At first, the XFL looks like the sports equivalent of Cop Rock, New Coke, and Battlefield Earth–a misbegotten idea doomed from its inception. But as Brett Forrest reveals in Long Bomb, his account of the ill-fated league's first and only season, there was a method to the pigskin madness of WWF huckster Vince McMahon and NBC Sports honcho Dick Ebersol. At the time of the league's creation, McMahon was riding high after a successful IPO left him flush with cash and hungry for respectability. He attempted to purchase an NFL team, but was coldly rebuffed, which only fueled his competitive fire. Ebersol and NBC, meanwhile, were smarting from a tape-delayed Olympics debacle and a schedule devoid of both professional football and then-trendy reality programming. The XFL promised to be both the ultimate football league and the ultimate all-access reality show, since the league vowed to insert cameras in places other broadcasts had the discretion to avoid. (Including, at one of many low points, the cheerleaders' locker room.) McMahon and Ebersol conceived of the XFL as a sports-entertainment juggernaut that would combine the bone-crunching action and longstanding tradition of football with the flashy showmanship of professional wrestling. What they ended up with, however, was a stitched-together Frankenstein's monster of a league that fused the clunky anonymity of a team sport played under helmets, facemasks, and layers of padding with the off-putting tackiness of a Vince McMahon extravaganza. McMahon and Ebersol dreamed of revolutionizing television and sports, but while widespread curiosity led to strong initial ratings, a steady stream of miscalculations and bad luck conspired to turn the league into a pathetic comedy of errors. Less an autopsy of the XFL than an opportunity for Forrest to Riverdance on the league's grave, Long Bomb compellingly recounts the hubris, egos, and clashes behind one of the biggest television disasters of all time. The author has fun lambasting a league that was constantly stumbling to new lows in its desperate grab for ratings, but his weakness for strained metaphors, overreaching allusions, and glib cynicism detracts from the book's fascinating central narrative. He seems intent on matching his subject's manufactured attitude, which is a shame, since he's sometimes funny, as when he observes that teams like Xtreme, Maniax, and Rage "sounded like the names not only of comic-book characters, but of comic-book characters who tried a little too hard." The same, unfortunately, can often be said of Forrest's writing style.