Massillon Against The World

After a fifty-three year drought, the 2023 Massillon Tigers finally won a State Championship on the field. The storied high school football program won 24 State Titles from 1909-1970, and then nothing. They made it to the State game six times and lost each time to a private school. Many wondered if a public school from a small town like Massillon, Ohio could win it? But no one in Tiger Town doubted it. A town of 30,000 people filled the Pro Football Hall of Fame Stadium with an announced attendance of nearly 15,000.Author Scott Ryan (Last Days of Letterman, Moonlighting: an Oral History) and educator Becca Moore (Massillon City Schools, Track Coach) interviews all the coaches in this oral history of a season that started with drama that could have ended everything before it began. They take readers through the big games of three #1 teams in a row, all beaten by the Tigers. The annual Massillon-McKinley game is covered, plus the exciting state championship game that was won with only one touchdown. This is an in depth look at how the coaching staff under the guidance of Nate Moore won a state title in Ohio ... finally.

The hosts of the YouTube series Tiger Talk interview coaches and players and take you through the magical 16-0 season. The Massillon Tigers, one of the most envied high school football teams in the nation from one of the most high school football rabid towns in the country, had gone fifty-three years without winning a state championship when they took the field against the Hoban Knights on the brisk night of November 30, 2023, a date no one in Massillon is likely to forget. A thrilling, hard-fought defensive battle ended with the Tigers on top 7-2, and Massillonians erupted in celebration, weeping, hugging complete strangers, and flooding the downtown area for a communal commemoration..As the players and coaches said afterward, this was truly a victory not just for the team, but for all of Massillon, a small town frozen in time for decades even as blue-collar employers fled in droves. The one thing Massillon could, and did, cling to was high school football, an obsession ever since Paul Brown, nicknamed the 'Miracle Man of Massillon," catapulted the team into national prominence by compiling an 80-8-2 record over nine seasons before moving on, first to Ohio State and later to the Cleveland Browns and the Cincinnati Bengals of the National Football League. In Massillon Against the World, Scott Ryan, an author and lifelong Tiger fan, and Becca Moore, the wife of Massillon's head coach Nate Moore, provide their own, unique personal accounts of the highlights of this unforgettable season-sometimes funny, sometimes emotionally powerful, but always insightful and absorbing-focusing on all of the hardships Massillon had to overcome on its road to victory. Mike Brown, Paul's son, contributes the foreword.

“ I feel like Scott Ryan could have written this directly to me and others in our generation who have basically &‘ given up' on movies. It is at once tribute and eulogy, so bittersweet.” &– Screenwriter Helen Childress (Reality Bites)“ The nineties are lucky to have Scott Ryan.” &– Actress Natasha Gregson Wagner (Two Girls and a Guy, Lost Highway)Ah, the nineties. Movies were something in those days. We' re talking about a decade that began with GoodFellas and ended with Magnolia, with such films as Malcolm X, Before Sunrise, and Clueless arriving somewhere in between. Stories, characters, and writing were king; IP, franchise movies, and supersaturated superhero flicks were still years away. Or so says Scott Ryan, the iconoclastic author of The Last Days of Letterman and Moonlighting: An Oral History, who here turns his attention to The Last Decade of Cinema— the prolific 1990s. Ryan, who watched just about every film released during the decade when he was a video store clerk in a small town in Ohio, identifies twenty-five unique and varied films from the decade, including Pretty Woman, Pulp Fiction, Menace II Society, and The Shawshank Redemption, focusing with his trademark humor and insight on what made them classics and why they could never be produced in today' s film culture. The book also includes interviews with writers, directors, and actors from the era. Go back to the time of VCR' s, DVD rentals, and movies that mattered. Turn off your streaming services, put down your phones, delete your Twitter account, and take a look back at the nineties with your Eyes Wide Shut, a White Russian in your hand, and yell “ Hasta la vista, baby” to today' s meaningless entertainment. Revel in the risk-taking brilliance of Quentin Tarantino, Amy Heckerling, Spike Lee, Robert Altman, Paul Thomas Anderson, and others in Scott Ryan' s magnum opus, The Last Decade of Cinema.

"Don't be alone, Doctor," Amy Pond tells the Eleventh Doctor in "The Angels Take Manhattan," and of course the irony is that in one sense the Doctor is always alone--a Gallifreyan whose regenerative powers mean he will outlast nearly everyone near and dear to him -- while at the same time he is rarely without one or more trusted companion by his side. This is a book about those companions--those fortunate few who accompany him on his journeys through space and time on--to quote the Ninth Doctor--"the trip of a lifetime." The editors of The Villains of Doctor Who are back with a new anthology of essays--paeans, really--to Donna Noble, Sarah Jane Smith, Rose Tyler, Wilfred Mott, Chang Lee, Clara Oswald, and more. Did your favorite companion make the cut? You're going to have to read to find out!

After playing 4 quarters of hard-fought football games, the Massillon Tiger football team gathered in a circle at the center of every football field they played on in 2019 to do 15 pushups—a pushup for every game it would take to lead them to the State Championship game. The mantra for the season became: 15 for 15. Each pushup is represented as a chapter in this book and a different piece of the puzzle that explains the football town of Massillon, Ohio. In this dramatic and entertaining book, Author and Tiger running back coach, David Lee Morgan, Jr. shares stories that offer a unique and unequaled perspective into the 2019 season and the Tigers' quest for that elusive state championship. The Massillon Tiger football program isn't a typical high school football program. It's a ministry of football with the first season dating back to 1894. In this small, midwestern Ohio rust belt town, the community has rallied around this team every Friday at the historic Paul Brown Tiger Stadium (capacity 16,000) for decades. The school has produced numerous NFL standouts, including coaching legend and Hall of Famer Paul Brown. The Massillon support, locally and nationwide, is unrivaled and is arguably one of the most recognizable and successful high school football programs in the country. The Massillon Tigers: 15 for 15 is the next generation's Friday Night Lights—the powerful tale of one of the most storied high school football programs anywhere in the country and their magical 2019 season, as told by an award-winning author and journalist who enjoyed unlimited access to the players, coaches, and families through his role as the running backs coach.