DAVID MAIALETTI / Staff photographer
Matthew Quick wrote a novel about an Eagles fan, which is set in 2006.
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MATTHEW QUICK quit his coveted job at Haddonfield High, where he was teaching American literature and film as art to bright, eager kids. Floated down the Amazon, climbed Peru's legendary steps at Machu Picchu, lived in a hut in South Africa, hiked to the snow-carpeted floor of the Grand Canyon.
And then retreated to the concrete basement of his in-laws' home in Holden, Mass., 10, 12 hours at a stretch, the snow piling up outside the backyard door, and wrote a novel, which is what he always wanted to do.
It's called "The Silver Lining Playbook," and it has a kelly-green helmet on the cover, with a silver cumulus cloud where the wings should be, but this is not a football book, even if Quick uses the 2006 Eagles season as a framework for his novel.
Consider yourself warned: Don't judge this book by its cover. It's more cuckoo's nest than Eagles' nest.
"It's about a guy who had a mental breakdown, and that sounds depressing," Quick said the other day. "But it does have a lot of humor in it. It's about a delusional optimist, which makes him an ideal Eagles fan."
It's about a guy named Pat Peoples, who has been sprung from a neural institution by his doting mother. His grumpy father is not thrilled to have Pat back home, frantically trying to recover memories of the last 4 years and stick them back in the script because he thinks his life is a movie. Dad's moods shift with the Eagles' W-L record. Win and he's warm, lose and he's loathsome.
Peoples wears a Hank Baskett jersey, even when he's watching the Eagles on television. Baskett? In 2006?
"Partly because he was a longshot," Quick said with a smile. "The book is about a guy clinging to hope in a delusional way. He'd pick an underdog.
"I had read an article about Hank where he said when he wasn't drafted, he had a coach in high school who told him, 'You get 1 day [to sulk] and then start working on a solution.'
"My initial reaction was, what if my guy's hero was a guy who never played? That would kind of be a joke. Then Hank caught that touchdown and it became this kind of underdog story.
"That whole year, I would just watch him. If he put a good block on somebody, my friends would call me on the phone. Then I got to meet him, we did a signing together, what I suspected was true. He's a phenomenally kind and gracious man."
Quick watched those games through the eyes of Pat Peoples, which added tension to those dead-on tailgate scenes. There's one ugly parking-lot brawl with a fan wearing his Giants gear. Which brings up the question: Daring or dumb?
"I'm conflicted about that," Quick confessed. "All through college [La Salle University], I had season tickets in the 700 level. It was suicide to do that [wear the opposition jersey]. I saw some horrific things.
"In some ways, the humanitarian, as a writer, objectively I look at that and say, 'That shouldn't happen.' And yet, I go to the Linc and I miss that rowdy energy we had at the Vet. It's conflicting."
Quick and his wife Alicia own a rescued greyhound. So how conflicted is he about the signing of Michael Vick?
"I'm not a Michael Vick fan," he said. "I booed him at the Linc long before he was charged and disgraced. What he did off the field was awful and inhumane. So the signing is confusing . . . When a man is trying to redeem himself, I tend to be hopeful. Good can come out of bad. All that being said, we don't pay football players millions because they are good citizens . . . we pay them to play football to the best of their abilities.
"Our seats are behind the goal posts now. And last year, at the Dallas game, there was a guy in our row wearing Cowboys stuff. Someone said something to him and then we found out he was a war vet, just back from Iraq.
"The word spread, in whisper-down-the-lane fashion. And nobody bothered him. Guys bought him beers. It was a cool moment."
A cooler moment came when the movie rights to his book were sold.
"I took my mother-in-law out to dinner and she cried," Quick recalled.
Tears of joy can wash away all those taunts about his sanity when he left Haddonfield High for the uncertainty of writing. He looks back without regret.
"In my classroom," he recalled, "I continually told my students to take risks, to do the things they needed to do to make their lives count, to make them extraordinary.
"That was my platform, that literature was the study of the extraordinary, the uncommon man. And here I was, harboring this secret fantasy of writing a novel one day, and I started to feel like a hypocrite.
"Teaching is a wonderful, amazing thing. But it wasn't my dream. It wasn't what I wanted to do since I was a kid. When I left, the principal who hired me, Joe Sirico, said, 'Matt, you've been telling these kids to go out and be extraordinary. Now, you go out and show them.' '' *
Send e-mail to stanrhoch@comcast.net.
