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The Big Book of Football Stories: Timeless and Compelling Tales from the Gridiron
There is nothing more American than playing football or cheering for favorite teams. Millions watch each fall with intense interest as high school, college, and professional players hit the field. And there is nothing more entertaining than reading about the game, its colorful players and coaches, and its rivalries.
Rich in history and detail, The Big Book of Football Stories will entertain, enlighten, and amuse. These are enduring stories that have passed the test of time and have attracted generations of readers. They are custom-made for the imaginative reader who seeks fantastic tales from the gridiron.
Here is icon Paul “Bear” Bryant on how to coach, founding father Walter Camp describing the best traits of a player, stories from football’s early days that inspired generations of players, and an account from 1921 on how teams can best use the new forward pass to its advantage.
The modern era is brought to life with an account of the trials of college football’s worst team, how “the NFL Today” revolutionized football's popularity, an account of Bullet Bill Dudley, the game’s last two-way player, stories of iconic quarterbacks Bart Starr and Tom Brady, and an inside view of the trenches from NFL brawler Ralph Cindrich.
Here is everything a reader needs for insight into the game, its players, and favorite teams. So many stories, it will take a full season to read and enjoy—and the best part, it won't hurt a bit.
Rich in history and detail, The Big Book of Football Stories will entertain, enlighten, and amuse. These are enduring stories that have passed the test of time and have attracted generations of readers. They are custom-made for the imaginative reader who seeks fantastic tales from the gridiron.
Here is icon Paul “Bear” Bryant on how to coach, founding father Walter Camp describing the best traits of a player, stories from football’s early days that inspired generations of players, and an account from 1921 on how teams can best use the new forward pass to its advantage.
The modern era is brought to life with an account of the trials of college football’s worst team, how “the NFL Today” revolutionized football's popularity, an account of Bullet Bill Dudley, the game’s last two-way player, stories of iconic quarterbacks Bart Starr and Tom Brady, and an inside view of the trenches from NFL brawler Ralph Cindrich.
Here is everything a reader needs for insight into the game, its players, and favorite teams. So many stories, it will take a full season to read and enjoy—and the best part, it won't hurt a bit.
314 pages, Paperback
Published July 1, 2025
About the author
Tom McCarthy
111 books508 followersTom McCarthy — “English fiction’s new laureate of disappointment” (Time Out, September 2007) — is a writer and artist. He was born in 1969 and lives in a tower-block in London. Tom grew up in Greenwich, south London, and studied English at New College, Oxford. After a couple of years in Prague in the early 1990s, he lived in Amsterdam as literary editor of the local Time Out, and later worked in British television as well as co-editing Mute magazine.
His debut novel Remainder was first published in November 2005 by Paris-based art press Metronome. After becoming a cult hit championed first by British webzines (it was 3:AM Magazine’s Book of the Year for 2005) and then by the literary press, Remainder was republished by Alma Books in the UK (2006) and Vintage in the US (2007). A French version is to be followed by editions in Japanese, Korean, Greek, Spanish and Croatian.
A work of literary criticism, Tintin and the Secret of Literature, was released by Granta Books in June 2006. It also came out in France and an American edition is in the offing.
Tom’s second novel, Men in Space came out in 2007.
He has published numerous stories, essays and articles on literature, philosophy and art in publications including The Observer, The Times Literary Supplement and Contemporary Magazine, as well as in anthologies such as London from Punk to Blair (Reaktion Books), Theology and the Political (Duke University Press) and The Milgram Experiment (Jan van Eyck Press). His story, “Kool Thing, Or Why I Want to Fuck Patty Hearst” appeared in The Empty Page: Fiction Inspired By Sonic Youth (Serpent’s Tail) in 2008.
His ongoing project the International Necronautical Society, a semi-fictitious avant-garde network that surfaces through publications, proclamations, denunciations and live events, has been described by Untitled Magazine as ‘the most comprehensive total art work we have seen in years’ and by Art Monthly as ‘a platform for fantastically mobile thinking’. In 2003 the INS broke into the BBC website and inserted propaganda into its source-code. The following year, they set up a broadcasting unit at the ICA from which more than forty ‘agents’ generated non-stop poem-codes which were transmitted over FM radio in London and by internet to collaborating radio stations around the world.
Tom has also tutored and lectured at various institutions including the Architectural Association, Central Saint Martins School of Art, the Royal College of Art, Goldsmiths College and Southern California Institute of Architecture. He recently taught a course on ‘Catastrophe’ with Marko Daniel at the London Consortium.
His debut novel Remainder was first published in November 2005 by Paris-based art press Metronome. After becoming a cult hit championed first by British webzines (it was 3:AM Magazine’s Book of the Year for 2005) and then by the literary press, Remainder was republished by Alma Books in the UK (2006) and Vintage in the US (2007). A French version is to be followed by editions in Japanese, Korean, Greek, Spanish and Croatian.
A work of literary criticism, Tintin and the Secret of Literature, was released by Granta Books in June 2006. It also came out in France and an American edition is in the offing.
Tom’s second novel, Men in Space came out in 2007.
He has published numerous stories, essays and articles on literature, philosophy and art in publications including The Observer, The Times Literary Supplement and Contemporary Magazine, as well as in anthologies such as London from Punk to Blair (Reaktion Books), Theology and the Political (Duke University Press) and The Milgram Experiment (Jan van Eyck Press). His story, “Kool Thing, Or Why I Want to Fuck Patty Hearst” appeared in The Empty Page: Fiction Inspired By Sonic Youth (Serpent’s Tail) in 2008.
His ongoing project the International Necronautical Society, a semi-fictitious avant-garde network that surfaces through publications, proclamations, denunciations and live events, has been described by Untitled Magazine as ‘the most comprehensive total art work we have seen in years’ and by Art Monthly as ‘a platform for fantastically mobile thinking’. In 2003 the INS broke into the BBC website and inserted propaganda into its source-code. The following year, they set up a broadcasting unit at the ICA from which more than forty ‘agents’ generated non-stop poem-codes which were transmitted over FM radio in London and by internet to collaborating radio stations around the world.
Tom has also tutored and lectured at various institutions including the Architectural Association, Central Saint Martins School of Art, the Royal College of Art, Goldsmiths College and Southern California Institute of Architecture. He recently taught a course on ‘Catastrophe’ with Marko Daniel at the London Consortium.
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