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

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.

Publishers Weekly

A former player in the National Football League and now a professor of English at Oregon State, Oriard advances the thesis that football is a cultural text, complete with metaphoric content and social context, read differently by people whose interpretations vary over time. He considers the formative years of the sport from the 1870s to the early years of this century, arguing that a reading of the popular press of that era helps us understand how actual audiences ``read'' the sport, based on the narrative structure established first by Walter Camp, who at the turn of the century was the Yale football team's ``unofficial, unpaid, unquestioned chief mentor and arbiter,'' and subsequently expanded by other interpreters. An added attraction of this book is the three dozen-plus excellent illustrations, most from magazines like Frank Leslie's Illustrated Weekly . Because it is about football as a cultural and even a literary phenomenon, this study is unlikely to appeal to a general sports audience. (Sept.)