Dream Season

A rookie outsider chases his sports-obsessed dream to relive his football glory days in “the ultimate fan book” (The New York Times). Bob Cowser, Jr. is a happy husband, father, and English professor in upstate New York. Only one thing is missing: the exhilaration he felt as a young man in sports-crazy Tennessee when he took the field for high school football games. In what is every Monday morning quarterback’s fantasy, Bob joins the Watertown Red & Black, the country’s oldest semi-professional football team, hungry to win its first championship in two decades. Over the next five months, and with the hesitant blessing of his wife, Candace, Cowser drives the lonely sixty miles for try-outs in a former mill town of soldiers, corrections officers, and blue-collar workers. A far cry from his leafy campus, the “Professor,” as his teammates call him, must work hard to earn the respect of these hard-edged men—some of them local celebrities—and the confidence of his coach, a former mill worker who has never used a playbook. Balancing the demands of family and academe with the rigors of practice and game play, Cowser must find a way to fit his childhood dream into his real life as an adult. “Deserv[ing] to join the ranks of great football books like George Plimpton’s Paper Lion, Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, and William Morris’s The Courting of Marcus Dupree” (Publishers Weekly), Dream Season invites us onto the line of scrimmage for each heartbreaking loss and breathtaking win, into the locker room of a fabled team challenged by a roller-coaster season, and ultimately into the heart of a man with a persevering thirst for glory. “Real, vivid, sensitive, accessible, warm, brutal, and wholly consuming,” this remarkable story reminds us why we love the games we play (Lee Gutkind, author of Forever Fat: Essays by the Godfather).