{"id":16523,"date":"2009-10-01T10:00:01","date_gmt":"2009-10-01T10:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2009\/10\/01\/a-few-seconds-of-panic-life-as-an-nfl-kicker\/"},"modified":"2009-10-01T10:00:01","modified_gmt":"2009-10-01T10:00:01","slug":"a-few-seconds-of-panic-life-as-an-nfl-kicker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20091001-01\/?p=16523\/","title":{"rendered":"A Few Seconds of Panic: Life as an NFL kicker"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Although I don&#8217;t follow him regularly when he appears on <i>All Things Considered<\/i> and didn&#8217;t when he wrote for <i>The Wall Street Journal<\/i>, I&#8217;m a quiet fan of Stefan Fatsis&#8217;s books because he writes about joining a world most of us don&#8217;t get to see. I previously wrote about his <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2004\/04\/14\/113053.aspx\"> excursion into the world of competitive Scrabble<\/a>. Today, it&#8217;s his book <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/dp\/1594201781?tag=tholneth-20\"> <i>A Few Seconds of Panic<\/i><\/a>, or more formally, <i>A Few Seconds of Panic: A 5-Foot-8, 170-Pound, 43-Year-Old Sportswriter Plays in the NFL<\/i>, another example of the <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2007\/10\/03\/5249867.aspx\"> <i>Catchy title: Long boring subtitle<\/i><\/a> book title fad. [Update: Now <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/dp\/0143115472?tag=tholneth-20\"> available in paperback<\/a>.] Fatsis convinces a professional football team to let him join them for a pre-season game as a place kicker. From there, he observes the working of an NFL team from the inside. NPR&#8217;s <i>Only a Game<\/i> interviewed him in August 2008. [<a href=\"http:\/\/www.bu.edu\/wbur\/storage\/2008\/08\/onlyagame_0823_7.mp3\">mp3<\/a>]\n (Fatsis is a regular member of Slate&#8217;s new weekly sports podcast <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/rss\/feed.aspx?id=2224225\"> <i>Hang Up and Listen<\/i><\/a>. He mentions his kicking career only every other podcast now.)<\/p>\n<p> (And I wasted far too much time on what is rumored to be another Stefan Fatsis production, <a href=\"http:\/\/nameoftheyear.blogspot.com\/\"> <i>Name of the Year<\/i><\/a>. Here&#8217;s a list of <a href=\"http:\/\/nameoftheyear.blogspot.com\/2007\/02\/year-by-year-noty-winners.html\"> previous winners<\/a>.) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Although I don&#8217;t follow him regularly when he appears on All Things Considered and didn&#8217;t when he wrote for The Wall Street Journal, I&#8217;m a quiet fan of Stefan Fatsis&#8217;s books because he writes about joining a world most of us don&#8217;t get to see. I previously wrote about his excursion into the world of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[103],"class_list":["post-16523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-non-computer"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Although I don&#8217;t follow him regularly when he appears on All Things Considered and didn&#8217;t when he wrote for The Wall Street Journal, I&#8217;m a quiet fan of Stefan Fatsis&#8217;s books because he writes about joining a world most of us don&#8217;t get to see. I previously wrote about his excursion into the world of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16523"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16523\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}