JIMMY GREAVES was a great entertainer and a national hero as a footballer, and is held in equal affection as a television pundit and performer. Now Greavsie reveals the footballers and managers who have given him most entertainment and are his biggest heroes. Greavsie has confined his star-studded assembly to players and managers of his lifetime -- dipping fondly back into the days of Stanley Matthews, Tom Finney and Len Shackleton and coming up to date with in-depth analysis of modern masters like Thierry Henry, Steven Gerrard and Wayne Rooney. Along the way he nods in the direction of his good pals Bobby Moore, Dave Mackay, Billy Wright and, of course, George Best. Footballing gods of the calibre of Pele, di Stefano, Puskas and Maradona naturally win a place in the personal Greaves Hall of Fame. You may not agree with all his selections, but if you are a true football fan you will agree that this is a book that makes you laugh and grips your attention as you take a look at some of FOOTBALL's GREAT HEROES AND ENTERTAINERS.

A biography of Len Shackleton, England's most skilful footballer of the 1940/50s

Much of Michael Oriard's education took place outside the schoolroom of his native Spokane, Washington, during "slaughter practices" on high school football fields. He was taught to "punish" and "dominate," to rouse his school spirit with religion, and to "tough it" through injuries, even serious ones. At the age of eighteen he entered Notre Dame and walked onto the football team, where studying hard was never harder. By his senior year, playing for Ara Parseghian's Fighting Irish, he was the starting center and co-captain of the team. After graduating, he signed with the Kansas City Chiefs and head coach Hank Stram. There he learned what it meant to be "owned." He rediscovered the game as it was played by grown men with families who were still treated like children and who dreaded nothing more than the end of their football careers. And without their fully realizing the consequences, every hard tackle inflicted its injury, some gradually growing into chronic conditions, some suddenly cutting a player's career short and ushering him off the field to be soon forgotten. In this thoughtful narrative, Oriard describes the dreams of glory, the game day anxieties, the brutal training camps and harsh practices, his starry-eyed experience at Notre Dame, and the cold-blooded business of professional football. Told from the inside, the book leaves aside the hype and the pathos of the game to present a direct and honest account of the personal rewards but also the costs players paid to make others rich and entertained. Originally published in 1982, The End of Autumn recounts the experiences of an ordinary player in a bygone era--before ESPN, before the Bowl Championship Series, before free agency and million-dollar salaries for NFL players. In a new afterword, Oriard reflects on the process of writing the book and how the game has changed in the thirty years since his "retirement" from football at the age of twenty-six.

Soccer, the world’s most popular mass spectator sport, gives birth to great achievers on the field of play all the time. While some of them become heroes and stars during their playing career, transforming themselves into national as well as global icons, very few come to be remembered as all-time greats. They leave an enduring legacy and thereby claim to be legends by their own rights. While the rise and achievements of these soccer greats have drawn considerable attention from scholars across the world, their legacies across time and space have mostly been overlooked. This volume intends to reconstruct the significance of the legacies of such great men of world soccer particularly in a globalized world. It will attempt to show that these luminous personalities not only represent their national identity at the global stage, but also highlight the proven role of the players or coaches in projecting a global image, cutting across affiliations of nation, region, class, community, religion, gender and so on. In other words, the true heroes, icons and legends of the world’s most popular sport have always floated at a transnational global space, transcending the limits of space, identity or culture of a nation. This book was published as a special issue of Soccer and Society.

The author of the bestselling Hard Men of Rugby gives us the thrilling stories of 20 of the greatest rugby mavericks from the last 80 years. Featuring exclusive player interviews, this lively book brings some of rugby's craziest moments, biggest characters and most remarkable stories to life.

Contents.--Ira Aldridge.--Marian Anderson.--Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong.--Josephine Baker.--Harry Belafonte.--Nat "King" Cole.--Sammy Davis Jr.--"Duke" Ellington.--Lena Horne.--Eartha Kitt.--Sidney Poiter.--Leontyne Price.--Paul Robeson.--Bill "Bojangles" Robinson.--"Bert" Williams.--Thomas "Fats" Waller.

This landmark work explores the vibrant world of football from the 1920s through the 1950s, a period in which the game became deeply embedded in American life. Though millions experienced the thrills of college and professional football firsthand during these years, many more encountered the game through their daily newspapers or the weekly Saturday Evening Post, on radio broadcasts, and in the newsreels and feature films shown at their local movie theaters. Asking what football meant to these millions who followed it either casually or passionately, Michael Oriard reconstructs a media-created world of football and explores its deep entanglements with a modernizing American society. Football, claims Oriard, served as an agent of "Americanization" for immigrant groups but resisted attempts at true integration and racial equality, while anxieties over the domestication and affluence of middle-class American life helped pave the way for the sport's rise in popularity during the Cold War. Underlying these threads is the story of how the print and broadcast media, in ways specific to each medium, were powerful forces in constructing the football culture we know today.

Portraits of eighteen representative black entertainers in the fields of concert music, opera, dance, radio, television, recordings, films, and theater.

This biographical dictionary shines the spotlight on several hundred unheralded stunt performers who created some of the cinema's greatest action scenes without credit or recognition. The time period covered encompasses the silent comedy days of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, the early westerns of Tom Mix and John Wayne, the swashbucklers of Douglas Fairbanks, Errol Flynn, and Burt Lancaster, the costume epics of Charlton Heston and Kirk Douglas, and the action films of Steve McQueen, Clint Eastwood, and Charles Bronson. Without stuntmen and women working behind the scenes the films of these action superstars would not have been as successful. Now fantastic athletes and leading stunt creators such as Yakima Canutt, Richard Talmadge, Harvey Parry, Allen Pomeroy, Dave Sharpe, Jock Mahoney, Chuck Roberson, Polly Burson, Bob Morgan, Loren Janes, Dean Smith, Hal Needham, Martha Crawford, Ronnie Rondell, Terry Leonard, and Bob Minor are given their proper due. Each entry covers the performer's athletic background, military service, actors doubled, noteworthy stunts, and a rundown of his or her best known screen credits.