The Rise of Intercollegiate Football and Its Portrayal in American Popu

The Rise of Intercollegiate Football and Its Portrayal in American Popular LiteratureWith the success of the Merriwell literature, late sport fiction became abundant. In all subsequent stories, the model for traditional juvenile sport fiction, even so continuing today, is the illustrious hot dog Merriwell (Oriard, 1982). As the Merriwell series dwindled to a collar in the 1910s, books began to dominate the world of childrens sport fiction. Oriard (1982) suggested the popularity of these books rose because the juvenile sports falsehood combined the action of the dime novels with the middle-class morality of the Alger (rags-to-riches) novel (p. 47). In 1912, the year Gilbert Patten retired as the author of the Merriwell stories, Owen Johnson make his childrens novel, Stover at Yale. Dink Stover looms as the hero of Johnsons novel, which follows green Dink from his freshman year to the beginning of his senior year at the illustrious Yale University. Johnsons novel while similar t o the Merriwell series, establishes a innovative era in juvenile sport literature that starts the maturation transition of the collegiate athlete-hero.Many of Frank Merriwells challenges did occur on the playacting field at Yale in a multitude of sports that included football, baseball, crew, and track. During to the highest degree of these events, however, the precocious hero and his comrades usually solved a mystery or righted some wrong. In addition, Merriwell left college for a few years, and this respite from college feeling enabled the multifaceted young man to write a play, purchase a champion thoroughbred horse, and travel the world in his pursuit to mold out all wrongdoing, all activities contrary to the ideals of amateurism. Stover receives the hero worship common o... ...mith, R.A. (1988). Sports and Freedom The Rise of Big-Time College Athletics. New York, NY Oxford University Press.Smith, R.A. (1993). History of Amateurism in Mens Intercollegiate Athletics The C ontinuance of a 19th-Century Anachronism in America. QUEST. Vol. 45, pp. 430-447.Standish, B.L. (1900). Frank Merriwells Policy or, Playing Columbia for Practice. TipTop Weekly. No. 238.Standish, B.L. (1901). diaphysis Merriwell at Fardale or, The Wonder of School. Tip Top Weekly. No. 291.Thelin, J.R. (1994). Games Colleges Play outrage and Reform in Intercollegiate Athletics. Baltimore John Hopkins University Press.Valenzi, K.D., Ed. (1990). Champion of Sport The bread and butter and Times of Walter Camp, 1859-1925. Charlottesville, VA Howell Press, Inc.Watterson, J.S. (1988). Inventing Modern Football. American Heritage. Sept./Oct., pp. 102-113.