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While the Super Bowl has become a worldwide cultural event, the annual league championship games had a long history even before the first Super Bowl in January, 1967. From the first American Football League's attempt to settle the league title on the gridiron in 1926 to the separate NFL and AFL championships of the 1965 season, this history offers a narrative of each game, including line-ups, box scores and team statistics.
In the first history of pro football's golden age--the glory days of the '60s--America's leading football historian takes readers back to the time of titans like Unitas, Meredith, Hornung, Brown, Lombardi, Sayers, Butkus, Namath, and the others who made the sport so popular. 100 photos.
The 1960s were a tumultuous period in U.S. history and the sporting world was not immune to the decade's upturn of tradition. As war in Southeast Asia, civil unrest at home and political assassinations rocked the nation, professional football struggled to attract fans. While some players fought for civil rights and others fought overseas, the ideological divides behind the protests and riots in the streets spilled into the locker rooms, and athletes increasingly brought their political beliefs into the sports world. This history describes how a decade of social upheaval affected life on the gridiron, and the personalities and events that shaped the game. The debut of the Super Bowl, soon to become a fixture of American culture, marked a professional sport on the rise. Increasingly lucrative television contracts and innovations in the filming and broadcasting of games expanded pro football's audiences. An authoritarian old guard, best represented by the revered Vince Lombardi, began to give way as star players like Joe Namath commanded new levels of pay and power. And at last, all teams fielded African American players, belatedly beginning the correction of the sport's greatest wrong.
The 1966 Green Bay Packers were one of the greatest teams in professional football history. Led by legendary head coach Vince Lombardi and 10 future Hall of Famers--including Bart Starr, Jim Taylor, Forrest Gregg, Willie Davis and Ray Nitschke--they were the decisive winners of Super Bowl I, defeating the Kansas City Chiefs and upholding the superiority of the National Football League over the upstart American Football League. This book tells the story of the hard-working '66 Packers on the gridiron and their legacy in Titletown, USA.
The All-American Football Conference was the only challenger to the NFL (except for the American Football League of the 1960s) to survive more than two seasons in competition with the established league. It ultimately failed to achieve its goal of a peaceful coexistence with the NFL and folded in 1949. Its Cleveland Browns and San Francisco 49ers, which were absorbed by the NFL in 1950, are still in business. This book takes a brief look at all of the NFL's challengers (and would-be challengers) from 1926 to 1945. It looks particularly at the All-American Conference, which overcame obstacles that proved too difficult for others and opened the 1946 season with teams on the East Coast, in the Midwest, on the West Coast, and in the deep South, making it a truly "All-American" enterprise. Each season and off-season is examined in detail.
The 1951 Los Angeles Rams were one of the greatest teams in professional football history. Led by pioneer owner Daniel Reeves, head coach Joe Stydahar, and future Hall of Famers Bob Waterfield, Norm Van Brocklin, Elroy Hirsch, Tom Fears, and Andy Robustelli, the team won the NFL championship of that season. In doing this, they defeated the defending champion Cleveland Browns in a fantastic rematch of the 1950 title game. The Rams were the first team in a major professional sports league to relocate to the West Coast, forever changing the face of the NFL and professional sports in America. Fueled by an exciting and accomplished lineup of veteran star players and impactful rookies, the product of the Rams' innovative scouting system and their reintegration of the NFL in 1946, the Rams successfully married the NFL to the glamorous world of Hollywood. Delve into the story of the '51 Rams, the NFL's First West Coast Champions.
Wearing borrowed uniforms, practicing on obscure college campuses, and led by a former Marine Corps W.W. II fighter ace as commissioner, the American Football League (AFL) debuted in the Fall of 1960 to challenge the monopoly of the well-established National Football League. Within ten years it had won two Super Bowls and had forced a merger with its rival, splitting the NFL into the National and American Football Conferences. This colorful history of the AFL and its unforgettable cast of characters, from Billy Cannon to Joe Namath to its "Foolish Club" of team owners, arrives on the 50th anniversary of the AFL's first season to recount the startling success of an upstart league that prevailed against long odds.
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.
For fans of professional football who thought they had read everything about the history of the game, Mark L. Ford breaks new ground with this account of the NFL preseason. Described as “test labs” by Ford, the preseason games are a time for trying out new strategies, considering future rule changes, and implementing television coverage innovations. For thousands of players who vie for a spot in the league every summer, the preseason is also the defining moment where careers can be made or broken. A History of NFL Preseason and Exhibition Games: 1960 to 1985 is one of two books by Ford on professional football’s preseason. Along with its companion volume—which covers 1986 to 2013—this resource provides information on every NFL and AFL preseason game played since the AFL was launched in 1960. All the interesting events and people that were part of these summer battles are detailed, as well as the first outings for new teams, new rules, and new stars. In addition, Ford includes amusing anecdotes and mishaps, such as a 1972 game that was lost because the players wore the wrong shoes. Throughout the book, Ford recounts key off-season developments that would transform professional football from a modest enterprise into a global monopoly with annual revenues and assets worth billions. A History of NFL Preseason and Exhibition Games is a unique and important reference for pro football fans and cultural historians alike.
In the mid-1960s, when pro football eclipsed baseball as America's leading spectator sport, the NFL had the most exciting season in its history. The Eastern Conference Cleveland Browns were the champions in 1965 yet most of the action was in the Western Conference, where the reigning Baltimore Colts contended with the formidable Green Bay Packers and Chicago Bears. All three teams played two games apiece against the Detroit Lions, a power earlier in the decade, and the Minnesota Vikings and Los Angeles Rams, who were becoming dominant in the league. In those days the NFL played a wide-open game--long touchdown passes, fumbles and interceptions kept fans on the edges of their seats through seven games each weekend. The league's deep bench included such players as Jim Brown, Johnny Unitas, Tom Matte, Bart Starr, Paul Hornung and Dave Robinson, rookies Gale Sayers and Dick Butkus, and key coaches Don Shula, Vince Lombardi and George Halas. A fantastic final weekend led to a one-game playoff for the right to face the Browns for the championship. Drawing on interviews with surviving players and executives, this book recounts the thrilling drama of the '65 season and places it in the broader context of NFL history.