the league’s hypocrisies, particularly regarding drug use by its players, its racism, and its way of using up and casting aside players like so much broken-down hardware. It’s also an eye-opening look at the physical toll of football on one’s body, as Gent’s alter-ego Phil Elliott must rely on a litany of drugs and therapies to function, much less continue to play the game. It’s all presented in a clever, often humorous style. A lot of ink goes to the debaucheries of the players’ lives off the field, which is probably what made the book a best-seller. I found those portions tiresome, like a frat boy bragging about his latest party antics. And the ending seems out of place. But it’s a well done story.

[Skye Wallace · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn’t loathe this book by any means, but it definitely wasn’t what I expected. It really wasn’t about football, per say but it had interesting and often times amazing tones around individualism and perseverance. For what it’s worth, the writing was tremendous. It did brush on some themes that I wasn’t fond of having to read at great length; most notably blatant racism, misogyny and heavy drug usage. These were hammered away at times. That being said, it’s quite the history lesson on some things that have changed and maybe a few that haven’t changed at all. It’s a peek behind the curtain, with all its good and bad. Really, this should be closer to four stars but the ending honestly was so odd and shocking that I couldn’t quite give it a four. I’d be interested in reading more of Peter Gent’s work and while I found myself a little out of my depth, there’s no taking away the fact that this book will stay with you for some time.

[Tony Bilotta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Definitely the third time I have read North Dallas and possibly the fourth. After a little over a half century the novel still holds up and while the players are bigger, stronger, faster, richer and what resides in locker rooms, team headquarters, and coaches offices may have changed only slightly with immediate news cycles and the digital age, Gent's message is the same: professional football is the modern day Roman bloodsport and is going nowhere soon; as a matter of fact, with the legalization of sports gambling (check of how prescient Gent's The Franchise is too) and speed of light information, pro football and the NFL in particular will continue to crush the spirit of the participants who do or don't play the game at the desired level and the pieces will continually be replaced and billions will continue to be made regardless.

Solid book and if you are even just a casual sports fan, get on it, it is more than worth it. Peace.

[Kevin Tinsley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Book still holds up despite its age

I first read this book as a teenager. It was one of the first "adult" novels I had ever read, and I was struck with the darkness it revealed about the world of professional football. I empathize with Elliott. Hiis way of looking at playing the sport meshed with mine. Sure, I wanted to win, but it was the sheer joy of playing that I loved. I even loved practicing, as he does. After seeing several shows about Don Meredith, it is obvious Gent nailed him with his portrayal of Maxwell. Meredith eventually tired of the persona he had created and lived out the last third of his life in seclusion. He seemed to finally find peace after he stopped trying to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral. This was a fantastic book, despite the dark ending. It is the finest piece of sports fiction I've ever read.

[Jon Koebrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

North Dallas Forty seemed like an appropriate book choice during Super Bowl Week. I have only seen bits of the movie with Nick Norte and Mac Davis. Certainly much has changed in NFL football in the approximately 50 years since this book was conceived by Peter Gent yet the bodily sacrifices of the players is likely similar with better medical care and more careful control of pain killing drugs. Phil Elliot is just trying to survive in the league another week. He gives his body but will not surrender his mind to the whims of the league coaches, owners and officials. Phil Elliot is still not a fully likeable guy and is something of an antihero character. A low three star book.

[Chris Koppenheffer · Rating 4 out of 5]

A look into the life of an aging professional football player. The book strips away the glamour and the allure and depicts a tragic and destructive lifestyle that is driven by fear and desperation not fame and fortune. The era the story is set in is illustrated well. The post Vietnam 70s full of drugs, angst, misogyny, racism and a coming to terms with the reality that the “American Dream” in practice is a soulless job and a house in the burbs with an emotionally shallow set of relationships is all captured through the experience of the main character. A comic tragedy that is worth the time to read.