A More Dangerous Game

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.