Football is For Lovers by Bob Brooker and Kay O'Dougherty

About the Author:

Bob Brooker and Kaye O'Dougherty have been adventuring together for a lot of years now. They first met at a recording studio on 42nd Street. Yes, that 42nd Street. They recorded a commercial for E.J. Korvette's, who went out of business soon thereafter.

Bob is an old saloon singer who, as Bobby Brookes, recorded for Victor and Capital back in the day. Kaye has trouble carrying a tune in a bucket. Nevertheless, over the years, as Brooker and O'Dougherty, the two have collaborated on a variety of theater projects, performing, writing, directing, managing, and producing. In keeping with the changing times, they have even created a cyber alter-ego named eBobb.

Recently, Bob and Kaye both took long-overdue turns at being rather mature college kids. Kaye now holds a Bachelors Degree in the Humanities from St. Peter's College in Englewood Cliffs, NJ. Bob was graduated magna cum laude from Montclair State University with a BA in Theater, and is a member of Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society.

You can visit their website by going to FootballforLovers.com.

About the Book:

Can learning about football be sexy? According to Football is for Lovers, when it comes to your love life, football can be better than oysters.

The good news is that Football is for Lovers makes the basics so . . . well, so basic that learning the game is easy as eating an ice cream cone. And just as much fun.

With anecdotes, illustrations, and a lot of laughs, Football is for Lovers not only makes it easy to understand the game, but also shows you how to put an end to the TV clicker wars, improve your relationship, and spice up your love life.

It just takes looking at the game of football a little bit differently.

Then again, since Football is for Lovers contains references to football great Jerry Rice in a pink tutu, images of paintings by French artist Jean Dubuffet, an alert about the dangers of speaking Northeastern Mandarin, an explanation of the value of M & M's in a relationship, and a Burma Shave sign, to say it looks at football "a little bit differently" may be something of an understatement.

But if your football-obsessed partner has been making you a 'football widow' from August NFL pre-season through the February Super-Bowl, thus convincing you that you hate football, this little book may be just the 'different look' you need to discover that, after all, Football really is for Lovers!

I was lucky enough to get the authors to agree to tell me a little more about themselves through some of their favorites. Here's what they had to say:

Bob Brooker and Kaye O'Dougherty have been adventuring together for a lot of years now. They first met at a recording studio on 42nd Street. Yes, that 42nd Street. They recorded a commercial for E.J. Korvette's, who went out of business soon thereafter.

Bob is an old saloon singer who, as Bobby Brookes, recorded for Victor and Capital back in the day. Kaye has trouble carrying a tune in a bucket. Nevertheless, over the years, as Brooker and O'Dougherty, the two have collaborated on a variety of theater projects, performing, writing, directing, managing, and producing. In keeping with the changing times, they have even created a cyber alter-ego named eBobb.

Recently, Bob and Kaye both took long-overdue turns at being rather mature college kids. Kaye now holds a Bachelors Degree in the Humanities from St. Peter's College in Englewood Cliffs, NJ. Bob was graduated magna cum laude from Montclair State University with a BA in Theater, and is a member of Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society.

You can visit their website by going to FootballforLovers.com or their blog by clicking here.

Can learning about football be sexy? According to Football is for Lovers, when it comes to your love life, football can be better than oysters.

The good news is that Football is for Lovers makes the basics so . . . well, so basic that learning the game is easy as eating an ice cream cone. And just as much fun.

With anecdotes, illustrations, and a lot of laughs, Football is for Lovers not only makes it easy to understand the game, but also shows you how to put an end to the TV clicker wars, improve your relationship, and spice up your love life.

It just takes looking at the game of football a little bit differently.

Then again, since Football is for Lovers contains references to football great Jerry Rice in a pink tutu, images of paintings by French artist Jean Dubuffet, an alert about the dangers of speaking Northeastern Mandarin, an explanation of the value of M & M's in a relationship, and a Burma Shave sign, to say it looks at football "a little bit differently" may be something of an understatement.

But if your football-obsessed partner has been making you a 'football widow' from August NFL pre-season through the February Super-Bowl, thus convincing you that you hate football, this little book may be just the 'different look' you need to discover that, after all, Football really is for Lovers!


Could you please tell us a little about your book?

We thought it was a shame that a cool game like football was apparently causing conflict in a lot of relationships. For example, although Val, our favorite bank teller, admitted she knew very little about the game, she nonetheless declared that she hated football. So, obviously, if she didn’t know what the game was about, it couldn’t really be football that she hated, now could it? A brief discussion of the subject revealed that it was being ignored by her boyfriend from August pre-season through the February Super Bowl that was putting a strain on their couplehood. And we were pretty sure Val’s relationship was not the only one in jeopardy. So we wrote Football is for Lovers as an antidote to what seems to be a rather common problem here in the USA: football widowhood. In the book, we not only make understanding the game as easy as buttering toast, but also we give you the tools to make football work for your relationship, not against it. In Football is for Lovers, we show you a whole new way of looking at football that can end the TV clicker wars, spice up your love life, and maybe even get you some M&Ms into the bargain. Not bad, huh?


Did something specific happen to prompt you to write this book?

Indeed it did. Over the years, our writing had mostly been in the entertainment field - songs, skits, scripts, stuff like that – because, besides writing, Bob had always been a performer. A singer mostly. But also an actor and director. But then, when Bob had a stroke a few years back, his life upon the wicked stage was cut short. One week, we were getting ready to go into a recording studio to finish up a new album. The next, we were in a local hospital figuring out some basic stuff like walking and talking. Even so, there was no way we were going to give up writing. Or entertaining. Only now, we realized we’d need to do it sitting down and with our mouths shut. A book seemed like a good idea. So we wrote one.


Who is your biggest supporter?

Bob is Kaye’s biggest supporter. Kaye is Bob’s biggest supporter. Hey, it works for us!

Your biggest critic?

We bet you can guess this one! But we’ll say it anyway: Kaye is Bob’s biggest critic. Bob is Kaye’s biggest critic.


What cause are you most passionate about and why?

We hope you won’t show this to Joe the Plumber! Actually, it’s the words that seem to make the problem. If we call it what it is – redistribution of the wealth – it seems to create an absolute panic. Even from the middle class and the poor, who have seen wealth being redistributed on a constant upward angle for the last thirty years. The gap between rich and poor has grown to the point that our Founding Fathers must be spinning in their graves. From the very beginning, they feared precisely this upward redistribution and the larding up of the nation’s wealth in the hands of the few. They considered this the key to what they saw as the downfall of Europe, and in fact the very reason for founding this brave new world. But if our Founding Fathers feared this, then surely it is not, as guys like Joe would have it - an unpatriotic idea. We think the problem is that it needs rephrasing. How about changing the ‘redistribution’ thing to ‘ensuring life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to all our citizens’? It’s the same thing, really. Think about it.


What are you currently working on?

We’re working on another humorous non-fiction book with the working title He’s Not the Guy (God Didn’t Do It!). It bothers us when we hear those stories about things like, say, a building collapsing and ninety-nine people being killed. Then the sole survivor says, “It was a miracle! God saved me!” So - uh – exactly what does that mean? God killed the other ninety-nine? We think not. And we intend to set the record straight.


What do you feel is your biggest strength?

Working together. It’s . . . boy, how to say this without sounding tooooo corny? Anyway. It’s made each of us more as individuals. And, as a team, it’s made the sum of us greater than just our two parts.


Are you a different person now than you were 5 years ago? In what way/s?

Life is change. So of course we’re different. Everybody is. Just some more so than others. In our case, the change for Bob has been pretty enormous, so he’ll speak to this question.

As we told you earlier, I had a stroke. But five years ago, I was still what I had been for most of my adult life: an entertainer. . . although Kaye and I had also made the time to go back to school to get our college degrees. It was just three months after my graduation from Montclair State (Kaye interrupts here to say: he graduated magna cum laude), on the Sunday before I was scheduled to go into that recording studio, that I had the stroke. My left side – including my left vocal chord – was paralyzed. What had been my life – what, in fact, had been me – was just that quickly changed. I had always been proud of the clean, clear notes I could hit as a singer. (Kaye interrupts again: and could he ever hit them! Damn, he was good!) Now, I had to go to a speech therapist to learn how to talk again. When I tried to sing, it sounded more like a frog croaking. So change had definitely come. The only question was: change to what? As you can see, the answer we came up with was to become Bob and Kaye, the authors of Football is for Lovers. Soon to be followed by many more books. And hey: I can still whistle.


What is the most important lesson you have learned from life so far?

Keep going.


Is there anything else you would like to share with us?

Yes. Keep going!