Gary Myers. The Catch: One Play, Two Dynasties, and the Game that Changed the NFL. New York:Crown Publishers, 2009. 304 pages.
With the Super Bowl behind us, here’s a review of a book about another momentous NFL game.
THE CATCH is filled with good reportage, including interviews from many of the key surviving figures of the 1981 season’s NFC Championship game between the Cowboys and the 49ers, but is marred by endless repetitions and poor structure. Myers starts the book by describing “The Catch” (a nearly impossible Dwight Clark reception of a Joe Montana touchdown pass in the closing minutes of the game) and sketching how some of the players got there.
By talking to those who were on the field for The Catch, Myers is able to get an inside story that will interest fans of the NFL and the respective teams. He traces the career arcs of most of the key players from college to retirement and beyond. While longtime fans may know these stories, they may be new to novice or casual fans.
But Myers seeks to do more than just report on the game and its players: he wants to make the case that this play was the key deciding factor in creating the 1980s 49ers dynasty and ending the reign of Tom Landry’s Cowboys over the NFL. In this, he’s not completely successful. As was pointed out in the book itself, The Catch would have been moot without the 49er defense’s subsequent stifling of the Cowboys’ final drive. And, as Myers points out, there were key structural issues leading to the 49ers’ ascent and Cowboys’ decline. Had The Catch not been made, it’s hard to argue that the 49ers would not have been a contender in the 1980s, given Bill Walsh’s offensive prowess–the dynasty might have just been born a year later. Throughout the book, though, Myers repeats his thesis time and again, dulling it through repetition.
Indeed, structure is an issue. Since the first paragraph of Joe Montana’s foreward reminds the reader that Clark made The Catch, there’s not much suspense in Myers weaving the story of the game through the rest of the book. The play-by-play is clunky, particularly since we already know the outcome, and it really impedes the flow of the book.