The United States Football League, 1982-1986

The United States Football League, 1982-1986 PDF Author: Paul Reeths
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476627738
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
One of the most ambitious (and short-lived) endeavors in professional sports history, the United States Football League was founded in 1982. Premiering with a spring schedule and an abundance of talent that included top rookies and National Football League veterans, the USFL gained national attention with broadcast and cable television contracts, controversial player signings, ownership battles and an unsuccessful billion-dollar lawsuit against the NFL. The USFL folded after four years yet represented the last major challenge to America's big four sports leagues--the NFL, the National Basketball Association, the National Hockey League and Major League Baseball. Based upon extensive research and interviews with owners, coaches, players and administrators, this book chronicles the league's formation, its three seasons of play and its long-term effects on pro sports.

The United States Football League, 1982-1986

The United States Football League, 1982-1986 PDF Author: Paul Reeths
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476627738
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
One of the most ambitious (and short-lived) endeavors in professional sports history, the United States Football League was founded in 1982. Premiering with a spring schedule and an abundance of talent that included top rookies and National Football League veterans, the USFL gained national attention with broadcast and cable television contracts, controversial player signings, ownership battles and an unsuccessful billion-dollar lawsuit against the NFL. The USFL folded after four years yet represented the last major challenge to America's big four sports leagues--the NFL, the National Basketball Association, the National Hockey League and Major League Baseball. Based upon extensive research and interviews with owners, coaches, players and administrators, this book chronicles the league's formation, its three seasons of play and its long-term effects on pro sports.

The United States Football League, 1982-1986

The United States Football League, 1982-1986 PDF Author: Paul Reeths
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476667446
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
One of the most ambitious (and short-lived) endeavors in professional sports history, the United States Football League was founded in 1982. Premiering with a spring schedule and an abundance of talent that included top rookies and National Football League veterans, the USFL gained national attention with broadcast and cable television contracts, controversial player signings, ownership battles and an unsuccessful billion-dollar lawsuit against the NFL. The USFL folded after four years yet represented the last major challenge to America's big four sports leagues--the NFL, the National Basketball Association, the National Hockey League and Major League Baseball. Based upon extensive research and interviews with owners, coaches, players and administrators, this book chronicles the league's formation, its three seasons of play and its long-term effects on pro sports.

Football for a Buck

Football for a Buck PDF Author: Jeff Pearlman
Publisher: Mariner Books
ISBN: 0544454383
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 397

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Book Description
From a multiple New York Times bestselling author, the rollicking, outrageous, you-can't-make-this-up story of the USFL The United States Football League--known fondly to millions of sports fans as the USFL--was the last football league to not merely challenge the NFL, but cause its owners and executives to collectively shudder. It spanned three seasons, 1983-85. It secured multiple television deals. It drew millions of fans and launched the careers of legends. But then it died beneath the weight of a particularly egotistical and bombastic owner--a New York businessman named Donald J. Trump. The league featured as many as 18 teams, and included such superstars as Steve Young, Jim Kelly, Herschel Walker, Reggie White, Doug Flutie and Mike Rozier. In Football for a Buck, the dogged reporter and biographer Jeff Pearlman draws on more than four hundred interviews to unearth all the salty, untold stories of one of the craziest sports entities to have ever captivated America. From 1980s drug excess to airplane brawls and player-coach punch outs, to backroom business deals, to some of the most enthralling and revolutionary football ever seen, Pearlman transports readers back in time to this crazy, boozy, audacious, unforgettable era of the game. He shows how fortunes were made and lost on the backs of professional athletes and also how, thirty years ago, Trump was a scoundrel and a spoiler. For fans of Terry Pluto's Loose Balls or Jim Bouton's Ball Four and of course Pearlman's own stranger-than-fiction narratives, Football for a Buck is sports as high entertainment--and a cautionary tale of the dangers of ego and excess.

Tackling Jim Crow

Tackling Jim Crow PDF Author: Alan H. Levy
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 9780786483853
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
Many are familiar with Jackie Robinson and the integration of Major League Baseball after all the years of separate black and white leagues, but fewer people know of the segregation and then integration of the National Football League. The timing and sequence of events were different, but football followed a pattern similar to that of baseball in regard to the beginning and end of racial segregation. This work traces professional football's movement from segregation to integration, beginning with a discussion of the various reasons why the game was first segregated. It describes the schemes that NFL owners came up with to ban African Americans from the league in the 1930s and 1940s, and tells how these barriers broke down after World War II. The author considers how professional football overcame the legacies of Jim Crow and how Jim Crow laws may still haunt the game.

The $1 League

The $1 League PDF Author: Jim Byrne
Publisher: Prentice Hall
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description


Fallen Generals

Fallen Generals PDF Author: Curtis Walker
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781539728320
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
In 1983, America began a brief flirtation with spring football as the United States Football League made its debut. With the signing of Heisman winner Herschel Walker, the New Jersey Generals were instantly thrust into national prominence. One year later, the team's profile would continue to grow after real estate magnate Donald Trump purchased the Generals, and over the next two years, he would spare no expense to bring in more star-quality talent. Easily his biggest coup was the signing of Boston College's Doug Flutie, college football's most prolific passer, giving the Generals their second Heisman winner in three years. Relive this unique era of professional football from its inception to its unnecessary downfall with this detailed week-by-week history of the USFL's marquee franchise. Included are Generals and league news, statistics, lineups and play-by-play.

World Football League Encyclopedia

World Football League Encyclopedia PDF Author: Tod Maher
Publisher: Saint Johann Press
ISBN: 9781878282408
Category : Football
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


The Life and Teams of Johnny F. Bassett

The Life and Teams of Johnny F. Bassett PDF Author: Denis M. Crawford
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476684324
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
One of the most influential sportsmen of the late 20th century, Johnny F. Bassett's marketing wizardry belied his impact on professional hockey and football. A Canadian showman with a Barnumesque flair for spectacle, Bassett challenged the orthodoxy of sports, building sporting utopias in the fatally flawed World Football League, World Hockey Association, and United States Football League. He catered to the common fan, demanded fair treatment of athletes, and forced the sporting establishment to change the way it did business, often to his own detriment. Drawing on archival research and interviews with Bassett's contemporaries, this comprehensive biography chronicles his life in and around professional sports: his quixotic attempt to compete with the Maple Leafs; his stunning coup in signing three members of the reigning Super Bowl champions for his WFL team; his battles with the Canadian government over American football; his audacious marketing of hockey in Alabama; and his rivalry with Donald Trump for the soul of the USFL.

George Allen

George Allen PDF Author: Michael Richman
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496238168
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 539

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Book Description
George Allen was a fascinating and eccentric figure in the world of football coaching. His remarkable career spanned six decades, from the late 1940s until his sudden death in 1990 at the age of seventy-three. Although he never won a Super Bowl, he never had a losing season as an NFL head coach and was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2002. In George Allen: A Football Life, Mike Richman captures the life and accomplishments of one of the most successful NFL coaches of all time and one of the greatest innovators in the game. A player's coach, Allen was a tremendous motivator and game strategist, as well as a defensive mastermind, and is credited with making special teams a critical focus in an era in which they were an afterthought. He had a keen eye for talent and pulled off masterful trades, often for veteran players who were viewed to be past their prime, who then had great seasons and made his teams much better. In addition to his coaching feats, Allen had an idiosyncratic and controversial personality. His life revolved around football 24-7. One of his quirks was to minimize chewing time by consuming soft foods, giving himself more time to prepare for games and study opponents. He lived and breathed football; he compared losing to death. Allen had contentious relationships with the owners of the two NFL teams for which he was the head coach, the Washington Redskins and Los Angeles Rams. Richman explores why he was fired by those teams and whether he was blackballed from coaching again in the NFL. Based on detailed research and interviews with family, former players, and coaches, George Allen is the definitive biography of the football coach who lived to win, loved a good challenge, and left a lasting legacy on pro football history.

Fourth and Long

Fourth and Long PDF Author: John U. Bacon
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476706441
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
From New York Times bestselling author and Michigan football expert John Back, an analysis of the state of college football: Why we love the game, what is at risk, and the fight to save it. In search of the sport’s old ideals amid the roaring flood of hypocrisy and greed, bestselling author John U. Bacon embedded himself in four college football programs—Penn State, Ohio State, Michigan, and Northwestern—and captured the oldest, biggest, most storied league, the Big Ten, at its tipping point. He sat in as coaches dissected game film, he ate dinner at training tables, and he listened in locker rooms. He talked with tailgating fans and college presidents, and he spent months in the company of the gifted young athletes who play the game. Fourth and Long reveals intimate scenes behind closed doors, from a team’s angry face-off with their athletic director to a defensive lineman acing his master’s exams in theoretical math. It captures the private moment when coach Urban Meyer earned the devotion of Ohio State’s Buckeyes on their way to a perfect season. It shows Michigan’s athletic department endangering the very traditions that distinguish the college game from all others. And it re-creates the euphoria of the Northwestern Wildcats winning their first bowl game in decades. Most unforgettably, Fourth and Long finds what the national media missed in the ugly aftermath of Penn State’s tragic scandal: the unheralded story of players who joined forces with Coach Bill O’Brien to save the university’s treasured program—and with it, a piece of the game’s soul. This is the work of a writer in love with an old game—a game he sees at the precipice. Bacon’s deep knowledge of sports history and his sensitivity to the tribal subcultures of the college game power this elegy to a beloved and endangered American institution.