Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Bill Wallace's book, Yale's ironmen, is a treasure of knowledge. Not just the knowledge of the Yale-Princeton football game of 1934 but the human history of the men who played in the game, their coaches, their families and how the development of television and professional football affected the attitudes of consumers for football and other sports activities.
Bill has given readers a unique gift of historical perspective on the game and how commercialism has distorted the sport. Though it's focussed on football and the details of the game, it will appeal to the general reader. It is also a reminder that the vicissitudes of life can be most difficult when the bright spotlight of fame has turned away.
It is writing at its best, easy to read, unvarnished truth and facts, heartfelt without spin on the life of the game and its participants, a very poignant tale of the joys and woes of reality by an author who knows, and luckily is sharing his knowledge with the general reader.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Yale's Ironmen: A Story of Football & Lives In The Decade of The Depression & Beyond
Princeton and Rutgers played the first game, in 1869. But it was at Yale where football evolved and no institution has a more meaty history of the sport. Yale was the first college to record 800 victories, that milestone reached in the year 2000. Sixty-six years before, a more significant triumph came unexpectedly to the Bulldogs on Princeton's field and from that contest emerged Yale's Ironmen.
They were supposed to lose by at least three touchdowns to an undefeated opponent being touted as a Rose Bowl candidate. The eleven Yale starters played all 60 minutes, an uncommon feat never duplicated thereafter in major college football.
The game was played against the background of the Depression. Yet Princeton's Palmer Stadium was full that warm November afternoon for the first time in six years. "I guess people wanted to get their minds off their troubles," said the Yale quarterback, Jerry Roscoe, who threw the winning touchdown pass to Larry Kelley, the latter the first winner of the Heisman Trophy.
How did this game, this success, affect the lives of those eleven men of iron? Who were they? What happened, as World War II descended and snared them?
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