Review: The Sports Book

I wanted to like THE SPORTS BOOK ($35.00, DK Publishing, $23.10 at Amazon). Really, I did. The advance release I received advertised an encyclopedia of the rules and tactics of virtually every common athletic competition the world over. Ever been struck one night with an intense desire to figure out, “Just what the heck is korfball”? Tuned across Australian rules football on a public TV digital subchannel and been strangely entranced, yet completely confused as to the actual goal of the event? Well, this should be the book to solve all those problems.

Plus, it’s covered in Astroturf. No, really.

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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.

London/Dublin Day 9: St. James's Gate to Short Pump in 37 Hours (Part 2)

UPDATE: Visitors from Off Wing, click here. Thanks for visiting!

With my hotel located all of three minutes from Gatwick’s South Terminal, I could have slept in on Sunday morning before my noon flight back to the States, and started to readjust my body clock to Eastern Standard Time. Unfortunately, I was fully awake by 7:45 — or 2:45 AM EST. Whoops. So I showered, completed repacking, loaded my red Rover, and decided to do a little bit of controlled-environment cruising down the two-lane road behind my hotel, which ran parallel to the west side of the Gatwick perimeter fence. After about fifteen minutes of the game of “Chicken” the English call rural driving (old bus skills served me well again, using the passenger-side mirror to keep that side’s tires just barely on the blacktop’s edge), my desire for adventure was sated, and I pointed the car back toward LGW.

• Point 1: The road approach to Gatwick South Terminal sucks almost as much as the road approach to Heathrow. The train station is the primary means of access for good reason.
• Point 2: If you follow the signs to the Europcar rental-car dropoff, but you wind up in a small, ugly parking lot almost nestled underneath the terminal access-road bridge with very few signs, you’re actually right where you need to be.
• Point 3: Parking an RHD car between two other cars, particularly in a typically-narrow English parking space, is scary.
• Point 4: If you, as an American, ask the rental-company attendants if you can just leave the car at the end of the lane and not try to turn into a parking space, your accent will betray your national origin to them. Given that knowledge, they’d much rather let you do so (and park the car themselves) than fill out the paperwork involved when yet another bloody Yank clips the corners of two other vehicles trying to park. For once, being perceived as a stupid American is to your advantage; use it.

Car dumped, I made my way to the American Airlines desk, where I used my newly-acquired Gold frequent flyer status to blow past the 60 people in the coach line and step into the business- and first-class check-in line. After a short Orange Terror Alert interrogation, I got boarding passes, checked my bag while most other passengers were still in line (MAJOR tactical error — read on), did the metal-detector routine, and returned to Gatwick Mall for McDonald’s and an hour or so of vegetating before proceeding to the gate.

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London/Dublin Day 0/1: This Day Has 43 Hours (Part 1)

With this entry I’ll begin my London/Dublin series, wherein I hit some of the highlights and lowlights of my most recent European adventure in more-or-less chronological order. I’ll occasionally branch off into mostly-unrelated tangents that crossed my mind on the trip, such as cars, book reviews, and Canadian identity crises. But admit it, you come here for that kind of weird stuff anyway, so I suggest you just sit back and enjoy it. Unless you come for the football, in which case this almost completely football-less saga is not for you. ;-)

After a long Christmas night of packing and collecting a folder of important documents that would be forgotten in the morning rush (like, say, my family’s itineraries and my collection of maps for the rental-car drive), I woke up Friday, 26 December at about 0730 EST for a long day of travel. I have trouble sleeping on planes anyway, and for trans-Atlantic jaunts, between the anticipation, the heavily-processed air and the necessarily out-of-sync mealtimes, the dream of sleeping my way across the Atlantic remains just that. So 24 + (24 - 5 hours for GMT adjustment) is 43 hours without sleep. Fun times.

My sister had to make one stop in McLean and get to Dulles (IAD) by 1300 to help with pre-departure administrivia. So for my 1528 departure from Reagan National (DCA), she picked me up at 0900, as I scrambled to take out the trash, secure the apartment, adjust the thermostat down, and otherwise prepare to leave for 10 days. Forgot to stop mail delivery? I’d just have to bring a trash bag to catch the overflow when I unlocked the box ten days later.

We got out of Richmond by 0915 and made great time up I-95, reaching my drop-off at Franconia-Springfield Metro at 1045. So, with just under five hours to kill before I caught the domestic leg of my trip, I made an executive decision: I’d stop at DCA to check my rollable bag, then head for the Washington Auto Show. American Airlines check-in was painless, and with my largest bag left in their capable hands, I caught the next Yellow Line train inbound.

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