Product Description: Much of Michael Oriard's education took place outside the schoolroom of his native Spokane, Washington, during "slaughter practices" on high school football fields. He was taught to "punish" and "dominate," to rouse his school spirit with religion, and to "tough it" through injuries, even serious ones...read more

Product Description: Sporting with the Gods examines the metaphors of "play," "game," and "sport" as they are reflected in American literature and culture. The "race" for salvation and success, the great "games" of business and politics, the distinctive American version of "fair play," the desperate "game" against an all-powerful opponent and the cruelties of chance and fate by which man becomes the "sport of the gods"--all of these metaphors touch fundamental American beliefs about fate and freedom, competition and chance, finitude and possibility...read more

Product Description: Professional football today is a $6 billion sports entertainment industry. In this astute field-level view of the National Football League since 1960, Michael Oriard looks closely at the development of the sport and at the image of the NFL and its unique place in American life...read more

This landmark work explores the vibrant world of football from the 1920s through the 1950s, a period in which the game became deeply embedded in American life. Though millions experienced the thrills of college and professional football firsthand during these years, many more encountered the game through their daily newspapers or the weekly Saturday Evening Post, on radio broadcasts, and in the newsreels and feature films shown at their local movie theaters. Asking what football meant to these millions who followed it either casually or passionately, Michael Oriard reconstructs a media-created world of football and explores its deep entanglements with a modernizing American society.Football, claims Oriard, served as an agent of "Americanization" for immigrant groups but resisted attempts at true integration and racial equality, while anxieties over the domestication and affluence of middle-class American life helped pave the way for the sport's rise in popularity during the Cold War. Underlying these threads is the story of how the print and broadcast media, in ways specific to each medium, were powerful forces in constructing the football culture we know today."[Oriard] captures the self-aggrandizing illogic of the game's cultural role in his absorbing study of early 20th-century culture.--New York Times"This excellent book should be required reading on any American Studies course worth the name. . . . Oriard's detailed and well-written work shows us how the game has been constructed through notions of national, gendered and ethnic--and, as he insists, also class--identities.--Journal of American StudiesIn this landmark work exploring the vibrant world of football from the 1920s through the 1950s, Michael Oriard explores how the mass media shaped and were shaped by the exploding popularity of football. King Football is at once a sweeping cultural history of football, a provocative study of the power of print and broadcast media, and a compelling investigation of American attitudes about race, class, and gender and their relationship to sport.-->

Looks at the early newspaper accounts of football, and argues that football came to embody ideals of order, teamwork, and manliness (view table of contents)

Product Description: Sporting with the Gods examines the metaphors of "play," "game," and "sport" as they are reflected in American literature and culture. The "race" for salvation and success, the great "games" of business and politics, the distinctive American version of "fair play," the desperate "game" against an all-powerful opponent and the cruelties of chance and fate by which man becomes the "sport of the gods"--all of these metaphors touch fundamental American beliefs about fate and freedom, competition and chance, finitude and possibility...read more

Analyzes the treatment of baseball, basketball, football, and boxing in American fiction, through the sports novels of such writers as Ring Lardner, Bernard Malamud, Mark Harris, and John Updike