An NFL tale with a light touch

In “Playing for Pizza,” John Grisham leaves the confines of the courtroom for the NFL locker room. The pairing of the master of the legal thriller and America’s most popular professional sports league would seem to be a marriage made in bestseller heaven.

Perhaps he’d craft a potboiler about a star quarterback involved in illegal dog-fighting and gambling? Or a story about a retired Hall of Fame running back who’d beaten double-murder charges only later to becharged with armed robbery? Maybe the plot would revolve around the genius head coach who broke league rules by stealing the defensive signals of the opposition?

“Playing for Pizza,” however, is Grisham without the legal machinations. Instead, we meet Cleveland Browns third-string quarterback Rick Dockery, who is lying in his hospital bed unconscious from a severe concussion. Rick, it seems, took the field at the end of an all-but-sewn-up game that would have propelled the long-suffering Browns into the Super Bowl.

With Cleveland about to go bonkers, Rick throws three interceptions in the final quarter -- the last resulting in the massive hit that sends him to the hospital and gives the game-winning touchdown to the Denver Broncos.

Remember last season’s goof by Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo, who bobbled the snap for the go-ahead field goal at the end of his team’s playoff loss to the Seattle Seahawks? That’s poor Rick, but add injury to insult. When he wakes up, he’s the outcast of Cleveland -- could anything be worse? -- and the laughingstock of the National Football League.

At a career crossroad, Rick takes the only job his smarmy agent can scrounge: starting quarterback for the Parma Panthers, in the football-mad country of . . . Italy. Well, it is the home of the ancestors of Vince Lombardi and Joe Paterno, and every Pittsburgh Steelers fan waving a Terrible Towel knows that Franco Harris is half-Italian.

Grisham’s fish-out-of-water scenario has promise: When in Parma, do as the Parmigiana do. Rick learns to wrestle a stick-shift Fiat into impossibly tight parking spaces. He attends an opera even though he can’t understand a single syllable. He savors the delights of culatello (Parma-style salami) and Lambrusco.

He bonds with his teammates, who get together to devour pizza and down mugs of Peroni beer. And he beds an American undergrad studying abroad who, post coitus, drags him on sightseeing excursions to 15th century cathedrals. Alas, in the land of Parmigiano-Reggiano, Grisham cannot locate one authentic Cheesehead.

Meanwhile, far removed from ESPN’s endless replays of his gaffe, Rick regains his quarterbacking mojo and some redemption. He rallies the scrappy Panthers on offense and -- warning: spoiler alert -- leads Parma to greater glory.

In such books as “The Firm” and “The Pelican Brief,” Grisham displays bravado and a familiarity with his terrain. His courtroom scenes crackle with page-turning tension; he layers his plots just as a lawyer builds a case.

In “Playing for Pizza,” Grisham is content to keep it light. The fish-out-of-water premise often devolves into stereotypes -- Italians like to eat amazing food and drink amazing wines -- while Rick’s transformations and the outcome of the Panthers season are predictable.

And Grisham avoids tackling perhaps the ultimate challenge for a sports novelist or screenwriter: writing an original halftime tongue-lashing by a coach. Instead, he merely describes the coach’s speech.

It’s a missed opportunity. The football novel didn’t hit its stride until the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the sport began to overtake baseball as our national obsession. Not coincidentally, the quartet of works that still dominate the pantheon -- Dan Jenkins’ “Semi-Tough,” Peter Gent’s “North Dallas Forty,” Frederick Exley’s “A Fan’s Notes” and Don DeLillo’s “End Zone” -- reflects the anti-Establishment chaos of Vietnam War-era America. In these funny and passionate novels, football serves as backdrop to stories of friendship, loss and obsession.

Today, the influence of contemporary football -- at the high school, collegiate and professional levels -- exceeds every other sport in America. The South shuts down on Saturdays for college games. Super Bowl Sunday serves as a secular holiday; even the commercials for the big game are hotly debated. After Hurricane Katrina, more than $150 million was spent to repair the Louisiana Superdome, in part so that the New Orleans Saints could play again.

Football’s favored status may well explain why the Michael Vick dog-fighting story as well as O.J. Simpson’s ongoing saga and Bill Belichick’s nefarious spy games are equally messy and compelling.

Grisham, by setting his novel in Italy, where U.S. football has little impact or fan support, avoids all this craziness but also all of its potential. Football may be at the center of “Playing for Pizza,” but this isn’t a football novel. It reads like part Frances Mayes’ “Under the Tuscan Sun,” part Mario Batali culinary diary and part Fodor guidebook.

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David Davis, a contributing writer to Los Angeles magazine, is the author of “Play by Play: Los Angeles Sports Photography, 1889-1989.”