Confession of an Eagles addict

A Memoir of My Father, Football, and Philly
By Tom McAllister

Villard. 240 pp. $22

They gather for a common cause, to wait out the night, united by their passion for a professional football team and the prospect of procuring tickets to a playoff game. Their preparation rituals are invariably the same, boiling down to: Drink . . . shout profanity . . . drink . . . urinate . . . drink . . . try to pick a fight . . . drink . . . crowd around a trash-can fire . . . drink . . . .

As depicted by the author of Bury Me in My Jersey, Tom McAllister, this has unsavory overtones of Mad Max.

McAllister's memoir, his debut as a book author, is an impassioned confessional, raw and angry. McAllister is a prisoner of emotion, not unlike the city itself. And he is unsparing, sometimes uncomfortably so, especially of himself and his weakness for drink, his volcanic temper, and his obsession with, and addiction to, all things Eagles.

He admits early on, in an unabashed longing that surely will resonate with fellow Iggles addicts: "I'm wishing I could stop caring. But I know that's never going to happen. The desperation in the city's air is contagious; it's a collective civic longing to be part of something great, even if we had nothing to do with it. I want that moment, that city-wide catharsis that will follow a Super Bowl. I need it."

So utterly helpless is McAllister, so thoroughly has he immersed himself in Eagles mania, that he becomes a slave to the Internet, to the Eagles Message Board, at one point averaging seven posts per day, his total reaching a mind-boggling 15,000 posts. Shy and awkward to begin with, he is an easy mark for Internet seduction and shrinks into the world of the recluse.