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Triumph Books
September 2008
On Sale: September 10, 2008
211 pages
ISBN: 1600780466
EAN: 9781600780462
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Sports
Here at last is the first book to fully explain how and why
the game of football became America's most powerful and
financially successful entertainment phenomenon--and how
this country's pioneers of sports, games, industry, and
politics helped transform a sleepy game inherited from
Europe into one that would explain what America wanted to
become and who we are as a people.
In How Football Explains America, Sal Paolantonio, ESPN
football reporter and a former national political reporter,
takes you all the way back to 1876, when the United States
was celebrating its 100th birthday, and explains how and
why the stodgy and low-scoring games of soccer and rugby
were rejected for a game that reflected America's lust to
control--Manifest Destiny!--an entire continent. How Football Explains America takes you through how and why
President Teddy Roosevelt saved football, how and why Jim
Thorpe and Bill Walsh changed the game, and how and why it
was influenced by Hollywood and West Point. How Football Explains America explains how football was
influenced by Davy Crockett, John Coltrane, Jackie
Robinson, and Douglas MacArthur. How Football Explains America shows how at the heart of
this country's real pastime is an insatiable need for
storytelling and mythmaking, how Johnny Unitas is like John
Wayne and Joe Montana is like Luke Skywalker, how the game
grew up when pioneers and cowboys set out to write
America's story across the West, and how football was a
game that perfectly explained that march across the
continent. "Football explains America," says NFL commissioner Roger
Goodell, "because the game is about teamwork and
camaraderie, competition and passion, strategy and energy,
strength and emotion. You can look at football and see the
heart of America." How Football Explains America takes you through a
fascinating historical and cultural journey, using the
intrigue, skullduggery, and drama of the 2007 NFL season--
the quest for perfection and triumph of an underdog against
all odds--to tell the story of a game and a nation that
have been sewn together and explain how we live, work, and
play.
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