Fun City

August 31, 2015
Deveney, a longtime writer and editor with Sporting News, nimbly chronicles the ups and downs of New York mayor John V. Lindsay and New York Jets quarterback Joe Namath, two big personalities who faced high demands while riding a humongous wave of late-1960s political and social tumult. By 1965, according to Time magazine, as Deveney notes here, New York City had become “a shiftless slattern, mired in problems that had been allowed to proliferate for decades.” Economic and technological changes left scores of N.Y.C. residents unemployed. Those looking to sports for a distraction only got more grief. The once-powerful Yankees and Giants were felled by age, institutional miscues, and plain old ennui. Change was needed in both spheres. Lindsay, an erudite, handsome 43-year-old Congressman, entered the mayor’s office in 1965 with a progressive mind-set (paying attention to minorities and ghettos), but his patrician air rankled blue-collar workers and their unions. Namath, hedonistic and shaggy-haired, took over as the Jets quarterback that same year, quickly becoming a headline-hogging sex symbol who elicited resentment from his teammates—and swoons from the ladies. This impressively researched history serves as a vivid portrait of the two men’s valiant, if fruitless, quest for greatness in a perpetually unforgiving city.

October 1, 2015

Vividly chronicling the social, racial, and political upheaval of New York City in the 1960s, Deveney (Before Wrigley Became Wrigley City) traces the intersecting rise of the Jets (football), Mets (baseball), and the Knicks (basketball) over New York's "establishment" teams: the Giants (football) and the Yankees (baseball). The two landscapes, politics and sports, were represented by the city's young, charismatic mayor John Lindsay, and the Jets's brash quarterback Joe Namath. During that period, Time lamented that the city was "a cruel parody of its legend," suffering a seeming deterioration of its political and cultural scenes. Lindsay and Namath represented a change of guard, with the mayor being elected under the campaign motto, "He is fresh and everyone else is tired." Despite bringing the Jets a Super Bowl victory, Namath's off-field playboy antics kept him from gaining the respect of his teammates. VERDICT This dense, objective, unflinching, and thorough narrative doesn't just paint a picture of New York in the 1960s. The work is steeped in the headlines, featuring immense detail and exhaustive research. In some places, it's too much like a chronicle and lacks levity, but fans of New York sports teams will feel viscerally transported.--Benjamin Malczewski, Toledo-Lucas Cty. P.L., MI

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2015
Deveney, Sporting News staffer and author of five books, including Before Wrigley Became Wrigley (2014), here moves his focus from the Windy City to the Big Apple, but any author would have a tough time proving how New York had been saved as it entered the dreadful decades following the sixties. Not a bad book; just the wrong verb. Gotham in 1977 was not a pretty picture; the Bronx was burning. Within a very few years of the end of Deveney's decade, Mayor Lindsay's ambitions and the city itself were in shambles, and subsequent mayor Abe Beame and Yankees manager Billy Martin, who came later, couldn't save it, either. This is a book about New York sports (the Mets and Knicks are featured, along with Joe Namath's Jets) and New York politics and labor issuesreally two books, both of which have been written many times before. But Deveney combines his two big subjects neatly and may actually be better, albeit not particularly original, on the urban grit and politics than on the sports. The hyperbole of the title aside, there is plenty here of interest for sports fans and followers of urban politics.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)