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King Football: Sport and Spectacle in the Golden Age of Radio and Newsreels, Movies and Magazines, the Weekly and the Daily Press
This landmark work explores the vibrant world of football from the 1920s through the 1950s, a period in which the game became deeply embedded in American life. Though millions experienced the thrills of college and professional football firsthand during these years, many more encountered the game through their daily newspapers or the weekly Saturday Evening Post , on radio broadcasts, and in the newsreels and feature films shown at their local movie theaters. Asking what football meant to these millions who followed it either casually or passionately, Michael Oriard reconstructs a media-created world of football and explores its deep entanglements with a modernizing American society.
Football, claims Oriard, served as an agent of "Americanization" for immigrant groups but resisted attempts at true integration and racial equality, while anxieties over the domestication and affluence of middle-class American life helped pave the way for the sport's rise in popularity during the Cold War. Underlying these threads is the story of how the print and broadcast media, in ways specific to each medium, were powerful forces in constructing the football culture we know today.
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"[Oriard] captures the self-aggrandizing illogic of the game's cultural role in his absorbing study of early 20th-century culture.-- New York Times
"This excellent book should be required reading on any American Studies course worth the name. . . . Oriard's detailed and well-written work shows us how the game has been constructed through notions of national, gendered and ethnic--and, as he insists, also class--identities.-- Journal of American Studies
In this landmark work exploring the vibrant world of football from the 1920s through the 1950s, Michael Oriard explores how the mass media shaped and were shaped by the exploding popularity of football. King Football is at once a sweeping cultural history of football, a provocative study of the power of print and broadcast media, and a compelling investigation of American attitudes about race, class, and gender and their relationship to sport.
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Football, claims Oriard, served as an agent of "Americanization" for immigrant groups but resisted attempts at true integration and racial equality, while anxieties over the domestication and affluence of middle-class American life helped pave the way for the sport's rise in popularity during the Cold War. Underlying these threads is the story of how the print and broadcast media, in ways specific to each medium, were powerful forces in constructing the football culture we know today.
<!--copy for pb
"[Oriard] captures the self-aggrandizing illogic of the game's cultural role in his absorbing study of early 20th-century culture.-- New York Times
"This excellent book should be required reading on any American Studies course worth the name. . . . Oriard's detailed and well-written work shows us how the game has been constructed through notions of national, gendered and ethnic--and, as he insists, also class--identities.-- Journal of American Studies
In this landmark work exploring the vibrant world of football from the 1920s through the 1950s, Michael Oriard explores how the mass media shaped and were shaped by the exploding popularity of football. King Football is at once a sweeping cultural history of football, a provocative study of the power of print and broadcast media, and a compelling investigation of American attitudes about race, class, and gender and their relationship to sport.
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512 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2001
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26 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 13, 2022
can't recommend this book highly enough. reading football was great - former nfl player oriard quite literally read everything football-related up to 1920 - but king football is in a league of its own. here, oriard ranges across newsreels, movies, magazine articles, daily sports coverage, and more, turning this material into exceptional chapters on race, class, ethnicity, masculinity (worth the price of admission all by itself), reform of the sport's rules, authority, etc.
when i interviewed oriard several years ago (https://www.splicetoday.com/sports/th...), i really slept on just how great he was. he might be the finest athlete-turned-academic in the history of the american academy. the end of autumn is a magnificent memoir, bowled over (a later work) was solid, and RF and KF - the fruits of his mature career - are masterpieces, the latter eminently so. this guy, who i believe has retired from oregon state, will vanish into the mists of history without the respect he is due or the clout he could have chased. what a friggin' champ, and i don't say that lightly.
i'm now reading brand nfl and his book on football illustration (a beautiful little offering from the university of nebraska press sports imprint). the former seems to be more in the class of bowled over, but a bit better because that's when oriard was an active player, while the book on illustration is top tier (oriard is a whiz when it comes to visual culture and such things).
one note: more and more these days, i'm reading books on kindle because i can easily adjust the typeface and size (i'm more likely to do this for non coffee table books, obviously - the kindle doesn't do justice to those big art books). given the volume of carefully chosen illustrations in KF, i procured a copy of the actual UNC Press book, and yep, it's as bad as all the rest they publish. UNC Press typically uses a minuscule font size - I've abandoned reading Michael O'Brien's Conjectures of Order so many times because of the font size of the text - and this book, set in New Baskerville, Meta, and Champion types by "Tseng Information Systems" is a fucking disasterpiece. Usually a 350-page monograph with this sort of dense construction takes me about 6-7 hours to read, perhaps 8 if i'm heavily outlining it for future use. this took +/- 12, maybe a tad longer, because my eyes kept glazing over (and i work one day job and several others, so i can't abide wasted time). yeesh.
when i interviewed oriard several years ago (https://www.splicetoday.com/sports/th...), i really slept on just how great he was. he might be the finest athlete-turned-academic in the history of the american academy. the end of autumn is a magnificent memoir, bowled over (a later work) was solid, and RF and KF - the fruits of his mature career - are masterpieces, the latter eminently so. this guy, who i believe has retired from oregon state, will vanish into the mists of history without the respect he is due or the clout he could have chased. what a friggin' champ, and i don't say that lightly.
i'm now reading brand nfl and his book on football illustration (a beautiful little offering from the university of nebraska press sports imprint). the former seems to be more in the class of bowled over, but a bit better because that's when oriard was an active player, while the book on illustration is top tier (oriard is a whiz when it comes to visual culture and such things).
one note: more and more these days, i'm reading books on kindle because i can easily adjust the typeface and size (i'm more likely to do this for non coffee table books, obviously - the kindle doesn't do justice to those big art books). given the volume of carefully chosen illustrations in KF, i procured a copy of the actual UNC Press book, and yep, it's as bad as all the rest they publish. UNC Press typically uses a minuscule font size - I've abandoned reading Michael O'Brien's Conjectures of Order so many times because of the font size of the text - and this book, set in New Baskerville, Meta, and Champion types by "Tseng Information Systems" is a fucking disasterpiece. Usually a 350-page monograph with this sort of dense construction takes me about 6-7 hours to read, perhaps 8 if i'm heavily outlining it for future use. this took +/- 12, maybe a tad longer, because my eyes kept glazing over (and i work one day job and several others, so i can't abide wasted time). yeesh.
September 20, 2019
It was a good book because my brother plays football.
December 8, 2009
I can’t believe I’m the first Goodreader to rate this book! I don’t know that I’ve encountered a long-forgotten 1960s English book about Modern Architecture that wasn’t on at least a couple “shelves” – and this is about the most popular sport in the country! Is football too pedestrian a subject for my esteemed fellow book club members? 18,000 people rating Goodnight Moon far north of four-stars tells me otherwise.
Anyhoo… the other day I heard the author on NPR and, as it’s that time of the year, I wanted to read his newest book about the development of college football as it transitioned into the questionable Bowl Championship System (BCS) currently in place. I was overwhelmed with shock and excitement when my local library’s database listed two copies as “available.” Then, of course, the typical disappointment set in when the book was nowhere to be found (I say typical since I’ve come to realize that if you can’t rely on the nation’s third largest library to never have the book you’re looking for, then what library can you rely on?). As Oriard has only written seven books, it was surprising that the library actually had one of them, so I quickly snatched it up.
Admittedly, the subtitle inclusion of such terms as “Spectacle…Golden Age…Newsreels…Daily Press…” concerned me quite a bit. However this is a terrific historical text that is in no way some nostalgic-trip-down-memory-lane picture book as the subtitle sort-of implies. If anything, it borders on being too academically rigorous like Harold Seymour’s baseball book that I just couldn’t get through. Oriard’s narrative is much more engaging as it stays away from insane, Seymourian statistics. Instead of stating something like, “There were 2,194 registered baseball players between the ages of 9 and 12 in Chicago’s South Side neighborhood during the 1923 season yielding a mean allotment of one municipal team for every 17.26 players…et cetera.,” Oriard might go with a more effective, “Football was popular that year amongst school-aged children.”
The other factor that made this quite palatable – though I was initially unsure – is Oriard’s reliance upon the aforementioned media resources as a vehicle with which to trace how the sport evolved to increasingly dominate the attention and participation of US citizenry. As I have an innate tendency to distrust most journalism from even the likes of The New York Times, Oriard’s use of resources from Some Town in Texas Gazette, goofy stories from Colliers, and, gulp, Hearst newsreels didn’t initially seem like the basis for solid scholarship. But this is indeed a solid narrative, dealing with seemingly all the relevant issues surrounding the game as it transitioned from an elite pursuit of helmetless Yalies to an increasingly padded anyone-from-anywhere population segment over a fifty-year period (well, anyman – not woman, though he deals with that as well). These issues include the Americanization of different ethnic groups, the incremental acceptance of black players during and after Jim Crow, the ongoing debates about the “professionalism” of the college game (including the coverage of various Socialist Dailies), the emergence of the NFL – definitely not a fait accompli circa 1920 – and the role of football as the ultimate expression of “masculinity” in the US (especially during interwar periods) to the logical exclusion of “sissies” and “females” (hilariously, J. C. Leyendecker’s oft-commissioned, early-century cover art that came to represent the ideal, football dude archetype were really paintings of his gay lover!).
The use of sundry media sources – as questionable as they might be individually – seems necessary to deal with these myriad social and cultural issues. All of this is poised against such external backdrops as Freudian theory, State Department visa restrictions, the “science” of Eugenics, the Civil Rights movement, World Wars, The Great Depression, fledgling Feminism, and, of course, the insatiable thirst for entertainment in this country. However, unlike many scholarly texts, say, within the discipline of architecture, Oriard doesn’t smother/disfigure the main topic under the weight of too much theoretical/socioeconomic/critical baggage. There’s a thankful exclusion of Heidiggerian quotes (or perhaps more relevantly, Nietzschean “Supermen”) that seem to sneak their way into every proper essay about a bathroom renovation within my chosen profession. It’s a well-balanced history that seems comprehensive while also necessarily incomplete. Here, many doors of further inquiry are opened, but for those not really interested in more football books (unless his latest offering miraculously appears on one of my library’s shelves), this is a fulfilling account of a pivotal period of the sport’s history.
Anyhoo… the other day I heard the author on NPR and, as it’s that time of the year, I wanted to read his newest book about the development of college football as it transitioned into the questionable Bowl Championship System (BCS) currently in place. I was overwhelmed with shock and excitement when my local library’s database listed two copies as “available.” Then, of course, the typical disappointment set in when the book was nowhere to be found (I say typical since I’ve come to realize that if you can’t rely on the nation’s third largest library to never have the book you’re looking for, then what library can you rely on?). As Oriard has only written seven books, it was surprising that the library actually had one of them, so I quickly snatched it up.
Admittedly, the subtitle inclusion of such terms as “Spectacle…Golden Age…Newsreels…Daily Press…” concerned me quite a bit. However this is a terrific historical text that is in no way some nostalgic-trip-down-memory-lane picture book as the subtitle sort-of implies. If anything, it borders on being too academically rigorous like Harold Seymour’s baseball book that I just couldn’t get through. Oriard’s narrative is much more engaging as it stays away from insane, Seymourian statistics. Instead of stating something like, “There were 2,194 registered baseball players between the ages of 9 and 12 in Chicago’s South Side neighborhood during the 1923 season yielding a mean allotment of one municipal team for every 17.26 players…et cetera.,” Oriard might go with a more effective, “Football was popular that year amongst school-aged children.”
The other factor that made this quite palatable – though I was initially unsure – is Oriard’s reliance upon the aforementioned media resources as a vehicle with which to trace how the sport evolved to increasingly dominate the attention and participation of US citizenry. As I have an innate tendency to distrust most journalism from even the likes of The New York Times, Oriard’s use of resources from Some Town in Texas Gazette, goofy stories from Colliers, and, gulp, Hearst newsreels didn’t initially seem like the basis for solid scholarship. But this is indeed a solid narrative, dealing with seemingly all the relevant issues surrounding the game as it transitioned from an elite pursuit of helmetless Yalies to an increasingly padded anyone-from-anywhere population segment over a fifty-year period (well, anyman – not woman, though he deals with that as well). These issues include the Americanization of different ethnic groups, the incremental acceptance of black players during and after Jim Crow, the ongoing debates about the “professionalism” of the college game (including the coverage of various Socialist Dailies), the emergence of the NFL – definitely not a fait accompli circa 1920 – and the role of football as the ultimate expression of “masculinity” in the US (especially during interwar periods) to the logical exclusion of “sissies” and “females” (hilariously, J. C. Leyendecker’s oft-commissioned, early-century cover art that came to represent the ideal, football dude archetype were really paintings of his gay lover!).
The use of sundry media sources – as questionable as they might be individually – seems necessary to deal with these myriad social and cultural issues. All of this is poised against such external backdrops as Freudian theory, State Department visa restrictions, the “science” of Eugenics, the Civil Rights movement, World Wars, The Great Depression, fledgling Feminism, and, of course, the insatiable thirst for entertainment in this country. However, unlike many scholarly texts, say, within the discipline of architecture, Oriard doesn’t smother/disfigure the main topic under the weight of too much theoretical/socioeconomic/critical baggage. There’s a thankful exclusion of Heidiggerian quotes (or perhaps more relevantly, Nietzschean “Supermen”) that seem to sneak their way into every proper essay about a bathroom renovation within my chosen profession. It’s a well-balanced history that seems comprehensive while also necessarily incomplete. Here, many doors of further inquiry are opened, but for those not really interested in more football books (unless his latest offering miraculously appears on one of my library’s shelves), this is a fulfilling account of a pivotal period of the sport’s history.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews