Rating
The Pequod Review:
Mad Ducks and Bears is an unstructured follow-up to Paper Lion, however it includes some candid interviews with Detroit Lions players that make it in many ways a more interesting book. Here is John Gordy's view of the fans:
It’s the frustration. They take out their frustrations through what we do on the field. They can’t go around hitting people. They’re scared to, or they don’t want to—it’s barbaric—so they pay football players to do it. But the trouble is that the game doesn’t really rid them of their frustrations. I’m not even sure that a win satisfies them, but a loss makes them grotesque. They wait for you at the end of a game. They hang over the fence, their faces twisted with hate, and shake their fists—these little people.
And Alex Karras on the tragedies that await:
Quarterbacks and tight ends die comfortably, in big beds, and the Irish setter is whimpering on the other side of the door, and someone is mowing the great lawn outside the big mansion. But the linemen give it up in these little rooms in the poor sections. They wake up on a cot in a room the size of a closet, and they look at their pushed-in kissers in the little mirror, and they pull out their old football jerseys with the number on the back out of the bottom drawer of the beat-up dresser, and they put them on and go up to the bridge there … and they drop off the Triboroughugh and float down here … There goes one. That’s Ed Glurk, number seventy, good journeyman tackle for the Eagles in the fifties. Always was a nice guy. Look how he rides nice and high in the water. Just behind him, that’s Al Wojciechowicz—good Polack kid who played guard for the old Yankees. He’s got his jersey on inside out. Look at him turn in the water. He always had classy moves.
Recommended.