Strange But True Football Stories

by Zander Hollander

Recounts twenty-three humorous, frustrating, disappointing, and exciting moments in the past half-century of football.

Genres: Sports, Football

Library Binding

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Zander Hollander was an American sportswriter, journalist, editor and archivist.

Many years before the internet and unfinished cable television system emerged, Hollander served as a prolific supplier of encyclopedias on every major sport. At this point, he edited, wrote or packaged around 300 books over a professional career that spanned 45 years.

From 1971 to 1997, Hollander edited sports yearbooks, brick-sized tomes known as Complete Handbooks, which in the pre-Internet era were almost holy objects to a certain type of sports-crazed youngster. Here, in one glorious place, was information — statistics, team rosters, records, schedules, predictions for the coming season and more — freed from the restrictions of newspaper column inches and far beyond what a still embryonic cable television system was providing.

Reviews

[Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many of the stories in this collection have appeared elsewhere, so are well known. There is the very famous sneaker game between the Giants and Bears in 1934, the famous “five downs” game in 1940 between Cornell and Dartmouth, the wrong way run by Viking Jim Marshall and the time when halfback Tom Matte was forced to play quarterback for the Baltimore Colts in the 1965 playoff game against the Green Bay Packers. A memorable feature of the game where Matte played quarterback was his use of a wristband crib sheet to help him in calling the plays.
The most significant feature of the book is the historical recollections about the changed role of football powers in college football. As some of the stories demonstrate, in the first half of the twentieth century, there were powerful teams fielded by small colleges and Ivy League schools were major powers in college football. There were also some incredible mismatches.
Written for the adolescent reader, this is a book about some of the unusual events that have taken place involving a few of the people that made the modern game what it is today.

[Timothy · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the books that started a life-long love of reading for me as a kid...I must have read this 200 times (or more!) as it was part of a sports library in our home. Perfectly written for kids 6 or up, no doubt Liberals would condemn this as "toxic masculinity" today and demand little boys read "My First Transsexual Sharia Law Coloring Book" instead or face "hate crimes" charges...

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

So I didn't know anything about football when I got this from a friend but I still found this book fascinating.

A ton of memorable stories in here:

(1) The poor team that got beat 222-0 or something.

(2) The one guy who scored a touchdown in the wrong direction.