Jock: a memoir of the counterculture - Paperback

by Robert Coe (Author)

"What magnificent, important work... I can clearly imagine you and me continuing our talk about the meanings and paradoxes of sporting effort, community and service, and me inviting you to train in Eugene after the '72 trials. Where I would have tried to shake you out of the provably erroneous assumption that four college years were all you were allowed for a career..." *Kenny Moore, two-time Olympic Marathoner, thirty-year veteran journalist with Sports Illustrated, screenwriter of "Without Limits," and author of "Bowerman and the Men of Oregon: The Story of Oregon's Legendary Coach and Nike's Cofounder" (2007). "JOCK: a memoir of the counterculture" is a coming-of-age story of a college athlete and an unexpurgated account of how the counterculture, war, politics, anti-authoritarianism, sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll impacted the world of big-time college athletics in the late Sixties and early Seventies. A walk-on from faraway Seabrook, Texas arrives at Stanford University in the fall of '68 and unexpectedly blossoms into a distance running star. He encounters hippiedom in his freshman dorm and race and anti-war politics on campus; a right-wing Head Coach and U.S. Olympic team leader with a Paleolithic worldview; a Head Trainer who slaps his face because he objected to the freshman's anti-racist activism; and an Athletic Department P.R. Director who mocks him at a "booster" breakfast supposedly held in his honor. But the runner perseveres because of his passionate commitment to his sport, his school, some great teammates (including two future Olympians), an unassuming Assistant Coach, and a wild & crazy fraternity house full of recreational drug-using countercultural football heroes and Olympic swim stars. (The book names names and takes no prisoners.) He competes in cross-country and track against some of the greatest runners of the age, including Steve Prefontaine (the subject of two feature films in 1997 and 1998.) His Zelig-like encounters eventually take him overseas to one of Stanford's European campuses, where he evolves into a full-blown hippie, hitch-hiking (and training) across England, France, Spain, Holland, Germany and over the Swiss Alps in February, sleeping in fields (and smoking hash) until the lure of competition draws him back to Palo Alto for more triumphs and soul-testing adversity. The two years that follow are interspersed with up-close tales about two extraordinary Rose Bowl victories by Stanford's countercultural "Indians," who upset heavily-favored, conservative Midwestern powerhouses: Woody Hayes' "Team of the Decade," the "four-yards-and-a-cloud of dust" Ohio State Buckeyes, and the best football team in the history of the University of Michigan, Bo Schembechler's 1971 Wolverines. The story ends shortly after the author's graduation, when he begins to explore the wisdom acquired from his journey into the heart of athletic achievement. At 145,000 words, JOCK offers readers a deep dive into the largest participatory sport in the United States: running today has forty million participants and a financial demographic comparable to golf. There has never been a memoir of Stanford University from this period, and never any sports memoir like this one, mostly because it's as much cultural history as it is the story of one man's trippy adventures through one of the most vivid periods in America's recent past to have been alive and young and reaching for the stars. Robert Coe's journalism has appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Vanity Fair, Esquire, Rolling Stone, New York magazine and a host of other publications. His plays have been produced across the country, and his book "Dance in America," published by E.P. Dutton, was the official book of the PBS "Dance in America" television series.

Author Biography

Robert Coe is a writer living in New Jersey. His journalism has appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine and Arts and Leisure section, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Esquire, New York, the Village Voice, American Theatre Magazine, and Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. His first play, "War Babies," received four nominations from the San Diego Theater Critics Circle, including Best New Play, and a Drama-Logue Award for Best Play. His book for "The Photographer" (with music by Philip Glass) opened the first NEXT WAVE, a world festival of contemporary performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), and later toured the eastern U.S. Coe served as dramaturge and occasional co-writer at BAM for Laurie Anderson's "United States: Parts I-IV," a legendary work that introduced performance art into the international arts mainstream. He also wrote the book for the coast-to-coast national tour of the Tim Rice/ABBA musical "Chess," and with three-time Tony Award winner Des McAnuff, co-wrote PERFECT LIGHT, a screenplay for Touchstone Pictures and The Walt Disney Company. As a dancer he performed with Bill T. Jones and Jane Comfort, and later wrote a book, "Dance in America" (E.P. Dutton, 1985), as the official companion volume to PBS's long-running television series. In addition to the official catalogue for the First NEXT WAVE Festival at BAM, he wrote the catalogue for the first New York International Festival of the Arts, the largest performing arts festival of the twentieth century. He is currently working on two books: "NOTHING LIKE I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE: An Autobiography of Downtown New York, 1974-1989," and a novel, "The Princess of the Leafy Suburbs."