Playing through the Whistle: Steel, Football, and an American Town Audiobook (Free)

From a Sports activities Illustrated senior writer, a moving epic of football and industrial America, telling the storyplot of Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, its now-shuttered metal mill, and its legendary senior high school football team

Aliquippa, Pa is well-known for two things: the Jones and Laughlin Metal mill, an industrial behemoth that helped gain World War II; and soccer, with a higher school team which has created numerous NFL stars including Mike Ditka and Darrelle Revis. However the mill, after the 4th about Playing through the Whistle: Metal, Football, and an American Town largest producer in the us, closed for good in 2000. What happens to a town when a wish dies? Does it just disappear?

In Using through the Whistle, famous sports writer S. L. Cost tells the storyplot of this extraordinary place, its people, its players, and through it, a wider story of American background from the switch of the twentieth hundred years. Aliquippa has been many things-a rigidly managed company town, a flourishing racial and ethnic melting pot, as well as for a brief time, a workers’ paradise.

Cost expertly traces this background, while also recounting the birth and advancement of high school sports, from a minor pastime to a way to obtain civic pride to today, when it sometimes seems like the only way out of a existence of poverty, substance abuse, and crime. Playing through the Whistle can be a masterpiece of narrative journalism that may make you cry and cheer in identical measure.

“A gut-wrenching portrait of a high school football team that has to embody the American desire for one small town, in large part because everything else that was likely to do it has fallen apart. I’d say that is some of the best sports composing I read this year, except that it’s among the better writing I’ve browse this year.”-David Epstein, writer of The Sports Gene