Bleachers John Grisham

I know reading John Grisham is about as unfashionable as reading Dan Brown right about now. There´s a scene in Third Rock from the sun where they´re all reading John Grisham and they´ve accidentally switched books and hadn´t even noticed.
“What´s yours about?”
“Mine is about a young Southern lawyer struggling against justice”.
“So is mine!”

John Grisham has written stacks of legal thrillers and I actually quite like ´em. But he has also written books on sports. Football to be exact.

I can´t tell a quarterback from a goldfish, so I probably wouldn´t have read this if I hadn´t thought it was one of his legal thrillers. I read two, one about a mean racist on death row and one about an evil company poisening the water, and I really liked them.

The slow pace, the easy plain language. So when I saw Bleachers, I didn´t stop to consider it might be about something else alltogether. Sports. My evil nemesis. Never liked sports. I played basketball in high school, I like walking, I just really don´t like sports on tv. Any sports. Well, maybe ice dancing… Yep, I am one hundred percent girl.

In Bleachers former players of a high school football team sit around in the bleachers as their old coach lays dying. They talk about the old days, those who were supposed to become stars, while they hold a vigil.

Neely Crenshaw, former all star quarterback, now a down on his luck real estate salesman, also returns to his home town to pay his respects to the coach he loved and hated and has to deal with all the mistakes he made, including the girl he let slip away.

Bleachers´ all about mistakes, and regrets and getting on with things. It´s plain and simple, but it struck a cord with me. All those big guys, who used to be stars in high school and are now mostly nobodies. Reminiscing on their glory days. Well worth the read, even if, like me, you don´t like sports.

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