I grew up watching this team and this player. His story was very good and the different players talking about him and the back story all just made this book more interesting. It also helped going back into how the AFL was built back then and how they made a difference to the old NFL. Everything about the two leagues was different and as a kid, it was different watching one just run the ball most of the time and the other league throw it. So the defenses back then had to be fast and also big here Willie Lanier broke many molds by starting at middle linebacker for the AFL when no other African American was playing middle linebacker. A very good book.

America’s Trailblazing Middle Linebacker. By Joe Zagorski. 2020. Rowman & Littlefield (ARC eBook).

An inspiring read about athlete and businessman Willie Lanier. Drafted by the Kansas City Chiefs in 1967 Lanier had to immediately compete against fellow teammate and hall-of-fame player Jim Lynch for the position of middle linebacker. Never completing a job or challenge half-way, Lanier studied the financial side of professional football as rigorously as he studied team playbooks and opponent strategies. So it was no wonder that after his NFL retirement Lanier didn’t sit on his laurels. Instead he became Phillip Morris’s CEO.

Zagorski’s biography is supported by archived interviews, films and news articles. With collected quotes from Lanier, coach Hank Stram, Lynch and more, it is easy to see how a player who analyzed but never criticized fellow players, and was always happy to have new experiences on and off the field, became immortalized in the NFL Hall of Fame. Overall, America’s Trailblazing Middle Linebacker is an entertaining book. It is a shame though that Lanier did not participate; as some new retrospective takes would have been another welcomed dimension for sports readers.

One of the unsung heroes of pro football in the 1960s and '70s receives well-earned accolades in Joe Zagorski's new book, America's Trailblazing Middle Linebacker: The Story of NFL Hall of Famer Willie Lanier.

Lanier, the stout linebacker for the Kansas City Chiefs last Super Bowl winner, was a trailblazer on the defensive side of the ball, earning the distinction as pro football's first African-American middle linebacker- the quarterback of the defense. That he was first would not have been significant aside from the fact that he was also great, thus paving the way for many who followed after him.

Zagorski has done yeoman's work in his research for this book. He is clearly a student of pro football history, and has reached through nearly endless archival sources in search of information about his subject, especially as it relates to his career on the field.

As much as the dedicated research shines through in the book, the narrative left me wanting more. I felt that I was getting to know a lot about Willie Lanier, while not necessarily getting to know Willie Lanier. Despite having been retired from the NFL for more than 40 years, barely 20 pages cover his post-football life, and many of these address Lanier's induction to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. While again the author has mined publicly available sources extremely well, we don't really get much that's not already out there to find. The strongest sections of the text cover Lanier's college and professional playing days, but these sections can sometimes feel like summaries of the teams Lanier played for as much as biographical information about the man himself.

Lanier declined to participate in the project, and his contributions certainly would have provided more color and depth to the story, but even given this hurdle it felt as if there was more to tell about the man who was a significant enough figure in pro football's history to warrant his own full-length biography.

America's Trailblazing Middle Linebacker is a sound addition to the literature of pro football history. It will be most appealing to fans of the Kansas City Chiefs and the AFL. Thanks to NetGalley for providing a digital review copy in exchange for an honest review.

America's Trailblazing Middle Linebacker: The Story of NFL Hall of Famer Willie Lanier
by
Joe Zagorski

2 Stars

I was very disappointed by this book. I expected and hoped for a biography of one of the greatest football players from my youth, Willie Lanier. What I found was essentially just a recap of each Kansas City Chiefs game from the early years of Lanier’s career sprinkled with quotes from Lanier pulled from interviews he gave to NFL Films. There is almost nothing about Lanier’s youth and painfully little about his time in college or his life after his retirement from the NFL. I don’t feel like I know any more about the man than I did before reading the book.

While this book has promise due to the subject matter, it felt flat to me. Instead really giving the reader an in-depth look at Willie Lanier the man, I felt like I was getting a better picture of the Kansas City Chiefs. I did enjoy reading about him and his college career, but once he went to the Chiefs, reading the book was as enjoyable as facing Lanier on the field on those Sundays in the late 1960’s. Namely, not much.