Michael J. Agovino's Books

The Soccer Diaries

An American's Thirty-Year Pursuit of the International Game

By: Michael J Agovino

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The Soccer Diaries

An American's Thirty-Year Pursuit of the International Game

By: Michael J Agovino

Although soccer had long been the world’s game when Michael J. Agovino first encountered it in 1982, here it was just a poor cousin to American football, to be found on obscure UHF channels and in foreign magazines. But as Agovino himself passionately pursued soccer, Americans got wise and turned it into one of the most popular sports in the country. Agovino’s love affair with soccer is a portrait of the game’s culture and an intimate history of the sport’s coming of age in the United States. Agovino’s quest takes him from the unkempt field in the Bronx where he taught himself to play to some of the sport’s most storied venues and historic matches. With Agovino we travel from school fields to Giants Stadium, then from England to Germany, Italy, and Spain, along the way taking in the final days of the North American Soccer League, the 1994 World Cup, and the birth of Major League Soccer. Offering the perspective of fan, player, and journalist, Agovino chronicles his obsession with the sport and its phenomenal evolution.

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Page Count

312

Publisher

U of Nebraska Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0803255659

ISBN 13

9780803255654

The Bookmaker

A Memoir of Money, Luck, and Family from the Utopian Outskirts of New York City

By: Michael J. Agovino

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The Bookmaker

A Memoir of Money, Luck, and Family from the Utopian Outskirts of New York City

By: Michael J. Agovino

Marking the debut of a gifted new writer, The Bookmaker teems with humanity, empathy, humor, and insight. At the heart of Michael J. Agovino's powerful, layered memoir is his family's struggle for success in 1970s, '80s, and '90s New York City—and his father's gambling, which brought them to exhilarating highs and crushing lows. He vividly brings to life the Bronx, a place of texture and nuance, of resignation but also of triumph. The son of a buttoned-up union man who moonlighted as a gentleman bookmaker and gambler, Agovino grew up in the Bronx's Co-op City, the largest and most ambitious state-sponsored housing development in U.S. history. When it opened, it landed on the front page of The New York Times and in Time magazine, which described it as "relentlessly ugly." Agovino's Italian American father was determined not to let his modest income and lack of a college education define him, and was dogged in his pursuit of the finer things in life. When the point spreads were on his side, he brought his family to places he only dreamed about in his favorite books and films: the Uffizi, the Tate, the Rijksmuseum; St. Peter's, Chartres, Teotihuacán. With bad luck came shouting matches, unpaid bills, and eviction notices. The Bookmaker is both a bold, loving portrait of a family and their metropolis and an intimate look into some of the most turbulent decades of New York City. In elegant and soaring prose, it transcends the personal to illuminate the ways in which class distinctions shaped America in the last half of the twentieth century.

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