Big television contracts in the 1960s created the Super Bowl, as well as the 1970 merger of the National Football League with the pass-oriented American Football League. Since then, professional football has been America's most popular televised team sport, developing into a wide-open passing game by the 21st century. Handling the completion side of the aerial game, receivers are not often as celebrated as quarterbacks or coaches, even in the era of San Francisco 49er Jerry Rice's supremacy. This book provides a history of pro pass receiving and its influence on the game prior to the televised era. The author studies pro football's formative and mid-20th century years, highlighting the players who pulled pigskins from flight, like the legendary Don Hutson, Gibby Welch, Johnny Blood, Ray Flaherty, Crazy Legs Hirsch, Mac Speedie, Choo Choo Roberts and many others.

The first comprehensive biography of the legendary figure who defined excellence in American sports: Jim Thorpe, arguably the greatest all-around athlete the United States has ever seen. With clarity and a fine eye for detail, Kate Buford traces the pivotal moments of Thorpe’s incomparable career: growing up in the tumultuous Indian Territory of Oklahoma; leading the Carlisle Indian Industrial School football team, coached by the renowned “Pop” Warner, to victories against the country’s finest college teams; winning gold medals in the 1912 Olympics pentathlon and decathlon; defining the burgeoning sport of professional football and helping to create what would become the National Football League; and playing long, often successful—and previously unexamined—years in professional baseball. But, at the same time, Buford vividly depicts the difficulties Thorpe faced as a Native American—and a Native American celebrity at that—early in the twentieth century. We also see the infamous loss of his Olympic medals, stripped from him because he had previously played professional baseball, an event that would haunt Thorpe for the rest of his life. We see his struggles with alcoholism and personal misfortune, losing his first child and moving from one failed marriage to the next, coming to distrust many of the hands extended to him. Finally, we learn the details of his vigorous advocacy for Native American rights while he chased a Hollywood career, and the truth behind the supposed reinstatement of his Olympic record in 1982. Here is the story—long overdue and brilliantly told—of a complex, iconoclastic, profoundly talented man whose life encompassed both tragic limitations and truly extraordinary achievements.

Includes entries for maps and atlases.

A world list of books in the English language.