Pigskin: The Early Years of Pro Football

While baseball's pastoral pace never lets us forget its past, football's martial-like essence seems forever fixed in the present. Yet, borne on the broad backs of men like Pudge Heffelfinger, Jim Thorpe, George Halas, Red Grange, Sammy Baugh, and Bronco Nagurski, football's history is filled with a legend, color, and personality as intriguing and all-American as that usually ascribed to baseball. Like a good offensive guard, Pigskin does yeoman-like work in the trenches, opening the right holes for football's barnstorming, step-child past to rush through. Thoroughly researched and authoritatively written, it helps resuscitate a sporting era--from the late 19th century to the dawn of saturation TV--when the passion for playing the game was far more alluring than all those soulless numbers on the business end of the dollar sign.