Dan Jenkins calls him “the greatest quarterback who ever lived, college or pro.” Slingin’ Sammy Baugh, who played for TCU and the Washington Redskins, single-handedly revolutionized the game of football. While the pros still wore leather helmets and played the game more like rugby, Baugh’s ability to throw the ball with rifle-like accuracy made the forward pass a strategic weapon, not a desperation heave. Like Babe Ruth, who changed the very perception of how baseball is played, Slingin’ Sam transformed the notion of offense in football and how much yardage can be gained through the air. As the first modern quarterback, Baugh led the Redskins to five title games and two NFL championships, while leading the league in passing six times—a record that endures to this day—and in punting four times. In 1943, the triple-threat Baugh also scored a triple crown when he led the league in passing, punting, and interceptions. Slingin’ Sam is the first major biography of this legendary quarterback, one of the first inductees into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Joe Holley traces the whole arc of Baugh’s life (1914–2008), from his small-town Texas roots to his college ball success as an All-American at TCU, his brief flirtation with professional baseball, and his stellar career with the Washington Redskins (1937–1952), as well as his later career coaching the New York Titans and Houston Oilers and ranching in West Texas. Through Holley’s vivid descriptions of close-fought games, Baugh comes alive both as the consummate all-around athlete who could play every minute of every game, on both offense and defense, and as an all-around good guy.

The history of New Texas, the Texas we know today—oil-rich, insufferably loud, and unbearably proud of itself—begins in the late 1920s, when a horned frog wakes from its thirty-one-year nap in a courthouse cornerstone and flabbergasts the nation. In slightly over two decades ten individuals—their words, actions, and accomplishments—come to define the New Texas of the twenty-first century. While the history of Old Texas rests on oft-told legends of Houston, Austin, Travis, Crockett, Rusk, Lamar, and Seguin, today’s New Texas—proud, loud, self-promotional, sports-crazy, and too rich for its own good—is the Texas that percolates throughout the nation’s popular culture. In Texas Loud, Proud, and Brash: How Ten Mavericks Created the Twentieth-Century Lone Star State, author Rusty Williams profiles ten largely unsung men and women responsible for the Texas you love, hate, and (secretly) envy today.

A classic NFL/civil rights story—the showdown between the Washington Redskins and the Kennedy White House In Showdown, sports historian Thomas G. Smith captures a striking moment, one that held sweeping implications not only for one team’s racist policy but also for a sharply segregated city and for the nation as a whole. Part sports history, part civil rights story, this compelling and untold narrative serves as a powerful lens onto racism in sport, illustrating how, in microcosm, the fight to desegregate the Redskins was part of a wider struggle against racial injustice in America.

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

A Native American track star training for the Olympics in the early part of the 1900s meets 1912 gold medal winner Jim Thorpe and Bill Pickett, the black cowboy who invented steer wrestling.

"In 1935 Betsy Throckmorton's father lures her back to Claybelle, Texas, with the promise that she can be the editor of his Claybelle Standart-Times. Betsy brings along her husband, Ted Winton, an easterner and Yale graduate who will run Ben Throckmorton's radio station, KVAT."--Page 4 of cover.

"A rich collection of fifty-one stories and articles by Roger Kahn. Written across six decades, this volume shows Kahn's ability to describe the athletes he profiled as they truly were in a manner neither compromised nor cruel but always authentic and up close"--

From the author of Semi-Tough comes a hilarious novel chronicling one year in the life of irreverent sports columnist Jim Tom Pinch. ​ Jim Tom Pinch is a unabashed sportswriter who has followed around and reported on too many blonde-haired skiers, basketball players with names like Potatus Fry, and Russian figure skaters who want to know how much a house with a toilet costs in America. Now he tells the story of a year of romance, cursing, bimbos, touchdowns, pandering, padded expense accounts­—from the Olympics to the Indy 500 to the heavyweight championship—a year that will leave neither Jim Tom nor the wide world of sports the same. "Bawdy, bitter, very funny...Jenkins's farewell salute to big-time sportswriting is a tell-all novel that deflates the hype around each and every event, from the Olympics to the Kentucky Derby to Wimbledon (Kirkus Reviews).

In the early days of professional football, coaches were little more than on-field captains who also ran practices—if there was time for practice. The emergence of post-graduate football and the coaching profession from 1920 to 1950 was crucial to the evolution of the game, and both developed and rose in stature over this critical period in the history of football. In Pioneer Coaches of the NFL: Shaping the Game in the Days of Leather Helmets and 60-Minute Men, John Maxymuk profiles some of the most innovative coaches from the early days of the NFL, including Guy Chamberlin, Curly Lambeau, George Halas, Potsy Clark, and Clark Shaughnessy. Along with biographical sketches and career details, the profiles examine the coaches’ strategic approaches, their impact on the history of the game, and the advancement of their roles both on and off the field. It was this group of coaches who initially devised the basic repertoire of plays and alignments, as well as passing routes, blocking schemes, shifts, and substitution patterns. These men morphed defensive alignments, introduced the four-man secondary, conceived zone and man-to-man coverage mixes, and concocted linebacker and safety blitzing. Pioneer Coaches of the NFL details how coaches from the first three decades of the NFL established many of the procedures, conventions, and strategies that modern football coaches still use today. These innovators presented those that followed them a rich palate with which to imagine and create an even greater game.

The epic tale of the five owners who shepherded the NFL through its tumultuous early decades and built the most popular sport in America The National Football League is a towering, distinctly American colossus spewing out $14 billion in annual revenue. But it was not always a success. In The League, John Eisenberg focuses on the pioneering sportsmen who kept the league alive in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, when its challenges were many and its survival was not guaranteed. At the time, college football, baseball, boxing, and horseracing dominated America's sports scene. Art Rooney, George Halas, Tim Mara, George Preston Marshall, and Bert Bell believed in pro football when few others did and ultimately succeeded only because at critical junctures each sacrificed the short-term success of his team for the longer-term good of the league. At once a history of a sport and a remarkable story of business ingenuity, The League is an essential read for any fan of our true national pastime.