When Tom Brady entered the 2005 NFL season as lead quarterback for the New England Patriots, the defending Super Bowl champions, he was hailed as the best to ever play the position. And with good reason: he was the youngest quarterback to ever win a Super Bowl; the only quarterback in NFL history to win three Super Bowls before turning twenty-eight; the fourth player in history to win multiple Super Bowl MVP awards. He started the season with a 57–14 record, the best of any NFL quarterback since 1966.

Award-winning sports journalist Charles P. Pierce’s Moving the Chains explains how Brady reached the top of his profession and how he stays there. It is a study in highly honed skills, discipline, and making the most of good fortune, and is shot through with ironies—a sixth-round draft pick turned superstar leading a football dynasty that was once so bedraggled it had to play a home game in Birmingham, Alabama, because no stadium around Boston would have it. It is also about an ordinary man and an ordinary team becoming extraordinary. Pierce interviewed Brady’s friends, family, coaches, and teammates. He interviewed Brady (notably for Sports Illustrated’s 2005 Sportsman of the Year cover article). And then he got the one thing he needed to truly take Brady’s measure: 2005 turned out to be the toughest Patriots season in five years.

"Charles Pierce might have written a book about a quarterback, but he's really the quarterback himself in this endeavor. Although Tom Brady is the cynosure here, Pierce wonderfully mixes his own offense up, leading the reader downfield with diversions into history, religion, strategy, and pigskin arcania––all with insight and wit and his usual charming way with words." –– Frank Deford

"I didn't think anyone could make me like and respect Tom Brady more than I already do.  But Charlie Pierce has created a wonderful portrait of a true American hero. `Moving the Chains' reminds me of John McPhee's classic A Sense of Where You Are, about young Bill Bradley.  Every few decades or so we get one of these finely-crafted, beautifully-written works that reminds us there is, indeed, valor in sport and in grace in sportswriting." —Rick Telander, Chicago Sun-Times; author of Heaven Is a Playground

"If you ever wanted a football hero to believe in, Tom Brady's your guy. How he came to be that hero, remaining true to himself and the game, and lived to laugh about it, is wonderfully explained by the inimitable Charlie Pierce in this book sparkling with wicked wit and uncommon good sense."           —Dave Kindred, author of Sound and Fury, a dual biography of Muhammad Ali and Howard Cosell

 

"Moving the Chains is a study of so much that is too often lost in victory: grace and character and humility. This is a magnificent biography, a meticulous and illuminating tale for those of us who still want to believe in champions. Put simply, Charles Pierce on Tom Brady is America's best sportswriter writing on one of America's best champions. As usual with Pierce, brilliant, beautiful work."

—Adrian Wojnarowski, author of New York Times best-selling The Miracle of St. Anthony

"Filled with the wit, insight, and shoe-leather reporting of Charlie Pierce—a great sportswriter and one of the nation's most entertaining writers on any subject—this book is a gift to every Patriots fan and everyone who loves football."—Joe Conason, journalist and author

 

“No one writes about sports like Charles Pierce,” —Buzz Bissinger, author of Friday Night Lights

“Charlie Pierce is not only the sports guy, but he is also the writing guy.” —Frank Deford, NPR.

 Reviews for Hard to Forget: An Alzheimer’s Story:

“A gripping memoir with universal themes,” —The Boston Globe

On the staff of The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine and a regular panelist on NPR’s It’s Only a Game, Charles P. Pierce has written for, among others, Sports Illustrated, GQ, and Esquire. He is the author of two books.

Imprint: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Distributor: MPS
Publication Date: 10-16-2007
Pages: 288
Measurements: 8.25in X 5.50in