We had just beaten a few of the top men's rugby football clubs in the East that excelled in both sevens and fifteens. This included - Mystic River, Beacon Hill, the Washington Exiles and two good college teams - Brown University and Coast Guard Academy. As I prepared for the championship final against another very good men's club - the Hartford Wanderers RFC - I lay down on the sidelines and stretched my sore leg muscles. My mind drifted and I couldn't help but remember the previous three consecutive finals our school (URI) had participated in. We had beaten some excellent teams each year to advance to the Harvard Business School Sevens finals, but we had lost each close championship match. This rugby sevens tournament was the most popular sevens tournament in the East and it consisted of rugby clubs - men's and college teams from all over and the U.S. - winner takes all!

Sex and rugby are the only things I care about. I play hard and f*ck even harder.Until my first love waltzes back into my life and I'm given a second chance to right the wrongs of my past. She doesn't want to forgive me, but I'll use everything at my disposal to make her see I've changed. That I can be the man she needs me to be.I've never pursued a woman the way I chase down opponents on the field, but this time I won't back down. I won't let her run away again.Sophie was my first love. I'm going to be her last.

Mark Bernstein shows that much of the culture that surrounds American football, both good and bad, has its roots in the Ivy League. With their long winning streaks, distinctive traditions, and impressive victories, Ivy teams started a national obsession with football in the first decades of the twentieth century that remains alive today. In so doing they have helped develop our ideals about the role of athletics in college life.

This ambitious and fascinating history considers why, in the space of sixty years between 1850 and 1910, football grew from a marginal and unorganised activity to become the dominant winter entertainment for millions of people around the world. The book explores how the world’s football codes - soccer, rugby league, rugby union, American, Australian, Canadian and Gaelic - developed as part of the commercialised leisure industry in the nineteenth century. Football, however and wherever it was played, was a product of the second industrial revolution, the rise of the mass media, and the spirit of the age of the masses. Important reading for students of sports studies, history, sociology, development and management, this book is also a valuable resource for scholars and academics involved in the study of football in all its forms, as well as an engrossing read for anyone interested in the early history of football.

A focused conditional program has become essential to on-field rugby success. Pook presents a comprehensive training approach that builds players' physical abilities as well as the rugby-specific skills their positions require.

The book that made a legend -- and captures America's sport in detail that's never been matched, featuring a foreword by Nicholas Dawidoff and never-before-seen content from the Plimpton Archives. George Plimpton was perhaps best known for Paper Lion, the book that set the bar for participatory sports journalism. With his characteristic wit, Plimpton recounts his experiences in talking his way into training camp with the Detroit Lions, practicing with the team, and taking snaps behind center. His breezy style captures the pressures and tensions rookies confront, the hijinks that pervade when sixty high-strung guys live together in close quarters, and a host of football rites and rituals. One of the funniest and most insightful books ever written on football, Paper Lion is a classic look at the gridiron game and a book The Wall Street Journal calls "a continuous feast...The best book ever about football -- or anything!"