Alexander book shines a light, just not on the field

To be honest, I should have finished the book months ago.

I asked the publisher for a copy so I could review it. I received it within days. Yes, work and real life delayed my completion of “Touchdown Alexander: My Story of Faith, Football and Pursuing a Dream.”

But the truth is that I didn’t find the book all that remarkable.

Shaun Alexander is a great NFL running back. We saw his value to the Seattle Seahawks last season, when he sat out some games through injury and the team struggled. Few runners smell the goal line as Alexander does. Indeed, he seems to get stronger and run harder the closer to paydirt he gets.

He also is very cooperative with the media. I get the feeling that he is honest with us in interviews and that he recognizes that we have a job to do. I get the feeling that he is genuinely a nice guy. Believe me, in an era when big-time athletes look at reporters the same way they look at a torn ACL, that means a lot.

But the book, an “as-told-to” work with Cecil Murphey, a Presbyterian minister who has authored more than 100 books, falls short in a number of ways.

Alexander deserves more than a little respect for his refusal to get caught up in superstardom. He is, arguably, Seattle’s greatest active sports figure. As he says about is status as a sports star: “That’s what I do, but that’s not what I am. Football is something I’m good at, but it isn’t my total life. I’m also a father, a husband and a Christian man. I’m a mentor to younger men as well, because they are our future.”

That’s fine, except most who buy the book buy it because of Shaun Alexander, the great running back. Alexander seems to want to pound his point home throughout the book, that he’s more than an athlete, at the expense of telling us how it feels to be chased by Brian Urlacher or tackled by Jevon Kearse or who on the Seahawks roster tells the best jokes.

The book is, rather, a religious discourse, with a little football, a love story and a bio tossed in. I’m sure it’s interesting to many, but it slowed my reading down to a slow jog.

That’s not to say the entire book reads like the Dead Sea Scrolls. Alexander lets us in on some self-insights we’ve never heard out of him before.

Alexander says he was a virgin until he married Valerie Boyd in 2002 and that they never even kissed until they stood at the altar and directed to do so by the pastor. He was 24 years old.

That was after a two-year courtship and, I’m thinking, innumerable cold showers.

As much as Alexander speaks of faith in the book, he seems to lack the reticence many would hope to see in a believer. Yes, that might be difficult in an autobiography, but there are times in the book where Alexander seems a tad insolent.

He writes about hearing directly from God. He talks about receiving revelatory dreams. His faith is shown to rely heavily on mysticism, rather than from Biblical guidance. He admits mistakes, but never sin.

And sometimes (let’s be charitable here) his memory fails him. In one chapter that addresses the infamous “backstabbing” comments Alexander made in January 2005, when he fell 1 yard short of the NFL rushing title. He publicly ripped coach Mike Holmgren for “betraying” him, for not putting him in the game one last play so he could land the title.

Instead, Alexander claims that one reporter pestered him on the field and later in the locker room, supposedly twisting his words and not recognizing he was joking.

Well, a number of reporters who were there, people I greatly respect for their honesty and reporting skill, remember otherwise. Their recollection is that Alexander was deeply angry. Look at the record. Two days later, he felt the need to apologize for his outburst.

“Touchdown Alexander” is a book I’d gladly recommend to young people for a little light reading. Those searching for concepts of spiritual guidance may well find the book enlightening and helpful.

But if you’re looking for secrets inside the locker room or for laugh-out-loud anecdotes, it’s better to re-read “Ball Four.”

Sports columnist John Sleeper: sleeper@heraldnet.com