Set in an easy-to-read Q&A format, this volume is full of the stories and firsthand accounts from many of the men who helped shape the 1970s into one of the most exciting and memorable eras in National Football League history.

The inside story of the most colorful decade in NFL history—pro football’s raging, hormonal, hairy, druggy, immortal adolescence. Between the Immaculate Reception in 1972 and The Catch in 1982, pro football grew up. In 1972, Steelers star Franco Harris hitchhiked to practice. NFL teams roomed in skanky motels. They played on guts, painkillers, legal steroids, fury, and camaraderie. A decade later, Joe Montana’s gleamingly efficient 49ers ushered in a new era: the corporate, scripted, multibillion-dollar NFL we watch today. Kevin Cook’s rollicking chronicle of this pivotal decade draws on interviews with legendary players—Harris, Montana, Terry Bradshaw, Roger Staubach, Ken “Snake” Stabler—to re-create their heroics and off-field carousing. He shows coaches John Madden and Bill Walsh outsmarting rivals as Monday Night Football redefined sports’ place in American life. Celebrating the game while lamenting the physical toll it took on football’s greatest generation, Cook diagrams the NFL’s transformation from second-tier sport into national obsession.

Drawn from personal interviews with the players themselves, a chronicle of the 1970s Pittsburgh Steelers, who won an unprecedented and unmatched four Super Bowls in six years.

A landmark year in the history of the game

Hell with the Lid Off looks at the ferocious five-year war waged by Pittsburgh and Oakland for NFL supremacy during the turbulent seventies.?The roots of their rivalry dated back to the 1972 playoff game in Pittsburgh that ended with the "Immaculate Reception," Franco Harris's stunning touchdown that led the Steelers to a win over the Raiders in their first postseason meeting.?That famous game ignited a fiery rivalry for NFL supremacy.?Between 1972 and 1977, the Steelers and the Raiders--between them boasting an incredible twenty-six Pro Football Hall of Famers--collided in the playoffs five straight seasons and in the AFC title game three consecutive years. Both teams favored force over finesse and had players whose forte was intimidation.?Pittsburgh's Steel Curtain defense featured Mean Joe Greene, Jack Lambert, Jack Ham, and Mel Blount, the latter's heavy hits forcing an NFL rule in his name.?The Raiders countered with "The Assassin," Jack Tatum, Skip Thomas (aka "Dr. Death"), George Atkinson, and Willie Brown in their memorable secondary.?Each of their championships crowned the eventual Super Bowl winner, and their bloodcurdling encounters became so violent and vicious that they transcended the NFL and had to be settled in a U.S. district court.? With its account of classic games, legendary owners, coaches, and players with larger-than-life personalities, Hell with the Lid Off is a story of turbulent football and one of the game's best-known rivalries.

The 1970 merger between the American Football League and the National Football League laid the foundation for a stronger brand of gridiron competition, providing a new level of excitement for fans. This book examines each year of the NFL's pivotal decade in detail, covering the great names, great rivalries and great games, as well as the key changes in both strategy and rules. Along the way, the author explains how pro football developed into a near-religious American tradition.

Many of the most powerful trends in baseball today have their roots in the 1970s. Baseball entered that decade seriously behind the times in race relations, attitudes toward conformity versus individuality, and the manager-player relationship. In a sense, much of the wrenching change that American society as a whole experienced in the 1960s was played out in baseball in the following decade. Additionally, the game itself was rapidly evolving, with the inauguration of the designated hitter rule in the American League, the evolution of the closer, the development of the five-man starting rotation, the acceptance of strikeout lions like Dave Kingman and Bobby Bonds and the proliferation of stolen bases. This book opens with a discussion of the challenges that faced baseball's movers and shakers when they gathered in Bal Harbour, Florida, for the annual winter meetings on December 2, 1969. Their worst nightmares would be realized in the coming years. For many and often contradictory reasons the 1970s game evolved into a war of competing ideologies--escalating salaries, an acrimonious strike, Sesame Street-style team mascots, and the breaking of the time-honored tradition that all players, including the pitcher, must play on offense as well as defense--that would ultimately spell doom for the majority of attendees.

Straight from the mouths of the legends of the Silver and Black, Cheating Is Encouraged recapitulates the many as infamous stories from the last team to play “outlaw” football. Regardless of whether you loved or hated them, the Oakland Raiders of the 1970s were an amusing cast of outlaws, misfits, and anomalies that made up one of the greatest pro football teams of their era. The Raiders’ roster consisted of a collection of mavericks and rebels, some with behavioral issues, such as John “Tooz” Matuszak and Lyle Alzado, as well as castoffs like the aging George Blanda and the sandlot player Otis Sistrunk, who were passed over or disregarded by other NFL teams. To say that this group of outlaws had “attitude” would be a gross understatement. They were the Oakland Raiders, the Silver and Black, and Al Davis’s dream of “Just win, baby.” Gridiron characters (such as the Snake, Foo, the Assassin, the Hit Man, Dr. Death, and many others) chronicle the notorious on- and off-the-field exploits, away-game adventures, and the party-hard attitudes that are reflected in the team’s intimidating and glorified mix of renegades. Cheating Is Encouraged defines an era that can only be considered the last days of “real football played by real men.” Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Sports Publishing imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in sports—books about baseball, pro football, college football, pro and college basketball, hockey, or soccer, we have a book about your sport or your team. Whether you are a New York Yankees fan or hail from Red Sox nation; whether you are a die-hard Green Bay Packers or Dallas Cowboys fan; whether you root for the Kentucky Wildcats, Louisville Cardinals, UCLA Bruins, or Kansas Jayhawks; whether you route for the Boston Bruins, Toronto Maple Leafs, Montreal Canadiens, or Los Angeles Kings; we have a book for you. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to publishing books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked by other publishers and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

Chuck Noll won four Super Bowls and presided over one of the greatest football dynasties in history, the Pittsburgh Steelers of the '70s. Later inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, his achievements as a competitor and a coach are the stuff of legend. But Noll always remained an intensely private and introspective man, never revealing much of himself as a person or as a coach, not even to the players and fans who revered him. Chuck Noll did not need a dramatic public profile to be the catalyst for one of the greatest transformations in sports history. In the nearly four decades before he was hired, the Pittsburgh Steelers were the least successful team in professional football, never winning so much as a division title. After Noll's arrival, his quiet but steely leadership quickly remolded the team into the most accomplished in the history of professional football. And what he built endured well beyond his time with the Steelers—who have remained one of America's great NFL teams, accumulating a total of six Super Bowls, eight AFC championships, and dozens of division titles and playoff berths. In this penetrating biography, based on deep research and hundreds of interviews, Michael MacCambridge takes the measure of the man, painting an intimate portrait of one of the most important figures in American football history. He traces Noll's journey from a Depression-era childhood in Cleveland, where he first played the game in a fully integrated neighborhood league led by an African-American coach and then seriously pursued the sport through high school and college. Eventually, Noll played both defensive and offensive positions professionally for the Browns, before discovering that his true calling was coaching. MacCambridge reveals that Noll secretly struggled with and overcame epilepsy to build the career that earned him his place as "the Emperor" of Pittsburgh during the Steelers' dynastic run in the 1970s, while in his final years, he battled Alzheimer's in the shelter of his caring and protective family. Noll's impact went well beyond one football team. When he arrived, the city of steel was facing a deep crisis, as the dramatic decline of Pittsburgh's lifeblood industry traumatized an entire generation. "Losing," Noll said on his first day on the job, "has nothing to do with geography." Through his calm, confident leadership of the Steelers and the success they achieved, the people of Pittsburgh came to believe that winning was possible, and their recovery of confidence owed a lot to the Steeler's new coach. The famous urban renaissance that followed can only be understood by grasping what Noll and his team meant to the people of the city. The man Pittsburghers could never fully know helped them see themselves better. Chuck Noll: His Life's Work tells the story of a private man in a very public job. It explores the family ties that built his character, the challenges that defined his course, and the love story that shaped his life. By understanding the man himself, we can at last clearly see Noll's profound influence on the city, players, coaches, and game he loved. They are all, in a real sense, heirs to the football team Chuck Noll built.

Long-time sports writer Bill Chastain examines every details about the beginning, heyday and end of the Steelers mid-1970s run of winning four Super Bowls in six years, a feat that many writers say will not be broken. Former Steeler Rocky Bleier not only wrote the foreword but will be handing all the extensive media.