Notre Dame and the Game that Changed Football: How Jesse Harper Made the Forward Pass a Weapon and Knute Rockne a Legend
On November 1, 1913, Notre Dame's 29-year-old football coach, Jesse Harper, defeated Navy by having his team rely heavily—and successfully—on the forward pass, which had been legalized only seven years earlier. Notre Dame's surprising victory was the start of its football program becoming a sports powerhouse, Maggio believes, and it forever changed how the game was played. The book's first half is excellent, as Notre Dame alum Maggio (he graduated from the law school in 1963) offers a well-researched, insightful look at football's beginnings and the school's early struggles, highlighting just how important that victory was for the survival of two future American institutions. Bafflingly, after the historical game, Maggio devotes countless pages to summarizing every game associated with Harper, who was also Notre Dame's athletic director from 1931 to 1933. Without interviews from players and coaches to offer new insights into these games, the rest of the book reads like eight years' worth of box scores punctuated by letters between Harper and Rockne: his friend, former player and coaching protégé. Even die-hard Fighting Irish fans will have trouble enduring Maggio's lack of narrative flair and focus. Photos not seen byPW.(Sept.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.