Balls »

Nanci Kincaid is the author of Crossing Blood, Balls, Pretending the Bed Is a Raft (made into the feature film My Life Without Me), Verbena, and As Hot as it Was You Ought to ThankMe. She divides her time between San Jose and Honolulu.

She's in love with--and married to--a coach on the rise. He's in love with--and married to--winning the game. Set in Alabama, where football is akin to religion, Balls is the story of a college football coach's fall from grace. Told by the women whose lives he changes, Balls should be required reading for any women who's ever been involved with a man who's involved with sports.

You might say that Balls is the story of a coach's kick-off, his first, second, and third downs...and his punt. But this coach's story belongs to the coach's wife, Dixie Gibbs, and to his mother, his mother-in-law, his daughter, his assistants' wives, his players' mothers, girlfriends, and grandmothers. It's the women standing behind handsome Coach Mac Gibbs who know--and tell--the secrets the sports page headlines leave out.

These women talk straight. They don't care much for the "science" of the game--or its brutality. They wince at the injuries, both physical and spiritual. They swear at the press and bristle at the fickleness of the fans. They see football as it really is--sexy, dirty, sweaty, painful, empowering, tainted. And the spin they put on the whole enterprise is ironic, often funny, and not always pretty, as the view from deep inside rarely is.

This is a novel that moves with the force of a fourth-down charge and shimmers with the tears of the women waiting outside the locker room when the big games are lost. If balls is another word for courage, then often it's the women off the field who come to understand that best. Balls is the novel every football widow will want to read.

New York Times Book Review - Erica Sanders

. . .[D]espite its drolly macho title, Balls is about women and marriage as much as . . .a college football recruiting scandal. . . .Kincaid cleverly mines the small moments. . . .[However, though] painstakingly developed, the characters do not have enough to except watch and talk.