Spirals: A Family''s Education in Football

Ivy League football is a preoccupation in Timothy Spearss family history. His grandfather Clarence Doc Spears was an All-American guard at Dartmouth in the early twentieth century, played on the Canton Bulldogs with Jim Thorpe, became a College Hall of Fame coach, and, as the legend goes, discovered Bronko Nagurski while driving through the backcountry of Minnesota. His father, Robert Spears, captained Yales 1951 team and was drafted by the Chicago Bears in 1952. By the time Timothy went to Yale in the mid1970s, it was more than talent or enthusiasm that prompted him to play football there.

Spirals tracks the relationship between college football and higher education through the lens of one familys involvement in the sport. Ranging over almost a century of football history, Spears describes the different ways in which his grandfather, father, and he played the game and engaged with its educational dimensions as the sport was passed from father to son. This intergenerational history attempts to uncover what the males in Spearss family learned from playing football and how the games educational importance shifted over time within higher education.   

While Spears chose an academic life after college, he understood later, with the decline of his parents, how much football stayed with him and shaped his familys history. With a voice that is part memoirist, part scholar, part athlete, as well as father and son, Spears discerns how football is embedded in our culture and came to be the fabric and common language of his family.


  See more