He just wanted to iron out some of the details. I think he pretty much knew what he wanted to write. Mike Souza, the Panther’s real-life quarterback and a transplanted American, told his hometown paper, the Monterey Herald, that the team was excited by Grisham’s visit. Grisham spent time with the team this spring (the football season runs from March to July in Italy), attending a game, touring the team’s facilities, even taking the entire team out for pizza. The Parma Panthers do indeed exist, playing in Italy’s American football league, where they’ve reached the Italian Super Bowl each of the last two years. Desperate to continue playing football, he turns to his agent, Artie, who lands him a job as starting quarterback with the mighty Panthers of Parma, Italy. After a disastrous performance in an AFC championship game, Dockery is dumped by the Browns and ignored by everyone else in the NFL. The lead character in Playing for Pizza is Rick Dockery, a former college football star who ends up riding the bench in the NFL as the third-string quarterback for the Cleveland Browns. The research was tough food, wine, opera, football, Italian culture but someone had to do it.
I was pleasantly surprised to find real American football in Italy, and as I dug deeper a novel came together, Grisham says. In a statement released by his publisher, Grisham says he got the idea for his new comic novel while in Bologna, Italy, doing research for a previous book, The Broker. John Grisham has already tried his hand at legal thrillers, autobiographical Southern fiction, Christmas angst and serious nonfiction, so why not add something funny to the mix? In his latest novel, Playing for Pizza, the master of courtroom tension aims for laughs with the story of an American football player transplanted to a country where fourth down is definitely a foreign expression.
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