Bøger af John Eisenberg

"Before there was Colin Kaepernick, there was Fritz Pollard. The first Black quarterback to play in the NFL, Pollard was a dynamo, leading his team to a national championship, drawing record crowds, and earning the highest salary in the league. He was also subject to a constant stream of racist abuse. Spectators jeered and threw rocks, and opposing players singled him out, using the cover of the game to pummel the only Black man on the field. It would be nearly fifty years before another NFL team started a Black man as quarterback. In Rocket Men, sportswriter John Eisenberg offers the definitive history of Black quarterbacks in the league-men who not only shaped the history of football, but made indelible contributions to the cause of civil rights in America. As Eisenberg recounts, white coaches, scouts, and team owners long perceived Black players as unfit for the quarterback position. Believing Black athletes could not play "in thinking roles," they relegated them to running back, defensive back, and receiver positions. In the late 1960s, a few teams began to bring on Black quarterbacks once more. Players like James "Shack" Harris and Marlin Briscoe proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Black men could play the position just as well-if not better-than their white peers. Yet it wouldn't be until the 1990s, when the league began hiring more Black coaches and general managers, that Black quarterbacks truly got the opportunity to shine. When they did, they transformed the game. Drawing on exclusive interviews with dozens of Black quarterbacks and the players, coaches, and managers who work alongside them, Rocket Men is a reminder of how much Black quarterbacks have had to overcome to gain a space in pro football, and a celebration of the athletes and activists who paved the way for today's Black quarterbacks to triumph"--

A new superstar appeared on the American sports landscape in the spring of 2006. Barbaro, a three-year-old racehorse, won the Kentucky Derby by the largest margin of victory in sixty years, stirring talk of a possible Triple Crown. But in the opening yards of the Preakness Stakes two weeks later, the magnificent animal suffered a catastrophic leg injury that ended his un-defeated career and left him fighting for his life.One of the world's top jockeys, Edgar Prado rode Barbaro to glory and then stood beside him for months as the horse valiantly struggled to survive. My Guy Barbaro is the true story of the dream that carried Prado from an impoverished childhood in Lima, Peru, to the winner's circles of the world's greatest racetracksand is the heartwarming account of his love for a beautiful, talented, irreplaceable teammate.

The epic tale of the five owners who shepherded the NFL through its tumultuous early decades and built the most popular sport in America