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One Shot at Forever: A Small Town, an Unlikely Coach, and a Magical Baseball Season

Author: Chris Ballard | Language: English | ISBN: B007MB5IRA | Format: PDF

One Shot at Forever: A Small Town, an Unlikely Coach, and a Magical Baseball Season Description

The Inspirational Story of a Coach, a Baseball Team, and the Season They'll Never Forget
In 1971, a small-town high school baseball team from rural Illinois playing with hand-me-down uniforms and peace signs on their hats defied convention and the odds. Led by an English teacher with no coaching experience, the Macon Ironmen emerged from a field of 370 teams to represent the smallest school in Illinois history to make the state final, a distinction that still stands. There, sporting long hair and warming up to Jesus Christ Superstar, the Ironmen would play a dramatic game against a Chicago powerhouse that would change their lives forever.
In this gripping, cinematic narrative, Sports Illustrated writer Chris Ballard tells the story of the team and its coach, Lynn Sweet, a hippie, dreamer, and intellectual who arrived in Macon in 1966, bringing progressive ideas to a town stuck in the Eisenhower era. Beloved by students but not administration, Sweet reluctantly took over the ragtag team, intent on teaching the boys as much about life as baseball. Inspired by Sweet's unconventional methods, the undersized, undermanned Macon Ironmen embarked on an improbable postseason run that infuriated rival coaches and buoyed a town suffering from a damaging drought and the shadow of the Vietnam War--one in desperate need of something to celebrate.
In a final grace note, Ballard returns to the present day, revisiting the 1971 Ironmen to explore the effect the game had on their lives' trajectories--and the men they've become because of it. Engaging and poignant, One Shot at Forever is a testament to the power of high school sports to shape the lives of those who play them, and it reminds us that there are few bonds more sacred than that among a coach, a team, and a town.

• Product Details
• Table of Contents
• Reviews

• File Size: 4853 KB
• Print Length: 272 pages
• Publisher: Hyperion (May 15, 2012)
• Sold by: Hachette Book Group
  
• Language: English
• ASIN: B007MB5IRA
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray:
  Enabled
• Lending: Not Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #86,273 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
  • #19
    in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Biographies & Memoirs > Professionals & Academics > Educators
  • #26
    in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Sports > Baseball > History
  • #56
    in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > History > Americas > United States > State & Local > Mid-Atlantic
• #19
  in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Biographies & Memoirs > Professionals & Academics > Educators
• #26
  in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Sports > Baseball > History
• #56
  in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > History > Americas > United States > State & Local > Mid-Atlantic

Everybody loves an underdog story. Chris Ballard's One Shot at Forever provides all of the nail-biting excitement characteristic of the David and Goliath tales of the sports world. I am sure that many will make comparisons to Hoosiers -- with its local color (Hickory - Macon, IL), star athlete (Jimmy Chitwood - Steve Shartzer), and controversial coach (Norman Dale - Lynn Sweet) -- and justifiably so. But One Shot at Forever is so much more.

This book transcends the sports genre. It is a character-driven page turner that will appeal to sports fans and non-sports fans alike. It offers a layered and nuanced portrait of Coach Lynn Sweet, the unforgettable protagonist whose unconventional approaches will captivate most readers just as the Robin Williams character did in Dead Poet's Society. And it pays careful attention to temporal characteristics and weaves them into the story in subtle fashion, much like Matthew Weiner does in Mad Men. Readers will feel transported to the early 1970s whether they lived through the era or not and will have a hard time not feeling nostalgic, as if they were part of Macon Ironmen themselves.

Ballard is a gifted writer who draws on his superior reporting and keen attention to detail to paint an intricate picture of a group of boys--bound together by America's game--coming of age against a small town, Vietnam era backdrop.

I couldn't put it down.

By Padrepat

Best book I've read this year. As Ballard is a writer at SI I was hardly surprised that this is a fantastic baseball story. But I was delighted to discover that the book delivers so much more. The main character, a teacher and coach named Lynn Sweet, is as remarkable a character as I can recall. He's a sensitive, courageous, free thinker, who finds himself plunked down in a time and place where conformity is the rule. As a high school teacher, I found myself inspired by Sweet's story. And the book is also the portrait of a small town seeking an identity through the exploits of its baseball team. Ballard's exquisite reporting not only preserves that identity for the town of Macon, but he also allows the rest of us to savor the folkways of a (recently) bygone era.

By Daniel Greenstone

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