This informational LGB is also a touching tribute to the lessons we learn from our fathers! Every Sunday, a boy and his dad watch the big football game on TV, and then go outside to play it. In this simple introduction to the game, the emphasis is on playing safely and having fun.

This landmark work explores the vibrant world of football from the 1920s through the 1950s, a period in which the game became deeply embedded in American life. Though millions experienced the thrills of college and professional football firsthand during these years, many more encountered the game through their daily newspapers or the weekly Saturday Evening Post, on radio broadcasts, and in the newsreels and feature films shown at their local movie theaters. Asking what football meant to these millions who followed it either casually or passionately, Michael Oriard reconstructs a media-created world of football and explores its deep entanglements with a modernizing American society. Football, claims Oriard, served as an agent of "Americanization" for immigrant groups but resisted attempts at true integration and racial equality, while anxieties over the domestication and affluence of middle-class American life helped pave the way for the sport's rise in popularity during the Cold War. Underlying these threads is the story of how the print and broadcast media, in ways specific to each medium, were powerful forces in constructing the football culture we know today.

The Golden Football How Greed and Athletics Changed a College Town After a hard day at work, Dr. James Conway, president of Western Montana College (WMC), settled into his favorite arm chair and opened the morning edition of the Missoulian. As he stared at the headlines, a shock wave of anger flowed through his body. It read: “WESTERN MONTANA TO JOIN THE SOUTH ALABAMA CONFERENCE.” His athletic department, primarily the football program, had unilaterally accepted a massive television deal worth millions to bolt from the Western Conference and join one two time zones away. He was the last to know. The writing was on the wall—he had lost control of his beloved college to big money interests and booster organizations. In a war of good versus evil (i.e., spiritual warfare), meet the main characters in this fast-pace saga: Bo Jensen: fantastic running back for the Western Montana College Bears with a promising future in the NFL. Changes in NCAA regulations allowed him to prosper from the sale of a variety of items including ladies thongs. Milton (Milty) Douglas, Esq.: senior partner at The Douglas Law Firm and former Bears football star. His practice was limited to defending “student-athletes” and fraternity/sorority members in their encounters with the law. Almost all the students on campus were familiar with the expression: “If you’re guilty, call Milty.” Bob (“Rooster”) Jones: ill-mannered, corrupt, and abrasive billionaire; and financial supporter of Bears football and former player. Queen Esther: Sigma Phi Beta sorority president, Madam of the sorority’s prostitution ring, and occasional student at WMC after her daily beauty treatments. Jimbo (“The Bear”) Collins: unscrupulous head football coach for the Bears. Mark and Hannah Anderson: pastors at Calvary Chapel, Missoula. They served as counter-weights to an immoral culture that was quickly sliding Missoula and the country into the sewer. Jill Hansen: 20 year-old sophomore at WMC. Raised in a small farming community of Darby, Montana, she was the woman nearly every parent hoped their son would someday marry.

The best of sports photographer Neil Leifer's 10,000 rolls of football pictures, including hundreds of rare and unpublished images.

"Includes Edward Penfield, J.C. Leyendecker, Frederic Remington, Charles Dana Gibson, George Bellows, and Many Others."

The story of the vibrant and revolutionary soccer culture in Hungary that, on the eve of World War II, redefined the modern game and launched a new era. In the early 1950s, the Hungarian side was unbeatable, winning the Olympic gold and thrashing England in the Match of the Century. Their legendary forward, Ferenc Puskás, was one of the game's first international superstars. But as Jonathan Wilson reveals in The Names Heard Long Ago, this celebrated era was in fact the final act of the true golden age of Hungarian soccer. In Budapest in the 1920s and 1930s, a new school of soccer emerged that became one of the most influential in the game's history, shaped by brilliant players and coaches who brought mathematical rigor and imagination to the style of play. But with the onset of World War II, many were forced into exile, fleeing anti-Semitism and the rise of fascism. Yet their legacy endured. Against the backdrop of economic and political turmoil between the wars, and in spite of extraordinary odds, Hungary taught the world to play.

A lively and profusely illustrated history of the Golden Gophers from their first informal game against Hamline University at the Minneapolis Fairgrounds in 1882 to the eve of their return to outdoor football on the U of M campus in 2009 after playing 26 years downtown in the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome.