New York Daily News Book Review for Are You Watching, Adolph Rupp?

"Here's a Great Guy Who's Finishing First"

Tuesday, September 5, 1989
Bill Reel
The New York Daily News

Spend the weekend reading a wonderful novel with a New York setting authored by a great guy with a ton of integrity, Dan Doyle. His success in writing and publishing despite a decidedly unorthodox approach to both is a story almost as good as his book.

"I have a wife, six children, and a job, so writing full-time obviously was out of the question," Dan, 40, told me. We gabbed on the phone yesterday. "I wrote only on Sunday mornings from 7:30 to 10:30. By that time everybody was up and we went to church. It took me three years but it was a labor of love. I don't play golf. Writing was my escape. It was never drudgery."

Dan lives in West Hartford, Conn., and commutes to work in Rhode Island. The drive takes an hour and a half. "Instead of listening to the radio or daydreaming, I used the commuting time to think about the story," Dan said. "I traveled with a tape recorder. I thought about characters and visualized scenes and made comments on tape. When I sat down Sunday morning to write, I knew what I wanted to say."

With no experience in publishing, Dan sought advice from those in the know and was assured that he needed a high-powered agent. He contacted one in New York. She read what he had produced and like it, but…"There's no sex, and novels without sex don't sell," she told Dan in no uncertain terms. "Your story is about college athletics with all the warts-a perfect vehicle for plenty of sex. This novel needs sex and lots of it."

Dan told her he had spent a good part of his life in college basketball, and that a gratuitous emphasis on sex would distort the truth and smear good family men in the game. He was writing because he had something important to say. He wanted to portray the power-grabbing, egoism and greed that infect big-time college sports. He also wanted to show that coaches, players and administrators with good moral values could prevail over the sleazy element bent on exploitation. To throw in sex scenes for sales would discredit his purpose. He wouldn't consider it.

End of relationship with agent. Dan took it from there. "I sent a manuscript to one of the major book distributors, and their representative liked it so much they agreed to distribute the book," Dan related. "I sent a manuscript to a bookstore chain, and they agreed to sell it. The introduction to my book is by Bob Cousy. The bookstore representative was a big fan of Bob's. I think that helped. A few friends and I formed a publishing company, Stadia Publishers of Kingston, R.I. We paid for the initial printing. Soon we had enough orders so there was a cash flow."

Are You Watching, Adolph Rupp? (Stadia Publishers, $18.95) came out last February. Some 36,000 copies have been sold. Expectations are high for strong Christmas sales. Creative Artists Agents of Los Angeles has approached Dan about making it into a movie.

This novel evinces the same kind of authenticity that made Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities" a best seller. A reader can tell that the author is intimately familiar with his subject. The hero of the novel, Jack McHale, reminded me of Holy Cross coach George Blaney, one of the outstanding men in sports. "The McHale character was inspired by several coaches. George was one of them," Dan acknowledged.

The struggling assistant coach, the referee desperate enough to dump a game, opportunistic parents of talented sons, avaricious sports promoters, barracudas in expensive suits in executive suites who would pollute pure sport for personal gain-they're all in this book, depicted in detail that spells truth. Maybe a few developments stretch credulity, but first-novelist Doyle is entitled to a little poetic license. Are You Watching, Adolph Rupp? is for everyone who enjoys and cares about sports. The plot is thick, the pace fast, the ending perfect, the final scene a heart-tugger. I loved it. Doyle writes better then Reel, darn him.

Dan grew up bouncing a basketball in Worcester, Mass., wanted to play at Holy Cross but wasn't recruited, co-captained the team at Bates College and majored in psychology, got a master's in international law at Tufts University and did coaching stints at a high school and three colleges. Unwilling to keep uprooting his family to further his career, he quit coaching and settled down as founder and director of the Institute for International Sport at the University of Rhode Island. And as an avocation, he wrote this very good novel.

"Probably the most gratifying thing is that I received a letter from one of my favorite authors, James Michener, saying he loved the book," Dan said. He added that he's at work on another novel-Sunday mornings before church only, of course. Say, that might do for a title.