From Publishers Weekly
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. The centerpiece of this personal approach is the extensive portrait of the career of Pete Rozelle, who became the NFL's commissioner at 33 and initiated many of the measures that ensured the sport's cultural ascendancy, including a television deal that distributed revenue equally among all teams. MacCambridge (The Franchise: A History of Sports Illustrated Magazine) zeroes in on two sideline projects that might have made the greatest difference in football's rise over baseball: NFL Properties, which brought a consistent standard of excellence to fan paraphernalia; and NFL Films, which solidified the myth of the game as an epic struggle through the instantly recognizable narration of John Facenda. MacCambridge also considers the sport's track record regarding race relations, noting that the NFL's first black players were on the field months before Jackie Robinson, while highlighting the roles played by great African-American athletes like Paul Younger and Jim Brown. Though some fans may be disappointed that their favorite teams and players aren't extensively covered, this magisterial history is a fitting acknowledgment of the sport's legacy. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Baseball sentimentalists (of whom, in the chattering classes, there are all too many) aren't going to like it, but Michael MacCambridge has got this right: Baseball may be the National Pastime, but put Past in italics. Professional football is America's game, and it has been for quite a while. In 1960, MacCambridge reports, a Harris Poll found that 36 percent of those interviewed picked baseball as their favorite sport, a fat lead over pro football's 21 percent. A decade later, there was "a shocking change: 38 percent for pro football, 23 percent for baseball." MacCambridge writes:"This was more than just a generational shift, signaling younger adults raised on football replacing a generation that had grown up listening to baseball on the crystal set. It showed that the NFL was reaching a vast, upwardly mobile middle class, and changing their loyalties. Conversely, the Grand Old Game of baseball -- plagued in 1968 by a historic offensive drought and slumping attendance -- for the first time seemed to have become passé, quaint, an anachronism representative of little more than nostalgia for an earlier, simpler time. This was a gross oversimplification, of course, but the truth remained that while football soared, baseball floundered, prisoner to its own complacence."In the three and a half decades since that second poll was taken, baseball has made a modest recovery (thanks to Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Barry Bonds and the past two years' exciting postseasons), and football has had its occasional difficulties (strikes, drugs, an intermittent dearth of exciting offensive players), but the landscape hasn't changed. For better and for worse -- in my view there's some of both -- professional football is now the sport that Americans follow most closely and identify with most strongly. "In the span of two generations in postwar America," MacCambridge writes, "pro football became a truer and more vivid reflection of the American preoccupations with power and passion, technology and teamwork, than any other sporting institution in the country."Maybe so, maybe not. A lot of hot air has been expended over the years about the allegedly deep psychosocial implications of both football and baseball and the meaning of all that, and MacCambridge cannot resist the occasional venture into this murky clime. Mostly, though, he has written a thorough, admirably researched and exceptionally interesting account of football's rise to its present eminence. America's Game isn't so much a history of pro football, since it scants the game's early years, as the story of what happened to it after World War II. MacCambridge is a rather pedestrian writer -- he's never met a cliché he didn't like -- and there are times when the story begins to drag, but mostly these times have to do with labor negotiations or rules changes or other matters that may be short on sex appeal but are intrinsically important.MacCambridge begins with a predictable set-piece: the 1958 National Football League championship in which the Baltimore Colts upset the New York Giants in an absolutely fierce game at Yankee Stadium. The game was thrilling -- no other word will do -- and focused the country's attention on pro football as nothing before had done. That the game was exciting certainly helped, but what really mattered was that it was televised nationally. So far as I can recall, it was the first pro game I'd ever watched on television, which was probably true of millions of others as well; it was a chilly December day, and the prospect of a novel way to pass the time was inviting. Many of us may have turned on the game out of curiosity or boredom, but we stayed hooked to our sets until its dramatic overtime conclusion, when Alan Ameche of the Colts thundered into the Giants' end zone.That game was the beginning not just of pro football's rise but of the age of sports television. More than any other single event, it set off the process by which a nation of participants turned into a nation of spectators. To say that pro football's rise is largely a product of television is scarcely original, but MacCambridge does a good job of linking all the ways in which the game and the medium grew together: the NFL's decisions in the 1950s to black out home games and to share TV revenues equally among teams; the contracts with CBS in the 1960s and 1970s that just got bigger and bigger; the five-year, $8.5 million deal that the young American Football League signed in 1960 with ABC, which gave it enough money to compete with the NFL; the debut in September 1970 of "Monday Night Football," after which, MacCambridge correctly says, "sports in America would never be the same."Not surprisingly, the most interesting and dramatic part of MacCambridge's very long book involves the years from 1960, when the AFL played its first game, through 1970, when the Kansas City Chiefs thumped the Minnesota Vikings in the fourth Super Bowl. This game followed by a year the Super Bowl in which the New York Jets upset the Baltimore Colts, a victory "guaranteed" by the charismatic Joe Namath. If the Jets' win "may be the best thing that ever happened to the game," as the NFL's commissioner, Pete Rozelle, reluctantly acknowledged, the Chiefs' victory left no doubt that the best AFL teams could play on equal terms with the best NFL teams, and that the full merger of the two leagues that was to take place the next season would boost pro football into the stratosphere.Rozelle figures prominently in MacCambridge's chronicle; he was "the smartest, most powerful man in American sports," and his influence on the NFL is almost literally incalculable. Other front-office types to whom he pays proper attention are Bert Bell, the commissioner whom Rozelle succeeded; Lamar Hunt, the "cool, deliberate" founder of the AFL who became, when merger negotiations got serious, "the pivot by [sic] which the AFL owners and NFL owners collaborated"; Sonny Werblin, owner of the Jets, who signed Namath and brought showbiz to football; Tex Schramm of the Dallas Cowboys, perhaps the most successful and influential general manager the game has known; and the present commissioner, Paul Tagliabue, smart, diligent, honest, effective and dull. Then there are the three famous owner/coaches: George Halas of the Chicago Bears, upon whom for some reason MacCambridge never really focuses; the eponymous Paul Brown of the Cleveland Browns and, later, of the Cincinnati Bengals; and Al Davis of the Oakland Raiders, the AFL's Svengali.On the sidelines there's Vince Lombardi, about whom no further word is necessary; many other notable coaches pass through these pages, perhaps chief among them Bill Walsh of the San Francisco 49ers. Among the players, four stand out: Johnny Unitas of the Colts, "an authentic American archetype, the virtual definition of a certain kind of honorable American manhood"; Jim Brown of the Cleveland Browns, beyond question the game's greatest running back and probably its greatest player, period; Sam Huff of the Giants and then the Redskins, who was the subject of a TV documentary called "The Violent World of Sam Huff" that celebrated and popularized defensive play; and Namath, who "transcended sports, making sports fans, or at least Namath devotees, of women who previously couldn't have cared less about sports."During the 1960s pro football "served as a kind of social touchstone, which recognized and honored . . . the eternal verities of hard work, dedication, respect for authority and community," as embodied by the likes of Unitas and Lombardi, though there were (and still are) those who find in Lombardi's "winning is the only thing" a "soulless mind-set that typified everything from male chauvinism to American manifest destiny." By the 1970s, though, there was "an odd sense of cognitive dissonance to pro football's rise," since its emphasis on "teamwork, self-sacrifice, the concerted application of mental and physical discipline toward a single, united goal" was very much out of step with the counterculture. Pro football came to be regarded as "a conservative sport," all the more so when Richard M. Nixon effectively appointed himself First Fan. When football players themselves began to let their hair grow long and in other ways express their individualism, the lords of the game had no small difficulty in adapting to the new reality.The other important subtext in pro football's postwar history is race. MacCambridge treats this touchy subject candidly and sensitively. On the positive side, pro football opened its rosters to blacks with far less resistance than baseball did, and for some years those rosters have been dominated by black players, but football hasn't been much better than any other American institution at facing inequality head-on. Black coaches are still uncommon, and a "vast majority" of front-office personnel is white. In this as in so much else, pro football is nothing if not all-American.It's all-American in another sense as well: It's gone corporate. With the big money and the big new stadiums (most of them financed by ordinary taxpayers for the benefit of millionaires) have come corporate culture and corporate trappings. If Johnny Unitas embodied pro football in 1960, the skybox embodies it in 2004. Football's clientele over the past three decades has become "more corporate, more affluent, and more white." Indisputably it's now America's game, but whether it's still the people's game is another question. Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.


From Booklist
*Starred Review* Football is the professional sport of choice in America today, evidenced by the fact that its championship game, the Super Bowl, is an undeclared national holiday. MacCambridge, author of the extraordinarily informative and very entertaining The Franchise: A History of Sports Illustrated (1997), picks up the struggling National Football League immediately after World War II, when the team owners were a ragtag collection of squabbling entrepreneurs. The owners pulled together somewhat to squash a rival league and usurp its best team, the Cleveland Browns, but the NFL's ascendancy really began in the 1950s, coinciding with the growth of television. MacCambridge tracks the history in a thoroughly readable narrative, devoting plenty of space to the 1958 overtime championship game between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants--a game that mesmerized a national television audience and created the momentum that would carry the league--under the visionary leadership of commissioner Pete Rozelle--through the merger with another rival, the American Football League, and the start of the Super Bowl phenomenon. MacCambridge also offers revealing profiles of the front-office figures who played key roles in the growth of the league--Rozelle, Paul Brown, Al Davis, and Lamar Hunt--as well as gleaning the insights of former players and coaches such as Jim Brown, Bill Walsh, and John Madden. This is a classy, carefully researched, and very enlightening overview of a uniquely American sports enterprise. Wes Lukowsky
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
“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 Inside Flap
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 and relentless 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.


About the Author
Michael MacCambridge is the author of The Franchise: A History of Sports Illustrated Magazine, and the editor of the bestselling ESPN SportsCentury. He worked for eight years as a columnist and critic at the Austin American-Statesman, writing about movies, music, and popular culture. He lives with his wife, Danica Frost, and their children, Miles and Ella, in University City, 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.”

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"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-the-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 and relentless 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.

SYNOPSIS

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’spresent-day preeminence under Paul Tagliabue. The unique portrait of the modern game’s inner workings and relentless 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 CRITICS

Richard Sandomir - The New York Times

What is so special about the N.F.L. that would make sensible businessmen worth billions fork over admittedly illogical sums for a sports team? The question is central to ,i>America's Game, an expansive and detailed history of the N.F.L. told in episodic style by Michael MacCambridge, whose admiration for the league and how it overtook baseball as the national pastime -- largely by making smarter business decisions at almost every conceivable juncture in its post-World War II history -- is evident on every page.

Publishers Weekly

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. The centerpiece of this personal approach is the extensive portrait of the career of Pete Rozelle, who became the NFL's commissioner at 33 and initiated many of the measures that ensured the sport's cultural ascendancy, including a television deal that distributed revenue equally among all teams. MacCambridge (The Franchise: A History of Sports Illustrated Magazine) zeroes in on two sideline projects that might have made the greatest difference in football's rise over baseball: NFL Properties, which brought a consistent standard of excellence to fan paraphernalia; and NFL Films, which solidified the myth of the game as an epic struggle through the instantly recognizable narration of John Facenda. MacCambridge also considers the sport's track record regarding race relations, noting that the NFL's first black players were on the field months before Jackie Robinson, while highlighting the roles played by great African-American athletes like Paul Younger and Jim Brown. Though some fans may be disappointed that their favorite teams and players aren't extensively covered, this magisterial history is a fitting acknowledgment of the sport's legacy. Agent, Sloan Harris. (On sale Oct. 26) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

In this history of professional football's phenomenal growth since World War II, MacCambridge (The Franchise: A History of Sports Illustrated Magazine) focuses primarily on the workings of the National Football League (NFL). Prominent figures like commissioners Bert Bell, Pete Rozelle, and Paul Tagliabue and executives Dan Reeves, Lamar Hunt, Al Davis, Tex Schramm, and Art Modell are emphasized but in the larger context of the league. The author chronicles every aspect of the NFL's development from an obscure, financially insolvent endeavor to representative of the quintessential American sport. Changing racial attitudes, the league's relationship with television, stadium construction and financing, artificial turf, and the wholesale movement of franchises are just a few of the topics covered. MacCambridge packs the text with a mix of details and telling anecdotes gleaned from copious personal interviews and a deep reading of books, magazines, and newspapers. Engagingly written and thorough, this work is a tour de force of narrative sports history and is highly recommended for all collections.-John Maxymuk, Rutgers Univ. Lib., Camden, NJ Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Michael MacCambridge￯﾿ﾽs 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￯﾿ﾽs most popular sport. — Bob Costas

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