Namath: A Biography

Namath: A Biography PDF Author: Mark Kriegel
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780143035350
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 548

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Book Description
In between Babe Ruth and Michael Jordan there was Joe Namath, one of the few sports heroes to transcend the game he played. Novelist and former sports-columnist Mark Kriegel’s bestselling biography of the iconic quarterback details his journey from steel-town pool halls to the upper reaches of American celebrity—and beyond. The first of his kind, Namath enabled a nation to see sports as show biz. For an entire generation he became a spectacle of booze and broads, a guy who made bachelorhood seem an almost sacred calling, but it was his audacious “guarantee” of victory in Super Bowl III that ensured his legend. This unforgettable portrait brings readers from the gridiron to the go-go nightclubs as Kriegel uncovers the truth behind Broadway Joe and why his legend has meant so much to so many.

Namath: A Biography

Namath: A Biography PDF Author: Mark Kriegel
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780143035350
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 548

Get Book Here

Book Description
In between Babe Ruth and Michael Jordan there was Joe Namath, one of the few sports heroes to transcend the game he played. Novelist and former sports-columnist Mark Kriegel’s bestselling biography of the iconic quarterback details his journey from steel-town pool halls to the upper reaches of American celebrity—and beyond. The first of his kind, Namath enabled a nation to see sports as show biz. For an entire generation he became a spectacle of booze and broads, a guy who made bachelorhood seem an almost sacred calling, but it was his audacious “guarantee” of victory in Super Bowl III that ensured his legend. This unforgettable portrait brings readers from the gridiron to the go-go nightclubs as Kriegel uncovers the truth behind Broadway Joe and why his legend has meant so much to so many.

Rising Tide

Rising Tide PDF Author: Randy Roberts
Publisher: Twelve
ISBN: 1455526347
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
The extraordinary story of how Coach Paul "Bear" Bryant and Joe Namath, his star quarterback at the University of Alabama, led the Crimson Tide to victory and transformed football into a truly national pastime. During the bloodiest years of the civil rights movement, Bear Bryant and Joe Namath-two of the most iconic and controversial figures in American sports-changed the game of college football forever. Brilliantly and urgently drawn, this is the gripping account of how these two very different men-Bryant a legendary coach in the South who was facing a pair of ethics scandals that threatened his career, and Namath a cocky Northerner from a steel mill town in Pennsylvania-led the Crimson Tide to a national championship. To Bryant and Namath, the game was everything. But no one could ignore the changes sweeping the nation between 1961 and 1965-from the Freedom Rides to the integration of colleges across the South and the assassination of President Kennedy. Against this explosive backdrop, Bryant and Namath changed the meaning of football. Their final contest together, the 1965 Orange Bowl, was the first football game broadcast nationally, in color, during prime time, signaling a new era for the sport and the nation. Award-winning biographer Randy Roberts and sports historian Ed Krzemienski showcase the moment when two thoroughly American traditions-football and Dixie-collided. A compelling story of race and politics, honor and the will to win, Rising Tide captures a singular time in America. More than a history of college football, this is the story of the struggle and triumph of a nation in transition and the legacy of two of the greatest heroes the sport has ever seen.

You Can't Catch Sunshine

You Can't Catch Sunshine PDF Author: Don Maynard
Publisher: Triumph Books (IL)
ISBN: 9781600783753
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
You Can Catch Sunshine is the astonishing true story of Jets wide receiver Don Maynard, a laid-back speedster from a dusty corner of Texas whose unlikely friendship with a brash, young quarterback named Joe Namath resulted in the most unlikely upset in football history: Super Bowl III. A cotton ginner's son whose gentle and understated demeanor made him one of the most unlikely rebels of the 1960s. Maynard was a ninth-round draft choice from a tiny mining school in El Paso, Texas, whose rookie status made him a most unlikely candidate to be the first player to touch the ball in the 1958 Championship game between the Colts and Giants.

Pistol

Pistol PDF Author: Mark Kriegel
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743284984
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 439

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Book Description
Basketball.

The Good Son

The Good Son PDF Author: Mark Kriegel
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743286367
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
A biography of boxing champ Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini who is considered the "real" Rocky.

Montana

Montana PDF Author: Keith Dunnavant
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1250017866
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
Rich in anecdotal detail, insight and context, Montana is a powerful story about a man who was defined by his intense competitiveness, and how this intangibly helped him become one of the ionic figures in football history. As long as football is played, Joe Montana will be synonymous with the heart-pounding rally. Seemingly impervious to the pressure of a scoreboard deficit, the quarterback known as Joe Cool brought a steadying calm to every huddle, especially when the situation seemed especially dire. His reputation for miracles began to take root at the University of Notre Dame. In the 1979 Cotton Bowl, he overcame the flu, hypothermia and a 22-point deficit to lead the Fighting Irish to a stunning victory over Houston. This narrative continued in the NFL, as he engineered 31 fourth-quarter comebacks, including victories known in professional football lore as The Catch and The Drive, forever casting his career in a heroic glow. While leading the San Francisco 49ers to four Super Bowl championships over a nine-year period, establishing a new standard for passing efficiency, and twice earning the league's Most Valuable Player award, Montana became the signature quarterback of the 1980s and one of the greatest ever to play the game. Overcoming his own limitations, which caused him to be underrated coming out of Notre Dame, he quickly mastered Bill Walsh's West Coast Offense, and thereby, helped reinvent offensive football. But it was rarely easy. Like the rallies he so often produced, his life was filled with the sort of tension that made his journey seem routinely dramatic: The father who pushed him. The high school coach who challenged his commitment. The college coach who very nearly squandered him. The back surgery that almost ended his career. The younger athlete who tried to take his job. In Montana, acclaimed author Keith Dunnavant sketches the definitive portrait of a man who repeatedly defied the odds, on and off the field.

The Last Coach: A Life of Paul "Bear" Bryant

The Last Coach: A Life of Paul Author: Allen Barra
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393254577
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 745

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Book Description
The explosive biography of the greatest college football coach in history. When Paul William "Bear" Bryant died on January 26, 1983, it was the lead story on the all three networks' evening news. New York City newspapers reported his death on their front pages. Three days later, America watched in awe as an estimated quarter of a million mourners lined the fifty-five mile stretch from Tuscaloosa to a Birmingham cemetery to pay their respects as his three-mile long funeral cortege drove by. Bryant's passing was noted with the kind of reverence our country reserved for statesmen or military leaders, though Paul "Bear" Bryant had insisted for much of his life that he was "just a football coach." For millions he was much more, he was the greatest coach the game ever saw, the heir to the tradition established by Knute Rockne. He took his Alabama Crimson Tide teams to an unmatched six national championships. But to the players, journalists and fans whose lives he touched in his more than half a century as a player and coach, he was the last symbol of values that transcended football—courage, discipline, loyalty, and hard work. To his critics, Bryant represented the dark side of big-time college football—brutality, fanaticism and blind adherence to authority. The real Bear Bryant was far more complex than either his admirers or detractors knew. While maintaining a public friendship with Alabama governor George Wallace, he continually sought ways to undermine the governor's segregationist policies, finally forcing a legendary football game in Birmingham with the University of Southern California that opened the floodgates to the integration of football at the University of Alabama, including its coaching staff. Old fashioned in his politics, he was nonetheless an admirer of Robert Kennedy, whom he planning to vote for in 1968. Allen Barra's The Last Coach traces Paul Bryant's rise from a family of truck farmers to recognition as the most successful and influential coach in the game's history. Through it all, Bryant's influence has not only endured but prevailed as his former players and assistants continue to define the best in not only college but professional football. A USA Today and Washington Post Best Sports Book.

Janis

Janis PDF Author: Holly George-Warren
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476793123
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
Longlisted for the 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence This blazingly intimate biography of Janis Joplin establishes the Queen of Rock & Roll as the rule-breaking musical trailblazer and complicated, gender-bending rebel she was. Janis Joplin’s first transgressive act was to be a white girl who gained an early sense of the power of the blues, music you could only find on obscure records and in roadhouses along the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast. But even before that, she stood out in her conservative oil town. She was a tomboy who was also intellectually curious and artistic. By the time she reached high school, she had drawn the scorn of her peers for her embrace of the Beats and her racially progressive views. Her parents doted on her in many ways, but were ultimately put off by her repeated acts of defiance. Janis Joplin has passed into legend as a brash, impassioned soul doomed by the pain that produced one of the most extraordinary voices in rock history. But in these pages, Holly George-Warren provides a revelatory and deeply satisfying portrait of a woman who wasn’t all about suffering. Janis was a perfectionist: a passionate, erudite musician who was born with talent but also worked exceptionally hard to develop it. She was a woman who pushed the boundaries of gender and sexuality long before it was socially acceptable. She was a sensitive seeker who wanted to marry and settle down—but couldn’t, or wouldn’t. She was a Texan who yearned to flee Texas but could never quite get away—even after becoming a countercultural icon in San Francisco. Written by one of the most highly regarded chroniclers of American music history, and based on unprecedented access to Janis Joplin’s family, friends, band mates, archives, and long-lost interviews, Janis is a complex, rewarding portrait of a remarkable artist finally getting her due.

SportsWorld

SportsWorld PDF Author: Robert Lipsyte
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813593212
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 405

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Book Description
Tough and witty, SportsWorld is a well-known commentator’s overview of the most significant form of mass culture in America—sports. It’s a sweaty Oz that has grown in a century from a crucible for character to a complex of capitalism, a place where young people can find both self-fulfillment and cruel exploitation, where families can huddle in a sanctuary of entertainment and be force fed values and where cities and countries can be pillaged by greedy team owners and their paid-for politicians. But this book is not just a screed, it’s a guided visit with such heroes of sports as Muhammad Ali, Billie Jean King, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Joe Namath, who the author knew well, and with some he met in passing, like Richard Nixon, who seemed never to have gotten over missing the cut in college varsity football, a major mark of manhood. We see how SportsWorld sensibilities help elect our politicians, judge our children, fight our wars, and oppress our minorities. And now featuring a new introduction by the author,SportsWorld is a book that will provide the foundation for understanding today’s world of sports and the time of Trump. In the America of 2017—where the SuperBowl is worth billions, athletes are penalized or forced out of sports for political and anti-racist activism, and Title IX is constantly questioned and undermined—Robert Lipsyte’s 1975 critique remains startlingly and intensely relevant.

Smashmouth

Smashmouth PDF Author: Elvin Bethea
Publisher: Sports Publishing LLC
ISBN: 158261881X
Category : Football players
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Smash-mouth football was just another day at the office during the heyday of professional football in the 1960s and 1970s. Elvin Bethea began his pro career with the Houston Oilers of the AFL in 1968 when the upstart league was filled with colorful characters and brilliantly gifted players who had finally proven they were good enough to compete with the NFL. After the AFL merged with the NFL in 1970, one of the most exciting decades in pro football history was underway. Smash-Mouth the story of Bethea's journey from a life of rural poverty in Trenton, New Jersey, to his All-American college football career at North Carolina A&T, where segregation still ruled the South. Smash-Mouth takes Bethea from potential Olympic track stardom in 1968 to his legendary pro football career where he earned his reputation as one of the most feared and dangerous defensive linemen in NFL history. From classic playoff battles with the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1978 and 1979 to off-the-field exploits with some of football's most eccentric characters, Smash-Mouth culminates in Bethea's greatest ultimate honor--his long overdue induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2003. Along the way, Bethea's story is filled with candid assessments of the talents and personalities of some of the greatest names in 1970s football--Terry Bradshaw, Joe Namath, O.J. Simpson, Archie Manning, Earl Campbell, Dan Fouts, Franco Harris, Bum Phillips, Dan Pastorini, Billy White Shoes Johnson, Chuck Noll, Hank Stram, Art Shell, Anthony Munoz, Kenny Houston, John Mackey, and many, many more.