No Time for Losing by Fran Tarkenton
Published 1976 · 58,000 words · about 2 hours at an average pace · Memoir & Autobiography, Sports, Self-Help
How hard is No Time for Losing to read?
No Time for Losing scores 15 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 22 out of 100
- Plain, journalistic vocabulary pitched at a general sports readership; football terms like blitz, audible, and scramble are explained through anecdote rather than assumed.
- Sentence structure: 20 out of 100
- Short, declarative sentences typical of a 1960s as-told-to sports memoir; the instructional 'Tips on Quarterbacking' chapters read like a coaching clinic, not literary prose.
- Abstraction: 30 out of 100
- Moves between concrete game anecdotes and a stated competitive philosophy — refusing 'time for losing' — but never strays into abstract theorizing.
- Information density: 26 out of 100
- Mixes career narrative with practical quarterbacking instruction, giving it more per-page density than a pure narrative memoir, though still digestible in short chapters.
- Narrative indirection: 100 out of 100
- Tarkenton narrates his own story in first person, plainly and directly, with the transparency typical of contemporary athlete memoirs; there is no gap between narrator and meaning.
- Symbolic density: 15 out of 100
- The title supplies the book's one guiding metaphor — a competitive refusal to accept losing — but the surrounding material stays literal: draft-day details, specific games, a coaching dispute.
- Ironic distance: 80 out of 100
- Earnest and sincere throughout; Tarkenton explains and instructs rather than commenting on himself from any distance.
- Resolution withholding: 80 out of 100
- Written in 1967 around his trade to the Giants, the book closes on a specific, stated turning point rather than an open question.
- Structural complexity: 15 out of 100
- A chronological account of his early Vikings years and his feud with coach Norm Van Brocklin, followed by a separate instructional section on playing quarterback — a simple two-part structure, not fragmented.
How No Time for Losing is regarded
No Time for Losing holds a literary regard score of 12 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.