Ten on Sunday

According to the 'Boy Code,' men must at all times be sturdy, stable, stoic and unemotional. Except when they play sports. Whether wearing pressed uniforms in packed sports arenas or rumpled sweat clothes in neighborhood pickup games, men are allowed to be verbal, animate, emotional, and intimate--as long as they’re engaged in sports. In THE SUNDAY GAME, Alan Eisenstock shatters the Boy Code forever. After the LA riots, Alan and his wife moved away from their old LA neighborhood and bought a dream house. For his wife, it was a dream house because of the location, the size of the house, and the pool. For Alan, it was the basketball court in the driveway. Soon he had a regular basketball game with eight guys, every Sunday. But what started as a simple weekly ritual of male gamesmanship soon turned into a meaningful exchange between men who normally would not express themselves--certainly not with other men. Marital issues, children, financial overextension, losing jobs--these were the topics that made each of the guys crave Sunday--on one occasion, one of the guys drove back from a vacation in Mexico, just to make the two-hour session. In Alan Eisenstock’s hands, THE SUNDAY GAME becomes a book about how men really handle emotional issues--how they respond to pressures and debt and joblessness--in a style that men will find familiar and women with find enlightening. Ultimately, THE SUNDAY GAME is about friendship, family, loss, and survival, about hanging out and hanging in through the confusion of midlife, about the true nature of intimacy among men, and about conversations about dying marriages, financial hardships, worries over children, and health issues.