Showing results for "Football" in United States

To borrow the slogan offered over the Bryant-Denny Stadium public address system before the start of every Alabama home game, "This is Alabama football." Ask a fan to talk about his favorite game and he’ll probably answer, "Which season?" Ask another to describe his favorite Crimson Tide play, and he may also respond the same way. And if asking an Alabama fan to recall his favorite player, don’t be surprised if you are asked to be more specific: "Which year? Which game? Which position?" Such is the tradition and legacy of the program.

The United States Football League was the last football league to not merely challenge the mighty NFL but also to cause it to collectively shudder. It spanned three seasons, featured as many as 18 teams, secured multiple television deals, drew millions of fans, and launched the careers of legends - but then it died beneath the weight of a particularly egotistical and bombastic owner, a New York businessman named Donald Trump. Jeff Pearlman draws on more than 400 interviews to unearth all the salty, untold stories of one of the craziest sports entities to have ever captivated America.

This wide-ranging history synthesizes scholarship and media sources to give the listener an inside view of the television contracts, labor issues, and other off-the-field forces that shaped the National Football League. Historian Richard Crepeau shows how Commissioner Pete Rozelle's steady leadership guided the league's explosive growth during the era of Monday Night Football and the Super Bowl's transformation into a mid-winter spectacle.

Founded in 1960, the Denver Broncos took 13 years to achieve their first winning season. But since then, this indomitable team has catapulted to excellence. In this newly revised edition of Game of My Life - Denver Broncos, fans of past and present will relive the greatest moments of Mile High football through the eyes of the players themselves. Floyd Little shares the pride and joy of scoring a touchdown in his last game as a Bronco, and John Elway describes the glory of leading the Broncos to their first Super Bowl victory in 1998....

In Wrecking Ball, award-winning writer Rick Bass chronicles three seasons on the field with the Texas Express, a semiprofessional team in the Dynamic Texas Football Association. Light-years from the NFL, it has nowhere near the pomp of college football nor even of Texas high-school football. Most players are in their twenties, but some are older. Every year a few get to try out for the college game; others get scholarship money and a shot at another life. But for most, this is their last chance.

No Friday Night Lights is the story of a rural Nevada high school football team that never wins. Veteran reporter John M. Glionna examines the 2022 season in which the McDermitt Bulldogs practiced for weeks in the summer only to learn once again that they had come up short of the necessary players due to the dwindling population on the Fort McDermitt Indian Reservation on the Nevada-Oregon border.

An “excellent sports history” (Publishers Weekly) in the tradition of Michael Lewis’s Moneyball, award-winning historian S.C. Gwynne tells the incredible story of how two unknown coaches revolutionized American football at every level, from high school to the NFL. Hal Mumme spent fourteen...

How Football Explains America is a fascinating, first-of-its-kind journey through the making of America's most complex, intriguing, and popular game. ESPN’s Sal Paolantonio explores just how crucial football is to understanding the American psyche. Paolantonio tackles varying American themes from Manifest Destiny to “fourth and one” as he goes deep in order to answer the age-old question: Why does America love football so much?

An acclaimed sportswriter offers an inside look at the Black quarterbacks whose skill and grit transformed the NFL In Rocket Men, John Eisenberg offers the definitive history of Black quarterbacks in the NFL—men who shaped not only the history of football but the cause of civil rights in...

Freddie Steinmark was starting safety for the undefeated University of Texas Longhorns in 1969. In the thrilling “Game of the Century,” a come-from-behind victory against Arkansas that ensured Texas the National Championship, Steinmark played with pain in his left leg. Two days later, X-rays revealed a cancerous bone tumor so large that it seemed a miracle Steinmark could walk, let alone play football. Within a week of the Arkansas game, his leg was amputated.

One year before Jackie Robinson broke the color line in major league baseball in 1947, four black players joined the Cleveland Browns and Los Angeles Rams to become the first professional football players of African-American descent in the modern era. While blacks had played on professional teams in the early days of pro football, none had joined a team since 1934.

Aliquippa, Pennsylvania is famous for two things: the Jones and Laughlin Steel mill, an industrial behemoth that helped win World War II; and football, with a high school team that has produced numerous NFL stars, including Mike Ditka and Darrelle Revis. But the mill, once the fourth largest producer in America, closed for good in 2000. What happens to a town when a dream dies? Does it just disappear?

The first fifty years of America's most popular spectator sport have been strangely neglected by historians claiming to tell the "complete story" of pro football. Well, here are the early stories that "complete story" has left out. What about the awful secret carried around by Sid Luckman, the Bears' Hall of Fame quarterback whose father was a mobster and a murderer? Or Steve Hamas, who briefly played in the NFL then turned to boxing and beat Max Schmeling, conqueror of Joe Louis?

Goal! covers the history of the beautiful game from its origins in English public schools in the early 19th century to its current role as a crucial element of a globalized entertainment industry.

During the 1980s, Black athletes and other athletes of color broadened the popularity and profitability of major college televised sports by infusing games with a "Black style" of play. At a moment ripe for a revolution in men's college basketball and football, clashes between "good guy" white protagonists and bombastic "bad boy" Black antagonists attracted new fans and spectators. And no two teams in the 1980s welcomed the enemy's role more than Georgetown Hoya basketball and Miami Hurricane football. The Hoyas and the 'Canes made the bad-boy image look good. Pop culture took notice.

In From Sandlots to the Super Bowl, Craig R. Coenen recounts the NFL's ascension from a cash-strapped laughingstock to a perennial autumn obsession for millions of sports fans. It offers an in-depth summary of the NFL's early years and its struggles to build an identity. This book approaches the history of the National Football League not only with stats and scores but with what happened beyond the gridiron.

An incisive narrative about a teen rape case that divided a Rust Belt town, exposing the hostile and systemic undercurrents that enable sexual violence, and spotlighting ways to make change. In football-obsessed Steubenville, Ohio, on a summer night in 2012, an incapacitated sixteen-year-old...