In today’s hypercompetitive world, contact sports bring about fierce rivalries between fans, between players, and even between countries. From the Ohio State Buckeyes and the Michigan Wolverines in grid iron football, to the Australian Wallabies and the New Zealand All Blacks in rugby, to Real Madrid and Barcelona in association football (soccer), contact sports incite a passion few other games can replicate. Though these modern contests of brawn might vary in ways both subtle and significant, they draw on a common history that dates back centuries. Overcoming rulers, conquerors, and religious leaders, the games of ancient times survived and flourished to become the sports we know and love today. In The Shared Origins of Football, Rugby, and Soccer, Christopher Rowley reveals how ball games arose and took shape into seven distinct forms: American football, association football, Australian rules football, Canadian football, Gaelic football, rugby league football, and rugby union football. Rowley traces ball games back to the Mayans in Meso-America and the Han Dynasty in China, through ancient Egypt and Greece, and on through the Cradle of football in England and Scotland. His narrative includes the relatively recent development of rules, codes, and leagues and concludes with the current state of football around the world. The Shared Origins of Football, Rugby, and Soccer takes the reader through this unique odyssey in world history by bringing to life the little-known games of the past. Rowley recreates ancient games from around the world based on surviving documents and illustrations, and relates first-hand accounts of fossil games still played today. Through careful research, the common ancestry of our modern seven codes of football is finally pieced together to create a fascinating history of the world of football that we know today.

What are the origins of all the modern day contact sports, from grid iron football to Aussie Rules, rugby, and soccer? In this book, Christopher Rowley reveals how ball games arose and took shape into what we know today as football, soccer, rugby, and others.

Randall Balmer was a late convert to sports talk radio, but he quickly became addicted, just like millions of other devoted American sports fans. As a historian of religion, the more he listened, Balmer couldn't help but wonder how the fervor he heard related to religious practice. Houses of worship once railed against Sabbath-busting sports events, but today most willingly accommodate Super Bowl Sunday. On the other hand, basketball's inventor, James Naismith, was an ardent follower of Muscular Christianity and believed the game would help develop religious character. But today those religious roots are largely forgotten. Here one of our most insightful writers on American religion trains his focus on that other great passion—team sports—to reveal their surprising connections. From baseball to basketball and football to ice hockey, Balmer explores the origins and histories of big-time sports from the late nineteenth century to the present, with entertaining anecdotes and fresh insights into their ties to religious life. Referring to Notre Dame football, the Catholic Sun called its fandom "a kind of sacramental." Legions of sports fans reading Passion Plays will recognize exactly what that means.

Sports on Film takes readers behind the scenes of how movies get made and puts them in the stands for some of the key moments in sports in America. Sports on Film documents key events in American sports history through the films that depict them, starting with the integration of major-league baseball when Jackie Robinson signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Other significant events and personalities examined include the college basketball point-shaving incident of the 1950s; journalist George Plimpton's attempt to go through the Detroit Lions' NFL training camp in the early 1960s; the originations and popularity of rodeo; the brief run of women's professional baseball during World War II; the underdog racehorse Seabiscuit during the Great Depression; the rise of African American boxer Muhammad Ali; the unique 1970s "Battle of the Sexes" tennis event between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King; and Ford Motor Company's run in the 1960s to take motorsports to Europe's premier event in Le Mans, France.

Forty years ago, a South African rugby tour in the United States became a crucial turning point for the nation’s burgeoning protests against apartheid and a test of American foreign policy. In Flashpoint: How a Little-Known Sporting Event Fueled America's Anti-Apartheid Movement, Derek Charles Catsam tells the fascinating story of the Springbok’s 1981 US tour and its impact on the country’s anti-apartheid struggle. The US lagged well behind the rest of the Western world when it came to addressing the vexing question of South Africa’s racial policies, but the rugby tour changed all that. Those who had been a part of the country’s tiny anti-apartheid struggle for decades used the visit from one of white South Africa’s most cherished institutions to mobilize against both apartheid sport and the South African regime more broadly. Protestors met the South African team at airports, chanted outside their hotels, and courted arrests at matches, which ranged from the bizarre to the laughable, with organizers going to incredible lengths to keep their locations secret. In telling the story of how a sport little appreciated in the United States nonetheless became ground zero for the nation’s growing anti-apartheid movement, Flashpoint serves as a poignant reminder that sports and politics have always been closely intertwined.

This ambitious and fascinating history considers why, in the space of sixty years between 1850 and 1910, football grew from a marginal and unorganised activity to become the dominant winter entertainment for millions of people around the world. The book explores how the world’s football codes - soccer, rugby league, rugby union, American, Australian, Canadian and Gaelic - developed as part of the commercialised leisure industry in the nineteenth century. Football, however and wherever it was played, was a product of the second industrial revolution, the rise of the mass media, and the spirit of the age of the masses. Important reading for students of sports studies, history, sociology, development and management, this book is also a valuable resource for scholars and academics involved in the study of football in all its forms, as well as an engrossing read for anyone interested in the early history of football.

From its earliest days, association football was seen not just as a contest between individuals and teams, but also between nations and peoples. The Irish national team was among the first in the world to participate in international competition in the early 1880s, but not everyone accepted it as a truly national entity. Sport in Ireland was disputed ground in a manner that was not the case elsewhere – even the term ‘football’ itself was a contested one. But soccer followers generally found no contradiction between their sporting and national loyalties, and the game found an important niche in Irish life, supported by many leading nationalists, from James Connolly to John Hume. This book provides a unique window into the history of Ireland and Britain, with keen insights into the making of national, regional, sectarian, class and gender identities that crystallised around Irish soccer. Taking the story from the 1870s up to the present, it examines the domestic as well the international game in Ireland, North and South, and sets both in a richly detailed historical and cultural context. It also examines the experience of Irish communities in England and Scotland, and the ways in which the game affected their relationship with their host societies. Carefully weaving together political, social, cultural and sporting history, No Foreign Game tells a story not just of division and conflict, but also one of solidarity and celebration, and in doing so it breaks new ground in the history of Irish sport.