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Author: Keith Alvin McCants Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform ISBN: 9781727214147 Category : Languages : en Pages : 328
Book Description
I heard all about fame and fortune as a star linebacker playing for my beloved Alabama Crimson Tide. I suited up with Derek Thomas, the best damn defensive end that I've ever seen. We broke our backs and dripped our sweat on the same set of stadium steps. I was an elite linebacker from Alabama. Hell, that's damn near royalty when it comes to football. I'm not sure when disappointment replaced excitement for me. Maybe it was on draft day 1990, when I believed I should have gone off of the board first, or maybe it was on the sidelines, while a NFL coach towered over my injured body and screamed at me to get back into the game. All I know for sure is that it left and there was a giant gaping hole just waiting to be filled by something. That something for me took the form of drugs. Drugs that I had never even heard of before until I stepped inside of a NFL locker room. My assent on the path to fame and fortune was fast, like a missile being launched into space. The decline was much slower, like a snowball rolling down a mountain. It grew larger and larger in size and speed. Eventually it reached the bottom of the mountain and crashed leaving my dreams smashed and broken. This is they story about my journey into the NFL, but it is much more than that. This is a story about a kid, who lost his innocence long before he was a multimillionaire. It's about secret conversations and pill lines. It's about playing injured and seeing my friends lost to the newfound phenomenon of CTE. Dreams are born and dreams die, and sometimes like in my case, they are stolen. I'm Keith McCants and this is my story.
Author: Keith Alvin McCants Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform ISBN: 9781727214147 Category : Languages : en Pages : 328
Book Description
I heard all about fame and fortune as a star linebacker playing for my beloved Alabama Crimson Tide. I suited up with Derek Thomas, the best damn defensive end that I've ever seen. We broke our backs and dripped our sweat on the same set of stadium steps. I was an elite linebacker from Alabama. Hell, that's damn near royalty when it comes to football. I'm not sure when disappointment replaced excitement for me. Maybe it was on draft day 1990, when I believed I should have gone off of the board first, or maybe it was on the sidelines, while a NFL coach towered over my injured body and screamed at me to get back into the game. All I know for sure is that it left and there was a giant gaping hole just waiting to be filled by something. That something for me took the form of drugs. Drugs that I had never even heard of before until I stepped inside of a NFL locker room. My assent on the path to fame and fortune was fast, like a missile being launched into space. The decline was much slower, like a snowball rolling down a mountain. It grew larger and larger in size and speed. Eventually it reached the bottom of the mountain and crashed leaving my dreams smashed and broken. This is they story about my journey into the NFL, but it is much more than that. This is a story about a kid, who lost his innocence long before he was a multimillionaire. It's about secret conversations and pill lines. It's about playing injured and seeing my friends lost to the newfound phenomenon of CTE. Dreams are born and dreams die, and sometimes like in my case, they are stolen. I'm Keith McCants and this is my story.
Author: Tim Green Publisher: Grand Central Publishing ISBN: 0446551007 Category : Sports & Recreation Languages : en Pages : 188
Book Description
In this book, 8-year veteran of the NFL Tim Green reveals for the first time the scandals, the horrors, the abuses and also the wonders of playing football
Author: Mark Fainaru-Wada Publisher: Crown ISBN: 0770437567 Category : Sports & Recreation Languages : en Pages : 457
Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The story of how the NFL, over a period of nearly two decades, denied and sought to cover up mounting evidence of the connection between football and brain damage “League of Denial may turn out to be the most influential sports-related book of our time.”—The Boston Globe “Professional football players do not sustain frequent repetitive blows to the brain on a regular basis.” So concluded the National Football League in a December 2005 scientific paper on concussions in America’s most popular sport. That judgment, implausible even to a casual fan, also contradicted the opinion of a growing cadre of neuroscientists who worked in vain to convince the NFL that it was facing a deadly new scourge: a chronic brain disease that was driving an alarming number of players—including some of the all-time greats—to madness. In League of Denial, award-winning ESPN investigative reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru tell the story of a public health crisis that emerged from the playing fields of our twenty-first-century pastime. Everyone knows that football is violent and dangerous. But what the players who built the NFL into a $10 billion industry didn’t know—and what the league sought to shield from them—is that no amount of padding could protect the human brain from the force generated by modern football, that the very essence of the game could be exposing these players to brain damage. In a fast-paced narrative that moves between the NFL trenches, America’s research labs, and the boardrooms where the NFL went to war against science, League of Denial examines how the league used its power and resources to attack independent scientists and elevate its own flawed research—a campaign with echoes of Big Tobacco’s fight to deny the connection between smoking and lung cancer. It chronicles the tragic fates of players like Hall of Fame Pittsburgh Steelers center Mike Webster, who was so disturbed at the time of his death he fantasized about shooting NFL executives, and former San Diego Chargers great Junior Seau, whose diseased brain became the target of an unseemly scientific battle between researchers and the NFL. Based on exclusive interviews, previously undisclosed documents, and private emails, this is the story of what the NFL knew and when it knew it—questions at the heart of a crisis that threatens football, from the highest levels all the way down to Pop Warner.
Author: Nick T. Pappas Publisher: Meyer & Meyer Verlag ISBN: 1841263389 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 394
Book Description
Elite-level athletes are placed upon heightened pedestals in societies world-wide. At the same time, there is dark side to these glorified competitors that remains hidden from those outside of exclusive athletic circles. Dr. Nick Pappas' unique background as a former collegiate and professional hockey player and coach in combination with his experience as a researcher, professional counselor, and adjunct professor have provided him with knowledge and inside access to a variety of athlete cultures. This has enabled Dr. Pappas to uncover an array of disturbing sexual behaviors which have silently thrived for decades in many athlete cultures. These practices, expressed through the athletes own words along with their frequencies, motives, and consequences, are the result of over 10 years of cutting-edge research involving in depth interviews with 142 collegiate and professional athletes from five major U.S. sports. While these findings are certain to shock, raise awareness, and provide a wake-up call for those in and outside of the sports world, they also highlight a sense of urgency for taking action against these harmful behaviors now. "The Dark Side of Sports" has strong appeal for diverse audiences because it highlights the need for risk management in every male athletic culture. This includes individuals with direct involvement in sports such as athletes, coaches, managers, administrators, and support staff who see the importance of addressing and deterring potentially harmful and dangerous behavior that can ruin an athletic program's reputation in an instant. At the same time, this book serves as an invaluable resource for parents, women, and fans by raising awareness to the significant issues surrounding a darker, hidden side of sports. The fact that certain negative practices were discovered at the high school level means that millions of middle and high school coaches and athletes, in addition to those at elite levels, need this information to keep deviant practices from gaining a foothold and becoming normalized within youth-oriented sports cultures. Finally, "The Dark Side of Sports" will be a welcomed addition to courses such as sociology of sport, sports psychology, women's studies, and an array of sociology classes including deviant behavior.
Author: Simon McCarthy-Jones Publisher: Basic Books ISBN: 1541646983 Category : Psychology Languages : en Pages : 176
Book Description
Spite angers and enrages us, but it also keeps us honest. In this provocative account, a psychologist examines how petty vengeance explains human thriving. Spite seems utterly useless. You don't gain anything by hurting yourself just so you can hurt someone else. So why hasn't evolution weeded out all the spiteful people? As psychologist Simon McCarthy-Jones argues, spite seems pointless because we're looking at it wrong. Spite isn't just what we feel when a car cuts us off or when a partner cheats. It's what we feel when we want to punish a bad act simply because it was bad. Spite is our fairness instinct, an innate resistance to exploitation, and it is one of the building blocks of human civilization. As McCarthy-Jones explains, some of history's most important developments—the rise of religions, governments, and even moral codes—were actually redirections of spiteful impulses. A provocative, engaging read, Spite shows that if you really want to understand what makes us human, you can't just look at noble ideas like altruism and cooperation. You need to understand our darker impulses as well.
Author: Michael Oriard Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press ISBN: 0807899658 Category : Sports & Recreation Languages : en Pages : 343
Book Description
Professional football today is an $8 billion sports entertainment industry--and the most popular spectator sport in America, with designs on expansion across the globe. In this astute field-level view of the National Football League since 1960, Michael Oriard looks closely at the development of the sport and at the image of the NFL and its unique place in American life. New to the paperback edition is Oriard's analysis of the offseason labor negotiations and their potential effects on the future of the sport, and his account of how the NFL is dealing with the latest research on concussions and head injuries.
Author: Travis Vogan Publisher: University of Illinois Press ISBN: 0252096274 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 257
Book Description
NFL Films changed the way Americans view football. Keepers of the Flame: NFL Films and the Rise of Sports Media traces the subsidiary's development from a small independent film production company to the marketing machine that Sports Illustrated named "perhaps the most effective propaganda organ in the history of corporate America." Drawing on research at the NFL Films Archive and the Pro Football Hall of Fame and interviews with media pioneer Steve Sabol and others, Travis Vogan shows how NFL Films has constructed a consistent, romanticized, and remarkably visible mythology for the National Football League. The company packages football as a visceral and dramatic sequence of violent, beautiful, graceful, and heroic gridiron battles. Historically proven formulas for presentation--such as the dramatic voiceovers once provided by John Facenda's baritone, the soaring scores of Sam Spence's rousing background music, and the epic poetry found in Steve Sabol's scripts--are still used today. From the Vincent Price-narrated Strange but True Football Stories to the currently running series Hard Knocks, NFL Films distinguishes the NFL from other sports organizations and from other media and entertainment. Vogan tells the larger story of the company's relationship with and vast influence on our culture's representations of sport, the expansion of sports television beyond live game broadcasts, and the emergence of cable television and Internet sports media. Keepers of the Flame: NFL Films and the Rise of Sports Media presents sports media as an integral facet of American popular culture and NFL Films as key to the transformation of professional football into the national obsession commonly known as America's Game.
Author: Edward J. Rielly Publisher: U of Nebraska Press ISBN: 9780803226302 Category : Sports & Recreation Languages : en Pages : 460
Book Description
"...provides a detailed look at America's pastime through the lens of pop culture, [an] A-to-Z inventory of how certain aspects of the game affect and reflect broader society."--from publisher description.
Author: Johnny Anonymous Publisher: HarperCollins ISBN: 0062422421 Category : Sports & Recreation Languages : en Pages : 260
Book Description
Meet Johnny Anonymous. No, that’s not his real name. But he is a real, honest-to-goodness pro football player. A member of the League. A slave, if you will, to the NFL. For the millions of you out there who wouldn’t know what to do on Sundays if there wasn’t football, who can’t imagine life without the crunch of helmets ringing in your ears, or who look forward to the Super Bowl more than your birthday, Johnny Anonymous decided to tell his story. Written during the 2014–2015 season, this is a year in the life of the National Football League. This is a year in the life of a player—not a marquee name, but a guy on the roster—gutting it out through training camp up to the end of the season, wondering every minute if he’s going to get playing time or get cut. Do you want to know how players destroy their bodies and their colons to make weight? Do you wonder what kind of class and racial divides really exist in NFL locker rooms? Do you want to know what NFL players and teams really think about gay athletes or how the League is really dealing with crime and violence against women by its own players? Do you wonder about the psychological warfare between players and coaches on and off the field? About how much time players spend on Tinder or sexting when not on the field? About how star players degrade or humiliate second- and third-string players? What players do about the headaches and memory loss that appear after every single game? This book will tell you all of this and so much more. Johnny Anonymous holds nothing back in this whip-smart commentary that only an insider, and a current player, could bring. Part truth-telling personal narrative, part darkly funny exposé, NFL Confidential gives football fans a look into a world they’d give anything to see, and nonfans a wild ride through the strange, quirky, and sometimes disturbing realities of America’s favorite game. Here is a truly unaffiliated look at the business, guts, and glory of the game, all from the perspective of an underdog who surprises everyone—especially himself. JOHNNY ANONYMOUS is a four-year offensive lineman for the NFL. Under another pseudonym, he’s also a contributor for the comedy powerhouse Funny Or Die. You can pretty much break NFL players down into three categories. Twenty percent do it because they’re true believers. They’re smart enough to do something else if they wanted, and the money is nice and all, but really they just love football. They love it, they live it, they believe in it, it’s their creed. They would be nothing without it. Hell, they’d probably pay the League to play if they had to! These guys are obviously psychotic. Thirty percent of them do it just for the money. So they could do something else—sales, desk jockey, accountant, whatever—but they play football because the money is just so damn good. And it is good. And last of all, 49.99 percent play football because, frankly, it’s the only thing they know how to do. Even if they wanted to do something “normal,” they couldn’t. All they’ve ever done in their lives is play football—it was their way out, either of the hood or the deep woods country. They need football. If football didn’t exist, they’d be homeless, in a gang, or maybe in prison. Then there’s me. I’m part of my own little weird minority, that final 0.01 percent. We’re such a minority, we don’t even count as a category. We’re the professional football players who flat-out hate professional football.
Author: Keith Alvin McCants
Author: Keith Alvin McCants
Author: Tim Green
Author: Mark Fainaru-Wada
Author: Nick T. Pappas
Author: Simon McCarthy-Jones
Author: Michael Oriard
Author: Travis Vogan
Author: Brian Tuohy
Author: Edward J. Rielly
Author: Johnny Anonymous