Outside of a few minor details, we never know how the men came together or why they started the tradition. “The cumbersome burden of the equipment was essential to the rite, as was the notion of quest, as was the act of bestowal, as was the inebriated sociability among fellow wanderers,” we are told of the equipment exchange. Everything must be done exactly as it has been in the past, even when it no longer makes sense or there is a better way-a vaguely religious impulse that gives the proceedings an air of sacrament, even as the performance is entirely ridiculous. A deliberately disorganized exchange of football equipment takes place in the hotel hallways. The following afternoon, they gather to analyze film, reliving the moment of injury over and over again. There is the lottery, in which the men draw ping-pong balls from a pillowcase and select whom they will impersonate. The novel moves meticulously over the course of roughly twenty-four hours-from the time the men arrive at the hotel on a rainy Friday afternoon to the event itself the following evening-and recounts the many rituals the men enact as they prepare to recreate the play (without the bone-breaking, of course). But the play itself is not the novel’s subject it is instead the means through which Bachelder, in one hilarious scene after another, investigates the disappointments and shortcomings of the middle-aged men who gather every year to reenact it. This grisly moment is at the center of Chris Bachelder’s novel The Throwback Special, which takes its title from the name the Redskins gave the play. It sounded like two muzzled gunshots going off, Theismann later recalled. As Theismann struggled, several other defenders piled on, and his leg bent sideways at the knee, snapping beneath him. New York Giants linebacker Lawrence Taylor was the first to reach Theismann, jumping onto his back and dragging him down. The play was supposed to trick defenders into following Riggins, but it failed.

In 1985, Washington Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann ran a trick play known as a flea-flicker in which he handed off the ball to running back John Riggins, who then tossed it back to him. $25.95.Įvery November for the past sixteen years, a group of twenty-two men have gathered at a two-and-a-half-star hotel chain off Interstate 95, “recognized in online reviews for its exceptional service, atrocious service, pretty fountain, and bedbugs,” to reenact one of the most gruesome injuries in NFL history.

Priestess by Yuu Watase