Season of Life: A Football Star, a Boy, a Journey to Manhood |
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Season of Life: A Football Star, a Boy, a Journey to Manhood
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Joe Ehrmann, a former NFL football star and volunteer coach for the Gilman high school football team, teaches his players the keys to successful defense : penetrate, pursue, punish, love. Love? A former captain of the Baltimore Colts and now an ordained minister, Ehrmann is serious about the game of football but even more serious about the purpose of life. Season of Life is his inspirational story as told by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jeffrey Marx, who was a ballboy for the Colts when he first met Ehrmann.
Ehrmann now devotes his life to teaching young men a whole new meaning of masculinity. He teaches the boys at Gilman the precepts of his Building Men for Others program : Being a man means emphasizing relationships and having a cause bigger than yourself. It means accepting responsibility and leading courageously. It means that empathy, integrity, and living a life of service to others are more important than points on a scoreboard.
Decades after he first met Ehrmann, Jeffrey Marx renewed their friendship and watched his childhood hero putting his principles into action. While chronicling a season with the Gilman Greyhounds, Marx witnessed the most extraordinary sports program he'd ever seen, where players say "I love you" to each other and coaches profess their love for their players. Off the field Marx sat with Ehrmann and absorbed life lessons that led him to reexamine his own unresolved relationship with his father.
Season of Life is a book about what it means to be a man of substance and impact. It is a moving story that will resonate with athletes, coaches, parents -- anyone struggling to make the right choices in life.
Great book. This is the best book I have read in 4 years! I would recomend it to anyone who likes to read!
This book is an interesting read, but it seems the author couldn’t decide which story to tell. His own? Joe Ehrmann’s? The Gilman football team’s? He goes deepest into Joe’s but keeps hinting at his own transformation. That led me to expect more than I found in the last chapter.
Season of Life is a quick and fulfilling read at not quite 180 pages. The author spends the 2001 football season with a private high school football team that is coached by his boyhood hero Joe Ehrmann, a former NFL defensive lineman turned ordained minister. The story weaves in and out of the season’s football schedule, Joe’s philosophy of “building men for others” (helping boys to value and nurture relationships) and the author’s own ruminations about his relationship with his dad.
You come to care about the boys and their season and to admire the messages of Coach Joe and his protege, Coach Biff who gets a little more “playing time” in the book that his mentor and “big brother” Coach Joe. There are a few basic lessons readers will get from Season of Life, most notably that a foundation of empathic relationships is key to becoming a man built for others. There are a few bible sermons along the way and an illustration of how Coach Joe’s lessons are applied by the author himself. Overall I enjoyed this book and I recommend it. It is refreshing to read a book that that is not preachy but teaches basic human values about the importance of treating others with respect and dignity, and all this in an interesting context that I could relate to as a former high school and college football player. Parents, teens, educators, coaches…go for it!
This is a great book to teach not just about football, but life. I coach a high school hockey team and give it to graduates prior to college!
The overarching message of Season of Life is to have empathy for those around you. Success comes to those who put others first.
I think this is a good message, I believe it, I teach my kids in this way and I actually make a modest attempt at living it. However, the downside to these types of books is the schmaltzy style in which they’re typically written.
Marx’ style isn’t notably different from “typical” in this case. The difference, I suppose, is that the book’s context is (as an SI reviewer puts it) “the most violent of American games.” The protagonists of this story would call that “false masculinity”… oh, well.