
Walter Camp: Football and the Modern Man (Hardback)
Julie Des Jardins (author)
£26.49
Hardback
416 Pages /
Published: 29/10/2015
- We can order this from the publisher
To a handful of colleagues, Walter Camp was a clock-company executive. To nearly everyone else, he was the quintessential gentleman athlete and the Father of American Football. Born in Connecticut in 1859, he attended Yale University just as collegiate sport was growing organized and competitive in the United States. In college, he was a varsity letterman who led the earliest efforts to codify the rules of football and to make it distinct from English rugby. As the
creator of the All-America football team and the writer of some of the first football fiction, guides, and sports page coverage, Camp popularized the game like no other. For four decades, he was the most influential regulator in college football, making him the target of charges that the game was
too brutal. Under his watch, dozens of college and high school players were killed or maimed on the gridiron. President Theodore Roosevelt urged him to reform football to prevent administrators from banning it, but Camp was ambivalent about removing the very physicality from the game that made it man-making in his eyes. Although he made his greatest contributions to football, he also had a hand in developing college baseball, crew, and track and field, as well as amateur boxing, tennis, and
Olympic teams, making him one the nation's foremost propagators of amateur sport. The greatest proof of his contention that athletics, football especially, cultivated effective, courageous men came in World War I, when massive numbers of college football players enlisted for military service and the
Allies defeated the Germans; Camp insisted that American athleticism was the reason. Along with cultivating his own body, he popularized strength training and the ideal of the muscular physique for American boys, helping to redefine the ideal man of modern times.
Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc
ISBN: 9780199925629
Number of pages: 416
Weight: 716 g
Dimensions: 236 x 167 x 27 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
The author skillfully illustrates how the sport of football uniquely spoke to men about being manly and helped to introduce new notions of masculinity. Walter Camp, then, is both a fine sport history and a superb cultural analysis. * R. W. Roberts, CHOICE *
You may also be interested in...
Please sign in to write a review
Sign In / Register
Not registered? CREATE AN ACCOUNTCREATE A plus ACCOUNT
Sign In
Download the Waterstones App
Would you like to proceed to the App store to download the Waterstones App?
Click & Collect
Reserve online, pay on collection
Alternatively, for multiple items you may find it easier to add to basket, then pay online and collect in as little as 2 hours, subject to availability.
Alternatively, for multiple items you may find it easier to add to basket, then pay online and collect in as little as 2 hours, subject to availability.
Thank you for your reservation
Your order is now being processed and we have sent a confirmation email to you at
When will my order be ready to collect?
Following the initial email, you will be contacted by the shop to confirm that your item is available for collection.
Call us on or send us an email at
Unfortunately there has been a problem with your order
Please try again or alternatively you can contact your chosen shop on or send us an email at