The Massillon Tigers

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.

Tiger Legacy examines the tremendous popularity of high school football in Massillon, Ohio through photographs and essays featuring all involved.

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.

An extraordinary, deeply inspirational photo essay follows elite wheelchair racer and wrestler and Netflix documentary star Zion Clark. This stunning photographic essay showcases Zion Clark’s ferocious athleticism and undaunted spirit. Cowritten by New York Times best-selling journalist James S. Hirsch, this book features striking, visually arresting images and an approachable and engaging text, including pieces of advice that have motivated Zion toward excellence and passages from Zion himself. Explore Zion’s journey from a childhood lost in the foster care system to his hard-fought rise as a high school wrestler to his current rigorous training to prepare as an elite athlete on the world stage. Included are a biography and a note from Zion. This first in a trilogy of books to be written by world-class athlete Zion Clark.

The sixteen original essays in this collection cover influential and famous rivalries from a variety of sports, including track and field, golf, boxing, basketball, tennis, ice skating, baseball, football, soccer, and more. The essays are diverse, but together they illustrate what is common to any rivalry: equally matched opponents that often have decidedly different backgrounds, styles, and personalities. These differences may center on race and culture, political and societal ideologies, personality, geography, or religion—a mix intensified by fans and the media. From highly publicized and emotionally charged individual competitions to bitterly fought team contests, Rivals illuminates what one-of-a-kind opponents and the passion they inspire tell us about ourselves and our society.

If the National Football League is now a mammoth billion-dollar enterprise, it was certainly born into more humble circumstances. Indeed, it began in 1920 in an automobile showroom in Canton, Ohio, when a car dealer called together some owners of teams, mostly in the Midwest, to form a league. Unlike the lavish boardrooms in which NFL owners meet today, on this occasion the owners sat on the running boards of cars in the showroom and drank beer from buckets. A membership fee of $100 was set, but no one came up with any money. (As one of those present, George Halas, the legendary owner of the Chicago Bears, said, "I doubt that there was a hundred bucks in the room.") From such modest beginnings, pro football became far and away the most popular spectator sport in America. In Pigskin, Robert W. Peterson presents a lively and informative overview of the early years of pro football--from the late 1880s to the beginning of the television era. Peterson describes the colorful beginnings of the pro game and its outstanding teams (the Green Bay Packers, the New York Giants, the Chicago Bears, the Baltimore Colts), and the great games they played. Profiles of the most famous players of the era--including Pudge Heffelfinger (the first certifiable professional), Jim Thorpe, Red Grange, Bronko Nagurski, and Fritz Pollard (the NFL's first black star)--bring the history of the game to life. Peterson also takes us back to the roots of the pro game, showing how professionalism began when some stars for Yale, Harvard, and Princeton took money--under the table, of course--for their services to alma mater. By 1895, the money makers--still unacknowledged--had moved to amateur athletic associations in western Pennsylvania and subsequently into Ohio. After the NFL formed in 1920, pro football's popularity grew gradually but steadily. It burst into national prominence with the Bears-Redskins championship game of 1940. As one sportswriter put it: "The weather was perfect. So were the Bears." The final score was 73-0. Peterson shows how, after World War II, the newly-created All America Football Conference challenged the NFL. Though dominated by a gritty Cleveland team, the AAFC was never viewed by NFL teams as much of a threat. That is, not until 1950 when the two leagues merged, bringing about the Cleveland Browns-Philadelphia Eagles game in which the Browns buried the Eagles 35-10. An elegy to a time when, for many players, the game was at least as important as the money it brought them (which wasn't much), Pigskin takes readers up to the 1958 championship game when the Baltimore Colts beat the New York Giants in overtime. By that time, the great popularity of the game had moved from newspapers and radio to television, and pro football had finally arrived as a major sport.

Scandals about cheating and corruption have dogged amateur and professional sports in the United States since the nation's earliest days. This work examines the most infamous and consequential of these controversies and scandals both on and off the field. Authoritative Individual essays tackle notorious events in popular American sports ranging from the 1919 Black Sox scandal to revelations of sign stealing by the Houston Astros throughout their 2020 championship season, with stops in between to survey horrific sex abuse scandals at Penn State, Baylor, and Michigan State; steroid and drug scandals that brought down once-admired athletes like Mark McGwire and Lance Armstrong; and cheating/betting controversies that tainted individual players (Pete Rose), teams (Boston College, New England Patriots), and entire leagues (including the Little League World Series in 2001). But this work does more than just recount these events; it will also examine the cultural and economic pressures and forces that contributed to these events, as well as the lessons learned and steps taken (if any) to enact reform and help the sport recover.