Download Free The Sports Of Our Presidents Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online The Sports Of Our Presidents and write the review.

"Looking at the athletic strengths, feats, and shortcomings of our presidents, John Sayle Watterson explores not only their health, physical attributes, personalities, and sports IQs, but also the increasing trend of Americans in the past century to equate sporting achievements with courage, manliness, and political competence."--Dust jacket [p. 2].
A colorful look at how modern presidents play sports, have used sports to play politics, and what our fan-in-chief can often tell us about our national pastimes. POWER PLAYERS tells all the great stories of presidents and the sports they played, loved and spectated as a way to better understand what it takes to be elected to lead a country driven by sports fans of all stripes. While every modern president has used sports to relate to Joe Q. Public, POWER PLAYERS turns the lens around to examine how sports have shaped our presidents and made for some amazing moments in White House history, including: Dwight Eisenhower played so much golf he had a putting green built outside the Oval Office!. (He also almost died on a golf course while in office.) How John F. Kennedy’s touch-football games with family were knowing plays to polish the Camelot mystique. People might not have related to the aloof and awkward Richard Nixon but, hey, he would bowl a few frames just like them. Ronald Reagan didn’t just play the part of “The Gipper” for the silver screen, but truly adopted the famous footballer’s never-say-die persona. George H.W. Bush once ran a horseshoe league from the White House – with a commissioner and brackets! (He would later claim to have come up with the fan expression, “You da man.”) Bill Clinton’s Arkansas Razorback fandom was so intense that he could be found shouting at the referees from a box at the basketball national championship game in 1994. George W. Bush’s not only owned the Texas Rangers but also threw out the most iconic first pitch ever in the 2001 World Series. What really went down when Barack Obama played pickup hoops with the North Carolina Tarheels. (He later won the state by .3 percent of the vote.) Donald Trump is the only president ever featured in a professional wrestling storyline—and everything real and fake that went with that. In the pages of POWER PLAYERS, a love of sports shines through as the key to understanding who these presidents really were and how they chose to play by the rules, occasionally bluff or cheat, all the while coaching the country into a few quality wins and some notorious losses.
Offers an up-to-date overview of the developing and symbiotic relationship between the nation's Commander in Chief and some of the nation's most popular pastimes
The Presidents and the Pastime draws on Curt Smith's extensive background as a former White House presidential speechwriter to chronicle the historic relationship between baseball, the "most American" sport, and the U.S. presidency. Smith, who USA TODAY calls "America's voice of authority on baseball broadcasting," starts before America's birth, when would‑be presidents played baseball antecedents. He charts how baseball cemented its reputation as America's pastime in the nineteenth century, such presidents as Lincoln and Johnson playing town ball or giving employees time off to watch. Smith tracks every U.S. president from Theodore Roosevelt to Donald Trump, each chapter filled with anecdotes: Wilson buoyed by baseball after suffering disability; a heroic FDR saving baseball in World War II; Carter, taught the game by his mother, Lillian; Reagan, airing baseball on radio that he never saw--by "re-creation." George H. W. Bush, for whom Smith wrote, explains, "Baseball has everything." Smith, having interviewed a majority of presidents since Richard Nixon, shares personal stories on each. Throughout, The Presidents and the Pastime provides a riveting narrative of how America's leaders have treated baseball. From Taft as the first president to throw the "first pitch" on Opening Day in 1910 to Obama's "Go Sox!" scrawled in the guest register at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2014, our presidents have deemed it the quintessentially American sport, enriching both their office and the nation.
The book examines the relationship between the presidency and the sport, and argues through stories that the two naturally go together. Golf is the sport of presidents. It defines the presidency. It is a game of patience, concentration, focus, and moving forward toward a target. The job is about aim and guiding others toward an end goal amid the obstacle, and the job requires simplicity and making progress in as fewer moves as possible. Golf allows access to the president, and it is also a form of communication the leader uses to send subtle messages to the public.
From the author of Heart Over Height with 3x NBA Dunk Champ Nate Robinson and Forces of Character with 3x Super Bowl Champion and Fighter Pilot, Chad Hennings, comes a groundbreaking new project by Jon Finkel. For the first time in the history of the United States, this book compiles a comprehensive, complete and official ranking of our presidents based on their skills as athletes. Amazingly, in our never-ending quest to quantify, qualify, list and rank everything in the known universe, our best and brightest stat geeks have thus far ignored the athletic accomplishments of our commanders-in-chief. This egregious oversight ends now. Which president saved 77 lives as a lifeguard? Which one's lucky handball is still sitting in the Smithsonian over a century after he last played with it? Which president invented a sport? Or practiced jiu-jitsu three afternoons a week while in office? Or was an NCAA champion? The answers to these questions (in order: Reagan, Lincoln, Hoover, T. Roosevelt, Ford) don't even scratch the surface of the athletic information in this book, which is why I harnessed the power of statistics and the spirit of sabermetrics to create a system to properly crown one of our presidents king of the athletic arena. To maintain consistency with other ranking systems, and to compete with the likes of ERA, WAR, VORP and all the others, this ranking metric is called PAS, short for President Athlete Score. In conversation, it could be used something like, "Dude, no way Woodrow Wilson was a better athlete than Ronald Reagan, have you seen their PAS rankings? It's not even close!" The components of the PAS ranking are as follows, with each president receiving either a 1 (worst) or a 5 (best) in a particular category. The highest possible score is a 25. Executive Power: Ranks a president's physical strength. Running Ability: Ranks a president's physical fitness and cardio. Weighs and Means: Ranks how fit a president stayed once in office. Executive Experience: Ranks the athletic accomplishments of a president. Mettle of Honor: Ranks a president's athletic toughness and endurance (for many of our earlier presidents, this involved military accomplishments in lieu of organized sports). The book is divided into two parts: Part I: Off the Ballot The first part of the book features the presidents that fall in the bottom half of the rankings and they've been divided up into three chapters: Commanders in Beef, The Van Buren Boys, and Lame Ducks. Part II: The Contenders This section features the presidents in the top half of the rankings, culminating in the revealing of our most athletic president. This section will be divided into four chapters: Fit for Office, National Treasures, Sultans of the Smithsonian and Mount Rushmore - The Athletes.
A collection of little-known facts about the U.S. presidents that provides a glimpse into their personalities, covering such topics as nicknames, families, finances, food and drink, homes, sports, hobbies, and oddities, as well as their lives after the presidency.
“It seemed as if Theodore Roosevelt’s biographers had closed the book on his life story. But Ryan Swanson has uncovered an untold chapter” (Johnny Smith, coauthor of Blood Brothers: The Fatal Friendship between Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X). Crippling asthma, a frail build, and grossly myopic eyesight: these were the ailments that plagued Teddy Roosevelt as a child. In adulthood, he was diagnosed with a potentially fatal heart condition and was told never to exert himself again. Roosevelt’s body was his weakness, the one hill he could never fully conquer—and as a result he developed what would become a lifelong obsession with athletics that he carried with him into his presidency. As President of the United States, Roosevelt boxed, practiced Ju-Jitsu, played tennis nearly every day, and frequently invited athletes and teams to the White House. It was during his administration that America saw baseball’s first ever World Series; interscholastic sports began; and schools began to place an emphasis on physical education. In addition, the NCAA formed, and the United States hosted the Olympic Games for the first time. From a prize-winning historian, this book shows how Roosevelt fought desperately (and sometimes successfully) to shape American athletics in accordance with his imperialistic view of the world. It reveals that, in one way or another, we can trace our fanaticism for fitness and sports directly back to the twenty-sixth president and his relentless pursuit of “The Strenuous Life.” “Essential reading for anyone who cares about the history of sports in America.” —Michael Kazin, author of War against War: The American Fight for Peace, 1914–1918