Why Football Matters

✍ Scribed by Edmundson, Mark

• Book ID: 108983681
• Publisher: Penguin Group US
• Year: 2014
• Tongue: en-US
• Weight: 376 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9781101635728

✦ Synopsis

Acclaimed essayist Mark Edmundson uses his own rite of passage as a high school football player to showcase larger truths about the ways America's game shapes its men

Football teaches young men self-discipline and teamwork. Football celebrates inflicting violence. Football is a showcase for athletic beauty and physical excellence. Football damages young bodies and minds, sometimes permanently. Football instills confidence and direction. Football instills cockiness, an inflated sense of superiority. The athlete is a noble figure with a proud lineage. The jock is America at its worst.

When Mark Edmundson's son began to play organized football, and proved to be very good at it, Edmundson had to come to terms with just what he thought about the game. Doing so took him back to his own childhood, when as a pudgy, shy, and bookish boy growing up in a blue-collar Boston suburb in the sixties, he went out for the high school football team and found his life...