Leather Soul: A Half-back Flanker’s Rhythm and Blues by Bob Murphy

The cover of Bob Murphy’s forthcoming memoir, Leather Soul: A Half-back Flanker’s Rhythm and Blues, will be revealed at 10.30am on Thursday, 1 March, supported by an extensive social media campaign. Leather Soul will be released in August 2018.

Bob Murphy has never been a typical footballer. Family man, music buff, Age columnist and Winnebago driver, he is as comfortable in a Fitzroy café or the front bar of a grungy pub as he is in the locker room.

In this unique memoir, Murphy takes the reader inside his seventeen-year career and three years as captain of the Bulldogs, exploring the people, places and events that shaped him. From playing backyard cricket in 1980s Warragul to Community Cup with Paul Kelly in the 2000s, and from the joy of marrying his high school crush to the agony of a season-ending ACL rupture: the man described as the spirit of the Bulldogs has soul, and it’s made of leather.

How did the country kid with a gypsy’s heart become an All-Australian captain? What’s it like to have your club reach the Grand Final for the first time in sixty-two years, and have to cheer from the sidelines? How does it feel to realise you can no longer do the things that made you great?

The great Australian football bard Martin Flanagan has long insisted Bob Murphy has a book in him like no footballer has written. Leather Soul proves him right.

Leather Soul: A Half-back Flanker’s Rhythm and Blues
Bob Murphy
9781760640521
C format, hardback, x1 16pp colour picture sections
$39.99
August 2018 release
www.blackincbooks.com

Category: Classifieds