Reading Football

<p>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 <i>Reading Football</i> the first contemporary book about football’s formative years.<br/><br/>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.<br/><br/>Oriard shows how this constant narrative in football’s early years developed many different stories about what the game <i>meant</i>: 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.<br/><br/>From the book:<br/>“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.”</p>