Every Sunday in America millions of people gather around their TV's to watch the most popular sport in the country today, professional football. Professional football's stature has only recently, in the last 35 years, grown to be the culture-defining pastime that it is today. Pigskin by Robert W. Peterson, who has written other sports history books such as Only the Ball Was White and Cages to Jump Shots, is about the roots of professional football, how the game was played and how the business was done before the era of big money TV contracts. It tells the story of how through humble beginnings and times of doubt professional football grew, found its place, and has thrived through the perseverance and hard work of many people. Early proponents of pro football had to fight feelings of anti-professionalism amongst the biggest gurus of their own sport. Sports such as boxing, horse racing, college football, not to mention baseball, dwarfed pro football in popularity and revenues. Pigskin is an excellent book that vividly describes the ascension of professional football from the days of under the table payments from Ivy League programs and athletic clubs to the television era of the 1950's.
The first recorded history of a football player being paid to play in a football game was in a game between Allegheny Athletic Association and the Pittsburgh Athletic Club in1892. According to the book there were as many as 5 professionals, or "ringers", playing in the game between the rival athletic clubs. Only one exists in writing today, Pudge Heffelinger, who was a 3-time All-American guard from Yale. The receipt of his $500 payment to play in the game for the Allegheny team now sits in the pro football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. .
Through the first two decades after the turn of the century, professional football was played without any organized league or conference of any kind. Local athletic clubs or YMCA's would just throw together a team and they would travel around playing football games for a pre-determined share of the gate receipts.
In "Pigskin, Patriarchy, and Pain" author Don Sabo declares that football is a socially stressed phenomenon that instills the "pain principle" into the male youth of today. Sabo begins his essay with some background information about himself, including the pain that he has been in for past years and...
Suzuki believes that by binding her eyes, nose, mouth and ears with pigskin, she is able to 'reset' her senses by using an aggressive sensual reduction to get in touch with her inner self. ... The pigskin included in Bind refers to Suzuki's childhood memories and represents the issue of societal oppression. The disfiguration of her face by the pigskin symbolises notions of violence and repression, with the colour of the blood emphasising the violence, aggression and anger women are experiencing and the black background highlighting the dark undertone of reality women in Japan h...
First day of school and they had us already planning on going to football games to practice for the big competitions in the fall, it was called Pigskin. Pigskin is where the best of the best get picked out amongst against other schools all over the area and if you make it far enough even state. ...
The current institutional structure of intercollegiate athletics is attempting to maximize educational quality and athletic excellence simultaneously. Each of which will inevitably impinge on one another. Universities claim that their athletes are amateurs who are attending college for academic achi...
