Professional Football Researchers Association Forum

I like football history. It's fun.

JeffreyMiller wrote:I like football history. It's fun.

Football is the best.

Probably like many I was attracted to history first through school and to the "big events" of History... usually wars.
For decades I've read and reread books about wars and famines and plagues and crusades and holocausts and...

It's nice to study history in which (hardly) anyone dies and man's inhumanity to man is (usually) confined to an elbow to the solar plexus or a knee to the groin.

Football is a war - a 60-minute battle for man's most basic possession: land.

oldecapecod 11 wrote:Football is a war - a 60-minute battle for man's most basic possession: land.

No.
Football is a physical game which can be compared to war in that both involve control of territory (and probably dozens of other metaphorical similarities).

I played sandlot for 20+ years but I would never compare my bravery to someone who actually served in combat.
All this "football is war" and "battle in the trenches" stuff is hyperbole.

Besides, a football game would actually be a battle and the season the war.

JeffreyMiller wrote:I like football history. It's fun.

That beats the hell out of "test"....

My father was a lay military historian, he never went to college or served in the military but he knew about every battle in history, who won, who lost, and why, along with the uniforms each army wore. He also played war games where he would paint hundreds of tiny little military figures in their respective colors and he and his buddies would get all their figures together and recreate battles on the dining room floor. He often appeared on local television and was consulted by college history professors due to his knowledge of military history, but he never made a penny at it as he was a draftsman by trade. He always said he would write a book, and when he died all that knowledge he had acquired died with him. I got the history bug from him, although my interest in history went in a different direction than his, and he never really understood my interest in Baseball and Football history. I have always been determined that the knowledge of Football history I have will not die with me, I will move the ball forward, so to speak, and publish what I have learned, and if everything works out, I would make every effort to make a living at it.