THE FAT LADY NEVER SINGS VIRTUAL BOOK TOUR '07

Join young sports memoir author Steven M. Reilly, author of THE FAT LADY NEVER SINGS: HOW A HIGH SCHOOL FOOTBALL TEAM FOUND REDEMPTION ON THE BASEBALL DIAMOND, as he virtually tours the blogosphere in October on his first virtual book tour with Pump Up Your Book Promotion Virtual Book Tours! Since 1976, Steve Reilly has coached baseball in Connecticut's Lower Naugatuck Valley. He has coached Babe Ruth, Senior Babe Ruth and American Legion teams and has spent the last 20 years assisting high school coaches. He assisted at Derby High School from 1986-1995, assisted Emmett O'Brien Regional Vocational Technical School in 1996 and will be coaching in his 11th season at Seymour High School in the Spring of 2007. He continues to coach a summer Senior Babe Ruth team and fall league team in Derby. A practicing Attorney since 1980, with an office in Oxford, Connecticut (http://www.getlawhelp.com/), Reilly and his wife, Suzanne, live in Seymour, Connecticut. You can visit his website at http://www.thefatladyneversings.com/. THE FAT LADY NEVER SINGS SYNOPSIS: On Friday nights in the fall, all around the country, scores of fans gather to support their local football teams. The town of Derby, Conn. is no different. In The Fat Lady Never Sings, author and former assistant baseball coach Steven M. Reilly tells the story of the downfall of the Derby Red Raider football team after 28 years of winning seasons, and how three seniors on that team seek redemption on the baseball diamond. Every boy in this blue-collar town dreams of playing football for the Derby High School Red Raiders. The city doesn’t have much else going for it, only the pride in its successful high school football program. After the fateful game that ends the Raiders first losing season in nearly 3 decades, seniors Gino DiMauro, Ben Bartone and Donny Shepard know that nobody will remember this game’s score, but no one will ever forget they lost. Although the three had given everything they had on the field, they know it won’t be good enough, not in Derby. In a few short minutes, they will forever be labeled as losers—unless they can prove otherwise during baseball season. The smallest school in the league, Derby qualifies for the state baseball tournament and ultimately advances to the championship game. Under the towering lights of Middletown’s Palmer Field, Gino, Ben, Donny, and the rest of the Red Raiders face off against Terryville. But in the last inning, the Raiders trail by two runs and are down to their final at bat. With one out remaining, the "fat lady" prepares to sing—or so they think. A feel-good story of perseverance much like those in the classic sports movies "Friday Night Lights" and "Hoosiers," The Fat Lady Never Sings provides an intriguing look at the "never give up" attitude of high school athletes, and the pressures they face from parents, coaches and members of the community. THE FAT LADY NEVER SINGS EXCERPT: CHAPTER ONE Thanksgiving Day 1991 Ben, Donny, and Gino sat together on the red wooden bench on the sideline in the last football game they would ever play for Derby High School. With his right hand, Ben squeezed into his mouth the little water left from the green plastic bottle. The fingertips of his left hand barely held on to his red helmet; a dirty plaster cast covered his arm—wrist to elbow. Gino and Donny just sat there with their helmets off, their heads between their hands, and their elbows on their knees. Mud obscured nearly every inch of their red and white uniforms. Their war paint, or eye black, as it’s more accurately called, was smudged under their eyes and down their faces. Although the three had left everything they had on the field, they knew that it wouldn’t be good enough, not in Derby. Nobody would remember this game’s score, but no one would ever forget they lost. In a few short minutes, they would be labeled losers forever, and there was nothing they could do about it. I leaned on the silver chain-link fence near a back corner of the end zone. I could hear the scoreboard clock behind me slowly and painfully clicking down the time. The Game was about to be finally and officially over. It was the annual Thanksgiving Day game against rival Shelton High School in 1991. Although the weather report predicted a 30 percent chance of snow, the game ended up taking place on a fall morning that was too warm for a heavy coat and too cold for a Windbreaker. The sun glared in my eyes, but I liked where I was standing; it allowed me to make an easy exit from the park whenever I wanted. Most of the nearly six thousand fans were continuing to make their way out Derby’s Leo F. Ryan Memorial Field to beat the traffic. Almost all of the people leaving before the game clock reached four zeros were Derby fans. Many were trudging through the open gates wearing red, making their way to their cars without ever looking back at the field. They couldn’t bear to watch Shelton’s players and fans celebrate on their field. Soon the Shelton faithful would drive through Derby’s streets with their horns beeping, orange and black pompons waving out their decorated car windows, screaming that Shelton is number one. The chain links atop the fence bar dug through my red jacket into my forearms. The metal barrier and the cinder track prevented me from getting any closer to the uncovered bench. Twenty feet away from the fence that surrounded the field, assistant coaches, police officers, and others lucky enough to obtain a red field pass walked past the three players on the bench without saying a word. I wondered what I would say to them if I were on the bench with them, but it was not my time, not my season. People want to remember success, forget about failure. Even a child knows he does not want to be the one holding the wonder ball or the one without a chair when the music stops. Perhaps we feel that way as children because winners are admired and accepted. Perhaps it’s because it makes them feel they’ve achieved a bit of immortality—to gain something nobody else has. Or perhaps it’s because winning makes the pain of life go away, even if only for a moment. When you’re part of a team, if you put the team’s goal ahead of your own, the reward can be everything that’s good about life: friendship, comradery, loyalty, a connection that lasts forever. The outcome of a single event can change a person forever. It isn’t the losers who are remembered; it’s those who make a monumental effort that go down in the annals of history. Dorando Pietri is remembered for the way he finished the 1908 Olympic marathon: collapsing after entering the stadium, getting up, taking a wrong turn, collapsing again, and finishing—only to be disqualified for being helped across the line. I remember Gabriella Anderson-Schiess’s stiff right leg and limp left arm as the exhausted marathon runner lurched past the finish line in the 1984 Olympics. We admire most, however, the loser who persists and finally wins against the odds. He is most extraordinary. I turned from my thoughts back to the players on the bench. These three seniors had been taken out of the game to allow the underclassmen, who mostly sat on the bench, a reason to get their uniforms washed. Sometimes I think it’s a strategy coaches employ in hopes that the team that’s killing you will follow suit, remove its regulars from the game, and have mercy on you. They usually don’t until you take the first step and take your starters out. That’s the risk a loser has to take. This strategy sometimes makes the final score look closer than the game actually was. In this game, it wouldn’t have mattered how close the final score was. It was the ultimate disgrace for the three seniors. It was bad enough they were losing to Shelton on their home field, but now they would be on the bench when the final whistle blew and the siren from the red and white ambulance parked below the scoreboard blared, marking the end of an era. You see, in Derby, the smallest town in Connecticut (only 5.3 square miles), football was life. Every boy in this blue collar town dreamed of playing football for the Red Raiders of Derby High School. The city didn’t have much else going for it, only the pride in its successful high school football program. Most years, unemployment in Derby was higher than the state average, and what was left of Derby’s manufacturing base was slowly waning out. For years, small downtown stores were closing in favor of department stores in larger cities. The City’s downtown buildings were decaying; reconstruction was prone to politics and wasn’t well planned. If Derby lost one of its rival football games, the mayor would worry he might not get reelected. The townspeople would have to blame somebody. For many years, the football games were played before a few thousand people, except for games against rivalries, in which the crowds reached nearly ten thousand fans. For a town of just more than twelve thousand people, everybody who read an Evening Sentinel, bought his smokes at the United Cigar Storeor the Bridge Smoke Shop, sipped cappuccino at Durante’s Market, ate breakfast at Connie’s Cucina,or ordered a pizza by delivery from a Derby phone attended the games. Those who couldn’t attend listened as the local radio station, WADS, broadcast the games. Whenever Derby scored a touchdown, someone lit the wick of a small red and white cannon in the back of the north end zone near the scoreboard. If you attended a game and didn’t realize Derby scored, you could be startled off your gray pine bleacher seat. White smoke, along with the pungent scent of black powder, crept across the field for the next ten minutes, constant reminders to the visiting team that they had given up a touchdown. During most home games, a short, stout man dressed as an Indian with an authentic red, white, and brown war bonnet and wearing red, yellow, and black war paint made a grand entrance. With one hand gripping a dry leather rein and the other a turkey-feathered lance, he rode down a hill behind the adjacent baseball field’s rusted backstop on a horse with a frayed blanket on its back. The brown and white spotted stallion clopped its way to the cinder track before Derby’s stands, and its silent rider raised the lance to acknowledge the raucous cheering of Derby fans. The horse stopped behind the team’s bench, and the Indian warrior motivated the team. I glanced toward the baseball field, behind the opposite end zone. Traditionally while the high school game carried on, younger kids played their own tackle football game. They played on the diamond during each football game until the day they were able to play on the big field. Until last year, nobody had seemed to care that these games chewed up the baseball field’s infield. The city finally resodded the infield and roped it off during football games. But that didn’t stop the game-during-the-game from taking place; it just moved the game into left field. As I looked across the field, I noticed the kids were already dispersing to go home with their parents. I turned around and noticed month-old campaign flyers with black and white pictures of smiling candidates littering the tarred entranceway leading from the north gate to the Ryan Field complex down the path behind me. Derby fans followed the same path to reach the gray wooden bleachers supported by aging concrete that covered the side of a pine and maple tree-filled hill for the football field’s entire length. Several flyers whipped up against the double gate portion of the chain-link fence the ambulance used whenever it traveled on the cinder track surrounding the field to get to a team’s bench. At the north entrance, candidates for state or municipal office sometimes passed out campaign literature and shook hands. Fans sometimes grumbled as they walked past them, as if the politicians violated the game’s sanctity and hindered them from securing a good seat. Twenty minutes before the annual Thanksgiving Day game between Derby and Shelton kicked off, each town’s politicians, along with each school’s representatives, gathered at midfield as if they were at a summit. After they shook hands and returned to their respective sides of the field, the warm-up began. Derby’s mascot, an alumnus or student dressed in full Indian garb waving a wood and stone axe, would have at it with the Shelton mascot on the home team’s emblem, painted on what was left of the midfield grass after a long season. Since Shelton’s nickname was “the Gaels,” it was always someone dressed in a Viking outfit. The mascots warmed up the cold crowd before the main event. The Indian tackled the ox-horn helmeted Viking and then the Viking tackled the Indian or vice versa, so each team’s fans could alternately cheer. They terminated the ritual after the fights became real, not staged. From 1967 through this game in 1991, Derby’s winning football tradition amassed three overall state championships, seven undefeated seasons, and multiple Housatonic League championships. After the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Association instituted divisional state championship games based on a school’s enrollment in 1976, Derby won two of those as well. For a school of Derby’s size, the number of all-valley, all-Housatonic League, and all-state players as well as players who excelled at Division I and II colleges and universities was an astounding accomplishment for such a small high school in the Northeast. But the most important record achieved was that—since 1963—Derby had never had a losing season. The torch had been passed each of the past twenty-eight years to Raiders who had endured the sacrifices necessary to ensure the continuation of the “Streak.” THE FAT LADY NEVER SINGS VIRTUAL BOOK TOUR '07 will officially begin on October 1, 2007. If you would like to follow Steven as he talks about his book and to be eligible to win a free copy, visit http://www.virtualbooktours.authorsabode.com/. To be eligible to win free copies, watch for his tour stops on our virtual book tour blog at the link above and leave a comment on each of his blog stops. On Halloween night, October 31, we will announce the winners on this blog, so watch to see if you're one of the lucky winners! Steven's virtual book tour is brought to you by Pump Up Your Book Promotion Virtual Book Tours at www.pumpupyourbookpromotion.com. Tags: Pump Up Your Book Promotion Virtual Book Tours, online book promotion, author publicity, virtual book tour, book promotion, Steven M. Reilly, The Fat Lady Never Sings, sports memoir