A More Dangerous Game
How a Young Sportswriter Met Patty Hearst and Landed in Federal Prison
Sign In or Register Now to see if this title is available for request.
Buy on BN.com Buy on Bookshop.orgSend NetGalley books directly to your Kindle or Kindle app
1
To read on a Kindle or Kindle app, please add kindle@netgalley.com as an approved email address to receive files in your Amazon account. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
2
Also find your Kindle email address within your Amazon account, and enter it here.
Pub Date Jan 5 2027 | Archive Date Nov 22 2026
University of Minnesota Press | Univ Of Minnesota Press
Talking about this book? Use #AMoreDangerousGame #NetGalley. More hashtag tips!
Description
REMINDER: Digital files are uncorrected proofs. Please check any quotes against final text.
From precocious sportswriter to Federal Prisoner #01150-134: The intersection of sports and the revolutionary 1970s, with one ambitious young man caught in the middle
Jay Weiner was an aspiring teenage sportswriter when he met Jack Scott, the charismatic, activist journalist who would become his mentor, immersing him in the political and social issues roiling sports—and so much else—in the late 1960s and 1970s. Weiner became a zealous student of Scott, joining a new tradition of sports journalism that interrogated questions of race, power, and politics alongside the games themselves. But his blind devotion took a treacherous turn when Scott took Weiner, as a surprise for his twentieth birthday, to a secluded Pennsylvania farmhouse where heiress-turned-FBI-most-wanted Patty Hearst was hiding out with her Symbionese Liberation Army kidnappers-turned-comrades.
A More Dangerous Game is Weiner’s story of coming of age in a shocking fashion. A wild mosaic of sports, journalism, betrayal, justice, courage, and redemption, his memoir charts the meeting of sports and the radical left in the 1970s, with Weiner unwittingly caught in the middle and left behind by his mentor. In the engaged, edgy style of a seasoned sportswriter, Weiner describes the fallout after that fateful encounter with the country’s most wanted fugitives: three years of federal subpoenas, impossible decisions, and, ultimately, four months in prison for refusing to testify before a grand jury.
With exhaustive background reporting, Weiner fits together the seemingly disparate pieces of his unlikely journey from young sportswriter to frightened FBI target to emboldened Federal Prisoner #01150-134. From its examination of the life and work of Jack Scott to its surprising angle on the well-chronicled saga of Patty Hearst, A More Dangerous Game is the engrossing story of a time when examining sports as a mirror of society put a writer on the cutting edge of one of the most notorious stories of a generation.
Advance Praise
"Jay Weiner's fascinating coming of age is a Kafka-esque tale of betrayal, death, the FBI, an NBA superstar, and a 50-year-old lesson on what could happen again. Like now. Reads like a thriller." —Robert Lipsyte, author of An Accidental Sportswriter: A Memoir
"Jay Weiner has written a coming-of-age story unlike any I have ever read. With the wisdom acquired over a half-century of distance, and with the storytelling skills of a master journalist, he has revisited both the bracing idealism and the dangerous self-delusions of the New Left. Weiner may have been only a bit player in the saga of Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army, but even that fleeting proximity endows this book with its drama and its tragedy." —Samuel G. Freedman, author of Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights
"Through his experiences in socially conscious sportswriting, Patty Hearst’s fugitive run, and his federal incarceration without being convicted of a crime, Jay Weiner surprised and intrigued me in A More Dangerous Game. It’s a powerful and fast-moving account of gaining wisdom the hard way." —Jack El-Hai, author of The Case of the Autographed Corpse and The Nazi and the Psychiatrist
"Jay Weiner is an award-winning former sports journalist who never abided by the admonition to ‘stick to sports.’ To read his intriguing memoir is to find out why. A More Dangerous Game tells the story of a surprising slice of American history with a compelling cast of characters, famous and infamous. Even though it happened decades ago, it’s a story worth retelling to this day." —Christine Brennan, USA Today columnist and author of On Her Game: Caitlin Clark and the Revolution in Women's Sports
"In A More Dangerous Game, Jay Weiner perfectly captures the zeitgeist of the 1970s through his brief, chance encounter with the notorious Patty Hearst. He could not have predicted the years-long saga that would follow, which ended with a stint in federal prison. Weiner’s book reminds us that true life is stranger than fiction." —Rachael Hanel, author of Not the Camilla We Knew: One Woman’s Path from Small-town America to the Symbionese Liberation Army
Available Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9781517920647 |
| PRICE | $25.95 (USD) |
| PAGES | 232 |