Author: Jim Trotter
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0544237145
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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This intimate biography of the NFL icon by a veteran sports reporter sheds light on his singular life and the controversy surrounding his tragic death. Tiaina Baul “Junior” Seau is widely considered to be among the best linebackers in NFL history, a ten-time All-Pro, a twelve-time Pro Bowl selection, and a first-ballot entrant into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. But in 2012, just two years after retiring from football, Junior Seau committed suicide. Studies of his brain by the National Institutes of Health concluded that Seau suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a brain disease often caused by repeated hits to the head. Seau’s suicide spawned numerous investigations into the brains of deceased NFL players, and many were found to have CTE. Drawing on exclusive access to Seau’s family as well as Seau’s never-before-seen diaries and letters, Jim Trotter paints a moving and revealing portrait of a larger-than-life sports star whose achievements on the field were rivaled by his personal demons. “Few people knew Junior Seau like Jim Trotter . . . he took a sports book and artistically crafted it into a lyrical narrative about dreams, love, and, ultimately, heart-wrenching loss.”—Lars Anderson, author of The All Americans

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780764969225
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Author: Mark Fainaru-Wada
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0770437567
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 457

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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A “meticulously documented and endlessly chilling” (The New York Times) exploration of the NFL’s decades-long attempt to deny and cover up mounting evidence connecting football and brain damage. “A first-rate piece of reporting [that] adds crucial detail, texture, and news to the concussion story, which despite the NFL’s best efforts, isn’t going away.”—Time ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Boston Globe, NPR “Professional football players do not sustain frequent repetitive blows to the brain on a regular basis.” So concluded the National Football League in a December 2005 scientific paper on concussions in America’s most popular sport. That judgment, implausible even to a casual fan, also contradicted the opinion of a growing cadre of neuroscientists who worked in vain to convince the NFL that it was facing a deadly new scourge: chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a chronic brain disease that was driving an alarming number of players—including some of the all-time greats—to madness. Everyone knows that football is violent and dangerous. But what the players who built the NFL into a $10 billion industry didn’t know—and what the league sought to shield from them—is that no amount of padding could protect the human brain from the force generated by modern football. In League of Denial, award-winning ESPN investigative reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru expose the public health crisis that emerged from the playing fields and examine how the league used its power and resources to attack independent scientists and elevate its own flawed research—a campaign with echoes of Big Tobacco’s fight to deny the connection between smoking and lung cancer. They chronicle the tragic fates of players like Hall of Fame Pittsburgh Steelers center Mike Webster, who was so disturbed at the time of his death he fantasized about shooting NFL executives, and former San Diego Chargers great Junior Seau, whose diseased brain became the target of a scientific battle between researchers and the NFL. Based on exclusive interviews, previously undisclosed documents, and private e-mails, League of Denial is the story of what the NFL knew and when it knew it—questions at the heart of a crisis that threatens American football—and of the battle for the sport’s future.

Author: Sid Brooks
Publisher: Sports Publishing LLC
ISBN: 1596700971
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
During his 27-year tenure with the San Diego Chargers, equipment manager Sid Brooks kept over 5,000 football players from appearing naked before their cheering fans. The first African-American to hold the job of equipment manager in the NFL, Brooks' job was to see that each player left the locker room in uniform. But the means to that end was far more complicated -- and outrageous -- than one would believe.Sid Brooks' Tales from the Chargers Locker Room takes the reader aboard the elevator to B2, the basement of Qualcomm Stadium, where the Chargers locker room is housed. In that basement, the equipment department and trainers, affectionately known as "dungeon rats," ran the Chargers locker room. There, Sid Brooks became caretaker for all who crossed its threshold. The locker room would be damp, dark, and quiet before the coffee and doughnuts arrived, before the arrogant swagger of the players and boom boxes, high-fives, and back-slapping brought the joint to life. Here Sid recreates that environment with tales from within the locker room, the team hotel, and the field of play, featuring stories about Chargers greats like Dan Fouts, Charlie Joiner, Kellen Winslow, Louie Kelcher, John Jefferson, Rodney Harrison, and Junior Seau. Sid recounts stories unique to a life spent working behind the scenes in the Chargers locker room. With an eye for detail, he recounts tales of spies sent out to capture the opposing team's playbooks; the night the lights went out on Don Schula; wild cab rides with Fouts, Joiner, and Winslow; the zany pre-game rituals and idiosyncrasies of Russ Washington, Wilbur Young, Pat Curran, Woodrow Lowe, and others; rivalries born not on the playing field, but at thedominoes table; and plenty of pranks and good-natured ribbing.Rarely does a book offer more than a passing glance at what makes a football team a family. But Chargers fans can rejoice, because Sid Brooks not only introduces the family, h

Author: Steve Almond
Publisher: Melville House Publishing
ISBN: 161219415X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
With American Football becoming an increasingly popular sport in the UK, concerns are also being raised about the health impact the sport can have on players. The scary facts about American football causing brain injury have become a hot topic in the media, especially as the same worries are surfacing for other full contact sports such as rugby. Steve Almond was a keen American football fan, but, in light of recent scientific studies about the prevalence of injuries within the sport has slowly turned against the game.

Author: Mark Edmundson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 110163572X
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
Acclaimed essayist Mark Edmundson reflects on his own rite of passage as a high school football player to get to larger truths about the ways America's Game shapes its men Football teaches young men self-discipline and teamwork. But football celebrates violence. Football is a showcase for athletic beauty and physical excellence. But football damages young bodies and minds, sometimes permanently. Football inspires confidence and direction. But football instills cockiness, a false sense of superiority. The athlete is a noble figure with a proud lineage. The jock is America at its worst. When Mark Edmundson’s son began to play organized football, and proved to be very good at it, Edmundson had to come to terms with just what he thought about the game. Doing so took him back to his own childhood, when as a shy, soft boy growing up in a blue-collar Boston suburb in the sixties, he went out for the high school football team. Why Football Matters is the story of what happened to Edmundson when he tried to make himself into a football player. What does it mean to be a football player? At first Edmundson was hapless on the field. He was an inept player and a bad teammate. But over time, he got over his fears and he got tougher. He learned to be a better player and came to feel a part of the team, during games but also on all sorts of escapades, not all of them savory. By playing football, Edmundson became what he and his father hoped he’d be, a tougher, stronger young man, better prepared for life. But is football-instilled toughness always a good thing? Do the character, courage, and loyalty football instills have a dark side? Football, Edmundson found, can be full of bounties. But it can also lead you into brutality and thoughtlessness. So how do you get what’s best from the game and leave the worst behind? Why Football Matters is moving, funny, vivid, and filled with the authentic anxiety and exhilaration of youth. Edmundson doesn’t regret playing football for a minute, and cherishes the experience. His triumph is to be able to see it in full, as something to celebrate, but also something to handle with care. For anyone who has ever played on a football team, is the parent of a player, or simply is reflective about its outsized influence on America, Why Football Matters is both a mirror and a lamp.

Author: Reid Forgrave
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN: 1643752022
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
"The story of a young man from small-town Iowa who decided to take his own life rather than continue his losing battle against the traumatic brain injuries (CTE) he had sustained as a no-holds-barred high school football player, and at the same time a larger story about the hot-button issues that football raises about masculinity and violence, and about what values we want to instill in our kids"--

Author: Seth Wickersham
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 163149824X
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 457

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Book Description
NOW WITH A NEW EPILOGUE ON THE 2021 SEASON AND TOM BRADY’S BRIEF RETIREMENT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER SPORTS ILLUSTRATED • NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR National Sports Media Association • Book of the Year Kirkus Reviews • Best Nonfiction of the Year “Seth Wickersham has managed to do the impossible: he has pulled off the definitive document of the Belichick/Brady dynasty.” —Bill Simmons, The Ringer The explosive, long-awaited account of the making of the greatest dynasty in football history—from the acclaimed ESPN reporter who has been there from the very beginning. Over two unbelievable decades, the New England Patriots were not only the NFL’s most dominant team, but also—and by far—the most secretive. How did they achieve and sustain greatness—and what were the costs? In It's Better to Be Feared, Seth Wickersham, one of the country’s finest long form and investigative sportswriters, tells the full, behind-the-scenes story of the Patriots, capturing the brilliance, ambition, and vanity that powered and ultimately unraveled them. Based on hundreds of interviews conducted since 2001, Wickersham’s chronicle is packed with revelations, taking us deep into Bill Belichick’s tactical ingenuity and Tom Brady’s unique mentality while also reporting on their divergent paths in 2020, including Brady’s run to the Super Bowl with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Raucous, unvarnished, and definitive, It’s Better to Be Feared is an instant classic of American sportswriting in the tradition of Michael Lewis, David Maraniss, and David Halberstam.

Author: Rob Ruck
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781620973370
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Longlisted for the PEN/ESPN Award "Everything that's rousing and distressing about block-and-tackle football is encompassed in Tropic of Football. . . illuminating." --Newsday How a tiny Pacific archipelago is producing more players--from Troy Polamalu to Marcus Mariota--for the NFL than anywhere else in the world, by an award-winning sports historian Football is at a crossroads, its future imperiled by the very physicality that drives its popularity. Its grass roots--high school and youth travel program--are withering. But players from the small South Pacific American territory of Samoa are bucking that trend, quietly becoming the most disproportionately overrepresented culture in the sport. Jesse Sapolu, Junior Seau, Troy Polamalu, and Marcus Mariota are among the star players to emerge from the Samoan islands, and more of their brethren suit up every season. The very thing that makes them so good at football--their extraordinary internalization of discipline and warrior self-image--makes them especially vulnerable to its pitfalls, including concussions and brain injuries. Award-winning sports historian Rob Ruck travels to the South Seas to unravel American Samoa's complex ties with the United States. He finds an island blighted by obesity, where boys train on fields blistered with volcanic pebbles wearing helmets that should have been discarded long ago, incurring far more neurological damage than their stateside counterparts and haunted by Junior Seau, who committed suicide after a vaunted twenty-year NFL career, unable to live with the demons that resulted from chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Tropic of Football is a gripping, bittersweet history of what may be football's last frontier.

Author: Xiaojian Zhao
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1598842404
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1540

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Book Description
This is the most comprehensive and up-to-date reference work on Asian Americans, comprising three volumes that address a broad range of topics on various Asian and Pacific Islander American groups from 1848 to the present day. This three-volume work represents a leading reference resource for Asian American studies that gives students, researchers, librarians, teachers, and other interested readers the ability to easily locate accurate, up-to-date information about Asian ethnic groups, historical and contemporary events, important policies, and notable individuals. Written by leading scholars in their fields of expertise and authorities in diverse professions, the entries devote attention to diverse Asian and Pacific Islander American groups as well as the roles of women, distinct socioeconomic classes, Asian American political and social movements, and race relations involving Asian Americans.