Pride and Poise: The Oakland Raiders of The American Football League takes a definitive look into the formation and turbulent early history of the Oakland Raiders. Beginning with the hurried scramble to bring professional football to a city that couldn't provide a home for the team only to suffer through three losing seasons a combined 9-33 record with 19 consecutive losses. After plodding through three head coaches and an alarming player turn around before finding a young dynamo who transformed their club from a doormat rumored to move to another city willing to pour more funds into a prolific loser before having ever played in their home city to an immediate, nearly unstoppable winner. Relive the exploits of the Oakland Raiders in a week in, week out chronicle of their first ten seasons. Meet six unique head coaches and the legends who helped to make the transitions caused by age, injuries associated with football seamless and the whirlwind transformation of a young dynamo from coach to commissioner and ultimately to ownership as he built one of the most respected and feared organization in professional sports. Packed with statistics, transactions and forgotten lore, Pride and Poise: The Oakland Raiders of the American Football League is the most complete, accurate and fair account ever produced of the early Raiders, revisiting every game, win, lose or tie as they make the great journey from near oblivion to professional football's elite and its most dominating franchise.

This is the definitive reference work on the NFL's Oakland/Los Angeles Raiders. Part I is a season-by-season review, covering each game and player from every campaign. Part II includes a complete all-time roster of players and coaches, with biographical information, along with information on all draft picks, schedules, and individual awards and honors. Part III covers the characters, from executives to cheerleaders, who made the Raiders one of the most colorful organizations in professional sports, and details the franchise's historic stadiums and uniforms.

The traditions of Alabama football are as timeless as any in American sports. This exciting series draws together the insights from nearly 100 former players, coaches, and fans, who tell their personal stories about what being a part of this legendary football program means to them.

In the years between the historic first moon landing by Apollo 11 on July 20, 1969, and his death at age 82 on August 25, 2012, Neil Armstrong received hundreds of thousands of cards and letters from all over the world, congratulating him, praising him, requesting pictures and autographs, and asking him what must have seemed to him to be limitless—and occasionally intrusive—questions. Of course, all the famous astronauts received fan mail, but the sheer volume Armstrong had to deal with for more than four decades after his moon landing was staggering. Today, the preponderance of those letters—some 75,000 of them—are preserved in the archives at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. Dear Neil Armstrong: Letters to the First Man on the Moon publishes a careful sampling of these letters—roughly 400—reflecting the various kinds of correspondence that Armstrong received along with representative samples of his replies. Selected and edited by James R. Hansen, Armstrong’s authorized biographer and author of the New York Times best seller First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong, this collection sheds light on Armstrong’s enduring impact and offers an intimate glimpse into the cultural meanings of human spaceflight. Readers will explore what the thousands of letters to Neil Armstrong meant not only to those who wrote them, but as a snapshot of one of humankind’s greatest achievements in the twentieth century. They will see how societies and cultures projected their own meanings onto one of the world’s great heroes and iconic figures.

After fi fty years of futile research on mind and behavior, trying to fi nd their causes in the brain, without success, psychiatrists and psychologists are turning their attention to the emotions, also looking for their causes in the brain, also without success. The problem is that there is no generally accepted theory or paradigm for understanding the emotions. William James suggested that such a paradigm must meet two criteria: (1) it must explain each individual emotion (i.e., anxiety, anger, depression, etc.), and (2) it must relate all the emotions to each other. This book presents such a paradigm. It is based on the accepted biological principle that all organisms from the lowest to the highest function in two biological motives, which I call bipolar reactivity. All organisms seek pleasure and/or that which sustains and promotes life, and all organisms seek to avoid pain and/or that which threatens or disables life. Interestingly, this biological principle corresponds to a basic principle of Buddhist psychology that the pain we cause to ourselves and to each other is caused by the Three Poisons: desire, aversion, and ego. Desire and aversion link humans to the great chain of being, and ego distinguishes humans from all other beings and recognizes our unique capacity for symbolic reactivity. I have used this paradigm for fi fty years in my practice of psychotherapy and have found it very useful for understanding my patients' mental and emotional pain and helping them to understand and heal themselves.

She was electrifying. She possessed astonishing charisma, charm, character, and poise. People would scream, and men withered in the heat of her unspeakable sex appeal as if she were some torrid female rock star. Eager fans threw flowers and gifts to her when she skated. They went absolutely ballistic. Nearly two decades later, she still creates frenzy. She's an international icon now, a planetary celebrity, playing Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, and like Cher and Madonna and Sting or Celine, she needs only one name, Maia, on the world's star roster. One in the audience tonight at Caesars tells Maia's story in more detail. He knows the story of her subjugation in the Soviet Sports Gulag, her suffering and callous abuse by KGB watchdogs, and her triumphant rise to fame as a wealthy American superstar. In the time of the Cold War, he and Maia chanced to dream of a shining life in the free world together. She got the life. He was left with the dream. In fall of 1983, Soviet fighter jets have just shot down a commercial 747 carrying 269 passengers and crew over the Sea of Japan. Everyone has perished. KAL 007 is suddenly another international incident, and the US and the USSR are at it again. Eddie Genell, a young sportswriter for Athlete, one of the top monthly magazines in the world, flies into the tense atmosphere of Cold War brinksmanship to get a feature story on the Soviet Union's first female-singles figure skater with a shot at an Olympic medal in the Winter Games. Maia Larisa Ulyanova is a phenom. The incredibly stunning young skater has captured the hearts of three hundred million Russians and holds the Soviet Union's first chance to make Olympic history. World press attention has been riveted also by her extraordinary beauty and drop-dead sex appeal.

The Football Coaching Bible features many of the game's most successful coaches. Each shares the special insight, advice, and strategies they've used to field championship-winning teams season after season.