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Paul Putz Profile picture
@p_emory
Jul 5, 2018 • 4 tweets • 2 min read • Read on X
Before evangelicals had their own versions of “secular” music and movies, they had their own fictional schoolboy athlete. My look at Tom Huntner, an obscure relic of the fundamentalist/neo-evangelical subculture sportianity.com/2018/07/the-fu…
From 1946, an ad and review in The Evangelical Beacon for the second Huntner book
Other ads for the books aimed at the coveted “red-blooded boys” demographic
I end this piece by mentioning prominent evangelical athletes who carried on the Merriwell/All-American thing in modified form. But I'd love to hear from #twitterstorians & sports observers about this. From the past half-century (ish), who else comes to mind?

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More from @p_emory

Paul Putz Profile picture
Aug 24, 2018
I enjoyed @SITimLayden's essay on football's outsized importance. But since he asked: no, that idea didn't start in the 1940s. It began in the late 19th century, and there's some great scholarship explaining how it became an entrenched part of US culture. A partial reading list:
Michael Oriard's writing played a big part in my decision to do sports history, so I gotta list him first amazon.com/Reading-Footba…
Oriard is especially good at explaining the multiple and contested cultural meanings that football held for Americans. Hist first book looked at football's early years, this one (my fav from him) looks at the 1920s-1950s amazon.com/King-Football-…
Read 17 tweets
Paul Putz Profile picture
Aug 15, 2018
I want to add a bit of historical perspective to the details we've learned recently about the toxic culture of intimidation and abuse in Maryland's football program by going back to one of the earliest moments when that style of coaching was publicly challenged: 1954 Nebraska.
Back then Nebraska was coached by Bill Glassford. He came to the school in 1949, bringing with him a hard-driving and "merciless" approach that, rather than causing concern, earned him a fawning 1951 profile in the Saturday Evening Post.
Glassford was hardly an anomaly, of course. This was the era in which Bear Bryant conducted his famed Junction, Texas, training camp/torture chamber.
Read 23 tweets
Paul Putz Profile picture
Jul 6, 2018
Mike Sweeney, Roger Staubach, Bill Bradley, Tim Tebow, David Robinson...who else cultivated a similar public persona?
Don't have a Mormon on the list yet, but Dale Murphy definitely belongs. Here's the beginning of a 1986 Jim Murray @latimes column on him:
A bunch of great suggestions to add the list (check out the thread for more). One name that came up a couple times: A.C. Green. Which reminded me of this classic sexual abstinence video:
Read 4 tweets
Paul Putz Profile picture
Jun 8, 2018
I kid you not, Walter Camp died less than two months after this promo was published
And yes, observers in 1925 noticed the irony as well. It led to a referendum of sorts on the benefits of exercise.
The headline above is from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. They compiled a bunch of responses to Camp’s death and began their story this way:
Read 6 tweets
Paul Putz Profile picture
May 29, 2018
I can't get over how similar this "visionary leadership" pablum is to the way business leaders of the 1920s (and their journalistic hype men and women) talked about themselves and their business principles nytimes.com/2018/05/24/us/…
For example, this isn't new at all. Go read business leaders of the 1920s talk about how they based their business leadership on the Golden Rule. The point was to serve society (or rather convince ppl you were serving society) so that ppl wouldn't clamor for structural change.
In the 1920s, too, there was an obsession with identifying The Thing that made leaders successful, which often degenerated into something so vague as to be meaningless. Very much like this:
Read 6 tweets
Paul Putz Profile picture
May 23, 2018
Miscellaneous moments in football and national anthem history, a thread. In 1936, this gentleman wanted severe reprimands for college football players who did not pause their game when flag-raising ceremonies were conducted at the same time as the opening kick-off
In 1948 a columnist in the Los Angeles Times lamented the increasing tendency to play the anthem before sporting events. It cheapened true patriotism, he said, plus it led to "atrocious" musical performances
In 1954, a Pittsburgh man attending an NFL game was arrested for refusing to remove his hat during the playing of the national anthem (he was later acquitted). Here's how the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette presented the story:
Read 13 tweets

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