They did and they lost in double overtime. And I was hoping Parma would make it to the Super Bowl. And the Parma Panthers played the Bergamo Lions just like in the novel - I'd finished the book by then. GRISHAM: Oh, in July the 14th of this year, I watched the Italian Super Bowl - my first ever Super Bowl - in a town of Reggio Emilia, which is about an hour from Parma.

Is there really a Super Bowl contest in Italy?

HATTORI: In the book, the team is out to win the Super Bowl. And that's what they played for, the beer and pizza after practice and after the games. And I said, do Italians get paid? He said, oh, no, we play it for pizza. And I asked him, I said, well, you know, the Americans get paid a little bit of money. And he was telling me about this league and a lot of stories about American football there. The first guy I met - he was this big, tough Italian guy, wonderful fellow. They play football and their reward is to get that pizza once in a while. HATTORI: And the title 'Playing for Pizza' is literally what they do. And so I was sort of intrigued by the notion of how a kid, who grows up in the U.S., how you would ever end up playing for the Parma Panthers in the Italian version of the NFL. The intriguing part of the story is that each team is allowed to have three Americans. I sort of stumbled across this football league and became fascinated with these Italian guys who loved to put on the pads and helmets and beat each other up once a week. GRISHAM: Well, there is American football in Italy when I was researching a book called 'The Broker' that was published, I think, in '05. HATTORI: John, 'Playing for Pizza' has nothing to do with Papa John's or Shakey's but rather American football in Italy, a country where most people think of football is soccer. JOHN GRISHAM (Author, 'Playing for Pizza'): Happy to be here. John Grisham joins us from our studios in New York. But Grisham's latest work is a departure from the courtroom setting. You know many of the titles - 'The Firm,' 'Pelican Brief,' 'The Client,' 'The Rainmaker.' He's written 20 books in all. author with seven books racking up a total of more than 60 million copies sold. In the 1990s, he was among the bestselling, if not the bestselling U.S. In the book world, when it comes to legal thrillers, no one is more closely associated with the genre than John Grisham.

Playing for pizza by john grisham