Author: Al Pickett
Publisher: TX A&m-McWhiney Foundation
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
The longest field goal in the history of football was kicked in Texas. But did you know it was love that first led a Swedish soccer player to Texas, where he still lives more than thirty years after his record-setting 69-yard field goal? That story is just one of dozens of unusual and behind-the- scenes stories veteran sports writer and broadcaster Al Pickett has compiled in more than twenty years of covering sports in Texas. Did you know that a tragedy on that same day that Ove Johansson kicked his record field goal changed University of Houston coach Art Briles' life forever? Did you know the greatest high school football coach in Texas history never played high school football himself? Or a case of déjà vu helped a Texan win the Masters golf championship? After each chapter of The Greatest Texas Sports Stories You've Never Heard, sports fans in the Lone Star State are certain to say, "I didn't know that." AL PICKETT writes for Dave Campbell's Texas Football, Red Raider Sports, and Total Texas Baseball magazines, and he hosts a daily radio show in Abilene. He is also the author of Team of the Century: The Greatest High School Football Team in Texas (State House Press, 2004) and Wishbone Wisdom, Emory Bellard: Texas Football Visionary as Told to Al Pickett (State House Press, 2010).
Author: Al Pickett
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 1623495512
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 162
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Book Description
Strongly inviting comparisons with the movie Remember the Titans, this book by veteran sports journalist and author Al Pickett is an inspiring, insider account of the Lubbock Estacado Matadors, who came together for love of a sport to become Texas State AAA High School football champions in their first year of eligibility. In the late 1960s, the Lubbock Independent School District was pressured by the courts to address its still-segregated system, and its response was the new, integrated Estacado High School. Estacado’s first head football coach, Jimmie Keeling, formed and fielded a team of young men who had never played together before and who came from widely differing parts of the social spectrum. Remarkably, he forged a unit that was not only cohesive but highly competitive, rolling undefeated toward a historic championship finish. Mighty, Mighty Matadors features action-packed accounts of Estacado’s championship season, but even more, it offers heartwarming glimpses of the lifelong friendships formed by players who joined hands across racial and social divides to accomplish a goal. In the process, they helped bring pride and unity to their hometown.
Author: Willie Morris
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1617031925
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 464
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Book Description
At the time of Marcus Dupree's birth, when Deep South racism was about to crest and shatter against the Civil Rights Movement, Willie Morris journeyed north in a circular transit peculiar to southern writers. His memoir of those years, North Toward Home, became a modern classic. In The Courting of Marcus Dupree he turned again home to Mississippi to write about the small town of Philadelphia and its favorite son, a black high-school quarterback. In Marcus Dupree, Morris found a living emblem of that baroque strain in the American character called "southern." Beginning on the summer practice fields, Morris follows Marcus Dupree through each game of his senior varsity year. He talks with the Dupree family, the college recruiters, the coach and the school principal, some of the teachers and townspeople, and, of course, with the young man himself. As the season progresses and the seventeen-year-old Dupree attracts a degree of national attention to Philadelphia neither known nor endured since "the Troubles" of the early sixties, these conversations take on a wider significance. Willie Morris has created more than a spectator's journal. He writes here of his repatriation to a land and a people who have recovered something that fear and misdirected loyalties had once eclipsed. The result is a fascinating, unusual, and even topical work that tells a story richer than its apparent subject, for it brings the whole of the eighties South, with all its distinctive resonances, to life.
Author: Richard Crouse
Publisher: ECW Press
ISBN: 1554905400
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 283
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Book Description
Offbeat movie buffs, discerning video renters, and critical viewers will benefit from this roll call of the best overlooked films of the last 70 years. Richard Crouse, film critic and host of televisions award-winning Reel to Real, details his favorite films, from the sublime Monsoon Wedding to the ridiculous Eegah! The Name Written in Blood. Each movie is featured with a detailed description of plot, notable trivia tidbits, critical reviews, and interviews with actors and filmmakers. Featured interviews include Bill Wyman on a little-known Rolling Stones documentary, schlockmeister Lloyd Kaufman on the history of the Toxic Avenger, reclusive writer and director Hampton Fancher on his film The Minus Man, and B-movie hero Bruce Campbell on playing Elvis Presley in Bubba Ho-Tep. Sidebars feature quirky details, including legal disclaimers and memorable quotes.
Author: Eric Dickerson
Publisher: Haymarket Books
ISBN: 1642596663
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 193
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Book Description
His style was iconic, and vintage ‘80s: aviator goggles, Jheri curls, neck roll, boxy pads. Eric Dickerson is the greatest player in Los Angeles Rams history and the NFL’s single season record holder for most rushing yards. In 2019, Dickerson was named to the National Football League’s 100th Anniversary All-Time Team. With an elegant upright running style that produced some of football’s most-watched highlights, it was said he was so smooth you couldn’t hear his pads clack as he glided past you. But during his Hall of Fame career, his greatness was often overshadowed by his contentious disputes with Rams management about his contract. In the pre-free agency era, tensions over his exploitative contract often overshadowed his accomplishments. What’s his problem? went the familiar refrain from the media. Can’t he just shut up and run? It’s time to reexamine how Eric Dickerson was portrayed. For the first time, he’s telling his story. And he’s not holding anything back.
Author: Justin Spizman
Publisher: WW Norton
ISBN: 0789260948
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 386
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Book Description
Every great sports coach is a life coach. This book identifies 168 outstanding coaches who have much to teach us about optimizing our performance, our character, and our lives. Coaches build winning teams and enable each athlete they mentor, guide, cajole, and nurture to achieve top performance. More than this, every great sports coach is first and last a life coach. Sportswriter Justin Spizman identifies and profiles 168 of the greatest coaches and managers of all time. They have much to teach us about optimizing our performance, our character, and our lives. Coach: The Greatest Teachers in Sports and Their Lessons for Us All profiles coaches in every significant sport, from football, basketball, baseball, and hockey to gymnastics, skating, rowing, rugby, soccer, and more. From field to court, diamond, rink, and pitch, the big leagues to the Olympics, college, and high school, Coach delivers the most teachable moments and methods—for play, for competition, and for life. Rich in quotations, each profile ends with lessons for top performance on and off the field, in and beyond the arena. Justin Spizman tracks all the relevant stats—for every sport keeps score—but he seeks first and last to disclose the mind, the heart, and the force of character that drive each of the indispensable men and women behind the world’s most envied and admired athletes. His profiles range from the likes of Cardinals manager Tony La Russa (already an MLB legend), to Aimee Boorman and Cecile Canqueteau-Landi (who both coached gymnastics phenom Simone Biles), Bill Belichick (the take-no-prisoners field general of the New England Patriots), Pat Summitt (who racked up 1,098 wins as coach of the University of Tennessee Lady Vols basketball team from 1974 to 2012), Marián Vajda (the coach behind tennis titan Novak Djokovic), and David Leadbetter (golf guru to champions Kathy Baker, Nick Faldo, and Michelle Wie).
Author: Randy Pausch
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780340978504
Category : Cancer
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
The author, a computer science professor diagnosed with terminal cancer, explores his life, the lessons that he has learned, how he has worked to achieve his childhood dreams, and the effect of his diagnosis on him and his family.
Author: Lora-Marie Bernard
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 1467142573
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 160
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Book Description
"The legend of the Yellow Rose of Texas holds an indisputable place in Lone Star culture, tethered to a familiar song that has served as a Civil War marching tune, a pop chart staple and a halftime anthem. Almost two centuries of Texas mythmaking successfully muddled fact with fable in song. The true story of Emily D. West remains mired in dispute and unrecognizable beneath the manipulative tales that grew up around it. The complete truth may never be recovered, but author Lora-Marie Bernard seeks an honest account honoring the grit and determination that brought a free black woman from the abolitionist riots of Connecticut to the thick of a bloody Texas revolution. A Lone Star native who grew up immersed in the Yellow Rose legend, Bernard also traces other stories that legend has obscured, including the connection between Emily D. West and plans for a free black colony in Texas."--Back cover.
Author: David Courtney
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477312978
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 120
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Book Description
A collection of Courtney's columns from the Texas Monthly, curing the curious, exorcizing bedevilment, and orienting the disoriented, advising "on such things as: Is it wrong to wear your football team's jersey to church? When out at a dancehall, do you need to stick with the one that brung ya? Is it real Tex-Mex if it's served with a side of black beans? Can one have too many Texas-themed tattoos?"--Amazon.com.
Author: Michael Hurd
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477314857
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 338
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Book Description
The history of black high school football in segregated Texas: “Though this book is long overdue, it is also right on time.” —Texas Observer At a time when “Friday night lights” shone only on white high school football games, African American teams across Texas burned up the gridiron on Wednesday and Thursday nights. Temple Dunbar, Austin Anderson, and other segregated high schools in the Prairie View Interscholastic League—the African American counterpart of the University Interscholastic League, which excluded black schools from membership until 1967—created an exciting brand of football that produced hundreds of outstanding players, many of whom became college All-Americans, All-Pros, and Pro Football Hall of Famers, including NFL greats such as “Mean” Joe Green, Otis Taylor, Dick “Night Train” Lane, Ken Houston, and Bubba Smith. Thursday Night Lights tells the inspiring, largely unknown story of African American high school football in Texas. Drawing on interviews, newspaper stories, and memorabilia, Michael Hurd introduces the players, coaches, schools, and towns where African Americans built powerhouse football programs under the PVIL leadership. He covers fifty years of history, including championship seasons and legendary rivalries such as the annual Turkey Day Classic game between Houston schools Jack Yates and Phillis Wheatley, which drew standing-room-only crowds of up to 40,000. In telling this story, Hurd explains why the PVIL was necessary, traces its development, and shows how football offered a potent source of pride and ambition in the black community, helping black kids succeed both athletically and educationally in a racist society. “[A] groundbreaking book.” —Houston Chronicle “In America’s current Colin Kaepernick-inspired moment, with sports once again taking on a conspicuous role in debates about black citizenship and the persistence of white racism, this book is especially timely and important.” —Great Plains Quarterly
