New 600-page tome/book on Curly Lambeau has been released by Herb Gould. Have you received, reviewed and read? Your thoughts?
I received Gould’s rough draft and told him I would fact check it for him and point out inaccuracies. I had done the same for Kris Leonhardt’s book on Lambeau. I did not edit either book; I only suggested changes for the sake of accuracy.
Gould is a gifted writer who had a long career at the Chicago Sun-Times. He has been writing features lately on the Door County Baseball League for the Door County Pulse that have an easy flow to them and would make for a good book in my mind.
As for his Lambeau book, I think I reviewed about a third of it and stopped after it took me seven hours one Sunday to read and suggest corrections on a single chapter. Basically, it was because he relied heavily on unsourced books that had muddled and, in some cases, butchered Packers history.
As a result, Gould’s rough draft read more like a Lambeau mythology to me than an historical account of his 31-year association with the Packers.
For example, there was little or almost nothing in the book about what I believe was Lambeau’s greatest strength as a coach: Constantly adapting his Notre Dame system to the talents of his players from the 1920s into the early 1940s, or until the game started to pass him by. There also was very little about Lambeau’s role in league matters, which could have been easily researched in the NFL meeting minutes. Lambeau was a prominent voice in the room.
In the end, I don’t know what suggestions of mine Gould accepted, and I didn’t read the last two-thirds or so of his draft. Thus, I don’t know what’s in the final version. Maybe it’s more accurate than the text I reviewed.
That said, there’s no pro football historian who has done more extensive research than David Neft. And he has told me that no newspaper covered the NFL in its early years more extensively than the Green Bay Press-Gazette.
Thus, as I reviewed Gould’s text, I felt like I was committing a sacrilege and betraying the legacies of former Press-Gazette writers Val Schneider, George Whitney Calhoun, John Walter and Art Daley.
As far as I recall, they were never cited as sources by Gould. Instead, there were numerous citations credited to authors who had done virtually no serious research and had littered their Packers books and stories with falsehoods and…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at News…