BALLS is the story of a college football coach, his rise, his fall, and his fallback position. You could say BALLS is the story of a coach's kick-off, his first, second, and third downs . . . and his punt. But BALLS is a coach's story that belongs to the coach's wife. To her, and to his mother, his mother-in-law, his daughter, his assistants' wives, his players' mothers and girlfriends, and even his players' grandmothers. It's the women standing behind this handsome football hero who tell the story behind the headlines of Mac Gibbs, Birmingham University coach Catfish Bomar's star quarterback, who married Dixie Carraway, the beautiful homecoming queen. Set in Alabama, home state of the legendary Paul "Bear" Bryant, BALLS is told by fifteen women and one little girl touched by Mac Gibbs's fall from fame as a college quarterback to infamy as head coach of the Birmingham University Black Bears. It's told in those women's voices, from their seats in the stands. They watch the other women, worry when players are slow to get up off the ground, pray when players are carried off on stretchers. They don't care much for the "science" of the game--or its brutality. They see football as it really is--sexy, dirty, sweaty, painful, empowering, corrupt. The story they tell is 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 door when the game is lost. The author, twice a head coach's wife, knows whereof she writes so brilliantly. She also knows a lot about love. And BALLS is, above all, a love story. If you link your happiness to the whims of a game, the odds of ever feeling truly satisfied are slim to none. In Balls , Nanci Kincaid reveals the misguided hopes and unfulfilled dreams of women trapped in lives that spiral around the coaches and players of Southern college football. She also exposes a darker side of the sport, where sexist attitudes, racism, and ignorance run as strong and deep as a receiver on a post pattern. Kincaid creates a large cast of interesting women by switching point of view from one chapter to the next. Her exacting dialogue allows half-joking responses, subtle revelations, and layers of unspoken subtext to shape each character. What happens when the smart, beautiful, rich homecoming princess succumbs to the passion of backseat love and marries the poor star quarterback? Pretty much what you'd expect. "Sometimes I tried to believe the ball was love, truth, or beauty so that I could look at the game, and the men playing it, differently, as if it ... would make the life I was living something worth devoting myself to." But Kincaid has devised a trick play, using stereotype as a trap to lure the reader into an intriguing study of the frailties of human behavior, the restraints on women in a male-dominated culture, and the fascinating ways people change over time as age and experience join to forge wisdom. --George Laney Kincaid (Pretending the Bed Is a Raft, LJ 9/1/97) scores another touchdown with this funny, entertaining novel about college football coaches and the women who love them. Set in Alabama, a fanatical football state where the late legendary Paul "Bear" Bryant is still worshipped, the plot focuses on the marriage of Dixie Carraway, an ex-homecoming queen, to Mac Gibbs, a former college quarterback. Narrated alternately by Dixie; her mother, Rose; Dixie's best friend, Frances Delmar; and a range of other vividly drawn female characters, the novel traces Dixie's transformation from young, adoring wife of a high-school football coach into a mature, independent woman disillusioned by the "win-at-any-cost" attitude of big-time college sports. Twice married to coaches, Kincaid knows her Southern football culture thoroughly. ("Alabama likes old coaches better than young ones. If a coach has at least one brother sent to prison, that really helps.") Despite some fumbles (a few minor narrators could have been cut), the novel's warm humor and eccentric characters, so reminiscent of Lee Smith, kicks this into the winning end zone.?Wilda Williams, "Library Journal" Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. Balls might be read for the wrong reasons, or at least not the best reasons, but that's okay. It's a novel by the wife of two big-time college football coaches (currently of the University of Arizona's Dick Tomey), and it's about being the wife of a big-time college football coach. As such, it promises an insider's view of the unrelenting pressure to win, the compromises that pressure begets, and the personal costs that are paid by the players, their coaches, and the families of both. And it surely does deliver on that score. But that's old hat, and it comes nowhere close to suggesting why the novel is so engrossing. Kincaid's story is told through the voices of a wealth of characters--the coach's wife, his mother, his wif