tailieunhanh - North Dallas Forty by Peter Gent

“Their talk was the talk of sordid buccaneers; it was reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage; there was not an atom of foresight . . . in the whole batch of them, and they did not seem aware these things are wanted for the work of the world.” | Snorth dallasB FORTY PETER GENT Foreword IN HIS NOVEL Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad put it this way Their talk was the talk of sordid buccaneers it was reckless without hardihood greedy without audacity and cruel without courage there was not an atom of foresight. . . in the whole batch of them and they did not seem aware these things are wanted for the work of the world. Thirty years after the first publication of North Dallas Forty it hits me that those words describe best the life I once led. In July of 1964 the right to work was all I hoped for when I arrived at my first Dallas Cowboys training camp in Thousand Oaks California north of Los Angeles. That September Tom Landry gave me a job as a receiver that I kept for five years. They were great years. Terrifying. Thrilling. Happy. Sad. Most of all they were ultimately satisfying. As an ex-basketball player from Michigan State University drafted by the NBA s old Baltimore Bullets I hadn t played football since high school. I had some trouble adapting to the incredible violence of the game. My teammates helped me learn both on and off the field. They were costly lessons but I have never regretted playing football in the NFL. I loved writing North Dallas Forty because it allowed me the rare pleasure of sinking myself in the ocean of memories from those years a hard violent and painful life. I spent it with 40 of the most fascinating intelligent cunning and dangerous men I ever had the pleasure to be around before or since. There were football players. Anybody who makes it as a professional football player has survived the horror of real violence facing the monster that lives in his heart these men were true gods in ruins. Whether he stays a man is still a question of fate because the monster is always straining to be loosed again. I still remember vividly the struggle to nourish desperate desires to be alive as a man can be to live each day as it if were the last feeling life pumping through us with the .