Download or read book Shake Down the Thunder written by Murray A. Sperber and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2002-08-13 with total page 668 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Sperber. . .tackles the details, great and small, unearthing a treasure." —New York Times Book Review Shake Down the Thunder traces the history of the Notre Dame football program—which has acquired almost mythical proportions—from its humble origins in the 19th century to its status as the paragon of college sports. It presents the true story of the program's formative years, the reality behind the myths. Both social history and sports history, this book documents as never before the first half-century of Notre Dame football and relates it to the rise of big-time intercollegiate athletics, the college sports reform movement, and the corrupt sporting press of the period. Shake Down the Thunder is must reading for all Fighting Irish fans, their detractors, and any reader engaged by American cultural history.
Download or read book Natural Enemies written by John Kryk and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2007 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Called the "definitive history of the rivalry" by the Chicago Tribune, this updated history of the classic tilt is much more than just the recounting of old games. The fates of Michigan and Notre Dame have been intertwined since that cold November day in 1877 when the Wolverines literally taught the game of football to an eager group of Notre Dame students. Richly illustrated and now including games through the 2006 season, Natural Enemies weaves these two chronologies together to produce a college rivalry book like no other.
Download or read book Beer and Circus written by Murray Sperber and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 538 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beer and Circus presents a no-holds-barred examination of the troubled relationship between college sports and higher education from a leading authority on the subject. Murray Sperber turns common perceptions about big-time college athletics inside out. He shows, for instance, that contrary to popular belief the money coming in to universities from sports programs never makes it to academic departments and rarely even covers the expense of maintaining athletic programs. The bigger and more prominent the sports program, the more money it siphons away from academics. Sperber chronicles the growth of the university system, the development of undergraduate subcultures, and the rising importance of sports. He reveals television's ever more blatant corporate sponsorship conflicts and describes a peculiar phenomenon he calls the "Flutie Factor"--the surge in enrollments that always follows a school's appearance on national television, a response that has little to do with academic concerns. Sperber's profound re-evaluation of college sports comes straight out of today's headlines and opens our eyes to a generation of students caught in a web of greed and corruption, deprived of the education they deserve. Sperber presents a devastating critique, not only of higher education but of national culture and values. Beer and Circus is a must-read for all students and parents, educators and policy makers.
Download or read book Playing with God written by William J Baker and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like no other nation on earth, Americans eagerly blend their religion and sports. This book traces this dynamic relationship from the Puritan condemnation of games as sinful in the seventeenth century to the near deification of athletic contests in our own day.
Download or read book The University of Notre Dame written by Thomas E. Blantz C.S.C. and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2020-08-31 with total page 710 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas Blantz’s monumental The University of Notre Dame: A History tells the story of the renowned Catholic university’s growth and development from a primitive grade school and high school founded in 1842 by the Congregation of Holy Cross in the wilds of northern Indiana to the acclaimed undergraduate and research institution it became by the early twenty-first century. Its growth was not always smooth—slowed at times by wars, financial challenges, fires, and illnesses. It is the story both of a successful institution and of the men and women who made it so: Father Edward Sorin, the twenty-eight-year-old French priest and visionary founder; Father William Corby, later two-term Notre Dame president, who gave absolution to the soldiers of the Irish Brigade at the Battle of Gettysburg; the hundreds of Holy Cross brothers, sisters, and priests whose faithful service in classrooms, student residence halls, and across campus kept the university progressing through difficult years; a dedicated lay faculty teaching too many classes for too few dollars to assure the university would survive; Knute Rockne, a successful chemistry teacher but an even more successful football coach, elevating Notre Dame to national athletic prominence; Father Theodore M. Hesburgh, president for thirty-five years; the 325 undergraduate young women who were the first to enroll at Notre Dame in 1972; and thousands of others. Blantz captures the strong connections that exist between Notre Dame’s founding and early life and today’s university. Alumni, faculty, students, friends of the university, and fans of the Fighting Irish will want to own this indispensable, definitive history of one of America’s leading universities. Simultaneously detailed and documented yet lively and interesting, The University of Notre Dame: A History is the most complete and up-to-date history of the university available.
Download or read book Down Thunder Road written by Marc Eliot and published by Touchstone. This book was released on 1993-09 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bruce Springsteen and how he became a star.
Download or read book Spirals written by Timothy B. Spears and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2018-10 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ivy League football is a preoccupation in Timothy Spears's family history. His grandfather Clarence "Doc" Spears was an All-American guard at Dartmouth in the early twentieth century, played on the Canton Bulldogs with Jim Thorpe, became a College Hall of Fame coach, and, as the legend goes, discovered Bronko Nagurski while driving through the backcountry of Minnesota. His father, Robert Spears, captained Yale's 1951 team and was drafted by the Chicago Bears in 1952. By the time Timothy went to Yale in the mid‑1970s, it was more than talent or enthusiasm that prompted him to play football there. Spirals tracks the relationship between college football and higher education through the lens of one family's involvement in the sport. Ranging over almost a century of football history, Spears describes the different ways in which his grandfather, father, and he played the game and engaged with its educational dimensions as the sport was passed from father to son. This intergenerational history attempts to uncover what the males in Spears's family learned from playing football and how the game's educational importance shifted over time within higher education. While Spears chose an academic life after college, he understood later, with the decline of his parents, how much football stayed with him and shaped his family's history. With a voice that is part memoirist, part scholar, part athlete, as well as father and son, Spears discerns how football is embedded in our culture and came to be the fabric and common language of his family.
Download or read book Sports in American Life written by Richard O. Davies and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2016-05-23 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The third edition of author Richard O. Davies highly praised narrative of American sports, Sports in American Life: A History, features extensive revisions and updates to its presentation of an interpretative history of the relationship of sports to the larger themes of U.S. history. Updated include a new section on concussions caused by contact sports and new biographies of John Wooden and Joe Paterno. Features extensive revisions and updates, along with a leaner, faster-paced narrative than previous editions Addresses the social, economic, and cultural interaction between sports and gender, race, class, and other larger issues Provides expanded coverage of college sports, women in sports, race and racism in organized sports, and soccers sharp rise in popularity Features an all-new section that tackles the growing controversy of head injuries and concussions caused by contact sports
Download or read book Radio Master written by John Lewis and published by Publish Green. This book was released on 2011-11-22 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: STREET SURVIVOR BOLD INNOVATOR RADIO STAR NIGHT OWL JEALOUS LOVER BATTLER OF CANCER INSPIRATION TO ANYONE WHO EVER HEARD THE SOUND OF HIS VOICE! This is the story of the most controversial, provocative and influential sports announcer the industry has ever known. Ted Husing was called the Master for good reason. But the man was much more than just another talking head. Yes, Husings life was about much more than sports. It was how he played the game!
Download or read book Creating the Big Ten written by Winton U Solberg and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2018-03-21 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Big Ten football fans pack gridiron cathedrals that hold up to 100,000 spectators. The conference's fourteen member schools share a broadcast network and a 2016 media deal worth $2.64 billion. This cultural and financial colossus grew out of a modest 1895 meeting that focused on football's brutality and encroaching professionalism in the game. Winton U. Solberg explores the relationship between higher education and collegiate football in the Big Ten's first fifty years. This formative era saw debates over eligibility and amateurism roil the sport. In particular, faculty concerned with academics clashed with coaches, university presidents, and others who played to win. Solberg follows the conference's successful early efforts to put the best interests of institutions and athletes first. Yet, as he shows, commercial concerns undid such work after World War I as sports increasingly eclipsed academics. By the 1940s, the Big Ten's impact on American sports was undeniable. It had shaped the development of intercollegiate athletics and college football nationwide while serving as a model for other athletic conferences.
Download or read book For Pride Profit and Patriarchy written by Gerald R. Gems and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sports history has emerged as a popular study over the past quarter century, and scholars have fueled this interest by providing a wealth of information on baseball and its role in American culture. Despite this increasing focus on the connection between sports and societal values, football, the sport that emerged in the late nineteenth century and merged the values of winning and commercialization with the culture of higher education, has been left relatively unexplored. This gap in sports history has left many questions unanswered, including football's link to American cultural values. Gerald R. Gems has filled this gap in sports history with his latest title, For Pride, Profit, and Patriarchy: Football and the Incorporation of American Cultural Values. This intriguing resource covers a host of issues including the rise of football, football and feminism, militarism and leadership training, and multiculturalism in football. A broad and comprehensive analysis of the ways in which football addressed the cultural and ideological tensions within American society during its period of development and consolidation after the Civil War, this study is ideal for everyone from the football enthusiast to the general reader.
Download or read book Stagg s University written by Robin Lester and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For this first case study of college football by a social historian, Lester has brought life to the story of a university football program that had an unusual beginning, a glorious middle, and a unique and inglorious conclusion. The nation's first tenured coach and the most creative and entrepreneurial of all college coaches from the 1890s to the 1920s, Amos Alonzo Stagg headed a program marked by creation of the lettermans club and by the dominant use of the forward pass, of jersey numbers, and of the collegiate modern T formation. Stagg, who had been an all-American football player at Yale University, joined the company of nine former college or seminary presidents and academic notables including John Dewey, Thorstein Veblen, and Albert Michelson when he was named associate professor of physical culture and coach of the football team at the University of Chicago in 1892. Within fifteen years the charismatic Stagg had developed a program so powerful that more Americans knew of it than of the physics experiments of Michelson, who in 1907 became the first U.S. citizen to win the Nobel Prize. The logical commercial trail established by Stagg and University President William Rainey Harper helped change football into a mass entertainment industry on American campuses. This fascinating look at the birth of bigtime college sport shows how today s gridiron glory and scandal were prefigured in Chicago s football industry of the early twentieth century, presided over by the brilliant, combative, saintly, but very human Amos Alonzo Stagg.
Download or read book Onward to Victory written by Murray Sperber and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2014-07-29 with total page 882 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed author of Shake Down the Thunder, Murray Sperber's Onward to Victory is a brilliant, detailed, and engrossing work of social history for not only sports fans, but anyone interested in the development of modern American culture. With the 1940 release of the classic film Knute Rockne, All American, the myth of the hero scholar-athlete was born, and with it came the age of big-time college sports in America. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, including press accounts, letters and diaries, historical papers, and interviews with many who were there, Murray Sperber recounts how the myths created by Hollywood studios were embellished and codified by a hungry press, infiltrating the collective unconscious with epic stories of players, coaches, and teams. As college sports became a mainstay of popular entertainment, they also were fertile ground for near-fatal scandal, ultimately giving rise to the modern NCAA. Sperber vividly re-creates the world of postwar America, with its all-powerful radiomen, its lurid press, its growing prosperity, and, of course, the infancy of television
Download or read book Play by Play written by Ronald A. Smith and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2003-05-22 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Noted sports historian writes on the relationship of the media to college athletics. Chosen as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2003 by Choice Magazine The phenomenal popularity of college athletics owes as much to media coverage of games as it does to drum-beating alumni and frantic undergraduates. Play-by-play broadcasts of big college games began in the 1920s via radio, a medium that left much to the listener's imagination and stoked interest in college football. After World War II, the rise of television brought with it network-NCAA deals that reeked of money and fostered bitter jealousies between have and have-not institutions. In Play-by-Play: Radio, Television, and Big-Time College Sport noted author and sports insider Ronald A. Smith examines the troubled relationship between higher education and the broadcasting industry, the effects of TV revenue on college athletics (notably football), and the odds of achieving meaningful reform. Beginning with the early days of radio, Smith describes the first bowl game broadcasts, the media image of Notre Dame and coach Knute Rockne, and the threat broadcasting seemed to pose to college football attendance. He explores the beginnings of television, the growth of networks, the NCAA decision to control football telecasts, the place of advertising, the role of TV announcers, and the threat of NCAA "Robin Hoods" and the College Football Association to NCAA television control. Taking readers behind the scenes, he explains the culture of the college athletic department and reveals the many ways in which broadcasting dollars make friends in the right places. Play-by-Play is an eye-opening look at the political infighting invariably produced by the deadly combination of university administrators, athletic czars, and huge revenue.
Download or read book Playing with the Best written by Lenny Wagner and published by Brookline Books. This book was released on 2024-09-15 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biography of Walter French, the only man who played for both a World Series winner and NFL Championship team. Before Bo Jackson and Deion Sanders, there were only nineteen men, throughout history, who played in the Major Leagues of baseball and in the National Football League, in the same season. Only one man from that group, Walter French, can lay claim to having played for a World Series winner and an NFL Championship team. In 1925, he starred for the Pottsville (PA) Maroons in their win over the Chicago Cardinals, in what was believed to be the NFL championship game, only to see the title stripped by a league office decision, a controversial move still being argued about today. Then in 1929, he was on the Philadelphia Athletics when they beat the Chicago Cubs in five games to win the World Series. Walter E. French was born in Moorestown, New Jersey in 1899 and he just might have been the best, but least known, all-around athlete to emerge from the decade of the 1920s, commonly referred to as the “Golden Age of Sports.” One analyst ranked him as the fastest man in football at the time, even placing him ahead of Red Grange. Although his exploits have dropped from the consciousness of all but the most ardent of sports fans in the last one hundred years, in his day, he was constantly in the news. He played with and against the biggest stars the decade of the 1920s had to offer, including Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Walter Johnson, Ty Cobb, and twenty-seven other ballplayers who would eventually wind up in the Baseball Hall of Fame. In football, he went up against the likes of Notre Dame’s George Gipp, the “Four Horsemen,” Curly Lambeau, Geoge Halas, Ira “Buck” Rogers and many more. The top sports writers of his day, from Grantland Rice to Ed Sullivan, made regular mention of him in their columns. Other well-known figures from the period such as Paul Robeson, Knute Rockne, Connie Mack, and General Douglas MacArthur are part of his journey as well, and make appearances in this book.
Download or read book Shaping College Football written by Raymond Schmidt and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2007-06-18 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Raymond Schmidt examines the many factors that were a part of college football's reshaping in the 1920s as the universities became dependent upon the revenue being generated by football, and the sport increasingly became identified as a commercialized, big business activity; all of it being played out against a backdrop of struggle between the academic and athletic factions over control of intercollegiate sport's place in the lives of the students and the university community. This is the most detailed examination ever undertaken of college football's "Golden Era," and the topics discussed range from the shift of power away from the game's pioneering schools, through the real evolution of forward passing, to stadium building and the decade-long struggle over the game's growing over-emphasis that culminated in the legendary Carnegie Report of 1929. Including chapters on college football's class-oriented opposition to professional football during the decade, the rise of the sport at the Catholic colleges and the historically Black colleges, and some of the major scandals and disputes involving the universities, Shaping College Football also contributes to the study of sport and culture.
Download or read book Mr Notre Dame written by Jason Kelly and published by Taylor Trade Publishing. This book was released on 2002-08-05 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edward "Moose" Krause spent nearly sixty years as a student-athlete, coach, athletic director, and de facto ambassador to the Notre Dame's legions of fans around the world. From an All-American career as a football and basketball player to a struggle with alcoholism in the wake of an accident that nearly killed his beloved wife, Mr. Notre Dame captures his remarkable story.
