NINE SATURDAYS MAKE A YEAR.
ByDave Camerer ’37. Garden City, N. Y.:Doubleday, 1962. 260 pp. $3.95.
Football coaching, be it at an Ivy League institution, a Big Ten university, or the smallest of colleges, is a precarious job at best. The judgment of a coach’s success or failure rests squarely on the outcome of the eight or nine games a team plays during the fall, and truly Nine Saturdays Make a Year for any football coach.
Dave Camerer ’37, who played football at Dartmouth under Coach Earl “Red” Blaik and who currently is a sports writer for the CBS network, has written a remarkably authentic and quite interesting account of one fall in the life of a college coach and the pressures, private and public, which confront the coach of a major university team seeking a winning season against a very tough schedule.
Camerer is at his best when he details the strategy and effort which a coaching staff puts into each pre-game week and the per- sonnel problems which arise in creating a formidable and winning team from nearly one hundred young men of diverse back- grounds and experience.
His attempts to probe into the family life and problems of Coach Simon Burke are less successful but add an element of emotion and suspense which will heighten the interest for many readers.
Alumni will enjoy recognizing some familiar Hanover names—Rope Ferry Road where Simon Burke lives, the Vox Clamantisin Deserto editorials in the university news- paper, and certain fictionalized characteriza- tions of coaches, trainers, and players whom Camerer encountered during his playing years at Dartmouth.
For some reason football players are usually not very articulate writers. Camerer now has three works of fiction and five non- fiction books to his credit, and in each he writes as hard and incisively as he tackled during his football days. Nine SaturdaysMake a Year is his best work of fiction and, as another fall football season rolls around, is particularly recommended to those who wish to have a better appreciation of the sport and all that goes into making football the great national game it has become.
