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.

Let us take a nostalgic trip back in time to the age of Harry Stafford, Charlie Roberts, Sandy Turnbull, Joe Spence, Johnny Carey and Jack Rowley. These were the greats who made Manchester United great; legends for their immense contribution both on and off the pitch but now consigned to history. There are no shrines or statues to these players at Old Trafford yet without them, other legends might never have emerged, indeed the club itself might not exist. The Forgotten Legends brings to vivid life the careers of an elite set of footballers. They had two things in common: all made their United debuts before the start of the Second World War and none of them have had their story told in print before. HARRY STAFFORD -- The mysterious figure who saved Manchester United and then disappeared. CHARLIE ROBERTS -- Manchester United's first great captain and founder of the PFA. SANDY TURNBULL -- a figure who attracted controversy as easily as he did match winning goals. JOE SPENCE -- United's only true great between the wars, a legend among the fans. JOHNNY CAREY -- United's next great captain, leading the club back to glory. JACK ROWLEY -- A prolific striker with a fearsome reputation on and off the pitch.