American Football

Gene Washington’s football career ended long before his daughter Maya was born. She never saw the legendary powerhouse as anything but her dad. She didn’t yet grasp the impact he’d had on the sport - and on America. To understand his historic role in the integration of college football and fully appreciate his legacy, Maya had a lot of catching up to do. Maya retraces her father’s journey from the segregated south to Michigan State during the peak of the Civil Rights Movement and his journey as an NFL pioneer after the 1967 draft.

Barney and Hattie Frank are 12-year-old twins who play football together on the school team. The team is trying to win the County Cup. Hattie is the better player but Barney thinks he can see where the school team is going wrong. So, when a TV talent show is looking for a new manager to help a failing Premiership team to start scoring again, Barney's sure he knows the answer. Maybe, to demonstrate his skills, he could train Hattie to be a top goal scorer.

In our Christian faith, we're either drawing closer to God and to his purposes for our lives or drawing further away. Like an athlete in training, there can be no middle ground.

In this hilariously funny essay collection, former ESPN columnist Rick Reilly com­piles the best of his sports columns - essays that include his expert opinion on athlete tattoos, NFL cheerleaders, and even running with the bulls in Pamplona.

In football, as in life, the value we place on people changes with the rules of the games they play. When we first meet the young man at the center of this extraordinary and moving story, he is one of thirteen children by a mother addicted to crack; he does not know his real name, his father...

James J. Braddock, dubbed “Cinderella Man” by Damon Runyon, was a once promising light heavyweight for whom a string of losses in the ring and a broken right hand happened to coincide with the Great Crash. With one good hand, Braddock was forced to labor on the docks of Hoboken. Only his...

Now a major motion picture starring Jon Voight, Nic Bishop, and C. Thomas Howell. This riveting true story of courage, strength, and football at the height of racial tension in Birmingham, Alabama tells the story of Coach Tandy Gerelds, his running back Tony Nathan, and a high school football...

Sally Jenkins, bestselling co-author of It's Not About the Bike, revives a forgotten piece of history in The Real All Americans. In doing so, she has crafted a truly inspirational story about a Native American football team that is as much about football as Lance Armstrong's book was about a...

Patrick Mahomes is a rising star in the National Football League (NFL). In 2020, the quarterback helped the Kansas City Chiefs win the Super Bowl, signed a record-breaking contract with the team, and was named the Super Bowl's Most Valuable Player. Off the field, Mahomes spends time with his family, works out and eats healthful foods, and gives back to the community. Learn all about the life of Mahomes, including his childhood, career in the NFL, family members, and more.

Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce is one of the best in the NFL. Growing up, he constantly competed against his older brother, Jason Kelce. Whether it was football, basketball, or baseball, Travis Kelce wanted to be the absolute best. In college, he made the switch from quarterback to tight end, and he never looked back. With phenomenal footwork, clutch catches, and record-setting seasons, Kelce has taken the NFL by storm. Follow Travis Kelce on his journey to becoming a star tight end, from high school to two Super Bowl victories.

John Eisenberg's That First Season is the seldom-studied prequel to a phenomenal football career for Vince Lombardi and the Packers, drawing on exhaustive new research and interviews to tell an incredible ensemble tale of a team, a town, and their leader. The once-vaunted Green Bay Packers were a laughingstock by the late 1950s. They hadn't fielded a winning team in more than a decade and were close to losing their franchise to another city. They were in desperate need of a savior, and he arrived in a wood-paneled station wagon in the dead of winter from New York City.

With extensive reporting and engrossing storytelling, Jim Baker and Bernard Corbett give us the scenes of one of the NFL's most successful and popular franchises.

In this revealing, in-depth look at the NFL's greatest quarterback controversy, Adam Lazarus takes listeners into the locker room and inside the huddle to deliver the real story behind the rivalry - when Joe Montana and Steve Young battled on and off the field and forged one of the finest football dynasties of all time. From 1987 to 1994, the two future Hall of Famers spurred each other on to remarkable heights, including three Super Bowl wins and four MVP awards, setting new standards for quarterback excellence.

New York Times reporter Gerald Eskenazi brings us back to 1954, when the New York Giants began a decade of success as an iconic American sports team, winning six division titles between 1954 and 1963. Emerging from years of slumber, going from the Polo Grounds to Yankee Stadium, they produced a crop of hall of fame players whose names still resonate, including Tittle, Gifford, Greer, and Robustelli, making a then $7 New York Giants ticket the toughest to buy in the world of sports.

The Thursday Speeches pulls back the curtain to put listeners in the room with exclusive access to the compelling pregame speeches from one of the best college football coaches in history. The book reveals the exact words James used to inspire the Huskies to slay the football giants of his day. It features the inspiring stories and invaluable life lessons that Coach Don James used to transform the University of Washington football program from obscurity to the national championship.

A story of faith, family, and determination, this book chronicles Notre Dame’s legendary football coach Terry Brennan and the intense, comeback season of 1957....

Can you imagine you and your team winning the biggest game of your lives and pulling off one of your state's biggest upsets? Take a stroll with Dan Blanchard in this heartwarming and inspiring book, The Boys of East Hartford. You'll feel like you've magically entered a special place where we're all on the same team rooting for something extraordinary that is bigger than ourselves. You'll appreciate the efforts of those who have gone before us and be inspired by how we can still collectively shape what lies in front of us. If you're a football fan, you're going to love this book.

In an increasingly secular, fragmented, and distracted culture, nothing brings Americans together quite like sports. On Sundays in September, more families worship at the altar of the NFL than at any church. This appeal, which cuts across all demographic and ideological lines, makes sports perhaps the last unifying mass ritual of our era, with huge numbers of people all focused on the same thing at the same moment. That timeless, live quality makes sports very powerful, and very lucrative. And the media spectacle around them is only getting bigger, brighter, and noisier.

Very few institutions in American sports can match the enduring excellence of the University of Alabama football program. Across a wide swath of the last century, the tradition-rich Crimson Tide has claimed twelve national championships, captured 25 conference titles, finished 34 times among the country's top ten, and played in 53 bowl games.

In the 1930s and 1940s, there was nothing bigger in Texas high school football than the Masonic Home Mighty Mites - a group of orphans bound together by hardship and death. These youngsters, in spite of being outweighed by at least 30 pounds per man, were the toughest football team around. They began with nothing - not even a football - yet in a few years were playing for the state championship on the highest level of Texas football. This is a winning tribute to a courageous band of underdogs from a time when America desperately needed fresh hope and big dreams.