Autobiography Of An Unknown Football Player

This book is a chronology of my life. It tells the story of a young Negro boy weaving his way through a hostile, alien world, almost alone. Mama went to one of my football games at U.C. Berkeley. She didn't know anything about football, but she knew her son was on the field, and she knew he was in college. Her support through the years helped me navigate the difficult times I grew up in. This book will take you on a journey through those years, spiced with details about the worlds of college and professional football, and of track and field, as well as original reports of the events happening in the wider world.

While the story of the reintegration of professional football in 1946 after World War II is a topic that has been covered, there is a little-known aspect of this integration that has not been fully explored. After World War II and up until the mid- to late 1960s, professional football teams scheduled numerous preseason games in the South. Once African American players started dotting the rosters of these teams, they had to face Jim Crow conditions. Early on, black players were barred from playing in some cities. Most encountered segregated accommodations when they stayed in the South. And when African Americans in these southern cities came to see their favorite black players perform, they were relegated to segregated seating conditions. To add to the challenges these African American players and fans endured, professional football gradually started placing franchises in still-segregated cities as early as 1937, culminating with the new AFL placing franchises in Dallas and Houston in 1960. That same year, the NFL followed suit by placing a franchise in Dallas. Now, instead of just visiting a southern city for a day or so to play an exhibition game, African American players that were on the rosters of these southern teams had to live in these still segregated cities. Many of these players, being from the North or West Coast, had never dealt with de jure or even de facto Jim Crow laws. Early on, if these African American players didn’t “toe the line” or fought back (via contract disputes, interracial relationships, requesting better living accommodations in the South, protesting segregated seating, etc.), they were traded, cut, and even blackballed from the league. Eventually, though, as the civil rights movement gained steam in the 1950s and 1960s, African American players were able to protest the conditions in the South with success. Much of what happened in professional football during this time period coincided with or mirrored events in America and the civil rights movement.

This book sheds light on experiences relatively underrepresented in academic and non-academic sport history. It examines how Asian and Pacific Islander peoples used American football to maintain a sense of community while encountering racial exclusion, labor exploitation, and colonialism. Through their participation and spectatorship in American football, Asian and Pacific Islander people crossed treacherous cultural frontiers to construct what sociologist Elijah Anderson has called a cosmopolitan canopy under which Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, and people of diverse racial and ethnic identities interacted with at least a semblance of respect and equity. And perhaps a surprising number of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have excelled in college and even professional football before the 1960s. Finally, acknowledging the impressive influx of elite Pacific Islander gridders who surfaced in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, it is vital to note as well the racialized nativism shadowing the lives of these athletes.

This updated edition of the bestselling and wildly popular I Am the Secret Footballer features a new introduction and an additional chapter. The anonymous writer of The Guardian's "Secret Footballer" column gives Premiere League fans an insider's look into the unseen world of professional football. It is often said that 95% of what happens in football takes place behind closed doors. Many of these stories I shouldn't be telling you. But I will. Who is The Secret Footballer? Only a few people know the true identity of the man inside the game. Whoever he is-and whatever team he plays for-TSF is always honest, fearless and opinionated. Here he takes readers past the locker-room door and reveals the inner-workings of a professional club, the exhilarating highs and crushing lows and what it's really like to do the job most of us can only dream of doing. TSF chronicles the exploits of his Premiership colleagues with a gimlet eye and frank humour. Managers, agents and players are not spared from his observations-their mindsets, their relationships with those outside the sport, their behaviour good and bad. In his inimitable style, TSF recounts entertaining and eyebrow-raising vignettes, naming names and dropping colourful details along the way.

The truth about professional football by the man on the inside.

Before the 1970 World Cup, a Brazilian sportswriter asked Joao Saldana, who was fired as coach of the Brazilian national team for political reasons, 'Who is Brazil's best goalkeeper?'' Saladana said, 'Pele.'' and best right back? The answer came 'Pele.'' After mentioning Pele's name in roughly half of the team's positions, Saladana laughed and said, 'Pele is the best footballer in the world in any position.'' Many who played with and against Pele echoed Saldana. End of a chapter. Football emperor Pele passed away. He died of colon cancer at the age of 82. He is the "greatest" footballer of the 20th century as judged by the "FIFA" magazine readers and the jury board. However, general football fans on the internet voted in favor of Diego Maradona. FIFA eventually announced the two men jointly as the Centenarians. Maradona died suddenly in 2020 at the age of 60. This time world also lost Pele.