The Ballad of the Whiskey Robber: the BTN Review

Given my Christmas haul of reading material, you can probably expect the occasional book review over the next few months here at BTN. This one’s a little different, though.

Back in October, sitting in a University of Miami classroom during a break in the IBM training class I was taking, I checked my e-mail to find:

From: ——@twbg.com
Subject: BALLAD OF THE WHISKEY ROBBER - Review Copies Available
Date: 4 October 2004 11:55:07 EDT

I’d heard about the review copy game before: publishers send out free copies of newly-released books to newspaper reviewers all the time, in hopes that they’ll get publicity — especially if they think the reviewer will be inclined to give it a favorable treatment. This sort of thing has crossed over to the big-name bloggers on occasion, but I didn’t expect an opportunity to join the fun. So I accepted, figuring that I’d at least get a new book out of the deal; if I liked it, great, and if not, well, it was free.

A few months, a relocation and a holiday season (oops… hey, I’m sure you guys have B&N or Amazon gift cards to use) later, here’s the review.

In 1990s Eastern Europe, fast-paced market liberalization, often-corrupt privatization schemes and rampant inflation caused distinct problems on the ground. The effect often resembled America’s Wild West days: the law was distinctly second-best, and the man on the street was looking for a folk hero.

Enter “Viszkis” — Attila Ambrus to his friends. He only knocked off banks and post offices (representing the rich and the government), he was always polite to his targets’ employees, and like Batman, Back To The Future’s Doc Brown and other great characters, he eventually picked up a bumbling young accomplice to join him in his adventures. Best of all, he had a signature style: though his crimes were obviously planned intricately and intelligently, he always pregamed with cheap whiskey before doing the deed, thus earning his public nickname: in English, “the whiskey guy.” Add in a well-intentioned if less-than-competent police force, a TV news man looking for fame by starting a Hungarian version of America’s Most Wanted, and the robber’s own day job as a bad professional hockey goalie, and you’ve got the ingredients for a great story.

Former Sports Illustrated writer Julian Rubinstein made this his first entry into the full-length non-fiction world, and he did a bang-up job with it. The style is clearly reminiscent of his sportswriting days, following Ambrus from his teenage escape from Ceausescu’s Romania into his tryout with UTE Budapest and hiring as Zamboni driver, through his promotion to practice goalie and pelt smuggler, and finally to occasional starter, world traveler and nationally-famous criminal.

Rubinstein’s attention to detail in the book’s setting, mostly in Budapest but including visits to Ambrus’s native Transylvania, seriously impressed me. The back of the book contains nearly 10 pages listing sources and citations, right down to which picture on which page of which newspaper showed a particular billboard Ambrus recalled driving by on one of his escape routes. The book has simplified maps of Budapest and diagrams of key locations in the story, allowing us to mentally picture Ambrus’s runs just as we would a sports play on a familiar field. It would be easy to get bogged down with this detail, but Rubinstein keeps the action coming throughout.

All in all, a good read, and definitely worth the $17 on Amazon the next time you’re looking for reading material — which, if you’re hockey-starved like me, might come pretty soon.

New Orleans Notes

Before we move into a long, cold winter without football or hockey, a few final notes on the Sugar Bowl and the city.

• My distaste with their team’s final drive aside, the Auburn fans I met on our flights down and in New Orleans were uniformly quality people — knowledgeable, dedicated and fired-up. And, like I’ve said, until the 1:57 mark I had no problem at all with their team’s play.
• That said, it’s curious how that sequence changed Hokie fans’ postgame mood for the better. Until then, I think we would have left the Dome in low spirits, quietly acknowledging Auburn’s superiority and wishing we could have just hit a few more passes earlier in the game. Instead, our heads were held high, and we were chanting “LET’S GO HOKIES!” down the square-spiral ramps, out onto the entrance plaza and on the way to the French Quarter.
• And yes, I’m with Coach Beamer: if in the preseason, you’d have offered me a 10-3 year, with a loss to an undefeated SEC team in a BCS bowl, I’d have taken it in a second. It was a magical year — maybe more so than 1999 because of how it happened.
• It’s easy to say this after last night’s beatdown, but I was saying it yesterday morning too: USC is a better team than Auburn, based on both the season as a whole and my observations from the games we played against both teams. USC played us tougher and faced a legitimate non-conference schedule pre-bowl, as opposed to the Tigers.
• Speaking of said Tigers’ out-of-conference schedules, they’re so terrible because Auburn decided recently it had to have seven home games every year and no OOC road games. No self-respecting I-A program will offer a visit or two without at least one return, not even most MAC schools, so they wind up with WAC, Sun Belt and I-AAers on the schedule. One effect of that decision was the cancellation of a 2010-11 home-and-home contract (see 8/11/03 comment) with… Virginia Tech. How much do we Hokies wish those games were still on now? Quite a lot.

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Sugar Bowl Postgame

NEW ORLEANS, LA — The magic just ran out.

All the breaks that went Virginia Tech’s way in its 8-game run to the ACC championship came back to haunt them in the Sugar Bowl tonight, as Auburn won 16-13 and staked a shaky claim to a shared national title.

An impartial observer could say that this game came down to two things: Auburn made the plays it had to in order to win, and Tech didn’t. I’m not impartial, and just spent four hours in the Superdome on an emotional roller-coaster, so let me make a few other observations:

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