Life in the Hyper-Mediated Marketplace of Football Narratives

Abstract

Probably no one has published more pages of scholarly ruminations upon just what might be the meaning of football than Michael Oriard—certainly no one who also captained the football team at Notre Dame and played in forty-two games in the National Football League before transitioning into the life of an academic. In his sixth book, after so many years of playing and writing about the game, he spoke of having “learned a great deal about Americans’ fascination with football since the 1880s” and how it had made him “wonder if football’s hold over us has changed, or how it has changed, as money washed over it.”