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.
