I grew up in western Pennsylvania during a time when the coal mines and steel mills of Jones & Laughlin Corporation provided employment for my dad and most of my friends’ dads too. In fact, other than a stint with Uncle Sam, my dad spent his entire working career with J&L.
We lived in “The Patch”, a community of duplex houses in alternating green and red shingles built by the company for its laborers. We shopped at the company store where my mother worked for a time until meeting my dad and allowing him to take her away from all that. There were patches all around the area supporting the particular mines and mills where their residents worked. It was the natural state of things.
S. L. Price, a writer for Sports Illustrated and other magazines, writes in “PLAYING THROUGH THE WHISTLE: Steel, Football, and an American Town” about one of those J&L patches: Aliquippa, a large steel town of ethnic neighborhoods with more than its share of high school football mastery throughout the decades. Price exhibits his own mastery by blending the elements of those ethnic identities, steel, and football into a rich history of American life.
Over the decades, western PA has provided more than its share of top NFL Players, and Aliquippa has been a rich resource of those players ranging from Mike Ditka to Darelle Revis. Price explains why the rich work ethic of the steel workers manifested itself into successful football programs. In many cases, racial tensions, unemployment, drugs and violence, made this success seem more than improbable, and Price examines the families, coaches, players, and their changing environments that made that success more difficult and unlikely.
Price’s history is an honest look at the people who have lived for their community, and their community, in many ways, lived for football. It is a an American story, and Price tells it well. ( )

As much as I love athletics - this was a pretty depressing book and unfortunately hard to read. While the book is thorough and amazingly detailed the focus seemed to be primarily on the negative. The day-to-day life for everyone in Aliquippa is about as rough as can be imagined. The citizens there are daily surrounded by all manners of crime and violence. The only positives to come out of that town are the amazing success of its high school athletic programs (primarily football). I think it is an example of totally misplaced priorities by everyone involved. ( )

I am going to start with what I didn't like about this book, in fact I would have taken 1 star off ordinarily.
1. There are no pictures! How in the world did this book get approved with no pictures?
2. The scattershot way the story is told. Especially the second half of the book. It was hard at times to keep track or remember who is who, who is related to who, sometimes the author would mention someone and I couldn't remember that person.
Playing through the whistle is the story of America as it took place in Aliquippa Pennsylvania. A town that is a football player making machine. But it is also a town ravaged by drug, by crime, and by despair. It is a town that had it all and then it had nothing. Except a drive to churn out football players. Players who would go on to college greatness, and NFL stardom.
I like football. I like to watch both college and pro, but I couldn't tell you when watching the NFL what college a player went to, and I definitely couldn't tell you what high school they attended. So I had never heard of Aliquippa, before reading this book.
I knew about the race riots of the 60's, but I knew of the ones in Detroit, Watts, NYC, I didn't know they happened in a town a suburb almost of Pittsburgh!
I knew about the shuttering of Steel making in America, the rust belt, a little about how it was managements fault, or it was the unions fault. I wondered what happened to these towns but I wondered about the big ones like Pittsburgh, not the smaller ones.
Playing through the whistle is a fantastic book about American greatness, as well as America's black eyes, its exceptionalism, and its racism. It's perseverance, and its diminishing work ethic. It about guns, and Radom shooting and it's about drugs, and how in some ways all of these things destroy society, and how there are two choices for kids in Aliquippa to get out and get on from there, Sports, or drugs.
I recommend this book highly, outside of my two complaints. I don't think you will be disappointed. ( )

PLAYING THROUGH THE WHISTLE by SL Price is a comprehensive history of the town of Aliquippa, Pennsylvania told from two perspectives: J&L Steel, a thriving company that supplied wars and created structure integrity for metal works across the US and high school football; such a small town and yet one of the most such programs in the country winning countless titles and putting many young men into college and beyond.
A small town outside of Pittsburgh, Aliquippa was created to provide housing for the workers at J&L Steel and was laid out into sections, or plans as they called it, which immediately created class and ethnic divisions in the town. Price revisits those divisions throughout the book and discovers that while the schism between neighborhoods is always present, that when comes to football team, the town Aliquippa quickly and proudly unites. From World War II to today, S.L. Price layers the chronology of J&L Steel rise and eventual collapse on top of the rise of Aliquippa football program and postulates on how the two of them correlate to each other. As the book moves forward in time, several theories on why the Aliquippa high football team is so successful are looked at, including coaching, the desire to get out of Aliquippa, amongst others. At times in the book, following all of the names and their relationships to each other was challenging and some of the nuances of the steel industry was lost on me. The reliving of some of the football highlights, told from many of the men who were a part of them, were great fun to read and made me want to meet everyone from Aliquippa who once playing for their home team.
It's obvious to me that S.L. Price cares about Aliquippa and all of its residents and truly wanted to understand what make the town and their football team tick and it shows in the care with which the book is written. I enjoy reading about high school sports and I found PLAYING THROUGH THE WHISTLE to be one of the better choices.
Thank you to Grove Atlantic, S.L. Price, and Netgalley for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review! ( )