Wait Till Next Year: The Story of a Season When What Should've Happened Didn't, and What Could've Gone Wrong Did

by William Goldman, Mike Lupica

"Read the book Steinbrenner and a host of other sports notables will want to burn. It's a beauty."
-Elmore Leonard

"The greatest high for any True Believer, besides seeing your team win the Super Bowl, the seventh game of the world series or the NBA Championship, is getting the chance to talk sports with another True Believer. Bill Goldman and Mike Lupica are so intelligent, insightful and accessible, it's like having a conversation with two really True Believers."
-Rob Reiner

"In the tradition of great double plays, Wait Till Next year is Lupica to Goldman to great reading,"
-Billy Crystal

The New York area's 1987 sports scene is replayed by incisive reporter Lupica and Goldman, screenwriter, novelist (Marathon Man), and zany sports fan. With intimate reporting and diverting asides, they trace the downfall of 1986's champion Mets and Giants, the early winning Yankees, the downtrodden Knicks and Nets, and the Jets. For good measure there's a concerned look at Columbia's football team, piling up a losing streak that only ended this October. Comparing the talents of the Celtic's Larry Bird and Danny Ainge, appraising sports broadcasters good and bad, and looking for better times in 1988 all add to the appeal of this bittersweet reading for Big Apple fans. Lots of fun for outsiders, too

Genres: Sports, Nonfiction, Baseball, Basketball, Football

363 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1988

About the author

Goldman grew up in a Jewish family in Highland Park, Illinois, a Chicago suburb, and obtained a BA degree at Oberlin College in 1952 and an MA degree at Columbia University in 1956.His brother was the late James Goldman, author and playwright.

William Goldman had published five novels and had three plays produced on Broadway before he began to write screenplays. Several of his novels he later used as the foundation for his screenplays.

In the 1980s he wrote a series of memoirs looking at his professional life on Broadway and in Hollywood (in one of these he famously remarked that "Nobody knows anything"). He then returned to writing novels. He then adapted his novel The Princess Bride to the screen, which marked his re-entry into screenwriting.

Goldman won two Academy Awards: an Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and an Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay for All the President's Men. He also won two Edgar Awards, from the Mystery Writers of America, for Best Motion Picture Screenplay: for Harper in 1967, and for Magic (adapted from his own 1976 novel) in 1979.

Goldman died in New York City on November 16, 2018, due to complications from colon cancer and pneumonia. He was eighty-seven years old.

Reviews

[Jay Reddick · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read this when I was 17, and it helped me fall in love with William Goldman's writing, his humor, his conversational style. Still nobody better.

[Jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite being a little outdated, "Wait Till Next Year" is still going in my sports book Hall of Fame. It's mostly for the incredible writing by William Goldman (the guy who wrote The Princess Bride among many other things).

That being said, I do like that the book isn't all Goldman. Having the chapters alternate between the factual reporting of Mike Lupica, and the conversational ranting of a super fan works well. You might say that Lupica does the play by play, and Goldman is the colour commentator.

My number one takeaway is that Bill Simmons read this book in the late 80s and has been doing a bad impression of Goldman ever since.

[Tom Gase · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another great surprise of a book I found at the book fair a few months ago and finally got around to reading.
This book, by great sportswriter and columnist Mike Lupica, along with script writer and superfan of sports, William Goldman (The Princess Pride, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid)takes the reader on a journey in what was the 1987 calendar year for sports in New York. The Mets and football Giants were coming off championships and most people thought they would repeat. But as the book says, whatever could go wrong, did. Talks about the Mets and Yankees, Giants and Jets and Knicks and Nets. So there is a lot of stories on Darryl Strawberry, Dwight Gooden (he was busted for drugs), Keith Hernandez, Don Mattingly, Rickey Henderson, Dave Winfield, Bernard King, Rick Pitino, Phil Simms, Lawrence Taylor, Ken O' Brien, etc. Mixed in are really good stories on Columbia University football almost breaking its long losing streak, who the best baseball players of all time are (at that time), a Mets series with the Cardinals late in the year, Goldman wondering how the first week of The Princess Bride will do in the theater, Larry Brown almost getting the Knicks job and a couple of others. Very, very good writing here by both authors and this book really took me back to the year 1987, when I was 9 going on 10-years-old. This was basically one of the very first years I was REALLY into sports (a combo of 1986 and 1987 when I moved to Wildwood in Thousand Oaks and people would rather play sports than He-Man or Transformers). So this book really took me back. I think the only reason I gave it four and not five stars is that it IS only focused on NY. Not that that's bad, it's just that I lived in L.A. at the time so would have been nice to relive some of those moments. But very good stuff and a pleasant surprise. A MUST-READ for New York sports fans.

[Aaron Martz · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very detailed and illuminating account of the 1987 year in sports for New York - the Yankees, Mets, Knicks, Nets, Giants and Jets - who all had horrible years. The book is painful and outrageously funny, and covers everything from sports reporting and announcing to the coaches, players, agents, owners, broadcasters and managers, and even has time for a day in the life of Bob Costas. Heck, the book has time for everything - Goldman even goes to a Columbia football game and watches them lose for the umpteenth time. The best passages are when Lupica deals with Gooden's cocaine use and Strawberry being an asshole in general, and when both Lupica and Goldman rail on Streinbrenner, who basically gets covered in shit through the whole book. Goldman has passages that are as literary and thrilling as in any of his novels, particularly Bronko Nagurski's comeback touchdown run, which he witnessed as a little boy, and a suspenseful evening spent trying to avoid watching any of an important Mets game because he felt he would jinx it - finding, of course, that everywhere he went the Mets game was on, and even if it wasn't everyone was talking about it. I learned more about sports and sports fanatics from reading this book than from being alive for over thirty years. It has everything a great sports game has - suspense, humor, pain, hatred, anguish, an envy of greatness. All that and more.

[Terry Heller]

After William Goldman died last fall, I decided to finally read Wait Till Next Year, a book he co-wrote will sportswriter Mike Lupica in the late 1980s, about the year 1987 in New York City sports. It alternates between reported chapters by Lupica and "a fan's notes" chapters by Goldman. The book is rightly credited with inspiring a generation of sportswriting that emphasizes subjectivity and the fan's perspective (Deadspin, Bill Simmons, Page 2, etc.) over insider access. The subject matter is clearly pretty dated, but it was fun to read and interesting to see how this long-running trend got started.

[Garth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting point-counter point between Goldman and Lupica. The best section of the book is when Goldman is writing that in 10 years (from when the book was written) that people would say that Magic Johnson and Larry Bird couldn't play in today's NBA, which is almost exactly what has happened.

[Craig · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lots of good stories, but too meandering to be substantive.

[Xtian · Rating 5 out of 5]

best sports book ever written

[Muneer Uddin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lupica's description of the season dragged on and I lost interest. Goldman's parts were hit or miss, and not enough to keep me reading.

[Jay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good. I bought it after hearing William Goldman interviewed on the BS Report.

[Erik · Rating 5 out of 5]

Goldman and Lupica are the best. Different styles, to be sure, but the balance really works here. It doesn't hurt that I was an 11 yo living on Long Island while this book was being written!

[Gavin Ray · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my first book that I’ve read on this account.

I really liked it. I think Goldman and Lupica work really well together. The pacing was a bit off, (over half the book on the Mets, and then the other 45% covering the Yanks, Giants, Nets, Knicks, COLUMBIA, and Jets is a little lopsided) but I really dug it. Goldman was witty and interesting, while Lupica was right-to-the-point and journalistic. Fun read.

[Josh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meh. A fun read, but not a terribly good one. Lupica's sections smack of his sanctimonious approach to everything. There are some clever lines, but ultimately he's just so painfully proud of himself that I can't enjoy it. Goldman's are more enjoyable, but even then, it's still a bit too voice-y for my tastes.

It was fun to relive some old sports memories, but this was not the enjoyable classic that I had heard it would be.

[Avard MacPhee · Rating 2 out of 5]

I could not get interested in the book on any level 1 Stars

[Larena · Rating 2 out of 5]

G:FAMILY: Minimal violence and no gratuitous frightening descriptions. No profanity, sex or nudity, though it may contain offensive slang.

E:Easy: 3rd grade Vocabulary

[DaveH · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very enjoyable look at the 1987 sports season in New York

[Ray Charbonneau · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little unfocused, and probably would have had more impact if it weren't over 20 years old.