Football Books

Great book and a must have for any fan of Louisville Athletics and fans of NCAA football. Gives great insight in the difficulties the program has gone through and the amazing strides it makes yearly.

This book is very exciting and enjoyable. It is a special love story that will be enjoyed by all readers.

I bought this book for my 7th grade classroom library after hearing about it at a conference. Before the day was over, I had many kids asking to sign it out and I haven't seen it back since I brought it in! A huge and hysterical hit!

One of the remarkable and sad things of life is how often those who are very great in their day are relatively forgotten with time. I do not know if this is true about Sid Luckman who was in the late thirties and through a good part of the forties, football's premier quarterback, but it is true of many.
Sid Luckman first at Columbia where in Coach Lou Little's words he made a team of mediocrities into a winner, and then with the Chicago Bears where under Coach George Halas he led them to five Championships he was a leader and winner. Many considered him to be the smartest football player they had ever seen.
Two estimates of his ability follow, taken from the Jewish Sports Heros ' Internet site.
" Official Red Friesell said of Luckman's college days, "I worked behind Sid in six of his college games. In each of those games, he threw at least 30 passes, and on every single one of them he was knocked nearly out of his britches by some fast charging opponent...Never once did I see him throw in fright or see him wince when he got his lumps. I never heard a word in protest about the beating he was taking. That brand of courage, coupled with his uncanny knack of hitting his target, put Luckman down in my book as the greatest forward passer I ever saw in college ranks."

Sportwriter Jimmy Cannon said, "You had to be there to realize how great Sid was because the statistics didn't measure his true worth to a team that didn't help him much. The defenders were in on him most of the time but he got most of his passes away as he ran from his tacklers in a hurried ballet of evasion."
He was the best of his time, the ideal combination of brains and guts together.

An absolutely beautiful collection of about 200 black and white and color photographs celebrating the global sport known as football. Since its founding by a collective of photojournalists in the '40s Magnum has been one of the world's premier photo agencies, so it's not surprising that their archives have yielded such an array of compelling photos of the beautiful game. Few of the photos are of the high level world or professional ranks, rather they are of regular players and fans in the grimy cities, dusty villages, and muddy pitches of the world. Some are action shots, some are posed, some are impressionistic-but all are a tribute to the simplest of sports. Sure to delight devotees of either football or photography, it's an attractive and inexpensive collection that deserves wide readership.

This is the continuation from the original book,The Centenary History Of The Collingwood Football Club.I have this the 1994 part as well as the 1993 part and the original book.This is a facinating story about the most famous team in the league Collingwood.
You can realy get glued to the stories on how our mighty club went in its first 100 years.The scores,the champions the stories that shaped our club.
I dont think there has been a better book about the Magpies.Another good book released at the time was A Century Of The Best,which has 100 of our most famous players.

First in a series of three, this unique cookbook is a collector's item in the making. It's filled with the favorite tailgate recipes of famous University of Michigan Players and coaches. Adding spice to the collection is a heaping helping of U of M trivia, and profiles of the people who helped make this renowned university a football powerhouse.

Prospective readers take heed: this is not a book about the glories of rugby union football. It's not about epic battles, soaring victories and crushing defeats, the heroes and the zeroes. This is not a book about sport; it is penetrating social science in the context of sport. This is a serious scholarly work, complete with compulsory academic-speak like "hegemony" and "pedagogy," even "bourgeoisie," and really deep academic-speak laden passages such as, "...the racial and patriarchal ideology of residual Celtic supremacy." If you're looking for a light diversion about playing rugby, this most certainly is not it. If you're a hunchbacked tight-five scrummie who's best when rucking and raking in the mud and the blood, this is not your kind of book.

But, if you're a rugby enthusiast and/or player with intellectual thinking a bit more expansive than the pitch and the pub, looking for a truly fascinating series of well researched and easy to follow studies of how your sport has influenced much larger social, societal, cultural, and national issues, then you'll most likely enjoy this.

Despite the title, this book isn't a gender studies examination of masculine identity within the context of Rugby Union Football (rugby). If you're anticipating a forced collection of touchy-feely work on masculine identity and other squishy gender issues in the context of rugby, this book will disappoint. There is one article which is mainly devoted to the book's inaccurate sub-title, Nauright's quasi-concluding article prior to the formal conclusion, in which he explores some aspects of gender identity and labeling. The rest of the book does take on issues of masculinity and its public perception and development in the context of rugby, but these discussions take place almost exclusively to set the stage for the much larger and arguably more interesting issues. Sure, there are passing references to the male culture of rugby, almost all of them negative, highlighting gender exclusivity, drinking, brawling, and what is portrayed unfairly as sexist ritual and institutional misogyny. Reading these passages, I wonder if any of the authors actually have ever played the sport.

The discussion of male identity takes place always in the context of how this was a precursor and then concurrent aspect of the building of larger national identity. There are many, eventually repetitive references to what would become an English vision of modern (read "Industrial Revolution") manliness: rural, strong, fit, and more than anything willing to engage in activities of explicit physical risk. The discussions of male-ness in this book center on an Industrial Revolution intelligentsia worried that factory work and the tyranny of technology would rob the English Man of his stamina, his connection to the land, of his vigor and his strength, his ability to withstand physical and spiritual hardship, and ultimately the Empire. The discussion is very much rural-vs.-urban, but is also economic and social, landed-vs.-dispossessed and gentry-vs.-peasant. Into this surprisingly strong and strident public discussion arrives rugby, a sport accessible at first to only some, and eventually to all, in which the ideals of English masculinity could be first regained, then strengthened, and then showcased, first domestically then internationally.

This leads to the real core of this book, which I found much more interesting than the predictable gender positions within rugby. It is the surprisingly influential and arguably pivotal role rugby played in the development and growth of national identity and then nationalism in England and Wales (by implication, Ireland and Scotland), and in the colonies of South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia. In a nutshell: rugby emerged as a class-restrictive sport, which rapidly became a location of class-transcending social mixing. As coalescing Industrial Revolution economic classes bonded over a common love, so was born mutual dependence, respect, and the basis for a larger understanding of common cause and purpose. So was born pride and societal/cultural definition, from which nationalism rapidly grew: ". . . the `mateship' associated with rugby served to transcend class boundaries and weld men together under a canopy of common masculinity."

There are 12 articles across 244 pages. The articles are arranged in a basic chronological order, starting with the opener discussing rugby in British public schools in the 1830s on, up to the final chronological article on the role of rugby in South Africa in the latter half of the 20th century.

For someone looking for some great quotes on maleness and rugby, the unique attributes of the sport, this book is a trove: rugby as "...physical combat without (having to resort) to uncontrolled violence;" the rugby player as "warrior-philosopher;" rugby as a display of "healthy animalism," and; the rugby pitch as "...a testing ground-a place where manliness was learned, character developed and manhood discovered." There are hundreds more to choose from.

The scholarly citation is quite good throughout, with ample opportunities to examine sources and seek out additional reading. I think it was a poor editorial decision, however, to use chapter end notes rather than traditional footnotes, as the moving back and forth to the end of the chapter interrupted the flow of my reading. The book is scholarly, after all, let the footnotes fall where they should. There is a surprisingly comprehensive index, another solid aid for the researcher and student.

Bottom line: If you're looking for a straightforward history of rugby, tales of storied matches, ancient rivalries, and wins/losses, this book isn't for you. If you are a serious gender studies student or reader, this book will deliver somewhat on the book's subtitled promise of masculine identity examination, largely confirming all of the worst rugby stereotypes. But, if you're a sports-minded intellectual accustomed to serious academic writing and with the basic background in current political science, economics, history, and the world system, looking for something interesting that ties all of them together convincingly, then this book will be as revealing and pleasurably surprising for you as it was for me.

This is one of the best year reviews of Manchester United. It gives a lot of information on players, coaches and competitions. Manchester Utd's performance in Premiership, FA Cup and the UEFA Champions League are in the book. It reveals some helpful information about the club, the players and the stadium. If you are a Reds fan, this is a must for YOU!

This is clearly the best written mechanics book available on the market. The layout is far superior to that of the CCA books. This manual also goes into things as working with the chain crew and ball boys and other seemingly small, but important things. It also has a list over "supplementary signals" that can be used to enhance internal crew communication. I promise you, you wont regret buying this book.