August 2005 Cover Courtesy: Simon & Schuster Inside Buckeye Madness • The 10 Spot's review | Read an excerpt | Buy it Hot Off The Press Embedded Balls: Adventures on and off the Tour with Golf's Premier Storyteller By Peter Jacobson ($24.95). One of golf's biggest personalities talks about life on the PGA Tour. On the Ridge between Life and Death: A Climbing Life Reexamined By David Roberts ($26). After over 40 years of climbing, Roberts writes about his experiences and the sport he loves. Winning the NFL Way: Leadership Lessons from Football's Top Head Coaches By Bob LaMonte and Robert L. Shook ($16). NFL coaches discuss how to be an effective leader. Get Your Own Damn Beer, I'm Watching the Game!: A Woman's Guide to Loving Pro Football By Holly Robinson Peete and Daniel Paisner ($14.95). The actress and wife of quarterback Rodney Peete breaks down the game of football for a female audience. Wrecking Crew: The Really Bad News Griffith Park Pirates By John Albert ($23). Tales of the Griffith Park Pirates, an amateur baseball team made up of Hollywood's finest. Five Under $5 Think words are cheap? These books won't break your bank (prices from barnesandnoble.com): • Jackie Robinson-First Black in Professional Baseball By Richard A. Scott ($3.95). Tracing the life of the baseball legend. • Pool Simplified, Somewhat By George Fels ($3.95). Strategies and tips on how to be a better billiards player. • At the Altar of Speed: The Fast Life and Tragic Death of Dale Earnhardt, Sr. By Leigh Montville ($3.98). Biography of the world's most famous driver. • Why I Love Baseball By Larry King and Michael Vinner ($3.98). The talk show host and Brooklyn native discusses his passion for America's pastime. • Golffirmations: The Golfer's Book of High Spirits and Lower Scores By Hugh O'Neill ($3.99). A mix of meditations, poems, limericks, inspiring stories, golf prayers from golf's top stars.

Welcome to the SI.com Book Club. Each month we'll review a sports book and offer an excerpt. August's selection: Buckeye Madness. 

There are places in this country where the passage of time is marked by three seasons: football, recruiting, and spring football. Places such as Columbus, Tuscaloosa, Ann Arbor and Baton Rouge where the local football coach is either deified or vilified, depending on his record. These are the places where college football is king.

There are books that attempt to explore and explain this phenomenon, not only for the already converted to revel in, but so that the uninitiated might understand. Buckeye Madness is not such a book.

Instead, sportswriter Joe Menzer, an Ohio native and unabashed Buckeyes fan, has crafted a fairly straightforward history of the program after the arrival of legendary coach Woody Hayes in 1951. Menzer's account is geared to those whose closets are already full of Buckeyes gear.

Early on in Buckeye Madness, former Ohio State offensive tackle Dave Foley, a captain on Hayes' undefeated 1968 national champions, gushes about how current coach Jim Tressel has helped return the program to its former heights. Tressel took over in 2001 for John Cooper, a carpetbagger without Ohio ties who won lots of games (.715 winning percentage over 13 seasons) but too often lost the wrong one (2-10-1 against Michigan).

"If you live in Ohio and you don't wear scarlet and gray now, you're an oddball," Foley says. "And it used to be that you could go around town even in Columbus and see a bunch of people in Michigan shirts ... And that's horrible, isn't it?"

That question, for Menzer and his target audience, is purely rhetorical. Obviously, any Columbus resident who roots for Michigan is a deviant. Why that passion runs so deep and the many colorful ways is which it can express itself, though, are not the subjects of this book. Rather, the importance of beating Michigan is treated as a self-evident truth, which it probably is to the book's likely readers.

Still, Menzer professionally executes the task he sets for himself. Particularly entertaining are the passages on Hayes. The coach best known outside Ohio for swinging at a rival Clemson player in his final game is presented here as the charismatic, driven, uncompromising man that established the legend in the first place before its national unraveling.

We learn that Hayes was a history buff who chased after his players to get their education; a humanitarian who regularly visited hospitals and gave freely to the sick with no attendant publicity; a blocking-and-tackling fundamentalist known for his conservative "three yards and a cloud of dust" rushing attack but flexible enough to unveil an early version of the no-huddle offense.

Hayes was also something of a nutjob, exploding into rages that his players and assistants dubbed "megatons" or, if they really got out of hand, "hundred-megatons." When an assistant once suggested that the staff turn in after four hours of fruitless late-night film viewing, Hayes became so agitated that he literally beat himself up, punching his own face until he developed two black eyes.

The coach also regularly slugged players in practice, though the way Menzer describes it, the players were usually more amused than alarmed. Hayes' outbursts are mostly played for comic effect, as in look-at-what-the-crazy-old-coot's-doing-now, rather than as the frightening side of runaway competitiveness. Maybe that was really how it played out, though the fact that Hayes knew how to beat Michigan (16-11-1) also earns him the benefit of the doubt in Buckeye land.

The book opens and closes with the 2002 national championship under Tressel, a born-and-bred Ohioan whom Menzer sees as a worthy heir (unlike Cooper) to Hayes' throne. The subsequent string of player arrests and the whole ugly mess with running back Maurice Clarett are touched on, but Menzer has clearly come to praise the Buckeyes, not to bury them.

If you know a Buckeye fan -- and there certainly seem to be plenty around, considering that they can jam more than 100 of them into a New York City bar every fall weekend -- Menzer's book would make a fine addition to their library. Others might want to try something like Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer by Warren St. John, a New York Times writer and Alabama fan who spent a year with the Crimson Tide's most hardcore supporters to help answer the question: Why do I care? The response to that more general question should be of interest to fans of any school.