Many novelists write out of pain, but very few of them can pinpoint the pain the way Peter Gent can. It is in his lower back. It has been there since 1967, when a linebacker named Vince Costello, who played for the New York Giants, put it there. Costello drove a knee into Gent, who was then a wide receiver for the Dallas Cowboys, and the knee ruined several ribs and ravaged the surrounding territory. Two years later, Gent stopped playing professional football, but the pain has persisted. It is reflected on ...
[Peter Gent] has written a big, powerful, chaotic novel about life in pro football and in Texas. Rich in sex and drugs, violence and satiric humor, "North Dallas Forty" is neither as hilarious as Dan Jenkins's "Semi-Tough" nor as scathing and self-righteous as the various football exposés of recent seasons—but it is not meant to match any of those books. Instead, Gent has written a sensitive, personal novel about one man's attempt at survival in a cold...
Peter Gent, former offensive end for the Dallas Cowboys and author of North Dallas Forty, has written another novel about professional football [Texas Celebrity Turkey Trot]. It has the interest of any inside look written by someone who knows what he is talking about. Who but a professional football or basketball player would think "real people are tiny?" Gent is not just another athlete turned author. He has real talent. His novel is very funny, if your tolerence for jock humor consisting of ...
Peter Gent's first novel ["North Dallas Forty"] proves that football players are capable of talented literary works without the assistance of a "ghost." "North Dallas Forty" is the story of eight days in the life of a professional football player. The characters are drawn very closely after those that are popularly publicized in the newspaper and, as such, are quite identifiable. Any reader who has followed professional football will undoubtedly get some sati...
[Gent] obviously knows what he's talking about in [Texas Celebrity Turkey Trot, a] first-person portrait of Texas football hero Mabry Jenkins, a 30-year-old defensive back with bad knees and a hankering to stay in the limelight. It's all machismo and pathos, with Jenkins and his teammates fighting battered joints and onrushing middle age to keep their places on the team. When the worst happens and Jenkins is cut from the squad, he tags along with childhood friends—rodeo luminary Luther ...
[The film] North Dallas Forty is based on Peter Gent's autobiographical novel, which he adapted for the screen with the help of Ted Kotcheff, the director, and Frank Yablans, the producer. I am told that the book is much tougher and seamier than the script, but I doubt whether the book's greater seaminess is ipso facto more valuable than the film's greater seemliness. I am willing to concede that there remains some exposé value in the film; but what if the things exposed are pred...
American football is hell, the pressures impossible to resist, the story goes. Peter Gent, who was one of the Dallas Cowboys for five years, writes from experience and is not afraid of giving the reader [of North Dallas Forty] a blow-by-blow account of the horrors of the profession. He writes tough, in quasi-epic para-military language…. Whenever the action dies down, Phil switches on his in-car cassettes, announces the song and composer (Rolling Stones, Byrds, Jerry Lee Lewis) and assumes that the r...
[In Texas Celebrity Turkey Trot] Gent unleashes black humor upon the world of pro football the way Wambaugh does upon the demesne of metropolitan cops. Unfortunately, such slapstick doesn't go over equally well with characters outside the gridiron. A 30-year-old defensive back having his best training camp ever, Mabry Jenkins gets cut from the squad after a knee injury. Faced with a career crisis, Mabry exploits his supposed celebrity by running with a pack of Texas promoters, media heavies, among fl...
