Pigskin nation

"When we think about "the '60s," most of us know where the era's major confrontations took place--outside the Pentagon, on college campuses, in the streets of Chicago. Not on the sidelines of a football field. Yet football was the sport of the decade. What did it say that Americans craved regular doses of televised but rule-bound mayhem at the same time that real violence involving Americans roughly the same age was taking place half a world away? The game's militaristic aura suggests a simple story: brutish, crewcut traditionalism opposing itself to the gentle, peace-loving vibe of hippie protestors. Whatever your political perspective, the NFL tried to convince you that you could enjoy the game. Pigskin Nation argues that we can better understand the decade's political battles by paying attention to these collisions between football and many different people's visions of America. The NFL's attempts to define football to America at large produced a sports-entertainment complex that helped define "the new politics." In a society where Americans across the political spectrum were busily "politicizing" things, the NFL itself, players, coaches, and fans--some as prominent as the President and Vice-President--leveraged the game's political implications to shape a post-'60s language built on spectacle. Politics and sports and celebrity and news all became part of a grander cycle focused less on traditional party loyalties and more on presentation, television, and style. Pigskin Nation tells the story of how the spectacle of football made its way into politics and culture and created a new template for the future"--