Lot About Notre Dame Football example essay topic

For as long as I can remember I have been a Notre Dame football fan. My father is to credit for getting me into it. He brought us to South Bend a couple of time for some games and I was just amazed by the campus and the history of the football program, so it was no surprise that I chose this particular book. Shake Down The Thunder: The Creation of Notre Dame Football was written by a man named Murray Sperber who was a sports writer interested on why fans were so into college football.

Because of his interest Sperber decided to go around the country to certain college campuses to do research on this. He started with the University of Notre Dame because he was aware of the history and the passion of their football program, he was also aware of the appreciation Notre Dame had from their fans. This book deals with they history of Notre Dame football including the nation championships, the players, the coaches, and the program itself. It explains exactly what happened thought out its history, the reality behind the myths so to speak. Notre Dame was very kind to Murray Sperber in that he was given many privileges that other authors of books regarding Notre Dame football were deprived of. These privileges allowed Sperber to do research on Notre Dame from a different point of view and in his research he found documents that jump started his interest to actually write this fantastic book.

Sperber found the actual letters that Knute Rockne wrote to different people, which contained a lot of unknown information about Notre Dame football. These letters were found in the basement of the library and were unopened; apparently they had been hidden there since his death. Theses letter gave Sperber a side of Notre Dame football that no one has ever seen. As I said before, this book deals with the beginning of Notre Dame football and in a time of anti-Catholicism, helped people become more accustom to this religion. It reveals the real personalities of some of the most well known people affiliated with Notre Dame, including Jesse Harper, George Gip p, Father John O'Hara, Elmer Laden, Frank Leahy, and Grantland Rice, but most of all Knute Rockne was at the center of everything. The book gave Knute Rockne all of the credit for making Notre Dame football what it is today.

I feel that is important for people in our field to read this book because it deals with the history of one of the most well known and beloved college football programs in history. The University of Notre Dame is home countless football legends including Knute Rockne, Frank Leahy, Joe Montana, Ara Parse gan and many more. Many people say that early Notre Dame football made college football what it is today. Shake Down the Thunder does not really have anything to do with physical activity; it simply is a book describing the history and the beginning of an epic college football program. It does, however, give us a better understanding the world of sport because it discusses some of the origins of sports. In this particular case it discusses the origin of Notre Dame football.

Part II Shake Down the Thunder had to do with sport sociology in that it dealt with similar problems that occur and have occurred over the years in college football, problems such as race in sports and the role of the coaches in football. Obviously, like every football program in the country, Notre Dame had an issue with blacks on the football field, and being a Catholic school this made situations even worse. There was not a whole lot of information about this issue but still it was a problem. The book revealed that allowing black athletes on the on the football field at the University of Notre Dame was not an easy task. As everyone knows, just being a good athlete will not earn you a place on the Notre Dame football roster, education is valued in South Bend and there are no exceptions. Earlier in the year in class we discussed how athletes in college were taking the "student" out of "student athlete".

We discussed how athletes were taking easier classes that required little to no work, but at the University of Notre Dame they will not allow that. Athletes are required to take regular classes and be a part of the student body, rather than just being in classes with just other members of their teams. As discussed in chapter 6 in our book about intercollegiate sports graduation rates (Sage, 121) are looked at. The graduation rate of top division one football colleges for the players is an absolute joke. Athletes at these schools are simply being cheated out of their education, mainly because the coach does not want his athletes getting into classes that will take time away from their sport. The reason why people aren't doing anything about this is because they don't know about it.

The school likes to keep this sort of information a secret to save them from getting a bad reputation. As you can probably imagine student who do know about this are very upset about mainly because it's just not fair. Regular student work very hard for their jobs and when they see that these players are getting by school by not doing any work things get messy. Shake Down the Thunder discussed how Notre Dame football players aren't separated from the student body.

Each athlete, as a freshman, is required to live in the dorms with the other students. This helps the athletes feel more like a regular student rather than just a dumb jock. Also as I said before, even the best Notre Dame athletes are treated like real students, where they take real classes and professors do not make exceptions for them. That's why people have so much respect for the University of Notre Dame, their athletes are well educated and they still have a good football program. Unfortunately, as of late, Notre Dame has gone through a lot of scrutiny in that people think they should start to lower their standards for their athletes.

Personally, I don't think that their standards are the problem; I feel that they should do a better job selling the school to their prospects. Part As I said in the very beginning, I have been a Notre Dame fan for as long as I can remember; I have seen "Rudy" at least 6 dozen times, I have been to 10 games, and my cousin is actually a student there and I have gone to visit him on several occasions. Just being in South Bend was so incredible, especially on game days where all of the dorms have different food stands set up to raise money for stuff, the band plays on the steps of the Golden Dome, and the players walking to the stadium. The whole experience is just awesome. As far as relating the book to my life, there really isn't a whole lot that relates. However, I never really knew a whole lot about Knute Rockne, and after reading Shake Down the Thunder I got a much better understanding about what he was all about.

I also found out that Rockne and myself were sort of a like, aside from his ability to construct a dominating football team. Rockne played for the University of Notre Dame and never lost a game for three years. This team would beat others unmercifully, achieving score of over a hundred points, which in this day in age is absolutely unheard of. How this relates to me is that when I played football in high school my team went all the way to the state finals. By achieving this goal, I like to believe that I know how to win. By winning week in and week out it helped me learn exactly what it takes to win games.

Knute Rockne knew a thing or two about winning as well and that's why I think we relate because we both know what it takes to win. Now don't get me wrong, I don't consider myself in even close to the same class as him, but I have the general idea. A good portion of the book dealt with Knute Rockne's ability to win. In conclusion, after reading Shake Down the Thunder I found out a lot about Notre Dame football that I never knew before. This book didn't have a whole lot to do with what we discussed in class but it certainly had some. There is no bibliography... i just used the book itself by Murray Sperber.