Football
Subtitle: The Ivy League Origins of an American Obsession
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: August 2001
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 344
ISBN-13: 9780812236279
Subjects: American football; Sports & Recreation; Ivy League (Football conferenc; Sports; USA; United States; Football - General; History; Football; Ivy League (Football conference)
First sentence: As America is the daughter of Europe, President John F. Kennedy once joked to open a commencement address in New Haven, Connecticut, so he was pleased to be at Yale, the daughter of Harvard.
Description: "Every autumn American football fans pack large college stadiums or crowd around grassy fields to root for their favorite teams. Most are unaware that this most popular American sport was created by the teams that now make up the Ivy League. From the day Princeton played the first intercollegiate game in 1869, these major schools of the northeast - Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Yale - shaped football as we now know it. Almost every facet of the game still bears their imprint: they created the All-America team, produced the first coaches, devised the basic rules, invented many of the strategies, developed much of the equipment, and even named the positions. Both the Heisman and Outland trophies are named for Ivy League players. Crowds of 80,000 no longer attend Ivy League games as they did seventy years ago, and Ivy teams are not the powerhouses they once were, but at times they can still be a step ahead of the rest of football, as in 1973 when Brown and Penn started the first black quarterbacks to face each other in a major college game." "In this rich history, Bernstein shows that much of the culture that surrounds American football, both good and bad, has its roots in the Ivy League."--Jacket.