Is football an athletic contest or a social event? Is it a game of
skill, a test of manhood, or merely an organized brawl? Michael
Oriard, a former professional player, asks these and other
intriguing questions in
Reading Football, the first
contemporary book about football's formative years.
American football began in the 1870s as a game to be played, not
watched. Within a brief ten years, it had become a great public
spectacle with an immense following, a phenomenon caused primarily
by the voluminous commentary about the game conducted in popular
newspapers and magazines.
Oriard shows how this constant narrative in football's early years
developed many different stories about what the game
meant:
football as pastime, as the sport of gentlemen, as a science, as a
game of rules and their infringements. He shows how football became
a series of cultural stories about power, luck, strategy, and
deception. These different interpretations have been magnified by
football's current omnipresence on television. According to Oriard,
televised football now plays a cultural role of enormous importance
for men, yet within the field of cultural studies the influence of
football has been ignored until now.
From the book:
"A receiver sprints down the sideline, fast and graceful, then
breaks toward the middle of the field where a safety waits for him.
From forty yards upfield the quarterback releases the ball; it
spirals in an elegant arc toward the goalposts as the receiver now
for the first time looks back to pick up its flight. The pass is a
little high; the receiver leaps, stretches, grasps the
ball--barely, fingers clutching--at the very moment that the safety
drives a helmet into his unprotected ribs. The force of the
collision flings the receiver backward, slamming him to the turf. .
. . This familiar tableau, this exemplary moment in a football
game, epitomizes the appeal of the sport: the dramatic
confrontation of artistry with violence, both equally
necessary."