Shake Down The Thunder: The Creation Of Notre Dame Football

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 jumpstarted 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 Gipp, Father John O'Hara, Elmer Layden, Frank Leahy, and Grantland Rice, but most of all Kute 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 Kockne, Frank Leahy, Joe Montana, Ara Parsegan 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