Book Review of 'Playing Through the Whistle'

Book review of 'Playing through the Whistle: Steel, Football, and an American Town' by S L Price, Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, 2016. x + 550 pp. $27.00. Journalist S. L. Price tells a story of high school football in the western Pennsylvania steel town of Aliquippa, a place that served as an inspiration for All the Right Moves and one that has produced a staggering number of star football players, including Mike Ditka, Tony Dorsett, Sean Gilbert, Ty Law, and Derrelle Revis. To his enormous credit, Price has not just written a tale for a comfortably complacent reader who might find pity or amusement in reading a romantically quixotic tragedy about hard scrabble dreamers in America’s heartland pouring their deepest inner souls into petty, provincial sports rivalries. Instead, the book digs deep into the history of Aliquippa, a small town along the Ohio River in which the Jones & Laughlin Steel Company (J&L) built its enormous Aliquippa Works in 1905. It is a story of working people in constant struggle, first to survive in the steel mills, and later, when the plant closes with stunning suddenness in the 1980s, to survive outside of them.