Manliness and civilization: A cultural history of gender and race in the United States, 1880–1917

Is football an athletic contest or a social event? Is it a game of skill, a test of manhood, or merely an organized brawl? Michael Oriard, a former professional player, asks these and other intriguing questions in Reading Football , the first contemporary book about football's formative years. American football began in the 1870s as a game to be played, not watched. Within a brief ten years, it had become a great public spectacle with an immense following, a phenomenon caused primarily by the voluminous commentary about the game conducted in popular newspapers and magazines. Oriard shows how this constant narrative in football's early years developed many different stories about what the game meant : football as pastime, as the sport of gentlemen, as a science, as a game of rules and their infringements. He shows how football became a series of cultural stories about power, luck, strategy, and deception. These different interpretations have been magnified by football's current omnipresence on television. According to Oriard, televised football now plays a cultural role of enormous importance for men, yet within the field of cultural studies the influence of football has been ignored until now. From the book: \"A receiver sprints down the sideline, fast and graceful, then breaks toward the middle of the field where a safety waits for him. From forty yards upfield the quarterback releases the ball; it spirals in an elegant arc toward the goalposts as the receiver now for the first time looks back to pick up its flight. The pass is a little high; the receiver leaps, stretches, grasps the ball--barely, fingers clutching--at the very moment that the safety drives a helmet into his unprotected ribs. The force of the collision flings the receiver backward, slamming him to the turf...This familiar tableau, this exemplary moment in a football game, epitomizes the appeal of the sport: the dramatic confrontation of artistry with violence, both equally necessary.\" |The first contemporary book about football's formative years. Oriard, a former professional football player, examines how American football changed from a game to be played to a game to be watched.

Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle.

(1995). Games Colleges Play: Scandal and Reform in Intercollegiate Athletics. The Journal of Higher Education: Vol. 66, No. 5, pp. 598-600.

Games Colleges Play: Scandal and Reform in Intercollegiate Athletics

By Clifford Putney. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2001. x + 300 pp. $39.95 (cloth); L26.50 (cloth). As Clifford Putney demonstrates in this highly engrossing study, church leaders were once deeply concerned about a culture of femininity that was allegedly sapping the vitality of American Protestantism. Alarmed by statistics indicating that the membership of Protestant denominations was becoming increasingly female, religiously committed men fretted about how to attract other men to their parishes. Some powerful lay figures (for example, Theodore Roosevelt and John D. Rockefeller, Jr.) placed the blame on the clergy-"thin, vapid, affected, driveling little doodles" (p. 79) who were happier sipping tea with women than bumping shoulders with men at sporting events. What congregations needed, they said, were far fewer "'ritualists,''parasites,' and "weaklings'" (p. 82) and more "men whose blood coursed strong and hot through their veins, fine specimens of muscular, soldierly Christianity" (p. 81). Building upon the insights of Ann Douglas in The Femlnization of American Culture (1977), Putney investigates the fears of male religious leaders about the debilitating influences supposedly exerted on them by women. He approaches this subject both chronologically and topically, examining the growth and development of "muscular" organizations such as the YMCA, the Boy Scouts, the Brotherhood of St. Andrew, the Student Volunteer Movement, and the "St. Grottlesex" prep schools of New England. Putney also examines the response of women who objected to this campaign to masculinize American Protestantism. Although a few chose to join new religious movements created and led by women-Christian Science, Theosophy, and the Church of the Higher Life-many others affirmed "the Cult of the Strenuous Life" (p. 33) just as vigorously as their male colleagues. Denying that good health and rugged outdoor experiences ought to be reserved only for boys and young men, these women established the YWCA, the Girl Scouts, the Camp Fire Girls, and similar organizations in order to meet their need for physical activity imbued with high-minded principles. Although muscular Christianity reached its apogee in the American churches during World War I, revulsion at the bloody slaughter of modern warfare, the moral relativism of the "Jazz Age," and the emergence of neo-orthodox theology effectively ended the movements appeal within the mainline denominations after 1920. …

Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880-1920

This Article is brought to you for free and open access by ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository. For more information, please contact thinkir@louisville.edu. Original Publication Information Huml, Matthew R., Meg G. Hancock, and Matthew J. Bergman. \"Additional Support or Extravagant Cost? Student-Athletes' Perceptions on Athletic Academic Centers.\" 2014. Journal of Issues in Intercollegiate Athletics 7: 410-430.

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Additional support or extravagant cost? : Student-athletes' perceptions on athletic academic centers.

The purpose of this article is to offer a sociohistorical overview of academic reform in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). To do so, the author draws heavily from football history and its association with academic reform in the broader intercollegiate athletics context. Intercollegiate athletics has undergone significant changes in professionalism and academic integrity over time—something that suggests the current dysfunctional structure can be systemically changed, too.

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NCAA Academic Reform: History, Context and Challenges

Football today, most conspicuously at the professional level (National Football League), is the economic and cultural colossus of American spectator sports. To speak of its ‘life cycle’, then, would seem nonsensical: although it has a clear ‘birth’, to speak of its ‘death’ might seem ridiculously premature. Yet, recent developments make imagining such a death possible. In this essay, I will explore two current controversies – over ‘athletes’ rights' at the collegiate level and the dangers of traumatic head injury at all levels – that have the potential to destroy American football at least in the form we know it today. And it will trace the factors behind those controversies – the insistent and persistent ‘amateurism’ of American college athletes and the fundamental violence of the game itself – back to their origins. What might end American football as we know it was present in the game from nearly its beginning.

https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1957/51318/OriardMichaelEnglishChronicleFootballDeath.pdf?sequence=1

Michael Oriard

Papers

NCAA Academic Reform: History, Context and Challenges

Chronicle of a (football) death foretold: the imminent demise of a national pastime?