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America's Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation - Hardcover

MacCambridge, Michael

 
9780375504549: America's Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0375504540 ISBN 13: 9780375504549
Verlag: Random House Inc, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

Traces the transformation of professional football from a struggling, third-class sport into a sports and mass-entertainment giant over the past sixty years.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Michael MacCambridge is the author of <i>The Franchise: A History of Sports Illustrated Magazine</i>, and the editor of the bestselling <i>ESPN SportsCentury</i>. He worked for eight years as a columnist and critic at the <i>Austin American-Statesman</i>, writing about movies, music, and popular culture. He lives with his wife, Danica Frost, and their children, Miles and Ella, in University City, Missouri.

Aus dem Klappentext

It’s difficult to imagine today–when the Super Bowl has virtually become a national holiday and the National Football League is the country’s dominant sports entity–but pro football was once a ramshackle afterthought on the margins of the American sports landscape. Yet in the span of a single generation in postwar America, the game charted an extraordinary rise in popularity, becoming a smartly managed, keenly marketed sports entertainment colossus whose action is ideally suited to television and whose sensibilities perfectly fit the modern age. Pro football’s ascent is an epic American story, and <i>America’s Game</i> does it full justice.<br>Beginning with the World War II years, when the NFL was fighting for its very existence, Michael MacCambridge traces the game’s grand transformation, with particular attention paid to six key franchises–the Rams, Browns, Colts, Cowboys, Chiefs, and Raiders–and how their fortunes reflected the larger growth of the game itself. Along the way we meet the sport’s legendary architects, men such as Pete Rozelle, George “Papa Bear” Halas, Bert Bell, Tex Schramm, and Lamar Hunt, as well as a wide range of its memorable characters–including Johnny Unitas, Paul Brown, Vince Lombardi, Jim Brown, Al Davis, Joe Namath, Bill Walsh, and Deion Sanders. In the process we witness the rivalries, the games themselves, and the passion that have made professional football the nation’s signature sport.<br>FLAP COPY (cont’d)AMERICA’S GAMEFALL 2004 (HC) <br><br>MacCambridge continues the story through the turbulent 1980s and 1990s, when labor disputes and off-field scandals shook the game to its core, and up to the sport’s present-day preeminence under Paul Tagliabue. The unique portrait of the modern game’s inner workings and relentless competitiveness sheds light on contemporary stars such as Ray Lewis and Peyton Manning, as well as on the men whose leadership skills are scrutinized and second-guessed by much of the country, celebrated coaches such as Bill Parcells, Dick Vermeil, Tony Dungy, and Brian Billick.<br>Magisterial and sweeping, definitive and unprecedented in scope, <i>America’s Game</i> is cultural history at its finest. A thoroughly entertaining account of the entire universe of professional football, from locker room to boardroom, from playing field to press box, it is a unique lens through which to view the past sixty years of American history.

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Chapter 1


Going West

Bundled in a heavy winter coat and sporting a beaverskin hat, Daniel Farrell Reeves dug his hands into his pockets and marched from the gate bordering the stands out onto the field in the cavernous Cleveland Stadium. In a matter of hours, his Cleveland Rams would take the field to play the Washington Redskins for the championship of the National Football League. But as he surveyed the field in the numbing chill of this overcast morning two days before Christmas, Reeves could see nothing on the gridiron but thousands of bales of straw, and a small army of men laboring to move them. This was pro football in 1945.

Compact and slender, no more than 5-foot-8 and 140 pounds, Reeves was

a man of reserved nature but wry wit. In four seasons, he had grown accustomed to the perennial financial losses—“Irish dividends,” as he called them—common to owning a pro football team. But the 1945 season had been uniquely rewarding and frustrating. Reeves had returned home just two months earlier, after a three-year tour of duty with the Army Air Corps, to what would become a season-long victory celebration. America’s triumph in World War II had been officially consecrated during August two-a-days, and the long lines that greeted the end of gas rationing dissipated by the season-opening win over the Chicago Cardinals. Just one season after the 1944 squad lost six of its last seven games, the Rams had rebounded to become the surprise of the NFL, and win their first Western Conference title. In early December, rookie quarterback Bob Waterfield, soon to be named the league’s Most Valuable Player, was profiled in Life magazine. And though the article spent less time on Waterfield than his wife—Hollywood bombshell Jane Russell, star of Howard Hughes’s “sex western” The Outlaw, which censors still hadn’t allowed to be screened in the U.S.—the mere thought that a player for the Cleveland Rams would merit space in Life seemed to Reeves a miracle in itself.

After the Washington Redskins beat the New York Giants in the regular season finale, Reeves’s dream match-up was set. For the title game, the Redskins would make their first trip to Cleveland in eight seasons, bringing along their famed 110-piece marching band to perform a special Christmas-themed halftime show. Interest was high for the match-up between the rookie Waterfield and perennial All-Pro Slingin’ Sammy Baugh. And so Reeves had bravely decided to move the championship game from the Rams’ regular stadium, the deteriorating League Park, with its cramped capacity of 30,000, to Cleveland Stadium, which seated 80,000.

Six days before the game, the National Weather Service had forecast a major winter storm hitting the Cleveland area in midweek, so the Rams had spent the early part of the week searching for enough bales of straw to cover the tarpaulin, to prevent the field from freezing. It was general manager Charles “Chile” Walsh who finally located 9,000 bales of straw from around Elyria, and had it delivered to the stadium at a cost of $7,200. In the days leading up to the game, eighteen inches of snow fell on Cleveland, leaving the stadium resembling an arctic snowscape, with drifts piled several feet high in the aisles.

On Sunday morning, the Rams lined up 275 workers, many of them off-duty city employees, to remove the bales. While the Rams were responsible for the field, the city of Cleveland was responsible for the stadium and the parking lots, which were left unshoveled. Despite the weather and conditions, the Associated Press projected the game would draw 50,000, and the New York Times wrote that “a crowd of better than 40,000 is almost certain with a capacity audience of 77,569 possible in case the forecasters are wrong.”

But when the lights were turned on at Cleveland Stadium at 6:30 the morning of the game, the temperature was eight degrees below zero. Marching in mucklucks from the Clevelander Hotel a little before eight, Reeves balefully noted the unpassable streets. There was no parking in the two blocks closest to the stadium, since that area was overrun with snow. And taxi service wasn’t running to the stadium, another skirmish in the war between the Rams and Arthur McBride, owner of the Zone/Yellow Cab Co. and the new Cleveland entry in the All-America Football Conference, which would begin competition in Cleveland the following fall.

By 10:30 that morning most of the 9,000 bales had been cleared off the field. But the trucks that were to transport them away had trouble gaining purchase on the still clogged city streets, leaving the workers no choice but to place the straw against the walls surrounding the playing field. Behind the benches, just in back of the end zones, and stacked more than ten bales high at the walls, the sea of straw was parted so the game could be played.

Cleveland Stadium had rarely looked so empty as on this day, when only 32,178 turned out. When former Rams business manager Manny Eisner and his wife walked into the stadium about an hour before kickoff, there were already people filing out, succumbing to the cold. In the stadium ticket office, Lou Isaacson was more prepared than most. Dressed in three pairs of socks, knee-high brogan work shoes, two pairs of pants, two sweaters, and two coats, he sat in the unheated box office for four and a half hours, and sold two tickets.

In financial terms, Reeves had already resigned himself to the realization that his share of the gate wouldn’t even pay for the cost of buying, transporting, and removing the bales of straw. But as the kickoff neared, none of that mattered. Up in the press box, Reeves was nervous and amiable, greeting writers and VIPs, accepting congratulations for signing Waterfield to a three-year contract the day before. “The stars are making so much money now, I call them ‘Mister’ and they just call me ‘Reeves,’ ” he said. When the game began, the joking ended, and Dan Reeves suffered in silence, as he’d done every game day since 1941, when he’d bought the team. He paced nervously, far removed from his wife, Mary, the rest of his family, and his closest friends. It was not a time to be jovial or even social. It was time for football.



Down on the field, the game sounded different, victim to the noiseless vacuum of severe cold. There was little kibitzing between the teams, and almost none of the concussive, amplified smack that so often accompanied the heavy hitting of professional football. The quality of play was still sharp, but on a day when the temperature was zero degrees at kickoff, the players felt the pain more than heard it, each tackle accompanied by heavy breathing and dull, muffled thuds. The crowd sounded different as well, its applause muted by layers of gloves, the cheers rising curt and thin in the icy air.

Even in the ’40s, people argued about whether the pressure of football built character or revealed it. But Reeves had long ago learned how capricious the game could be, how random its deciding factors. On this frigid Sunday, he watched Sammy Baugh’s pass from the Redskins’ end zone hit the goalpost and fall back into the end zone, for what was then an automatic safety. After Waterfield threw the first of two long touchdown passes for the Rams, his extra point attempt was partially blocked, with the ball careening toward the crossbar, hitting it, and dribbling weakly over. Baugh’s freak safety and Waterfield’s wounded conversion had been the difference in the 15–14 edge the Rams nursed into the fourth quarter.

By that time, the windows of the Cleveland Stadium press...

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Verlag
Random House Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
2004
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0375504540
ISBN 13 
9780375504549
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
552
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Harder
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