"Meet the characters and relive the games and controversies that captured the imagination of the nation's sports fans. Jim Reeves, for decades The Fort Worth Star-Telegram's award-winning columnist, goes behind the scenes to explain how the Cowboys battled for five Super Bowl titles, how Tex Schramm's creative genius forged them into America's Team, then becoming the richest NFL franchise under owner Jerry Jones"--Page 4 of cover.
A behind-the-scenes account of the on- and off-field competition between the New York Giants, the Washington Redskins, the Philadelphia Eagles, and the Dallas Cowboys, citing such influences as personality conflicts and sports fans.
Emmitt Smith, the NFL’s all-time leading rusher of the Dallas Cowboys, Dancing with the Stars champion, and successful real-estate investor, outlines the principles that helped him become a winner on and off the football field. In this book he encourages you to live your God-given dream, now. Emmitt reveals that it’s not only vision and talent that propel us toward our dreams, but also a combination of determination, persistence, humility, courage, and faith. Game On is more than self-help. The book gives readers practical tools to empower them to pursue their God-given purpose with all their mind, heart, and soul.
Troy Aikman. Emmitt Smith. Michael Irvin. Tom Landry. The names are easily recognizable as Dallas Cowboys, and their legacies are on display in one location: the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. Twenty-two members of the Hall of Fame were a part of the Dallas franchise; only eight NFL teams can boast more, and seven of those teams have been in existence much longer than the Cowboys. In Dallas Cowboys in the Hall of Fame: Their Remarkable Journeys to Canton, David Thomas shares the stories of these incredible players and the ups and downs they all experienced on their way to pro football’s most exclusive club. Each player’s life story is told in such a way to reveal what led him to become a hall of famer, including childhood memories, influential coaches, the teammates who brought the best out in them, and more. Cowboy fans will discover such details as the fact that Troy Aikman was the largest player on his high school football team—bigger even than the linemen—and that it was Michael Irvin’s fancy last-minute talking with the Green Bay Packers on draft day that got him to Dallas and away from a cold-weather team. In addition, each entry includes career statistics, a player bio, and his top five Cowboy moments, describing his greatest games and on-field accomplishments. Cowboy fans have become accustomed to watching high-caliber players on the field every season, and Dallas Cowboys in the Hall of Fame brings them the inside information on their favorite stars of the past. All football fans will enjoy the chance learn more about the iconic players profiled in this book—legends who have helped shape the Dallas franchise and the NFL.
National Bestseller: The “powerful novel” about the hidden side of pro football, written by a former NFL player (Newsweek). On the field, the men who play football are gladiators, titans, and every other kind of cliché. But when they leave the locker room they are only men. Peter Gent’s classic novel looks at the seedy underbelly of the pro game, chronicling eight days in the life of Phil Elliott, an aging receiver for the Texas team. Running on a mixture of painkillers and cortisone as he tries to keep his fading legs strong, Elliott tries to get every ounce of pleasure out of his last days of glory, living the life of sex, drugs, and football. Adapted for the screen in 1979, this novel, written by ex-Dallas Cowboy Peter Gent, is widely considered the best football novel of all time.
For many football fans, the National Football League season of 1970 was a landmark year in the history of the game. The NFL and the American Football League finally began playing as a merged league--one that featured such legendary figures as George Blanda, Tom Dempsey, Vince Lombardi, George Allen, Sid Gillman, Lamar Hunt, and Al Davis. The NFL, Year One focuses on several key games throughout this thrilling initial season. One saw the Raiders and Browns play in Cleveland. This contest serves as the backdrop for the story of forty-three-year-old Oakland kicker Blanda, who went on that season to win or tie four consecutive games in the last seconds, becoming a hero to middle-aged American men. Among other notable games that Brad Schultz examines are the Browns-Jets game that marked the debut of Monday Night Football with commentators Keith Jackson, Howard Cosell, and "Dandy" Don Meredith; the Chiefs-Vikings game that served as a rematch for the Super Bowl IV competitors; and the Colts-Jets game that ultimately set the scene for the 1970 players' strike. Schultz also demonstrates how the season continues to influence the NFL today. Meticulously researched and thoroughly entertaining, The NFL, Year One is a riveting account of one of the most important and compelling seasons in NFL history. Any fan will surely enjoy Schultz's revisiting of the game's amazing 1970 season.
This award-winning satire shares a day in the life of a nineteen-year-old U.S. soldier home on leave from the Iraq War to take part in an NFL halftime show. A ferocious firefight with Iraqi insurgents at “the battle of Al-Ansakar Canal”—three minutes and forty-three seconds of intense warfare caught on tape by an embedded Fox News crew—has transformed the eight surviving men of Bravo Squad into America’s most sought-after heroes. For the past two weeks, the Bush administration has sent them on a media-intensive nationwide Victory Tour to reinvigorate public support for the war. Now, on this chilly and rainy Thanksgiving, the Bravos are guests of America’s Team, the Dallas Cowboys, slated to be part of the halftime show alongside the superstar pop group Destiny’s Child. Among the Bravos is the Silver Star–winning hero of Al-Ansakar Canal, Specialist William Lynn, a nineteen-year-old Texas native. Amid clamoring patriots sporting flag pins on their lapels and Support Our Troops bumper stickers on their cars, the Bravos are thrust into the company of the Cowboys’ hard-nosed businessman/owner and his coterie of wealthy colleagues; a luscious born-again Cowboys cheerleader; a veteran Hollywood producer; and supersized pro players eager for a vicarious taste of war. Among these faces Billy sees those of his family—his worried sisters and broken father—and Shroom, the philosophical sergeant who opened Billy’s mind and died in his arms at Al-Ansakar. Over the course of this day, Billy will begin to understand difficult truths about himself, his country, his struggling family, and his brothers-in-arms—soldiers both dead and alive. In the final few hours before returning to Iraq, Billy will drink and brawl, yearn for home and mourn those missing, face a heart-wrenching decision, and discover pure love and a bitter wisdom far beyond his years . . . Poignant, riotously funny, and exquisitely heartbreaking, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is a devastating portrait of our time, a searing and powerful novel that cements Ben Fountain’s reputation as one of the finest writers of his generation. Now a major motion picture directed by Ang Lee Praise for Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk Finalist for the National Book Award Winner, National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction Winner, Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction “Brilliantly done . . . grand, intimate, and joyous.” —New York Times Book Review “The Catch-22 of the Iraq War.” —Karl Marlantes
