An accomplished sports historian traces pro football's
metamorphosis from a regional curiosity into a national obsession.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, pro football was seen by
athletes and organzers as a corruption of the purer, more noble
college pasttime - never mind that many pros were collegians
playing under assumed names. Today, universities fight a losing
battle to keep their best players from bolting to the National
Football League after a season or two on campus. With consummate
skill and an impressive command of sources, Peterson (Only the Ball
Was White, 1971, etc.) chronicles the persons and events that made
this turnabout a reality. Formed in 1920 by a cabal of coaches,
players, and team owners who gathered in a Canton, Ohio, auto
dealership, the NFL was initially a loose confederation of teams
representing such burgs as Duluth, Minn., Decatur, Ill., and
Dayton, Ohio. By luring such high-profile college and "amateur"
athletes as Jim Thorpe, Illinois's "Red" Grange, Stanford's
"triple-threat," Ernie Nevers, and Michigan's Benny Friedman, the
league slowly gained acceptance. Star names on the marquees helped
gain attention and fans for a new version of football, featuring
liberalized ball movement and substitution rules, changes that
helped to make the game (for better or worse) into the high-scoring
attraction it is today. After WW II, a restless public hungry for a
game with more action than the pastoral sport of baseball took to
football as never before. In the 1950s the game entered its golden
age, landing, thanks to coast-to-coast TV coverage, in the national
spotlight. With the classic 1958 Championship - an overtime
thriller pitting the Baltimore Colts against the New York Giants -
watched in some 10 million homes, the modern commercial colossus we
know as the NFL finally arrived. Peterson reconstructs this
colorful aspect of America's sporting past accurately and with
great immediacy. (Kirkus Reviews)
If the National Football League is now a mammoth billion-dollar
enterprise, it was certainly born into more humble circumstances.
Indeed, it began in 1920 in an automobile showroom in Canton, Ohio,
when a car dealer called together some owners of teams, mostly in
the Midwest, to form a league. Unlike the lavish boardrooms in
which NFL owners meet today, on this occasion the owners sat on the
running boards of cars in the showroom and drank beer from buckets.
A membership fee of $100 was set, but no one came up with any
money. (As one of those present, George Halas, the legendary owner
of the Chicago Bears, said, "I doubt that there was a hundred bucks
in the room.") From such modest beginnings, pro football became far
and away the most popular spectator sport in America.
In Pigskin, Robert W. Peterson presents a lively and informative
overview of the early years of pro football--from the late 1880s to
the beginning of the television era. Peterson describes the
colorful beginnings of the pro game and its outstanding teams (the
Green Bay Packers, the New York Giants, the Chicago Bears, the
Baltimore Colts), and the great games they played. Profiles of the
most famous players of the era--including Pudge Heffelfinger (the
first certifiable professional), Jim Thorpe, Red Grange, Bronko
Nagurski, and Fritz Pollard (the NFL's first black star)--bring the
history of the game to life. Peterson also takes us back to the
roots of the pro game, showing how professionalism began when some
stars for Yale, Harvard, and Princeton took money--under the table,
of course--for their services to alma mater. By 1895, the money
makers--still unacknowledged--had moved to amateur athletic
associations in western Pennsylvania and subsequently into
Ohio.
After the NFL formed in 1920, pro football's popularity grew
gradually but steadily. It burst into national prominence with the
Bears-Redskins championship game of 1940. As one sportswriter put
it: "The weather was perfect. So were the Bears." The final score
was 73-0. Peterson shows how, after World War II, the newly-created
All America Football Conference challenged the NFL. Though
dominated by a gritty Cleveland team, the AAFC was never viewed by
NFL teams as much of a threat. That is, not until 1950 when the two
leagues merged, bringing about the Cleveland Browns-Philadelphia
Eagles game in which the Browns buried the Eagles 35-10.
An elegy to a time when, for many players, the game was at least
as important as the money it brought them (which wasn't much),
Pigskin takes readers up to the 1958 championship game when the
Baltimore Colts beat the New York Giants in overtime. By that time,
the great popularity of the game had moved from newspapers and
radio to television, and pro football had finally arrived as a
major sport.
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