A book series for general readership that examines the impact of sport on American society, particularly illuminating the intersections between sport and a broad range of issues in American history and culture, such as race, class, ethnicity, and gender.
There are three things that can happen when you throw a pass, and two of them are bad. --Woody Hayes The quarterback pass is one of the leading offensive components of today's National Football League and college football's top level of play. This was not always the case. In early American football, the strategy focused entirely on advancing the ball one running play at a time, with the player tucking the then-roundish ball on his hip and sprinting ahead until tackled by a swarm of defenders. The revolution that transformed the sport began in 1906, when passing was first legalized. The passing weapon made the game safer, altered strategy, turned the quarterback into a key offensive player, and made possible the high-scoring games of today. Lew Freedman traces football's passing game from its inception to the present, telling the tale through the stories of the quarterbacks whose arms carried (and...
Although the Latino/a population of the United States has exploded since the 1960s, an analysis of its place in the history of American sport has, until recently, been sorely underrepresented. The thoughtful...
LaVern Roach, a skinny kid from the small town of Plainview, Texas, rose from obscurity to become one of boxing's most popular figures during the 1940s. Roach's rise to prominence occurred during an...
Adolph Toepperwein, Tom Frye, and Sharpshooting's Forgotten Controversy
by Tim Price
Price: $27.95
ISBN: 9780896729773
Pub Date: June 2016
Every few years, a book comes along that makes an important contribution to the history of American sport, even though--or, maybe, because--its storyline delves into the obscure. The event that launches the narrative in Shooting for the Record is the 1959 news report that strapping and handsome Tom Frye had broken sharpshooting's endurance world record after he shot at 100,000 hand-thrown wooden cubes and missed only six. But even as the Guinness Book of World Records immortalized Frye, previous record-holder Adolph Toepperwein, having just reached his 90th birthday, was sitting down to write a letter accusing Frye of cheating. Frye and Toepperwein were the two top-performing riflemen in the history of shooting sports, with the span of one generation separating them. Both had performed hundreds of sharpshooting exhibitions on behalf of major firearms manufacturers Winchester and Remington. Shooting for the Record reminds readers of America's longtime fascination with the shooting...
Loyola University Chicago was ahead of its time when racial matters were forefront in a long overdue revolution in civil rights. The Ramblers of the 1962-1963 NCAA college basketball season were pioneers...
When Wilbert Montgomery earned his Super Bowl XLVII ring as running-backs coach for the Baltimore Ravens in 2013, he was no stranger to glory. In Philadelphia and elsewhere his legacy still looms large....
Clyde “Bulldog” Turner rose from the West Texas plains to become an early lynchpin of the Chicago Bears and the NFL and one of the greatest linemen of the pre-television era. Fame, however, did...
At the outset of summer break in 1959, Texas Tech senior Jerry Craft had no more enticing options than to stay home and help on the family ranch—so the telephoned offer to play for a semi-pro baseball club he’d never heard of came as a welcome surprise. But Craft was in for an even bigger surprise when he reported for tryout and discovered he’d been recruited for the West Texas Colored League. Out of his two seasons with the Stars comes an unlikely story of respect, character, humor, and ultimately friendship as the teammates came together to succeed in a game they loved.
While baseball may have long been considered an all-American sport in which a melting pot could celebrate ethnic heroes like Joe DiMaggio, Lou Gehrig, Hank Greenberg, Connie Mack, and Stan Musial, racial segregation excluded blacks from an otherwise democratic picture. Such was certainly the case in Texas, where, in the state’s first professional matchup soon after the Civil War, the R. E. Lees faced the Stonewalls—and African Americans, not surprisingly, played no part. Drawing upon oral histories and mining such rare sources as rosters and box scores from black newspapers, Rob Fink situates Texas’s African American teams and players against the rise and decline of professional Negro Leagues. From the 1880s Galveston Flyaways through Dallas shortstop Ernie Banks’s signing with the Chicago Cubs in 1953, Playing in Shadows brings to light an important but little-studied inning in American sport.
