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Reading football

Name: Reading football
Author: Michael Oriard
ISBN: 9780807820834

by Michael Oriard

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Overview

Is football an athletic contest or a social event? Is it a game of skill, a test of manhood, or merely an organized brawl? Michael Oriard asks these and other intriguing questions in Reading Football, the first contemporary book-length study of football's formative years. American football began in 1870s as a game to be played, not watched. Within a brief ten years, it had become a great public spectacle with an immense following. Not coincidentally, Oriard argues, football's formative years were also the golden age of print, an era when newspapers and periodicals reached a larger and more varied audience than ever before. These publications carried vast amounts of commentary about football conducted by journalists, coaches, ministers, college presidents and faculty, and various others. The daily newspaper in particular, Oriard argues, virtually created football as a popular spectacle. Oriard shows how this constant narrative developed many different stories about what the game meant: football as pastime, as the sport of gentlemen, as a science, as a game of rules and their infringements, as Darwinian struggle. He shows how football, in its early years, became a series of cultural stories about power, luck, strategy, and deception. These narratives, or interpretations, Oriard contends, often contradicted one another: they were read differently by different groups and individuals, and the various interpretations of the game changed through time. One question played out in the early years of football was this: Is football a game of brutality or a game that calls on the "manly" virtues of self-discipline, patience, bravery, and teamwork? Walter Camp, the Yale coach who is known as the father of American football, wanted it to be seen as a game of discipline, obedience, pluck, and tactical genius - a mirror of corporate America. But the public cared more for "individual brilliancy," and football was increasingly described in print as brutal and barbarous as the gam

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

A former player in the National Football League and now a professor of English at Oregon State, Oriard advances the thesis that football is a cultural text, complete with metaphoric content and social context, read differently by people whose interpretations vary over time. He considers the formative years of the sport from the 1870s to the early years of this century, arguing that a reading of the popular press of that era helps us understand how actual audiences ``read'' the sport, based on the narrative structure established first by Walter Camp, who at the turn of the century was the Yale football team's ``unofficial, unpaid, unquestioned chief mentor and arbiter,'' and subsequently expanded by other interpreters. An added attraction of this book is the three dozen-plus excellent illustrations, most from magazines like Frank Leslie's Illustrated Weekly . Because it is about football as a cultural and even a literary phenomenon, this study is unlikely to appeal to a general sports audience. (Sept.)

Library Journal

The hype surrounding modern football is not new. The sport and popular newspapers and magazines grew up together in the late 19th century. Football, with its play-by-play format, was seemingly made for journalism. In this account by a former player, the game's early era (1876-1914) is reconstructed with original narratives and illustrations from the popular press. Oriard shows football's early evolution as a sport, pastime, science, and ``definition of male identity.'' His is a scholarly book on a topic often ignored by the scholarly press. It can be recommended for libraries with collections in sports history and popular culture.-- Donald W. Maxwell, Stone Hills Lib. Network, Bloomington, Ind.

Booknews

Oriard (English, Oregon State U.) played professional football for the Kansas City Chiefs from 1970 to 1973. His study traces football from its beginnings in the 1870s as a game to be played, not watched, and its evolution within a brief ten years into a public spectacle. He shows as significant that the same decade also saw a substantially increased audience for newspapers and periodicals; and he details some of the heated issues played out in the media concerning football--its "manly" virtues and its violence. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)