The Short Version
- Voice: Ben Bartolone reads Blount's unified comic-serious voice without tipping into either register exclusively; he preserves the tonal intelligence that makes the writing work.
- Big ideas: access journalism, the human cost of professional sport, team identity on the cusp of greatness
- Atmosphere: Warm and observational with dark undercurrents
- Worth it?: A landmark of American sportswriting that holds up as an audiobook because Bartolone treats Blount's prose as literature rather than sports copy.
Does sports journalism still work the way it did before every athlete had a media coach and a PR clause in their contract? I kept returning to that question while listening to this audiobook, Roy Blount Jr.'s account of a full 1973 season embedded with the Pittsburgh Steelers. Ben Bartolone narrates a book that, for all its 1970s vintage, reads like an argument about what has been lost from American sports writing: access, candor, and the willingness to let players be complicated rather than branded.
A Dynasty Before It Knew Its Own Greatness
Blount spent six months with the Steelers in 1973, from the first day of training camp to the final selection of the draft. The team that season was poised to dominate the NFL for more than a decade, the Super Bowl dynasty was assembling itself around players like Terry Bradshaw, Franco Harris, and Mean Joe Greene, though none of them knew yet exactly what they were becoming. That historical position gives the book an accidental elegance: Blount captures a team at the precise moment before it understood its own greatness, which is a richer subject than the team at the height of its powers.
Reviewer selfstarter called it 'the kind of journalism missing in today's blog/news-bite world,' and that assessment is accurate. Blount writes with a closeness to the players' actual lives, their fears about injury and money, their relationships with wives and owners and fans, their locker room humor and genuine vulnerabilities, that modern access journalism rarely achieves. He does not aestheticize them into heroes or reduce them to statistics. He writes about them the way a novelist writes about characters: with enough specificity to make them strange, and enough patience to let that strangeness become affection.
Bartolone Keeps a Comic and Melancholy Voice Unified
Blount's prose is where the audiobook earns its distinctive value. He is one of the great American humor writers, and that register operates constantly even when the material is serious. Ben Bartolone navigates that tonal complexity well, he does not play the comic beats as punchlines or the more melancholy observations as elegies. He reads it as the unified voice it is: intelligent, affectionate, occasionally savage, and always aware that sports is a strange crucible for American character. Reviewer Darryl Meadows noted that rereading it decades later it 'still timely, extremely well written and hilarious', that durability is partly Blount's writing and partly Bartolone's ability to keep the voice fresh rather than antiquarian.
The portraits of individual players are the book's core. Blount gives sustained attention to players who rarely received it in football coverage of the era: offensive linemen, backup quarterbacks, journeyman receivers approaching the end of their window. He tracks the emotional economics of a professional football player's life, the calculation of risk against reward, the understanding that a knee injury can end a career in a single Sunday, with a precision that anticipates the kind of player-welfare journalism that would only become mainstream decades later.
The Economics of a Career That Could End Sunday
The book is a period document in the best sense, which also means it carries some of the period's blind spots. The treatment of race within the Steelers' culture, while more honest than most sports journalism of its era, is seen primarily through Blount's white Southern perspective. His awareness of that limitation is evident but incomplete. Listeners coming to this book with contemporary sensibilities should approach those sections as reportage about a specific moment rather than a neutral account.
The structure is loosely episodic rather than narrative, Blount moves through the season thematically and by player rather than game-by-game. Listeners who want a strict season narrative with scores and standings will need to supplement with other sources. What Blount provides is interior life, which is a different and rarer thing. Reviewer James Cowan described it accurately: 'Good light and easy reading about little known facts and behind the scenes antics of a pro football team.' That undersells it, but captures the accessibility correctly.
One of the book's underappreciated qualities is Blount's tracking of the economic reality of professional football in 1973. The pre-free-agency era meant players had almost no leverage over their contracts, and the book's attention to how players understood their financial position, their vulnerability to injury-driven termination, and the arithmetic of career longevity adds a dimension that retrospective Steelers histories rarely include. Blount interviews wives, too, and their accounts of what an NFL season meant in domestic terms, the absences, the financial uncertainty, the physical cost that came home, gives the book a social texture that pure football journalism almost never achieves. These peripheral figures, rendered with the same care as the star players, are where the book's claim to being genuinely literary journalism is strongest.
For listeners coming to this audiobook without a strong connection to 1973 Pittsburgh, the book is still accessible. Blount is attentive enough to context that you do not need encyclopedic NFL knowledge. But the more you know about the dynasty that was forming, the richer the reading is: knowing that Terry Bradshaw will win four Super Bowls, that Mean Joe Greene will become one of the sport's great figures, makes the book's portrait of this team in its uncertain formation year something closer to dramatic irony than simple nostalgia.
Recognizable to Readers of Gay Talese and Deford
Football fans with an interest in the Steelers' dynasty years will find historical depth here that no retrospective account can reproduce. This is journalism that was written before the outcome was known, and that uncertainty runs through every page. Beyond football, any listener interested in the craft of sportswriting or in the sociology of professional sports labor in the pre-free-agency era will find this genuinely instructive.
Listeners expecting a strict game-by-game season narrative, or those unfamiliar with the general context of early-1970s NFL history, may find the episodic structure disorienting. But listeners who read Gay Talese, Frank Deford, or Roger Angell will recognize the tradition Blount is working in, and will understand immediately why this audiobook version is worth twelve hours of their time.
Do I need to be a Pittsburgh Steelers fan to enjoy this audiobook?
No. Blount's interest is in the players as people rather than in the team's record. The football content is real but the book's center of gravity is character and social observation. General readers interested in American life in the early 1970s will find as much here as football fans.
How does Ben Bartolone handle Roy Blount Jr.'s comedic voice in the audiobook?
Bartolone keeps the delivery grounded rather than performing the humor. The comedy in Blount's prose emerges from specific detail and precise observation, and Bartolone trusts that rather than signaling jokes. The result feels like listening to a very intelligent person tell a story rather than a comedian delivering material.
Is the audiobook of About Three Bricks Shy of a Load the full unabridged text?
The edition appears to be the full text at nearly thirteen hours, which matches the scope of Blount's original season-long immersion. Listeners who want to verify should check the publisher's edition details before purchasing.
Does this audiobook cover the Steelers' Super Bowl wins, or just the 1973 season?
The 1973 season only. The Steelers won their first Super Bowl in January 1975. Blount is writing about the team's formation period, before the championships, which gives the book its particular atmosphere of potential on the verge of becoming legacy.
