It doesn’t come out until August, so you can strike it from the early phases of your summer reading list. But few football books figure to be more entertaining than Sapp Attack, the first written offering from former NFL lineman Warren Sapp.
Gary Shelton of the Tampa Bay Times recently previewed the 314-page effort, in which Sapp apparently perfectly captures his essence: "[H]e is loud, and he is profane, and he is stepping on a different set of toes every time you turn a page,” Shelton writes. “You may like it, you may hate it, and you may stay up late laughing about it.”
Sapp shares his views on his coaches and teammates, telling it like he sees it. Sapp says he chose to play college football at Miami over Florida State in part because coach Bobby Bowden referred to one of his other players as a “fat ass.” Sapp says that his first NFL coach, Sam Wyche, tried to motivate “by making snide comments, by belittling people.” Sapp says that “Tony Dungy put the damn cake in the oven, and then Jon Gruden came in and put the icing on it.”
Sapp’s views on the men he played with include outing former Bucs defensive tackle Brad Culpepper for cheating. Sapp claims that Culpepper, now a lawyer and one of the many former players suing the NFL for concussions, used silicone to make it harder to be held. “Now that [Culpepper] also is retired, I’ll confess for him that he was one of the people who did that,” Sapp writes. “He practically bathed in silicone before a game. Trust me, if he had ever tried to hug his wife before a game, she would have slipped right out of his arms and gone straight up in the air.”
Um, does that make Sapp a snitch?
Perhaps the most intriguing thing about the book is that the cover art features an image of Sapp wearing the Super Bowl ring that, according to his bankruptcy filing, he lost several years ago. Though it’s quite likely that the picture was digitally altered, it’s a detail that Sapp will surely have to explain at some point to one of Sapp’s colleagues in the judiciary.