From Publishers Weekly
American college football as it is played today, more rugby-style than soccer-style, was a product of Harvard, and the game remained the preserve of Ivy League schools for 50 years, although the first game, in 1869, involved non-Ivy Rutgers versus Princeton. During the years of their supremacy, the prestigious colleges of the Northeast produced such legendary figures as Glenn (Pop) Warner, John Heisman, Walter Camp and Amos Alonzo Stagg. But after WWI, attention gradually shifted to Midwestern and Southern schools, and, after WWII, the Ivies started to de-emphasize the sport, prohibiting spring practice and postseason play in 1952. In 1982, the major football powers froze the Ivies out of major television revenues, in effect banning them from Division I-A, where the TV money went. New York Times sportswriter Goldstein offers a nostalgic, lively history of the Ivy League, despite the decline in the caliber of play in the past 70 years. And he writes with a sense of fun, as when he shows how the Harvard Crimson was wont to report the games: "Harvard beats Yale, 29-29."
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Kirkus Reviews
A New York Times football writer scores points in this illustrated account of how a major college football conference ``downsized'' to retain its focus on academics. Comprising Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Penn, Dartmouth, Brown, and Cornell, the Ivy League is indisputably the cradle of American football, the place where the sport's founding fathers learned to play. Goldstein faithfully recreates the game's early days, when Ivy schools dominated and play was rough, often excessively so. (In 1905, the year after 18 men died on the nation's gridirons, President Theodore Roosevelt intervened by holding a White House summit to put an end to the mayhem.) The author, however, is quick to point out (occasionally stridently) that, despite their prowess and frequently unchecked ardor for the game, these are, after all, scholar-athletes. To underscore this fact, he identifies an impressive raft of gridiron heroes who used their heads as more than mere helmet stuffing, including Jack Kerouac. He notes that when the rest of the nation's colleges softened their academic standards for footballers the Ivy league's teams regularly had their hats handed to them. Conceding that they couldn't maintain academic excellence and still compete with the top teams, the eight officially formed the Ivy League in 1956 as a means of restoring football to its intended extracurricular status. Since then, no Ivy team has seriously contended for a national title (the last Top 20 team was Dartmouth in 1970, with the league finally being relegated to Division I-AA status in 1982). Nor have their players been in the running for the Heisman trophy (named for Penn player and coach John Heisman) since Cornell's Ed Marinaro placed runner-up in 1971. However, in this era of marginal importance, as Goldstein's volume underscores, Ivy League football remains the game's sentimental bastion against creeping professionalism, and a good show besides. (112 photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
