Back Football: Great Writing about the National Sport (paperback)

Football: Great Writing about the National Sport (paperback)

Forty-four selections of deadline reportage, long-form profiles, and autobiographical accounts More

Edited by John Schulian

“Mr. Schulian has collected 44 pieces of first-rate writing, from Jimmy Breslin on Y. A. Tittle to Michael Lewis on Adam Vinatieri. Football fans and fans of great writing will love it.”—The Wall Street Journal

Overview
Table of Contents
Contributors

Overview

Interviews John Schulian: The “deadline artists” who brought the sports pages to life
April 26, 2019

Interviews Sportswriter Alexander Wolff: “Basketball becomes a way of working through things”
March 28, 2018

Inspiring passionate loyalties from millions of fans and redefining the weekend in America, football has become the national sport. Ideally suited for our television age, it combines athletic grace with brutal violence in a game that plays out against a backdrop of glitzy entertainment. Since football’s meteoric rise in the mid-twentieth century, the standout writers on the sport have gone behind and beyond the spectacle to reveal the complexity, the contradictions, and the deeper humanity at the heart of the game. Now, in a landmark collection, The Library of America brings together the very best of their work: gems of deadline reportage, incisive long-form profiles of football’s storied figures, and autobiographical accounts by players and others close to the game.

Celebrating the sport without shying away from its sometimes devastating personal and social costs, the forty-four pieces gathered here testify to football’s boundless capacity to generate outsized characters and memorable tales. As editor John Schulian, himself an award-winning sportswriter, recalls in his introduction, “The story was always the thing. It was what we lived for: re-creating the drama every game is built on, pillaging our notebooks for the perfect quote, forever searching for something in the people we wrote about that maybe even they weren’t aware of.”

Here are Jimmy Breslin lauding the professionalism of New York Giants Hall of Fame quarterback Y. A. Tittle, dignified even in defeat; George Plimpton taking a few perilous snaps as the Detroit Lions’ “no-string quarterback”; legendary Green Bay Packers lineman Jerry Kramer battling it out in the frigid trenches of the 1967 Ice Bowl; Gary Cartwright piercing the veneer of fellow Texan Tom Landry, the enigmatic head coach of the Dallas Cowboys; Richard Price bringing his Bronx swagger to Bear Bryant’s Alabama; Jennifer Allen recalling life at home after her father was unceremoniously fired as the Los Angeles Rams’ head coach; Michael Lewis immersing himself in the topsy-turvy world of NFL kickers, the least respected players on the field; former Denver Broncos tight end Nate Jackson wrestling with the temptation of human growth hormone; Bryan Curtis showing us Texas youth football in the post–Friday Night Lights era; and Roy Blount Jr. recounting his forty-year love affair with the Pittsburgh Steelers, diminished only slightly by twenty-first-century press restrictions. Together, this All-Pro roster of writers will forever change the way you look at the game.

John Schulian, editor, was a sports columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and Philadelphia Daily News before moving to Hollywood, where he was, among other things, the co-creator of Xena: Warrior Princess. With George Kimball, he co-edited the Library of America anthology At the Fights. He is the author most recently of Sometimes They Even Shook Your Hand: Portraits of Champions Who Walked Among Us.

This paperback edition has been printed on acid-free paper.
Table of Contents

Introduction by John Schulian

Grantland Rice | from The Tumult and the Shouting
W. C. Heinz | The Ghost of the Gridiron
Myron Cope | from The Game That Was: Johnny Blood
Shirley Povich | The Redskins’ Longest Day
Red Smith | The Most Important Thing* | The Lost Cause
Frederick Exley | from A Fan’s Notes
Stuart Leuthner | from Iron Men: Pat Summerall
Gary Smith | Moment of Truth
Frank Deford | The Best There Ever Was
John Schulian | Concrete Charlie
David Maraniss | from When Pride Still Mattered
Jimmy Cannon | Greatness
Jimmy Breslin | . . . The One Last Good One That Wasn’t to Be
George Plimpton | from Paper Lion
Dan Jenkins | An Upside-Down Game
Jerry Izenberg | A Whistle-Stop School with Big-Time Talent
Jerry Kramer & Dick Schaap | from Instant Replay
Jennifer Allen | from Fifth Quarter
Al Silverman | Gale Sayers: The Hard Road Back
Jim Murray | Don’t Look Now . . . but the Funny Little League is No. 1
Larry Merchant | from . . . And Every Day You Take Another Bite
Arthur Kretchmer | Butkus
Paul Hemphill | Yesterday’s Hero
Gary Cartwright | Tom Landry: Melting the Plastic Man
Tom Archdeacon | Smith Hates for It to End Like This
Richard Price | Bear Bryant’s Miracles
Rick Reilly | A Matter of Life and Sudden Death
Leigh Montville | A Miracle in Miami
H. G. Bissinger | from Friday Night Lights
Mark Kram | No Pain, No Game
Charles P. Pierce | Legends of the Fall
Ira Berkow | The Minority Quarterback
Peter Richmond | Flesh and Blood
John Ed Bradley | The Best Years of His Life
Wright Thompson | Pulled Pork & Pigskin: A Love Letter to Southern Football
Rick Telander | Atkins a Study in Pride and Pain
Pat Forde | Broncos Earn Respect With Improbable Victory
Michael Lewis | The Kick Is Up and It’s . . . a Career Killer
Jeanne Marie Laskas | G-L-O-R-Y!
Nate Jackson | from Slow Getting Up
Paul Solotaroff | The Ferocious Life and Tragic Death of a Super Bowl Star
Bryan Curtis | Friday Night Tykes
Roy Blount Jr. | Immaculate Memory
Contributors

Jennifer Allen
Tom Archdeacon
Ira Berkow
H. G. Bissinger
Roy Blount Jr.
John Ed Bradley
Jimmy Breslin
Jimmy Cannon
Gary Cartwright
Myron Cope
Bryan Curtis
Frank Deford
Frederick Exley
Pat Forde
W. C. Heinz
Paul Hemphill
Jerry Izenberg
Nate Jackson
Dan Jenkins
Mark Kram
Jerry Kramer & Dick Schaap
Arthur Kretchmer
Jeanne Marie Laskas
Stuart Leuthner
Michael Lewis
David Maraniss
Larry Merchant
Leigh Montville
Jim Murray
Charles P. Pierce
George Plimpton
Shirley Povich
Richard Price
Rick Reilly
Grantland Rice
Peter Richmond
John Schulian
Al Silverman
Gary Smith
Red Smith
Paul Solotaroff
Rick Telander
Wright Thompson

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-417-7 484 pages

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