Gridiron Underground

Gridiron Underground
Author: James R. Wallen
Publisher: Dundurn
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2019-01-26
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1459743229

Gridiron Underground traces the Canadian lifeline that brought talented African-American football players who were overlooked, ignored, or prevented from playing football in their home country from the 1940s right through to the present day.

Growing Up on the Gridiron

Growing Up on the Gridiron
Author: Vicki Mayk
Publisher: Beacon Press
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2020-09-01
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 0807021962

Explores the experience of one young man and the concerns about CTE he helped to illuminate, and the cultural allure of football in America that keeps boys trying to make the team despite the dangers Award-winning journalist Vicki Mayk raises a critical question for football players and their communities: does loving a sport justify risking your life? This is the insightful and deeply human story of Owen Thomas—a star football player at Penn, who took his own life when he was 21, the result of the pain and anguish caused by chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). It was Owen’s landmark case which demonstrated that a player didn’t need years of head bashing in the NFL, or even multiple sustained brain concussions, to cause the mind-altering, life-threatening, degenerative disease known as CTE. And Owen’s case could not have come to light without Dr. Ann McKee, the neuropathologist who bucked conventional wisdom, and the football establishment, as she examined Owen’s brain and its larger significance, building an ever-stronger case that said, at the very least, football should not be played by children under the age of 14. With its focus on a single life and the community touched by it—Owen’s family, his teammates and friends, his teachers and coaches, and, later, Dr. McKee—Growing Up on the Gridiron explores the place of football in our lives. It doesn’t make a heavy-handed argument to abandon the sport. Rather, it explores why football matters so deeply to many young men, and why they continue to take risks despite the evidence of serious, long-term harm.

Gridiron Glory Days

Gridiron Glory Days
Author: Robert E. Wilder
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2011
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0881462675

¿The ball was round, the equpiment was homemade, and the rules were uncertain, but that game the boys were playing on the lawn at Mercer University in 1892 was football....¿ Thus begins this colorful history of football at Mercer University, 1892-1942. Mercer had only 179 registered students in 1892 when the first Mercer eleven met the first Georgia eleven on the gridiron in Athens in January 1892, the FIRST college football game in the state of Georgia, and one of the first in the Southeast. College football in 1892 was a far cry from the organized splendor it is today. Uniforms were makeshift, with little or no padding. Players begin growing their ¿helmets¿ or ¿head pads¿ in early summer, and rumor has it that those long, bushy manes prompted Mercer¿s nickname--the Bears. It was a rough-and-tumble, disorganized free-for-all on the 110x53 yard field. Touchdowns counted four points; extra points, two; field goals, five; and safeties, two. But all those interesting facts--and many more--are included in this exciting chronicle. For fifty years Mercer played against the the great (Alabama, Army, Georgia, Florida, and others) and the nearly great (Savannah Library Association, Locust Grove Institute, North Georgia Aggies). Alas, college football eventually became a big (and expensive) business, and with the US facing world war, the last Mercer team was fielded in 1941. But, beginning in Fall 2013, the Mercer Bears will once again take the field following a seventy-year hiatus. This time, however, the helmets are much improved.

Out of the Shadows

Out of the Shadows
Author: David K. Wiggins
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
Total Pages: 474
Release: 2008-02-01
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 1557288763

The original essays in this comprehensive collection examine the lives and sports of famous and not-so-famous African American male and female athletes from the nineteenth century to today. Here are twenty insightful biographies that furnish perspectives on the changing status of these athletes and how these changes mirrored the transformation of sports, American society, and civil rights legislation. Some of the athletes discussed include Marshall Taylor (bicycling), William Henry Lewis (football), Jack Johnson, Satchel Paige, Jesse Owens, Joe Lewis, Alice Coachman (track and field), Althea Gibson (tennis), Wilma Rudolph, Bill Russell, Jim Brown, Arthur Ashe, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, and Venus and Serena Williams.

Women's American Football

Women's American Football
Author: Russ Crawford
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2022-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1496233824

Tackle football has been primarily viewed as a male sport, but at a time when men’s participation rates are decreasing, an increasing number of women are entering the gridiron—and they have a long history of doing so. Women’s American Football is a narrative history of girls and women participating in American football in the United States since the 1920s, when a women’s team played at halftime during an early NFL game. The women’s game became more organized in 1974, when the National Women’s Football League was established, with notable teams such as the Dallas Bluebonnets, Toledo Troopers, Oklahoma City Dolls, and Detroit Demons. Today there are two main professional leagues in the United States: the Women’s Football Alliance, with nearly seventy teams, and the Women’s National Football Conference, with eighteen, in addition to a number of smaller leagues. The National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics and the NFL have recently begun sponsoring flag football teams at the college level, and the game is growing for high school girls as well. In 2021 more than two thousand girls played on mostly boys’ teams, and there are currently four all-girls leagues in the United States and Canada, in Manitoba, Utah, Indiana, and New Brunswick. In addition to the rapid growth of women playing football, there have been advancements in other areas of the game. Beginning with Jennifer Welter in 2015, several women have earned positions coaching the professional game. In 2020 ESPN aired Born to Play, a documentary on the Boston Renegades, the 2019 champion of the Women’s Football Alliance. Based on extensive interviews with women players and focusing closely on leagues, teams, and athletes since the passage of Title IX in 1972, Russ Crawford illuminates the rich history of the women who have played football, breaking barriers on and off the field.