Good tight ending

[Scott]

http://www.sovo.com/2006/5-5/arts/books/gayfalcon.cfm

Good tight ending


By GREG MARZULLO
Friday, May 05, 2006


ESERA TUALO’S MEMOIR about being gay in the NFL, "Alone In The Trenches," chronicles his career as a professional football player and the emotional turmoil he suffered during that time.

Tuaolo, the son of Samoan immigrants, was born and raised on the island of Oahu in Hawaii. He spent his time on his parents’ banana farm until his father died when Tuaolo was 13, when the boy moved to the mainland to live with an abusive brother.

In high school, Tuaolo’s athletic prowess surfaced, and he won a football scholarship to Oregon State University. Shortly after college, he joined the Green Bay Packers in Wisconsin, then the Minnesota Vikings, the Jacksonville Jaguars, the Atlanta Falcons and the Carolina Panthers. After a nine-year career, he retired from the NFL in 1999. He came out publicly in 2002 in a news segment on HBO’s "Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel."

Tuaolo now works as a motivational speaker. Aside from his skills on the field as a nose guard, he was also known for his singing voice. He was asked to sing the national anthem at a variety of NFL games, including after he came out as gay.

Tuaolo WROTE "ALONE IN THE Trenches" with the aid of John Rosengren, a freelance journalist.

With a master’s degree in creative writing from Boston University and articles in more than 75 publications, readers might expect Rosengren would have done a better job. The simplistic and terse sentence structure creates an abrupt rhythm that frequently distracts from the book’s message.

Fragmented narratives and non-linear storytelling plague Tuaolo’s memoir. Wild shifts in topic are common in the book, and in some cases, specious connections between passages evaporate completely.

In one section, Tuaolo talks about the importance that a book by David Kopay, another NFL player who came out after his retirement, had on him.

"His book gave me the strength to think that if something did happen, if someone did come along, I would pursue a relationship with him. Kopay’s book gave me courage."

The very next sentence leaps schizophrenically to an unprecedented subject.

"Ever since I listened to my mom and dad play the ukulele and sing traditional Samoan songs around the campfire on the beach, I had loved music."

THE STYLE is highly problematic, but the story does manage some compelling emotional impact. Tuaolo wrestles with suicide and drinking because of his all-too-present paranoia of discovery. Every time the media picked up on one of his plays or his face went out over the wire services, he feared an ex-boyfriend would come forward to out him. His success as an athlete became a liability.

Tuaolo finally does meet the man of his dreams, which speeds up his impending NFL retirement. The passages about his life with his partner, Mitchell, are refreshingly honest, revealing the dysfunctional patterns that some gay men can bring to their relationships.

The writing in the book improves dramatically when Tuaolo addresses coming out. Now openly gay, he finds his voice along with his freedom, and his direct addresses to the reader seem more inspired and less awkward than the early portions of the book.