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In 2015, when Ohio State took on the University of Oregon in the first College Football Playoff championship game, millions of sports fans tuned in. But back in 1869, when Rutgers University and Princeton University played the first-ever college football game, no one predicted the national spectacle that a college football championship game would become. Author Matt Doeden takes readers on a journey from the disorganized games of the early years to...
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"A captivating chronicle of the pivotal decade in American sports, when the games invaded prime time, and sports moved from the margins to the mainstream of American culture. Every decade brings change, but as Michael MacCambridge chronicles in THE BIG TIME, no decade in American sports history featured such convulsive cultural shifts as the 1970s. So many things happened during the decade-the move of sports into prime-time television, the beginning...
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"A captivating book that brilliantly reveals an American sports legend long overlooked. Sally Jacobs tells the riveting story of Althea Gibson, my personal hero, who overcame daunting odds - on the tennis court and off - to stand at the world pinnacle of her sport and became an inspiration to many." - Billie Jean King. In 1950, three years after Jackie Robinson first walked onto the diamond at Ebbets Field, the all-white, upper-crust US Lawn Tennis...
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Sportscaster and sports historian Jim Gray "gives the reader a coveted all-access pass as he reviews the best interviews, the best athletes, and the best games in modern sports history. It's like a personal introduction to the characters and careers of these heroes and villains we've known since childhood. He examines how money, celebrity, the media, and power interact, and how sports ... has led to ... transformations in American society"--Publisher...
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"You Are Looking Live! is the story of how one live television show in 1975 captured the excitement of the country, and launched four magnetic personalities to stardom: Brent Musburger, Phyllis George, Irv Cross and Jimmy The Greek Snyder. It explores some of America's most enduring obsessions - football, sex, race, and gambling-- all told through the lens of the fashion, music, and pop culture of the 70's and 80's. It's the Madmen of NFL Broadcasting-a...
7) Black ball: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Spencer Haywood, and the generation that saved the soul of the NBA
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"Against the backdrop of ongoing massive resistance to racial desegregation and increasingly strident calls for Black Power, the NBA in the 1970s embodied the nation's imagined descent into disorder. The press and the public blamed young Black players for the chaos in the NBA, citing drugs, violence, greed, and criminality. The supposed decline of pro basketball became a metaphor for the first decades of integration in America: the rules of the game...
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"Before there was Colin Kaepernick, there was Fritz Pollard. The first Black quarterback to play in the NFL, Pollard was a dynamo, leading his team to a national championship, drawing record crowds, and earning the highest salary in the league. He was also subject to a constant stream of racist abuse. Spectators jeered and threw rocks, and opposing players singled him out, using the cover of the game to pummel the only Black man on the field. It would...
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"The unknown story of the Black pioneers who collectively changed the face of the NFL in 1946. The Forgotten First chronicles the lives of four incredible men, the racism they experienced as Black players entering a segregated sport, the burden of expectation they carried, and their many achievements, which would go on to affect football for generations to come. More than a year before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball,...