Traces the history of Longhorn football, looks at each season and coach, and recalls memorable players

Not so fast Rudolph-Willy guides Santa's sleigh in Texas! When Santa visits Texas, he encounters dense fog and needs a local's help to deliver gifts. Willy, a longhorn longing to fly with Santa, jumps at the opportunity to help. With the help of glowing blue paint, his horns light the way. Follow Willy and Santa on their journey to every house in the Lone Star State as they fly over Texas landmarks to deliver presents and a Texas-sized portion of cheer.

The Texas Longhorn made more history than any othr breed of cattle the world has known. Their story is the bedrock on which the history of the cow country of America is founded.

With trivia boxes, pep talks, records, and Longhorn lore, this lively, detailed book explores the personalities, events, and facts every Texas fan should know. It contains crucial information such as important dates, player nicknames, memorable moments, and outstanding achievements by singular players. This guide to all things Longhorns covers the team's first live mascot, the season they broke the NCAA record for points scored, and the player that caught every single touchdown pass thrown in the 1972 season. Now updated through the 2013 season, McEachern has provided additional chapters bringing the book up through the retirement of Mack Brown and the hiring of Charlie Strong, as well as the 2009 perfect regular season and trip to the BCS title game.

When it comes to college football, there are teams and there are Texas teams. The University of Texas in Austin boasts one of the best, most celebrated football teams in the nation. This action-packed volume takes readers (and Longhorn fans) through the history of the team and highlights some fantastic players, coaches, and game moments. Includes exciting sidebars with bonus information.

A gritty, undersized player, Freddie Steinmark started at safety for the undefeated University of Texas Longhorns in 1969. In the thrilling "Game of the Century," a come-from-behind victory against Arkansas that ensured Texas the national championship, Steinmark played with pain in his left leg. Within a week of that game and after cancer was confirmed, his leg was amputated. Steinmark had quickly become a fan favorite at Texas, and his story captivated the nation. Written with unfettered access to the Steinmark family and archives, Freddie Steinmark: Faith, Family, Football is the exploration of a brief but full life, one that began humbly but ended on a grand stage. Book jacket.

Firsthand accounts of the legends and lore of Texas football The most outstanding voices of the University of Texas football tradition come together in this decade-by-decade collection of more than 40 stories. Texas fans will relish the intimate stories told by Darrell Royal, Mack Brown, Earl Campbell, Ricky Williams, and other figures they have come to cherish. This collection of interviews with student athletes and coaches captures the true essence of Texas football, making it the perfect book for any Longhorn fan.

Some presidents throw out baseball’s first pitch of the season. Some post picks for college basketball’s March Madness. One might tweet about a football player kneeling. President Richard M. Nixon phoned Miami Dolphins coach Don Shula to suggest plays for the Super Bowl. He hosted players in the 1969 Major League All-Star game for a party deemed the strangest since the mob scene during Andrew Jackson's inauguration. He attended a Washington Redskins practice to boost moral; altered the NFL’s policy for televising home games; introduced the practice of calling teams after Super Bowl or World Series wins. The list goes on, but the point is clear: Richard Nixon was the nation’s first sports super fan to occupy the Oval Office. And this, Nicholas Evan Sarantakes suggests, may explain why Nixon, so despised for all his faults and failings, was nonetheless also widely loved by the American public. In Fan in Chief Sarantakes sets out to show how Richard Nixon’s passion for sports, more than policy positions or partisan politics, engaged the American people—and how Nixon used this passion to his political advantage. Fan in Chief takes place in the realm of political theater, a theater in which the president’s role was perfectly genuine. A true fan, Nixon exposed core elements of his personality, character, and values in the world of sports; through sport he could connect and communicate with the character and values of his fellow Americans. Fan in Chief is thus a story of both personality and politics; but more than that, it is an in-depth exploration of what Richard Nixon’s love of sport can tell us about the man and his times.

How did cattle drives come about—and why did the cowboy become an iconic American hero? Cattle drives were the largest, longest, and ultimately the last of the great forced animal migrations in human history. Spilling out of Texas, they spread longhorns, cowboys, and the culture that roped the two together throughout the American West. In cities like Abilene, Dodge City, and Wichita, buyers paid off ranchers, ranchers paid off wranglers, and railroad lines took the cattle east to the packing plants of St. Louis and Chicago. The cattle drives of our imagination are filled with colorful cowboys prodding and coaxing a line of bellowing animals along a dusty path through the wilderness. These sturdy cowhands always triumph over stampedes, swollen rivers, and bloodthirsty Indians to deliver their mighty-horned companions to market—but Tim Lehman’s Up the Trail reveals that the gritty reality was vastly different. Far from being rugged individualists, the actual cow herders were itinerant laborers—a proletariat on horseback who connected cattle from the remote prairies of Texas with the nation’s industrial slaughterhouses. Lehman demystifies the cowboy life by describing the origins of the cattle drive and the extensive planning, complicated logistics, great skill, and good luck essential to getting the cows to market. He reveals how drives figured into the larger story of postwar economic development and traces the complex effects the cattle business had on the environment. He also explores how the premodern cowboy became a national hero who personified the manly virtues of rugged individualism and personal independence. Grounded in primary sources, this absorbing book takes advantage of recent scholarship on labor, race, gender, and the environment. The lively narrative will appeal to students of Texas and western history as well as anyone interested in cowboy culture.