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Pigskin: The Early Years of Pro Football | 
 enlarge | Author: Robert W. Peterson
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Category: Book
List Price: $30.00
Buy New: $26.65
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Avg. Customer Rating:  4 reviews
Sales Rank: 180755
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.6
ISBN: 0195119134
Dewey Decimal Number: 796.332640973
EAN: 9780195119138
ASIN: 0195119134
Publication Date: October 30, 1997
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com
While baseball's pastoral pace never lets us forget its past, football's martial-like essence seems forever fixed in the present. Yet, borne on the broad backs of men like Pudge Heffelfinger, Jim Thorpe, George Halas, Red Grange, Sammy Baugh, and Bronco Nagurski, football's history is filled with a legend, color, and personality as intriguing and all-American as that usually ascribed to baseball. Like a good offensive guard, Pigskin does yeoman-like work in the trenches, opening the right holes for football's barnstorming, step-child past to rush through. Thoroughly researched and authoritatively written, it helps resuscitate a sporting era--from the late 19th century to the dawn of saturation TV--when the passion for playing the game was far more alluring than all those soulless numbers on the business end of the dollar sign.
Product Description
If the National Football League is now a mammoth billion-dollar enterprise, it was certainly born into more humble circumstances. Indeed, it began in 1920 in an automobile showroom in Canton, Ohio, when a car dealer called together some owners of teams, mostly in the Midwest, to form a league. Unlike the lavish boardrooms in which NFL owners meet today, on this occasion the owners sat on the running boards of cars in the showroom and drank beer from buckets. A membership fee of $100 was set, but no one came up with any money. (As one of those present, George Halas, the legendary owner of the Chicago Bears, said, "I doubt that there was a hundred bucks in the room.") From such modest beginnings, pro football became far and away the most popular spectator sport in America.
In Pigskin, Robert W. Peterson presents a lively and informative overview of the early years of pro football--from the late 1880s to the beginning of the television era. Peterson describes the colorful beginnings of the pro game and its outstanding teams (the Green Bay Packers, the New York Giants, the Chicago Bears, the Baltimore Colts), and the great games they played. Profiles of the most famous players of the era--including Pudge Heffelfinger (the first certifiable professional), Jim Thorpe, Red Grange, Bronko Nagurski, and Fritz Pollard (the NFL's first black star)--bring the history of the game to life. Peterson also takes us back to the roots of the pro game, showing how professionalism began when some stars for Yale, Harvard, and Princeton took money--under the table, of course--for their services to alma mater. By 1895, the money makers--still unacknowledged--had moved to amateur athletic associations in western Pennsylvania and subsequently into Ohio.
After the NFL formed in 1920, pro football's popularity grew gradually but steadily. It burst into national prominence with the Bears-Redskins championship game of 1940. As one sportswriter put it: "The weather was perfect. So were the Bears." The final score was 73-0. Peterson shows how, after World War II, the newly-created All America Football Conference challenged the NFL. Though dominated by a gritty Cleveland team, the AAFC was never viewed by NFL teams as much of a threat. That is, not until 1950 when the two leagues merged, bringing about the Cleveland Browns-Philadelphia Eagles game in which the Browns buried the Eagles 35-10.
An elegy to a time when, for many players, the game was at least as important as the money it brought them (which wasn't much), Pigskin takes readers up to the 1958 championship game when the Baltimore Colts beat the New York Giants in overtime. By that time, the great popularity of the game had moved from newspapers and radio to television, and pro football had finally arrived as a major sport.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Review of Pigskin: The Early Years of Pro Football May 31, 2008
Pigskin is a history of professional football from its origins in the late 1800's through the 1950's. It details the state of professional football early in the century when football was really dominated by colleges, particularly the Ivy League schools. At that time professional football was more like semi-pro ball, and was relatively disorganized with club teams going on barnstorming tours. The book does a good job of chronicling how professional football evolved, becoming more and more organized and structured over time up to the creation of a professional league with Jim Thorpe, the most famous athlete of the time, as president and player. Once World War II came about professional football, while not in its heyday, was finally taking over college football in fan interest but the war was rough on professional sports as many of the greatest athletes went into the service. After the war football continued to grow in fan interest and really hit it big with the invention of television. "The Greatest Game Ever Played" - the 1958 overtime championship game where the Baltimore Colts defeated the New York Giants 23-17, which was televised and watched by millions, launched the NFL into the mainstream and it hasn't slowed down since.
Overall this book has a lot of good information and is well organized. The drawback is that the writing style is not very exiting so it makes this monograph a bit on the boring side. For those only mildly interested in the history of professional football, I would not recommend it.
 Fascinating book about the early history of Pro Football January 2, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This was a book that surprised me when I read it because it has so much great information about the early days of pro football. The struggles of football at the professional level to become a "respected" game was one of the surprises in the book along with the fact that, for example, the "draw play" that is used today was discovered completely by accident years ago (read the book to find out why). The book is a great look back at the early years of the game, the subtle changes to the game over the first few decades and the changes that brought the game to the status it has today in our society. This is a great read about the early history of football in our nation.
Solid Pro Football History April 24, 2005
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
What I most like about this book is the author's dedication to historical accuracy. It was apparent that the author weighed the reliability of different accounts of what happened in order to give a true picture of pro football's past. Often this meant discarding some of the more colorful but dubious stories frequently repeated in other books.
I was impressed with the sources used for the book. Sources included research of the Professional Researchers Association, other respected books and authors, and original interviews of star and more ordinary former players as well as coaches.
The book spans the era of pro football from the late 1800's to the 1958 NFL championship game. Roughly the first third of the book is devoted to the pre-NFL days of pro football prior to 1920. There are 16 pages of photos. The quality of these photos- even considering that they are old- is not good, unlike the cover photo, which is very good.
I did not find the book difficult to read. This is a book I would recommend to anyone of high school age or older who wants a good foundation on the history of pro football. This book delivers a solid, straight-forward account of how pro football developed.
 Pigskin lacks the moves to score a touchdown February 22, 2004
6 out of 8 found this review helpful
While this book contains lots of interesting historical facts and little known tidbits of information on pro football's rise in America, it is written in such a way as to have readers wishing the sport had died at birth.
As I said above, there is very good information on the sport here, but once I read the particular nugget I don't need it given to me again on the next page, or the next, or the next. The author is very repetative and some of the chapters go on forever with really no new facts given.
The second thing you might notice is that the author likes to play with seldom used "big words" from the English language. Not a problem if used in moderation, but here they are so frequent as to disrupt the flow of the story and makes the book difficult to read.
The final penalty here is the bad editing. There are either numerous mispellings, or he is using words I never learned in school. There are also several spots in the book where [] appear around letters or whole words. I'm not sure what those are there for, but someone must have thought they needed to be there I guess. Alo, many of the chapters are badly arranged, bits of story seemingly thrown in wherever there was room.
In conclusion I found this book hard to read and only finished it because i'm a die-hard football fan. Makes a good read if you're an insomniac though.
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