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    Playing Through the Whistle: Steel, Football, and an American Town
    Unavailable
    Playing Through the Whistle: Steel, Football, and an American Town
    Unavailable
    Playing Through the Whistle: Steel, Football, and an American Town
    Ebook717 pages8 hours

    Playing Through the Whistle: Steel, Football, and an American Town

    By S.L. Price

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    In the early twentieth century, down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh, the Jones & Laughlin Steel Company built one of the largest mills in the world and a town to go with it. Aliquippa was a beacon and a melting pot, pulling in thousands of families from Europe and the Jim Crow south. The J&L mill, though dirty and dangerous, offered a chance at a better life. It produced the steel that built American cities and won World War II and even became something of a workers’ paradise. But then, in the 1980’s, the steel industry cratered. The mill closed. Crime rose and crack hit big.

    But another industry grew in Aliquippa. The town didn’t just make steel; it made elite football players, from Mike Ditka to Ty Law to Darrelle Revis. Pro football was born in Western Pennsylvania, and few places churned out talent like Aliquippa. Despite its troublesmaybe even because of themAliquippa became legendary for producing football greatness. A masterpiece of narrative journalism, Playing Through the Whistle tells the remarkable story of Aliquippa and through it, the larger history of American industry, sports, and life. Like football, it will make you marvel, wince, cry, and cheer.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAtlantic Monthly Press
    Release dateOct 4, 2016
    ISBN9780802190093
    Unavailable
    Playing Through the Whistle: Steel, Football, and an American Town

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    Reviews for Playing Through the Whistle

    4/5

    9 ratings2 reviews

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    • 3/5
      As much as I love athletics - this was a pretty depressing book and unfortunately hard to read. While the book is thorough and amazingly detailed the focus seemed to be primarily on the negative. The day-to-day life for everyone in Aliquippa is about as rough as can be imagined. The citizens there are daily surrounded by all manners of crime and violence. The only positives to come out of that town are the amazing success of its high school athletic programs (primarily football). I think it is an example of totally misplaced priorities by everyone involved.
    • 5/5
      I am going to start with what I didn't like about this book, in fact I would have taken 1 star off ordinarily.1. There are no pictures! How in the world did this book get approved with no pictures?2. The scattershot way the story is told. Especially the second half of the book. It was hard at times to keep track or remember who is who, who is related to who, sometimes the author would mention someone and I couldn't remember that person.Playing through the whistle is the story of America as it took place in Aliquippa Pennsylvania. A town that is a football player making machine. But it is also a town ravaged by drug, by crime, and by despair. It is a town that had it all and then it had nothing. Except a drive to churn out football players. Players who would go on to college greatness, and NFL stardom.I like football. I like to watch both college and pro, but I couldn't tell you when watching the NFL what college a player went to, and I definitely couldn't tell you what high school they attended. So I had never heard of Aliquippa, before reading this book.I knew about the race riots of the 60's, but I knew of the ones in Detroit, Watts, NYC, I didn't know they happened in a town a suburb almost of Pittsburgh! I knew about the shuttering of Steel making in America, the rust belt, a little about how it was managements fault, or it was the unions fault. I wondered what happened to these towns but I wondered about the big ones like Pittsburgh, not the smaller ones.Playing through the whistle is a fantastic book about American greatness, as well as America's black eyes, its exceptionalism, and its racism. It's perseverance, and its diminishing work ethic. It about guns, and Radom shooting and it's about drugs, and how in some ways all of these things destroy society, and how there are two choices for kids in Aliquippa to get out and get on from there, Sports, or drugs.I recommend this book highly, outside of my two complaints. I don't think you will be disappointed.