Abstract
Professional football today is a $6 billion sports entertainment industry. In this astute field-level view of the National Football League since 1960, Michael Oriard looks closely at the development of the sport and at the image of the NFL and its unique place in American life. At the heart of this story is a question with no simple answer: has the extraordinary commercializing and branding of NFL football since the late 1980s ironically weakened the cultural power of a sport whose appeal for more than a century was fundamentally noncommercial? Oriard skillfully traces the evolution of the Super Bowl, the development of NFL Films and ESPN, the rise of the commissioner as corporate CEO, the management of player demands, changing attitudes toward race, and the roles of icons such as Vince Lombardi, Joe Namath, and Deion Sanders. As a former member of the Kansas City Chiefs (1970-1973) who lost his job at the end of the first players' strike, Oriard offers unique insight as both insider and historian. He details how the game is marketed as entertainment rather than sport, making the NFL ripe for popular consumption. This repackaging, Oriard warns, also risks alienating those passionate fans drawn to the game on the field and its larger-than-life heroes.
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