America's Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation

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It’s difficult to imagine today—when the Super Bowl has virtually become a national holiday and the National Football League is the country’s dominant sports entity—but pro football was once a ramshackle afterthought on the margins of the American sports landscape. In the span of a single generation in postwar America, the game charted an extraordinary rise in popularity, becoming a smartly managed, keenly marketed sports entertainment colossus whose action is ideally suited to television and whose sensibilities perfectly fit the modern age.

America’s Game traces pro football’s grand transformation, from the World War II years, when the NFL was fighting for its very existence, to the turbulent 1980s and 1990s, when labor disputes and off-field scandals shook the game to its core, and up to the sport’s present-day preeminence. A thoroughly entertaining account of the entire universe of professional football, from locker room to boardroom, from playing field to press box, this is an essential book for any fan of America’s favorite sport.

Review

“A gem . . . Amazing. . . . MacCambridge is a master storyteller.” –Sports Illustrated“MacCambridge paints a moving account of the game’s rise in popularity as well as American society at large. For anyone who cares about a good story well told, MacCambridge’s America’s Game hits all the right notes.” –Fort Worth Star-Telegram“An expansive and detailed history of the N.F.L….MacCambridge deftly integrates well-chosen accounts of games with profiles of league visionaries and tales of television negotiations and internal meetings…MacCambridge combines prodigious interviewing and research with a savvy use of anecdotes.”--New York Times Book Review“A thorough, admirably researched and exceptionally interesting account of football’s rise to its present eminence.”--Washington Post Book World“MacCambridge’s sweeping history of pro football starts just before WWII, when the National Football League was still largely a regional organization, and ends with Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction at Super Bowl XXXVIII. Though there are plenty of vivid descriptions of remarkable games, what sets this chronicle apart from a slew of other recent football books is the depth and breadth of its stories about players, coaches and owners…This magisterial history is a fitting acknowledgment of the sport’s legacy.”--Publishers Weekly“America’s Game tells the beguiling story of pro football–from Johnny Unitas’s high-topped shoes to Janet Jackson’s exposed breast. It is both rollicking and scholarly, definitive and distinctive. You will never find more concise or pleasurable portraits of some of the names that are already storied, including Vince Lombardi, Pete Rozelle, Jim Brown, and Joe Namath, and some giants of the game whose luster is harder to recall, including Bert Bell, Kenny Washington, Ed Sabol, and George Allen. It is indispensable to understanding pro football, and a wonderful enhancement to enjoying it.”–SCOTT SIMON, host, NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday“The authentic story of how the NFL won America’s heart has never been told–until now. Michael MacCambridge weaves a fabulous tale, guiding us through sixty years of professional football. It is a sports story, of course, filled with great games and rich characters. But it is also a big American story. Anyone wondering what makes our vast, violent, adoring, breathless, late-charging, hard-hitting, face-painting, high-fiving, touchdown-celebrating, Super Bowl-partying country tick will find some fascinating answers here.”–JOE POSNANSKI, columnist, The Kansas City Star“Michael MacCambridge’s prologue begins with the 1958 NFL Championship game, the first pro football game I remember. The league is dramatically different now, and MacCambridge captures every essential aspect of that evolution in this revealing history of what is now America’s most popular sport.” -BOB COSTAS, host, HBO's Inside the NFL“Michael MacCambridge has written a lively, highly entertaining book on the ascent of the NFL into the center of America’s DNA. If there is a better book on the subject, I’m not aware of it.”--DAVID HALBERSTAM

From the Back Cover

It's difficult to imagine today-when the Super Bowl has virtually become a national holiday and the National Football League is the country's dominant sports entity-but pro football was once a ramshackle afterthought on the margins of the American sports landscape. Yet in the span of a single generation in postwar America, the game charted an extraordinary rise in popularity, becoming a smartly managed, keenly marketed sports entertainment colossus whose action is ideally suited to television and whose sensibilities perfectly fit the modern age. Pro football's ascent is an epic American story, and "America's Game does it full justice.
Beginning with the World War II years, when the NFL was fighting for its very existence, Michael MacCambridge traces the game's grand transformation, with particular attention paid to six key franchises-the Rams, Browns, Colts, Cowboys, Chiefs, and Raiders-and how their fortunes reflected the larger growth of the game itself. Along the way we meet the sport's legendary architects, men such as Pete Rozelle, George "Papa Bear" Halas, Bert Bell, Tex Schramm, and Lamar Hunt, as well as a wide range of its memorable characters-including Johnny Unitas, Paul Brown, Vince Lombardi, Jim Brown, Al Davis, Joe Namath, Bill Walsh, and Deion Sanders. In the process we witness the rivalries, the games themselves, and the passion that have made professional football the nation's signature sport.
MacCambridge continues the story through the turbulent 1980s and 1990s, when labor disputes and off-field scandals shook the game to its core, and up to the sport's present-day preeminence under Paul Tagliabue. The unique portrait of the modern game's inner workings andrelentless competitiveness sheds light on contemporary stars such as Ray Lewis and Peyton Manning, as well as on the men whose leadership skills are scrutinized and second-guessed by much of the country, celebrated coaches such as Bill Parcells, Dick Vermeil, Tony Dungy, and Brian Billick.
Magisterial and sweeping, definitive and unprecedented in scope, "America's Game is cultural history at its finest. A thoroughly entertaining account of the entire universe of professional football, from locker room to boardroom, from playing field to press box, it is a unique lens through which to view the past sixty years of American history.

"From the Hardcover edition.

About the Author

Michael MacCambridge is the editor of ESPN College Football Encyclopedia and ESPN Sportscentury, as well as the author of America’s Game and The Franchise: A History of Sports Illustrated. He lives with his wife and children in St. Louis, Missouri.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

Going West

Bundled in a heavy winter coat and sporting a beaverskin hat, Daniel Farrell Reeves dug his hands into his pockets and marched from the gate bordering the stands out onto the field in the cavernous Cleveland Stadium. In a matter of hours, his Cleveland Rams would take the field to play the Washington Redskins for the championship of the National Football League. But as he surveyed the field in the numbing chill of this overcast morning two days before Christmas, Reeves could see nothing on the gridiron but thousands of bales of straw, and a small army of men laboring to move them. This was pro football in 1945.

Compact and slender, no more than 5-foot-8 and 140 pounds, Reeves was

a man of reserved nature but wry wit. In four seasons, he had grown accustomed to the perennial financial losses—“Irish dividends,” as he called them—common to owning a pro football team. But the 1945 season had been uniquely rewarding and frustrating. Reeves had returned home just two months earlier, after a three-year tour of duty with the Army Air Corps, to what would become a season-long victory celebration. America’s triumph in World War II had been officially consecrated during August two-a-days, and the long lines that greeted the end of gas rationing dissipated by the season-opening win over the Chicago Cardinals. Just one season after the 1944 squad lost six of its last seven games, the Rams had rebounded to become the surprise of the NFL, and win their first Western Conference title. In early December, rookie quarterback Bob Waterfield, soon to be named the league’s Most Valuable Player, was profiled in Life magazine. And though the article spent less time on Waterfield than his wife—Hollywood bombshell Jane Russell, star of Howard Hughes’s “sex western” The Outlaw, which censors still hadn’t allowed to be screened in the U.S.—the mere thought that a player for the Cleveland Rams would merit space in Life seemed to Reeves a miracle in itself.

After the Washington Redskins beat the New York Giants in the regular season finale, Reeves’s dream match-up was set. For the title game, the Redskins would make their first trip to Cleveland in eight seasons, bringing along their famed 110-piece marching band to perform a special Christmas-themed halftime show. Interest was high for the match-up between the rookie Waterfield and perennial All-Pro Slingin’ Sammy Baugh. And so Reeves had bravely decided to move the championship game from the Rams’ regular stadium, the deteriorating League Park, with its cramped capacity of 30,000, to Cleveland Stadium, which seated 80,000.

Six days before the game, the National Weather Service had forecast a major winter storm hitting the Cleveland area in midweek, so the Rams had spent the early part of the week searching for enough bales of straw to cover the tarpaulin, to prevent the field from freezing. It was general manager Charles “Chile” Walsh who finally located 9,000 bales of straw from around Elyria, and had it delivered to the stadium at a cost of $7,200. In the days leading up to the game, eighteen inches of snow fell on Cleveland, leaving the stadium resembling an arctic snowscape, with drifts piled several feet high in the aisles.

On Sunday morning, the Rams lined up 275 workers, many of them off-duty city employees, to remove the bales. While the Rams were responsible for the field, the city of Cleveland was responsible for the stadium and the parking lots, which were left unshoveled. Despite the weather and conditions, the Associated Press projected the game would draw 50,000, and the New York Times wrote that “a crowd of better than 40,000 is almost certain with a capacity audience of 77,569 possible in case the forecasters are wrong.”

But when the lights were turned on at Cleveland Stadium at 6:30 the morning of the game, the temperature was eight degrees below zero. Marching in mucklucks from the Clevelander Hotel a little before eight, Reeves balefully noted the unpassable streets. There was no parking in the two blocks closest to the stadium, since that area was overrun with snow. And taxi service wasn’t running to the stadium, another skirmish in the war between the Rams and Arthur McBride, owner of the Zone/Yellow Cab Co. and the new Cleveland entry in the All-America Football Conference, which would begin competition in Cleveland the following fall.

By 10:30 that morning most of the 9,000 bales had been cleared off the field. But the trucks that were to transport them away had trouble gaining purchase on the still clogged city streets, leaving the workers no choice but to place the straw against the walls surrounding the playing field. Behind the benches, just in back of the end zones, and stacked more than ten bales high at the walls, the sea of straw was parted so the game could be played.

Cleveland Stadium had rarely looked so empty as on this day, when only 32,178 turned out. When former Rams business manager Manny Eisner and his wife walked into the stadium about an hour before kickoff, there were already people filing out, succumbing to the cold. In the stadium ticket office, Lou Isaacson was more prepared than most. Dressed in three pairs of socks, knee-high brogan work shoes, two pairs of pants, two sweaters, and two coats, he sat in the unheated box office for four and a half hours, and sold two tickets.

In financial terms, Reeves had already resigned himself to the realization that his share of the gate wouldn’t even pay for the cost of buying, transporting, and removing the bales of straw. But as the kickoff neared, none of that mattered. Up in the press box, Reeves was nervous and amiable, greeting writers and VIPs, accepting congratulations for signing Waterfield to a three-year contract the day before. “The stars are making so much money now, I call them ‘Mister’ and they just call me ‘Reeves,’ ” he said. When the game began, the joking ended, and Dan Reeves suffered in silence, as he’d done every game day since 1941, when he’d bought the team. He paced nervously, far removed from his wife, Mary, the rest of his family, and his closest friends. It was not a time to be jovial or even social. It was time for football.

Down on the field, the game sounded different, victim to the noiseless vacuum of severe cold. There was little kibitzing between the teams, and almost none of the concussive, amplified smack that so often accompanied the heavy hitting of professional football. The quality of play was still sharp, but on a day when the temperature was zero degrees at kickoff, the players felt the pain more than heard it, each tackle accompanied by heavy breathing and dull, muffled thuds. The crowd sounded different as well, its applause muted by layers of gloves, the cheers rising curt and thin in the icy air.

Even in the ’40s, people argued about whether the pressure of football built character or revealed it. But Reeves had long ago learned how capricious the game could be, how random its deciding factors. On this frigid Sunday, he watched Sammy Baugh’s pass from the Redskins’ end zone hit the goalpost and fall back into the end zone, for what was then an automatic safety. After Waterfield threw the first of two long touchdown passes for the Rams, his extra point attempt was partially blocked, with the ball careening toward the crossbar, hitting it, and dribbling weakly over. Baugh’s freak safety and Waterfield’s wounded conversion had been the difference in the 15–14 edge the Rams nursed into the fourth quarter.

By that time, the windows of the Cleveland Stadium press box had fogged over, and most of the writers covering the game had abandoned their typewriters and gone outside into the biting cold, cursing as they bundled up to face the brutal wind, but drawn to the finish of the frantic battle below. Reeves himself was outside when he saw the play that decided the game. With the Redskins nearing midfield in the closing minutes, running back Steve Bagarus made an end run to the right, then reversed field and broke free, running in a sweeping arc to the far sideline, with two Rams in hot pursuit. The first slowed him down and the second, Waterfield (who in addition to being the star quarterback was also the team’s best defensive back), made a desperate lunge and extended his left arm before hitting the ground. The contact was scant—Waterfield’s hand barely nicked the toe of Bagarus’s trailing foot—but it was just enough to knock the runner off his feet and save a touchdown. The Rams’ defense stiffened from there and the Redskins missed a field goal attempt.

Moments later, the game was over and the Cleveland Rams were world champions. The hardiest fans stormed the field to tear down the goalposts in celebration, while the rest of the crowd headed for shelter and celebration into Cleveland’s bars, restaurants, and dance halls. In the locker room, where the players massed for the traditional celebratory championship candid photograph, head coach Adam Walsh hugged his brother, Chile Walsh, and announced, “I knew you were champs back there at Bowling Green! I knew it! I knew it!”

NFL commissioner Elmer Layden greeted Adam Walsh, his old college roommate at Notre Dame, with a hug and a handshake. Then Layden presented Reeves with the league’s Ed Thorp Memorial Trophy, given annually to the NFL champion. “I’ve been used to losing for so long,” said Reeves, with tears in his eyes, “that I wasn’t counting on anything until it was all over.”

As Reeves returned with friends and family to his suite at the Clevelander Hotel, his jubilation was tempered by the private realization that his time in Cleveland was near its end. Reeves had lost more money in earlier years, but in the season in which his team had marched to the world championship, it still lost $64,000. And the prospects for box office improvement were dim, since the rival All-America Football Conference would begin play the following season, with a franchise in Cleveland that seemed to be the strongest in the league.

Reeves had decided, win or lose, that when the NFL held its annual meeting in January, he would insist on fulfilling his goal, stated for years in private sessions with the owners, to move his franchise to Los Angeles. This time, he was determined: Dan Reeves was heading west, or else Dan Reeves was leaving football.

By the end of World War II, the unique personality and character of the National Football League had begun to develop. The NFL owners comprised a particularly hidebound and tightly knit fraternity, loath to accept outsiders, reluctant to change the often circuitous, inefficient manner in which proceedings were conducted. Many could remember the league’s earliest years, when it was perceived to be—and for the most part was—a haphazard assemblage of pickup games and hired hands making weekend pay.

The Bears’ legendary coach and owner George Halas had been there from the start, present at the creation of the league, one of sixteen men in Ralph Hay’s Jordan and Hupmobile showroom in Canton, Ohio, in August 1920. That meeting, called by the league’s first president, Jim Thorpe, laid the foundation for what would be called the American Professional Football Association, and two years later renamed the National Football League, though it had no franchises west of Chicago or south of Washington, D.C.

Its next president, elected in 1921, was the tireless Columbus promoter Joe F. Carr, who presided over the league’s dark ages, in which thirty-five franchises folded in the league’s first ten seasons. At that 1921 meeting, Halas moved the Decatur Staleys to Chicago, where a year later he renamed them the Bears, and the Green Bay Packers and Earl “Curly” Lambeau entered the league. Four years later, they were joined by New York bookmaker Tim Mara, who bought the New York Giants for $2,500, reasoning that any franchise in New York City ought to be worth that much.

In 1932 and 1933, the rest of the inner circle came on board. First there was George Preston Marshall, the bombastic Southern laundry man, who bought the Boston Redskins in 1932, moving them to Washington, D.C., five years later. In 1933, “Blue-Shirt Charlie” Bidwill, Chicago businessman and diehard Bears fan, bought the crosstown rival Chicago Cardinals, though those closest to him knew the Bears were still his favorite club.

Then there was Philadelphia’s Bert Bell and Pittsburgh’s Art Rooney, who’d met at a horse track in the late ’20s, and whose franchises joined the league in 1933, the same year that the Pennsylvania state legislature relaxed its blue laws, allowing sporting events on Sundays. De Benneville “Bert” Bell, the son of a Pennsylvania attorney general, was a blueblood aristocrat with a common touch, who spent much of the ’20s roaring his way through his inheritance. The raconteur Art Rooney, son of a corner tavern owner in Pittsburgh, was a delightfully egalitarian personality in his own right. Rooney’s team was called the Pirates throughout the ’30s, before changing its name to the Steelers in 1940.

For most of the ’30s and ’40s, these seven men—Halas, Lambeau, Mara, Marshall, Bidwill, Bell, and Rooney—were the National Football League. The ’30s brought hard-earned growth, with liberalized passing rules, the introduction of a two-division system with an annual championship game (Marshall’s idea), and the first college draft (the brainstorm of Bell), all introduced under Carr’s watch. Through the decade, the game retained its slangy sense of barnstorming informality. Pittsburgh head coach Johnny Blood once missed a game because he simply forgot it was on the schedule. Most players fit practices during the week around their regular jobs, others came into town on the weekends, and played for less than $100 a game.

The tight band of owners fought like brothers, but persevered in the face of several rival start-ups, the indifference of much of the American sporting public, the condemnation of many in college football, and the failures of several of their partners. Those who remained were cautious, inherently suspicious of change, and not eager to test their horizons.

In 1936, the Cleveland Rams, who had struggled through a season with the failing rival American Football League, called NFL president Joe Carr to apply for an expansion franchise in the NFL. Carr came to Cleveland, met owner Homer Marshman, and invited him to come to the next meeting to apply for membership.

“So in December 1936,” recalled Marshman, “I went to the NFL meeting in Chicago and made my presentation. They told me to sit down and wait. Next, a man from Houston made his presentation. They thanked him and told him to leave. I thought that was very impolite since I was allowed to remain. Next, a man from Los Angeles made a pitch for Los Angeles. They excused him, too. I couldn’t understand it, because their presentations were every bit as good as mine. As soon as the two others had left the room, George Preston Marshall jumped up and said, ‘I move we give it to Cleveland.’ Everybody agreed. It was set up. They had decided on us in advance. They wanted to keep the teams in the east and midwest.”

Review:

4.9 out of 5

97.78% of customers are satisfied

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent.

C.S. · August 31, 2024

Impact of pro football to read.

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Book, but a bit of NFL propaganda

M.W.S. · June 15, 2015

Let me start by saying this is a great book that I could not put down. The discussion of the earlier, struggling years of the NFL is fascinating and the war with the AFL was great.Having said that, and despite giving it five stars, a couple of things bothered me. First, I think, at times MacCambridge comes across as an NFL propagandist. In his quest to show that the NFL is really America's game, he denigrates other sports too much. In particular, after reading the book, you would think no one ever attends a baseball game. No doubt the NFL has been far better run than MLB but the implication that this is why football eclipsed based is, I think, a bit misleading. Simply put, football is a far better game on TV than baseball and the NFL's growth coincided with TV. MacCambridge acknowledges this but I think he downplays that fact in suggesting that the NFL was so incredibly far-sighted.The other thing that bothered me about the book is his seeming apologia for the owners. He spends little time on how the Rozelle Rule kept down salaries. Rozelle was clearly a great commissionet and comes across in the book as a good guy, but I suspect he was not as well loved by the players. He, like every other commissioner in sports, is hiref to work for the owners and to protect and advance their interests at the expense of the players if necessary. In fact, I would argue that the entire rationale of the merger with the AFL was to reduce salaries. The implication in the book is that, without the merger, there could have been no Super Bowl, but that's not true. There is no reason the leagues could not have competed on the field without being financially tied together. But, of course, the owners would not have made as much money; more of the profits would have gone to the players, who were, as we see, crippling themselves to largely profit the owners. And, no, I am not suggesting that the owners should not have made any money. But, for most of it's history and, really, even today, it's the owners that share most of the profits and the players make do. And without the strikes, the players would not have gotten that. I think MacCambridge should have done more with that. He made the NFL seem like a commonwealth of interests in which the players and owners are partners, but that's just not true.The last point is a corollary to his dismissal of baseball. The book came out well before concerns about concussions and player safety came to the fore so you can't really fault him for not being able to predict this as an issue. And he does, to some extent, address issues of player conduct; but again, this was long before the Ray Rices of the world came along. I don't blame him for not being prescient, but there seems to be a suggestion that the NFL is invincible, at least so long as the owners continue to focus on the league itself rather than their individual interest-which seems to be a slap at Jerry Jones. But, as we see, nothing is inevitable and while I don't expect the NFL to decline like boxing or even like baseball, it has significant problems and the future of the league is not necessarily as bright as it once was.Meanwhile, baseball has its own problems, of course, what with an aging demographic and so on, but no one is suggesting that kids should stop playing baseball in order to avoid being drooling slobs when they get older.Despite these criticisms, I do think this is a great book and a real gem for anyone that likes sports history, especially, of course, the NFL.

4.0 out of 5 stars 5 Stars 1945-1970, 3 Stars Afterwards

H.W. · June 3, 2008

Book gets 5 stars from where it starts (end of WW 2) through the AFL-NFL merger, then loses steam from 1970-present.That said, it is worth reading simply for the first part. The section on the LA Rams itself makes the book worthwhile as is the section on the early Cleveland Browns.Yet it pretty much ignores the 50s Detroit Lions who were a power as well.The AFL is treated quite fairly, which is unusual. And you get a very nuanced picture of Lamar Hunt, nice going.Wellington Mara gets panned a bit, he is not seen as the generous man whose altruism gets praised time after time. Rather, his backing of the National TV contract is seen as something he was talked into. His signing of Pete Gogolak is roundly panned in this book.Great great information on Bert Bell, the commissioner before Rozelle.Very little on George Halas.But it seemed to me that the author could not find many topics he liked in the post-merger NFL.BTW, this book is almost totally concerned with the owners and managers of the team. Relatively little on the players.

5.0 out of 5 stars No Instant Replay; Thoughtful Research and Analysis Instead

T.J.B. · July 4, 2005

Michael MacCambridge has produced a volume of research and analysis worthy of any historical bookshelf. Let the reader beware: the author is nothing but faithful to his title. This is not a nostalgic romp with the Decatur Staleys, nor a highlight reel in words. Rather, MacCambridge traces and assesses how the corporate NFL has managed itself from its humble pre-World War II status to a position today of sports preeminence.For starters, the author does not think much of pro football before 1945. Pro football was a confederation of teams, all of which were north and east of a line between Chicago and Washington. The owners were a club unto themselves, mostly Catholic and educated by nuns. Their greatest gifts to the game, in MacCambridge's view, are that they did not muck it up too much and they elected Bert Bell to serve as commissioner after the war. Bell was not the brightest bulb in the chandelier--his selection smacks of cronyism as much as anything--but in his humble, gracious way, Bell served the game as well as the owners. He was the first commissioner who sensed an obligation to protect the game itself.He was challenged quickly enough by another major figure in this work, Paul Brown, and a new league taking shape, the All America Football Conference. The AAFC enjoyed a brief flare of success in the late 1940's, with franchises in glamour cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco. On the field, however, the premiere team was Cleveland, where Brown invented the model of modern coaching management. Cleveland and its imitators in the AAFC were simply too good to go away. Bell decided to pick the franchises he wanted and add them to the NFL fraternity. By 1950 the NFL was coast to coast and the enemy had been destroyed.With Bell's sudden death in 1959, the NFL owners closeted for eleven days, and when the white smoke poured from football's Sistine Chapel, there on the balcony stood the longest of long shots, the Rams General Manager Pete Rozelle, 33. If there is a hero in this book it is Rozelle. He, too, was tested from the start, by a number of millionaires from across the country, in particular the south, clamoring for league expansion and new franchises.In truth, the old guard did not want expansion, but unlike baseball with its antitrust exemption, the NFL under Rozelle was indeed vulnerable to a charge of cabalistic behavior. Rozelle could not play dumb as Bell had. There were too many suitors now, at least a dozen. As these prospective new owners gravitated toward a new American League, Rozelle tried to slow the momentum by the early 1960's addition of Dallas, Minnesota, and Atlanta franchises to the NFL. In hindsight, Rozelle might have done better to appease Lamar Hunt, the driving force behind the new AFL.The titanic battle of the two leagues ended in 1966, with secret negotiations between Rozelle and Hunt [and not Al Davis, the actual AFL commissioner, who would get his pound of flesh from Rozelle] prompted by bidding wars for top draft choices and then established league stars. MacCambridge observes that negotiating conference alignments was as difficult as selling merger itself. Who of the old guard would go to the AFC?What made this entire enterprise workable, in the final analysis, was Roselle's management of television. Beginning in the 1960's Rozelle negotiated a series of network contracts that ensured many healthy benefits: national coverage [to feed enthusiasm of local fans], the much beloved "double-header game" at 4 PM, and most importantly, equal division of TV revenue among all teams. In addition, MacCambridge gives considerable attention to Rozelle's cultivation of Ed and Steve Sabol's NFL films production as an invaluable marketing tool of the league.MacCambridge is the first author of my experience to explain the significance of the USFL's suit against the NFL and its potential to destroy the league. The USFL, a pleasant little league that enjoyed its workable niche in the springtime sports world, decided to go head to head with the NFL in the fall, and filed its now-famous antitrust suit. Rozelle's first instinct was to settle, but he and the owners were dissuaded by the brilliant attorney Paul Tagliabue. Tagliabue understood that a non-defense by the NFL would make the league vulnerable to suits from any sandlot league claiming to be shut out of the national TV market and demanding admission to the NFL.The USFL trial completely exhausted Rozelle, who resigned after a three decade tenure. His replacement in 1989, the steely Tagliabue, would find his tenure filled with home-grown problems. Player conduct, an absence of minority executives and coaches, unforeseen difficulties with the new league salary cap, and even a bare breasted Janet Jackson Superbowl fiasco would occupy his first fifteen years. But his biggest challenge came from the owners themselves over an issue considered anathema forty years before: franchise jumping. Los Angeles to Oakland, Los Angeles to St. Louis, Cleveland to Baltimore, and Houston's melancholic relocation to Vanderbilt University--this was a trend that would alienate the heart of the league's success, fan identification, not to mention a repudiation of the founding credo, "the good of the league." Clearly, Tagliabue did not enjoy the power of a 1970 Rozelle, but the author notes that the commissioner was not Bud Selig, either. His compromise of restoring expansion franchises to Cleveland and Houston was better than nothing. And Tagliabue may have gotten help from an unexpected source: wholesale taxpayer opposition to publicly funded football stadiums, which would of necessity put a damper on owner enthusiasms.In the final analysis, MacCambridge believes that the NFL is still the healthiest of all professional sports in the United States in terms of fan base and business practices. This work contains an exhaustive bibliography that will probably send the reader off in several directions--at least till the season starts.

Excellent

S.J. · February 6, 2024

Excellent

Excepcional

L.F.a.N. · March 5, 2020

Um dos melhores livros de futebol americano que já li na vida.

Gran libro

j. · April 15, 2017

El autor detalla de manera muy clara el éxito económico ,deportivo y social de la NFL, lo compre para leerlo durante vacaciones y he quedado más que satisfecho

Great

L. · September 1, 2020

Not as good as 'the league's but interesting none the less

great book

R. · April 29, 2014

Easily one of the best sports books ever written. A must read for any football fan, both old and new.

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America's Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation

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