Quick Take
- Narration: Ben Bartolone handles Blount’s sardonic Southern wit without flattening it, a serviceable performance that respects the material’s rhythm.
- Themes: Immersive sports journalism, human cost of professional football, portrait of a dynasty in formation
- Mood: Warm, irreverent, and unexpectedly literary
- Verdict: A forgotten classic of American sports writing that holds up fifty years later, and sounds every bit as alive in audio form.
There is a particular pleasure in encountering a book from another era that reads like it was written last year. I came to About Three Bricks Shy of a Load without much context, I knew Roy Blount Jr. as a humorist and occasional presence on NPR’s Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me, but not as a sports journalist. This book, first published in 1974 based on a season Blount spent embedded with the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1973, arrived like a dispatch from a time when magazine writers could still disappear into a subject for six months and come back with something that was neither a puff piece nor a takedown.
The 1973 Pittsburgh Steelers were, by Blount’s reckoning, a team that had everything it needed to win a Super Bowl except the precise moment at which all those elements aligned. They were one year away from beginning the most dominant run in NFL history, four Super Bowl victories in six seasons, with the Steel Curtain defense and Terry Bradshaw and Franco Harris. Blount got there just before the breakthrough, embedded with a team poised on the edge of something large, and the book captures that moment of potential with the sensibility of a novelist who also happens to understand a 4-3 defense.
The Kind of Sports Journalism That No Longer Gets Made
One reviewer called this “the kind of journalism missing in today’s blog/news-bite world,” and that assessment holds. Blount was given extraordinary access because the era permitted it. He traveled with the team, ate with players, stood in locker rooms, listened to coaches argue. What he produced is not an expose and not a tribute. It is an immersive portrait of how a professional football team actually functions as a human organization, the tensions between veterans and rookies, the relationship between the coaching staff and ownership, the domestic lives of players in a city that measured self-worth in touchdowns.
The Pittsburgh Steelers of 1973 included some of the most recognizable names in football history, and Blount writes about them as people rather than as archetypes. Mean Joe Greene appears not just as the fearsome defensive tackle but as a man navigating the peculiar social world of a locker room. Bradshaw is rendered as a player still unsure whether he was good enough. The book’s humanity is its most lasting quality.
Blount’s Particular Gift for Absurdity
Roy Blount Jr. is one of the funniest writers America produced in the second half of the twentieth century, and that gift is fully present here. He has an eye for the detail that is simultaneously specific, true, and ridiculous, the kind of observation that makes you laugh and then immediately reach for a pen to mark the passage. His descriptions of training camp as a combination of monastic discipline and summer-camp chaos, or his rendering of the complex social protocols of a team bus, are the work of a writer who understood that humor is not the opposite of seriousness.
Ben Bartolone’s narration captures this tonal range adequately. He understands that Blount’s prose has music in it, that the jokes are built into the sentence rhythms rather than arriving as separate events, and he does not rush through the punchlines. The result is an audiobook that functions as comedy as much as history.
The Long Prologue to a Dynasty
For listeners who know how the story ends, the four Super Bowls, the Steel Curtain’s place in football legend, there is a particular poignancy in reading about this almost-season. Blount spent months with players who were one year away from becoming icons, and captured them in the unguarded state that precedes fame. By 1974 the Steelers would win their first Super Bowl and begin their remarkable run. The 12-hour-and-57-minute runtime gives Blount room to be digressive in the best sense. He follows threads that a tighter book would cut, a conversation with a player’s wife, an afternoon watching coaches study film, a long sequence at the draft, because those threads are where the actual human story lives.
Who Should Listen, Who Should Skip
Football fans, especially those with any affection for the Steelers franchise, will find this close to essential. Listeners who enjoy the literary tradition of sports journalism, George Plimpton, Frank Deford, Roger Angell, will recognize Blount as a peer. Anyone who came up reading the best of Rolling Stone or Sports Illustrated in their prime years will feel immediately at home.
Listeners who want a focused game-by-game season recap should look elsewhere. This book has little interest in scores and standings. It is interested in people, and if that distinction matters to you, it is the most important thing to know before you start.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do you need to be a Pittsburgh Steelers fan to appreciate this book?
No, though fans will get an additional layer of satisfaction from recognizing the players. Blount writes about football as a human environment, not as a series of games, and that universal approach works for any interested reader.
How does the book handle the 1973 season itself, is there detailed game coverage?
Game coverage is present but not the focus. Blount is more interested in training camp, team dynamics, and the people around the sport than in play-by-play recaps. The season serves as a frame for a much broader portrait.
Is the humor in the book accessible to contemporary listeners or does it feel dated?
Multiple reviewers across different decades have noted that the book remains funny and alive. Blount’s comedic instincts are grounded in human observation rather than topical reference, which gives it remarkable shelf life.
How does Ben Bartolone’s narration compare to reading the physical book?
Bartolone handles the prose rhythm well and does not flatten Blount’s sardonic tone. The audiobook is a solid delivery mechanism, though Blount’s writing is dense enough that some passages reward the slower pace of reading on the page.
