Authors: Ty Cashion, O.A. "Bum" Phillips
ISBN-13: 9780876112212, ISBN-10: 0876112211
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Texas State Historical Association
Date Published: January 2007
Edition: New Edition
TY CASHION, the author of many books and articles on Texas history and culture, is professor of history at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville.
High school football is one of the identifying institutions of twentieth-century Texas. It is not unusual to see youthful football players placed on the same pedestal as the cowboy, oil man, or other icons of the Lone Star State. In fact, it is shaped in the image of its coaches who are, by and large, an enigma to most of us. We think of them as caricatures, men who are alternately revered and vilified (usually depending on how many games they have won recently), but they have always been members of a traditional, closed society, and we do not really know them in their complexities.
Pigskin Pulpit opens the Texas high school coaching profession to historical scrutiny for the first time, examining this breed of men who shaped the game-and generations of players-in their own images. Tracing side-by-side the development of the game and the coaching profession from its beginnings to today, author Ty Cashion explains how this avocation wove itself so tightly into the fabric of Texas culture.
Football fans and critics of the game alike will be drawn into this probing, analytical study that is sure to become a Texas classic.
Acknowledgments | ||
Foreword | ||
Introduction | 1 | |
Pt. I | Overview | |
Ch. 1 | The Coaches and the Game | 13 |
Pt. II | The Development of Coaching and Texas High School Football, 1890-1945 | |
Ch. 2 | Pioneers on a Hundred-Yard Long Frontier: Football in Texas, 1890-1930 | 49 |
Ch. 3 | Growing Up on Black-Eyed Peas and Football: Coaches' Childhoods, 1920s-1940s | 75 |
Ch. 4 | A Rough Sport for Tough Times: Football in the Great Depression | 91 |
Ch. 5 | Down at the Stadium and Other Theaters of War: Football in the 1940s | 115 |
Pt. III | The Golden Age of Texas High School Football, 1945-1970 | |
Ch. 6 | The Last Days of the Iron Man: Texas High School Football at Its Peak | 141 |
Ch. 7 | A Glorious and Bittersweet Career: Coaching in the Golden Age | 175 |
Ch. 8 | Autumn Widows and Other Dependents: The Coaches and Their Families | 207 |
Pt. IV | An Era of Change and Crisis: The 1960s and Beyond | |
Ch. 9 | Falling Out of Step: Coaches and Changing Values | 225 |
Ch. 10 | Circling the Wagons: Coaches' Reflections on Their Lives and the Game | 255 |
Appendix | 281 | |
Notes | 287 | |
Index | 295 |