The Sunday Game: At the Dawn of Professional Football

With today's multimillion-dollar player contracts and equally grandiose sponsorship deals in football, it's hard to imagine the game's modest beginnings. This book is a detailed chronicle of the start of semi-professional football, focusing on the period from 1915 to 1917. During these three seasons, players were paid for the first time; fans were charged admission; teams were sponsored (often by railroad companies) and newspaper coverage of games became more significant. Many of these early football teams became members of the National Football League, particularly where there was strong community support and interest. Not surprisingly, rivalry between neighboring cities and teams was fairly common. This book is a very precise description of the players, managers and atmosphere with the occasional interesting vignette, such as when one team refused to get on the field because the opposition had a black player. However, the play-by-play accounts of some games and details about the team schedules are just boring. Also, much of the early history takes place in the Midwest and is associated mostly with college teams, which further limits the book's appeal. Today's fans simply accept the existence of the game and probably aren't curious enough to read a play-by-play of games from 80 years ago. (Aug.)