NFL Football in the Rowdy, Reckless '70s--The Era that Created Modern Sports
W. W. Norton & Company, Incorporated
September 2012
On Sale: September 3, 2012
288 pages ISBN: 0393080161 EAN: 9780393080162 Kindle: B007Q6XMHE Hardcover / e-Book Add to Wish List
The inside story of the most colorful decade in NFL
history—pro football’s raging, hormonal, hairy, druggy,
immortal adolescence.
Between the Immaculate Reception in 1972 and The Catch in
1982, pro football grew up. In 1972, Steelers star Franco
Harris hitchhiked to practice. NFL teams roomed in skanky
motels. They played on guts, painkillers, legal steroids,
fury, and camaraderie. A decade later, Joe Montana’s
gleamingly efficient 49ers ushered in a new era: the
corporate, scripted, multibillion-dollar NFL we watch today.
Kevin Cook’s rollicking chronicle of this pivotal decade
draws on interviews with legendary players—Harris, Montana,
Terry Bradshaw, Roger Staubach, Ken “Snake” Stabler—to
re-create their heroics and off-field carousing. He shows
coaches John Madden and Bill Walsh outsmarting rivals as
Monday Night Football redefined sports’ place in American
life. Celebrating the game while lamenting the physical toll
it took on football’s greatest generation, Cook diagrams the
NFL’s transformation from second-tier sport into national
obsession. 8 pages of photographs