Pre-Owned The Games Presidents Play: Sports and the Presidency (Hardcover) 080188425X 9780801884252

The Games Presidents Play provides a new way to view the American presidency. Looking at the athletic strengths, feats, and shortcomings of our presidents, John Sayle Watterson explores not only their health, physical attributes, personalities, and sports IQs, but also the increasing trend of Americans in the past century to equate sporting achievements with courage, manliness, and political competence. The author of College Football begins with George Washington, whose athleticism contributed to his success on the battlefield and may well have contributed to the birth of the republic. He moves seamlessly into the eighteenth century when, for presidents like Jackson, Lincoln, and Cleveland, frontier sports were part of their formative years. With the twentieth-century presidents - most notably the hyperactive and headline-grabbing Theodore Roosevelt - Watterson shows how the growth of mass media and the improved means of transportation