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Playing for Pizza
Playing for Pizza
Dec 2, 2025 3:20 PM

Author:John Grisham,Christopher Evan Welch

Playing for Pizza

Rick Dockery was the third-string quarterback for the Cleveland Browns. In the deciding game at the climax of the season, to the surprise and dismay of virtually everyone, Rick actually got into the game. With a 17-point lead and just minutes to go, Rick provided what was arguably the worst single performance in the history of the NFL. Overnight, he became a national laughing stock and, of course, was immediately dropped by the Browns and shunned by all other teams.

But all Rick knows is football, and he insists that his agent, Arnie, finds a team that needs him. Against enormous odds, Arnie finally locates just such a team and informs Rick that, miraculously, he can in fact now be a starting quarterback. Great says Rick - for which team?

The mighty Panthers of Parma, Italy.

Yes, Italians do play American football, to one degree or another, and the Parma Panthers desperately want a player from the home of American footballat their helm. So Rick reluctantly agrees to play for the Panthers - at least until a better offer comes along - and heads off to Italy. He knows nothing about Parma (not even where it is), has never been to Europe, and doesn't speak or understand a word of Italian.

To say that Italy - the land of opera, fine wines, extremely small cars, romance and football americano - holds a few surprises for Rick Dockery would be something of an understatement.

Reviews

Grisham comes into his own. The man knows how to crank up the tension, we are soon on the edge of our seats. Read this book, enjoy it.

—— Daily Express

Playing for Pizza is well plotted and shows Grisham's gift for coming up with twists and appealing minor characters.

—— Sunday Times

Playing for Pizza is a lyrical page-turner and a gasp-inducing reminder of the scope of this man's genius with the written word. Grisham is something of a Da Vinci with words. He can blow your brains out with the power of truth or paint pictures that magically reveal the reality beneath. This is a smooth, satisfying and delightful read.

—— Sunday Express

Grisham's writing takes on an energy and precision in this amiable novel

—— TLS

To convey an adequate idea of a book of such various merits as that which the author of Typee and Omoo has here placed before the reading public, is impossible in the scope of a review. High philosophy, liberal feeling, abstruse metaphysics popularly phrased, soaring speculation, a style as many-coloured as the theme, yet always good, and often admirable; fertile fancy, ingenious construction, playful learning, and an unusual power of enchaining the interest, and rising to the verge of the sublime, without overpassing that narrow boundary which plunges the ambitious penman into the ridiculous; all these are possessed by Herman Melville, and exemplified in these volumes

—— London Morning Advertiser, October 24 1851

What a book [Moby-Dick] Melville has written! It gives me an idea of much greater power than his preceding ones. It hardly seemed to me that the review of it, in the Literary World, did justice to its best points

—— Nathaniel Hawthorne

Osama bin Laden's name and face have become so numbingly familiar to Americans as in effect to obliterate any history he and his shadowy followers might have had before they became stock symbols of everything loathsome and hateful to the collective imagination. Inevitably, then, collective passions are being funnelled into a drive for war that uncannily resembles Captain Ahab in pursuit of Moby Dick

—— Edward Said

That young lady has a talent for describing the involvements of feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with

—— Sir Walter Scott

I'd like to write a play as perfect as Emma

—— Simon Gray

A literary phenomenon on the grandest scale – a work of genius

—— Isabel Quigly

Sublime and sweet melancholy suffuses the story. Beautiful

—— Tim Waterstone , The Week

A delicate meditation on mortality, decay and the fading of beauty

—— Martin Sixsmith , The Week

Historical fiction at its best

—— Orlando Figes , The Week

No novel is perfect, but this small, wonderfully atmospheric and immensely poignant story...comes very close

—— Sunday Times, *Summer Reads of 2021*
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