The central theme of our discussion revolves around the notion that a religious experience in sports is not merely a contemporary phenomenon but has been a recurrent aspect of American history. Our esteemed guest, Art Remillard, author of "Bodies in Motion: A Religious History of Sports in America," elucidates the ways in which sports have acquired sacred meanings and characteristics over time. He compellingly argues that while sports may not constitute a new religion, they undeniably embody elements of reverence and devotion akin to religious fervor. Drawing upon his own experiences and academic insights, Remillard highlights the intricate connections between football and broader societal themes, including identity, tradition, and cultural conflict. Throughout this episode, we delve into the historical significance of various sports figures and events, illuminating the profound impact of sports on American cultural and religious landscapes.

Arthur Remillard has recently written a book on the subject, which is the topic of our conversation: Bodies In Motion: A Religious History of Sports in America.

Join us at the Pigskin Dispatch website and the Sports Jersey Dispatch to see even more Positive football news! Sign up to get daily football history headlines in your email inbox @ Email-subscriber

Don't forget to check out and subscribe to the Pigskin Dispatch YouTube channel for additional content and the regular Football History Minute Shorts.

Miss our football by the day of the year podcasts, well don't, because they can still be found at the Pigskin Dispatch website.

In our episode tonight, our guest joins us who wrote a book that a religious experience in sports in America could be happening right before our eyes and all through history.

Art Remillard is up in just a moment to tell us all about it.

This is the Pigskin Daily History Dispatch, a podcast that covers the anniversaries of American football events throughout history.

Your host, Darren Hayes is podcasting from.

America's North Shore to bring you the memories of the gridiron one day at a time.

Hello, my football friends.

This is Darren Hayes of pigskindispatch.com welcome once again to the Pig Pen, your portal deposit of football history.

And welcome to another edition where we get to talk about an author.

Talk to an author about a recent book they've had out that's it's got some.

Some football themed items in it and sports galore.

The gentleman's name is Arthur Remillard and he's joining us today.

Arthur, welcome to the Pig Pen.

Well, it's good to be here.

Thanks for inviting me.

Looking forward to talking all things football.

Yeah.

Well, first of all, thank you for the advanced copy of the book.

I read it, I really enjoyed it, and we got a lot to talk about because you really unpacked a lot of sports history and a lot along your theme of your book in the pages here.

In just a short amount of pages, really.

It was a great read and a quick read and I recommend it to everybody.

But why don't you tell us maybe a little bit what the basic theme of the book is and give us the title and where folks can get it right.

So the book is called Bodies in Motion Religious History of Sports in America.

And what I wanted to do was understand the ways in which sports have taken on certain religious characteristics through time, have assumed sort of sacred meanings without going so far as to say that sports is our new religion.

And we can get into that a little bit.

I bristle a little bit at that one.

But I think for the purposes of this podcast, it's probably worth saying that my entry point into this whole conversation was football.

And I went to graduate school at Florida State University and I was not an FSU fan or anything like that.

I just was going to school there and I saw, you know, just the mania around that team.

You know, I'm close to Penn State.

I understand college football mania, but boy, this was just another level.

You know, somebody rolling in on Thursday with their million dollar RV that has all the garnet and gold all over the place.

And at one point I was in A discussion and the mascot came up.

It's the Florida State Seminoles.

And I saw people get really, really fired up immediately.

And I thought, oh, wow, you know, I'm studying things now.

You know, I'm in graduate school.

And specifically Emile Durkheim, who's a sociologist who understood that, who wanted to try to understand religion beyond kind of institutional forms.

And he really focused on what he called sacred things.

And the best characterization of what Durkheim meant by this was from another sociologist who framed it as something that is deeply cherished and violently defended.

And I said, whoa, that's this mascot.

And so that led me down the road to writing about the history of the conflict over this, this mascot and the various directions that went.

And it just sort of snowballed from there.

So, yeah, absolutely.

Football is kind of where my entry point has been to look at sports more generally through time.

Yeah, it's.

I mean, it's a fascinating subject and it's one that's really popped up, you know, a few times, more than a few times here on this podcast.

You know, we just talked before we came on, you know, you're familiarity and you even had recommendation from Dr. Randall Balmer, who was our guest not too long ago, a year or two ago, on his book, which had a similar theme but much different subject matter.

So didn't see any crossover other than some of the themes and the points that you made.

And, you know, we've had some other guests that talked about some of the iconology of the football helmet and, you know, the emblems on the football helmet and what it's going to symbolize it.

So it's very, very interesting.

And I mean, I'm a, I'm a Christian man myself, and I, I, so I recognize the characteristics, but I was so oblivious until, you know, you recent guests have come on here and really pointed out to me that, oh my gosh, this really is.

Have a lot of parallelisms to sports fandom and religion.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I think that that's really a very kind of common and natural thing to see the connection.

And I think it does come down to the enthusiasm, the interest.

And I mean, look, you can see, like you were saying, sacred images.

And again, when I was down at Florida State, they don't call their mascot a mascot, called a symbol.

Right.

This isn't a mascot.

And the logo that they have, there's a lot of care and protection of this logo.

And these things on their own are not significant.

Right.

There's no sort of utilitarian value to them, but people invest a lot of meaning to it.

So, you know, if I walked into the practice area of the football team and I decided to go stomping on the logo, that wouldn't end well for me.

You know, I learned that really quickly.

And this was, again, my entry point was that there were people, you know, outside of the Florida state sort of circle who were raising questions about the appropriateness of this particular mascot.

And I.

The amount of vitriol that would come toward them was.

Was something.

This is sort of pre Internet.

This is pre social media.

You know, I had written something for.

For the local newspaper at that time, really, just trying to describe the backstory on who, you know, Chief Osceola was and how he died, which, you know, he was.

He was captured.

The specifics are kind of probably going to be a little foggy in my mind.

It's been a while since I've done this.

But he was captured and sort of lured in on a truce flag.

And then they captured him, and eventually he died and they removed his head.

This was something that happened at this point.

They put his head in a jar, and it was kind of like this war trophy.

And so for years in St. Augustine, there was Osceola's head in a pharmacy, in the window of a pharmacy.

And so, you know, some of the objections were when I'm looking at this logo and I see, you know, the head of an indigenous person sort of encircled like this.

Right.

This is.

This is sort of reminiscent of this.

Do you want to think about that?

And so I had sort of brought that up.

And again, this is pre social media.

My.

I was getting all sorts of hate mail.

Okay, I touched a nerve, right?

Yeah, yeah, you.

When you're talking about the emblem thing, it almost made me think about a few decades ago, maybe longer ago, that one, I think it was.

Terrell Owens was playing for the 49ers at the time and playing in Dallas's stadium and scored a touchdown, ran to the center field, spiked the ball on the star.

And, you know, a few years later, he's wearing a Cowboys uniform, which is kind of ironic, but, yeah, people were very upset about that.

Him spiking that ball on their emblem in the middle of the field.

Yeah.

And the Steelers were playing against the Tennessee Titans, I believe it was.

And one of the players from the opposite side, after they had won the game, like, I think he blew his nose into the terrible towel and stomped on it or something.

And this was just, like, outrage.

Right?

And then I think that particular player, he ended up getting hurt a little bit later.

And the Titans lost their next game.

And then they started the next season, they lost a couple games.

And in Pittsburgh, the story was that's the curse that.

You know, like, the curse of the towel.

That's what you get.

Right.

It was maybe even more obvious.

TJ Husmandrada, who's playing for the Cincinnati Bengals, they were playing a game, playoff game.

The Steelers were at Cincinnati, and Cincinnati looked like.

Started the game.

They were on fire, scoring like crazy.

Houston, Jada takes the terrible towel, shines his shoes with it, and, you know, Carson Palmer gets injured, like, on the next play, and the Steelers go on and win the playoff game.

And again, the curse of the towel.

You got it.

Myron Cope is getting his vengeance on you for that.

Absolutely.

I mean, the terrible towel is a great example, especially around here.

For when I'm talking about this, I always start with it.

Right?

And I always start with that kind of like, what if I walked into a Steelers bar and I blew my nose into this?

Right?

Like, oof.

Right?

Like, the flinches that happen.

Just somebody thinking about that.

Hairs on the back of my neck are a little off right now.

You know, I mean, people wrap their newborn children in this.

Myron Cope, he had a.

He had a whole, like, blanket of these on his coffin when.

When they laid him to rest.

You know, they take these all over the world.

I talk about, you know, I've lived in my life halfway across the world, halfway across America.

I've lived, you know, in a lot of different places.

Every place I have ever lived, there has been a Steelers bar.

You know, that community has spread out, and there is an intensity in that community that is pretty impressive.

Yeah, you definitely don't want to blow your nose on it, because you never know who's watching.

Yeah, I agree with you.

I've been, you know, I'm a Steelers fan.

I've, you know, traveled across the country, and I was in Phoenix, and I got off a plane, and there's somebody in the Phoenix airport wearing Steelers gear, and I'm, like, going, so.

I mean, it felt like a home.

You know, that was kind of nice.

But.

Yes.

I mean, your book is not just about football.

Matter of fact, it's probably more of other sports in there.

But you have some great instances of football to.

To bring about, but one not.

And with the.

You know, I wish this was Called Pugilism Dispatch.

Because one of your stories in the beginning of the book was about a young African American fighter.

And that really resonated with me.

And you.

You really grabbed my attention as a reader by introducing this gentleman.

Maybe you could just talk about him briefly and his story.

I love this story.

I love this story because one of the things I wanted to do was start to thinking about, you know, when America was founded, right?

When we had the revolution and then we had the founding and we had everything like that.

One of the things that had to happen was, is that communities had to figure out who they were.

And we do that in part by saying, you know, who are.

Who are heroes?

Who are the people we look up to?

Who are the.

The ones who really stand apart?

And in early America, George Washington was a.

Was a big hero.

He was a big heroic figure for all that he had done and all that he had represented.

I mean, the statues and the.

And the speeches and all the things about Washington.

Yes, absolutely.

But there were other heroes of the age coming from other populations.

We have a large and growing enslaved population at this time.

And the story that you're referencing, Tom Malno, this is a really interesting one.

So the story goes that he is a.

He's an enslaved person, and he is.

His father was a boxer, and he was a boxer.

And the person who owned the plantation had set up a fight between him and a neighboring plantation.

Tom Malno wins the fight and thereby wins his freedom and then goes off to New York.

It's a great story of sports and liberation and things like that.

Not necessarily backed by the historical record, but it's become part of the mythology of Tom Malnau.

So he goes to New York, he becomes the, you know, the champion of America.

But he realizes the money's to be made over in England, and so he goes over, and when he gets to London, there is a new kind of sport, new kinds of journalism starting.

Pierce Egan is the name of the person, the plutarch of prize fighting, as he would be called.

He starts to write about the colorful figures, about the events, about just the mania of this lovely sport that's all across London.

And Tom Malno is an object of fascination for not just Pierce Egan, but just all of London is really interested in this American hero, right?

This is how Pierce Egan is understanding this person.

And sort of the high point of Tom Malno's story is that he finally is able to get a fight against the champion, who is Tom Cribb.

And these were rough fights.

These were rough I mean, this is bare knuckle, you know, it was knockdown, drag out fights and there's all kinds of stories about what happened during this.

But at the end of the day, the folks in London didn't want an American or a black American to be taking this, this crown.

And there's stories of, of the, of, of the crowd rushing in, of once Maloneau looks like he's going to win, they stop him, you know.

But it's a great story about how the idea of an American hero takes a different form than what we normally know and unfolds in a different place.

Right.

We're really not that far removed from the revolution at the time that he's over in England.

So all of those international tensions are playing out in these fights and certainly there's a racial dimension and all these other things.

And so.

Yeah, I really loved kind of getting into the details of that story.

I'm glad you picked that one up.

Yeah.

Like you said, there were so many facets to it in being, you know, a 200 year old plus story.

Yeah.

And just having so many elements of modern society in it that I would have never guessed in a million years that that could have happened 200 years ago.

Yeah.

And Malno becomes a kind of point of reference for years after.

I mean, a hundred years after, almost 100 years after he's fighting in England, there's another black fighter in the United States who becomes the champion.

Jack Johnson.

He beats Tommy Burns over in Australia.

And this is at the height of Jim Crow America.

Right.

Where we have segregation that's really tightening its grip.

And there were real questions about whether or not this should even interracial boxing should even happen.

And at some point, you know, Jack Johnson's talent was such that, boy, the sports fighting public, they really wanted to see him, you know, they really wanted to see him against the best.

And so he wins the championship.

Jim Jeffries was the former champion.

He had retired, he had gone to California, but he ran out of money.

And the white spirit, prize fighting fan, just, they could not let him go.

Right.

They thought he was the, quote, unquote, great white hope.

That's where that term sort of emerged from.

And he got thumped.

You know, Jack Johnson just absolutely thumped him.

One of the sports writers there was actually Jack London, the great writer, and he, his account was just like, oh boy.

Yeah.

No Hope, right?

No hope here.

But Tom Melno became a point of reference when Jack Johnson was fighting that those stories kind of meshed and then they sort of moved forward.

And in later generations, when Muhammad Ali comes along, he's looking at Jack Johnson, who was this brash, fast talking, didn't care, would just offend the sensibilities of everybody and flaunt it.

Right.

You know, those, that.

There's that kind of line that you can see from Tom Malnod to Muhammad Ali.

Right.

It's, it's, it is really kind of interesting when you start to connect all those dots.

Yeah, it definitely is.

And I guess you help segue me into the next topic I wanted to talk about is you go chronologically hard for me to get that out.

But you go up into the Roaring twenties, you know, the golden age of sports, and you get into some of, you know, you're talking about Jack London, but you have some of these journalists that are writing, you know, before him that are, you know, really setting the stage for modern day sports rating.

And, you know, the Grant Rices and you also had Francis Wallace and, you know, maybe you could just tell some of the parallelisms you have with Grantland Rice and some of his pros and, and get into Mr. Wallace as well.

Yeah, I, I love that you picked up on that because that was a great story for me.

You know, I read this book after I kind of got through.

I don't know if you read the Mosquito bowl by Buzz Bissinger.

I did, yeah.

So I was in the Marine Corps, and so I was really interested in this because I served.

Well, thanks.

I was, I did two years over in Okinawa.

And so I was really interested to read this.

But one of the things that Bissinger really emphasized was how well the Marine Corps used media and print media in particular.

Like, they were really good about getting journalists who could tell a story in a way that made the Marine Corps look like the Marine Corps that we know.

Right.

You know, the thing that drew me in uniforms, just the mystique of it.

Right.

That was building at the same time as you had people like Francis Wallace and Grantland Rice writing about sports.

So I was like, whoa, right.

What a neat connection about, you know, journalism and the way in which journalism developed at roughly this, the same time.

But yeah, Grantland Rice really liked to put a flare on sports and emphasize that his job was making heroes.

He said, if you're not making heroes, then what are we even doing?

Right.

And so he's the one who is putting a Spotlight on Babe Ruth, on Ty Cobb, on these great athletes of the era.

Francis Wallace I really like, because that story tells you the story of American Catholicism at this time.

Right.

And so when you get Notre Dame starting to rise up and become a force in college football, it's a way in which Catholics are presenting themselves in this very American way, right?

Muscularity and strength and everything else, and doing so on a football field against the best Protestant and, you know, secular teams of the time.

And so that level of legitimacy that is owed to him.

So you had people like Francis Wallace really kind of amping this up, you know, making Knute Rockne a heroic figure.

And then, you know, in the midst of that, you have a fairly infamous clash with the Klan.

The Klan was very prominent in Indiana at this time, and they had a march in.

In South Bend.

And, of course, the Notre Dame students weren't too happy about it.

There were a lot of confrontations.

Some of the football players were involved in this.

And this is where that moniker, the Fighting Irish, starts to emerge.

In the initial, the administration at the time, they didn't really like that term.

They thought they played into stereotypes.

But Francis Wallace was, like, picking it up and using it.

And it's that whole thing of, you take something that's meant to be an insult, you make it a badge of honor.

That's what happened.

After a couple years, it starts to become this thing, and then the Fighting Irish becomes this very Catholic team.

I mean, they do very Catholic things, but on a national stage and really kind of expands what American pluralism means through this really unique, combative sport.

Yeah, I had.

I'm a Notre Dame fan, and I.

And I've been lifelong.

And I had never realized that.

That there had been such, you know, a disparity during the era of Newt Rockne and the Four Horsemen.

It's almost a riotous situation.

And even, you know, one of the Four Horsemen, Harry Stool Dreher, you have, you know, they were throwing potatoes at the light bulbs, I believe, in your book.

And Stool Dre is the one that knocks out the final light bulb to, you know, put Notre Dame's point across that, you know, absolutely against their adversaries here.

So that was something I never heard before, and I love learning something new, especially about a team that I thought I knew a lot about.

Yeah, they were a big.

That.

That was A big deal.

And I think that, again, it's really important to understand the way in which sports kind of makes these ways for, you know, pioneers.

One of the chapters that I wrote to make their way.

One of the stories that, I mean, shifting to a different sport that I always tell is, is Hank Greenberg.

He's, you know, like, if I could go back in time and meet anybody, I think I'd want to meet Hank Greenberg.

I really.

I really believe in historians kind of.

I don't know that they necessarily agree with me on this.

I really believe they stopped pitching to him because they didn't want him to get Babe Ruth's record.

You know, I really believe that.

But he was in a time and in a place.

You know, he's in.

He's in Detroit.

And you've got, you know, Henry Ford putting out the protocols of Elders design.

You've got Father Coughlin just, you know, doing his thing on the radio.

There was a lot of anti.

Semitism, and I think he did so much to push back on that.

Just the fact that he was Hammer.

And Hank, he was this muscle man, like, who could just.

He was a power hitter.

He was important to the team.

And then people learned about Judaism through him.

You know, what.

What.

What it is.

And.

And then he, you know, was In World War II like so many of these guys, right?

And then, you know, the scene that.

That I keep coming back to, again, I wish I was there, was when, you know, Jackie Robinson had just come into the league and they came to Pittsburgh.

And at this point, you had Hank.

Hank Greenberg was part of Pittsburgh.

He had finished off his career there, and he was playing first base, and the two had collided on first base.

And, you know, Jackie Robinson, he's getting all these taunts.

He's.

It's.

It's.

It's a bad scene.

And afterward, Greenberg checked in on him, make sure he was okay, and just said, hey, you know what?

Stay.

Hang in there.

You're gonna be all right.

You know, and this is a guy who's been through it.

You know, Greenberg, he had been through it, right?

And.

And there was such a.

Such a bond between those two from that.

And I thought, wow, you know, like, what a.

What a great story.

What a powerful story.

What a testament to the character of both of these people and.

And what they meant, again, to kind of expanding the moral map of what America is and could be.

Yeah.

Especially from two different races.

Two different.

Growing up differently, you know, looking differently, and.

But to have the same empathy for each other because they you know, really had the same troubles that they've gone through their lives and their lives in baseball.

So, yeah, that was pretty powerful.

Your story on him too, as.

And you touch on so many different athletes.

And, you know, folks, you really got to get a copy of the book and, you know, get into this because there are some athletes that I have never heard of.

And like I said, I read quite a few sports books and I really got to enjoy some stories, not only about football that I didn't know, but especially, you know, some of, you know, the women's sports and people that lived, you know, a century ago or early 20th century.

And you have, you know, you have them by the dozens coming out in the pages of this book, which is really intriguing.

And they all carry that central theme of you.

You proving your point, you know, you know, where are we going with sports?

I think is sort of what I. I got out of it.

Is that sort of the message that you're starting to.

Yeah, I mean, that's.

That's certainly.

That's certainly a big part of it.

Like, what.

What do these things mean to us?

You know, and.

And it can certainly take us into difficult places.

You know, by the end, I get into the story of.

I look into icons, sports icons, which was really an interesting.

That was one of my favorite chapters to write because that has not been a framing that we've used for sports until fairly recently, as I kind of understood it.

You start to have this language of sports icon emerging at the same time that we have digital technologies emerge, right?

On our digital devices, we have icons.

That's the language that we started to use.

And we use these icons to create images and to mass produce these images.

And so we get people like Michael Jordan.

You go anywhere in the world and if you see that, you know, that image of Air Jordan that Nike popularized, you know who it is, you can't see the face.

It's just an image, right?

And so I love telling the story of the way in which corporations stepped in and elevated images.

I mean, think of all the great images that we have of Tiger woods, his, you know, iconography.

The iconic red shirt that, you know, Rick Sunday, right, the Weeknd warriors would wear just to kind of like mimic and be in the presence of this.

And the story that really stuck out to me was Lance Armstrong, because I didn't appreciate, until I started writing this book just how much people revered him.

Not just for the bike stuff, but for everything that his cancer story told.

Because we, we've all been touched by this and to kind of have somebody who really rises up and overcomes that is.

It's a powerful story.

And he meant so much to so many people that they really held onto it until the bitterest of bitter ends, right?

And then, you know, he goes on Oprah and everything starts to unravel, and the shine comes off.

And I think that a lot of the people who had commented on him said, wow, right?

Like, it was right in front of me the whole time, and I didn't want to see it.

And I think that that's always the tension that we have in sports.

I refer to it early as the Olympias problem.

So who is Olympias?

So if you go to St. Augustine, there's a story of him teaching, and there's this young man, Alypius, who really loves the circus.

It's these sort of games, these really brutal games that they would go and watch.

And, you know, Augustine's like, that's really not good for you to do.

And he's like, okay, I'm gonna quit going to the games.

I'm gonna quit going to the circus.

But then his friends cajole him, and he goes.

He says, okay, I'm gonna go, but I'm not gonna watch.

I'm gonna cover my eyes.

He covers his eyes, but he starts to hear all the noises of the circus.

And then he can't.

He can't hold back anymore, right?

He's drawn in.

And so I call that the Olympias problem, because that was the thing that the Puritans were really worried about.

They understood that sports had value.

I mean, like, beyond utilitarian stuff.

Yes.

Sports can get you prepared for war.

They can make men strong.

They can.

All these things that.

They had an understanding of that.

But they also understood that there was something to sports that was just valuable to the people, to the human being.

But they worried about if it would take over.

And I think that that push and pull plays out all through American history that we're always worried about.

You know, in the early 20th century, the baseball craze, that this is taking us away, this is a distraction.

This is bringing us to ball fields on Sunday instead of church.

The marathon craze at around the same time you had at the Olympics.

John.

Oh, goodness.

John Kelly, you know, winning a gold medal.

I'm sorry, Johnny Hayes.

And this Sparks this marathon craze.

And you have people looking at this saying is, yes, endurance is a value, but that is too much.

That's Extreme.

And young men shouldn't be doing this.

This is.

This is too much.

Right.

And so there's always that again, that.

That push and pull there.

Yeah, it's you.

I love it when a book makes me think when I put it down.

And your book, you know, having read it recently, has really made me think a lot this week, you know, I'll take it back to my Steelers fandom, you know, the tradition and how you, you know, you can't break tradition.

And I found it really interesting, and you made me think about it in a different way.

When they took the field, you know, Rooney designed jersey, and they had to change some things.

They had you.

Now they have to have a number there, so they sort of turn, put it off the side on the.

The chest.

But people are up in arms over that.

That uniform and the Bumblebee uniform that came a couple years afterwards, which they had, you know, a decade ago on.

And I'm sitting here thinking they're fighting that, you know, they can't break the tradition.

But the tradition, this is what started the Steelers organization.

This is more traditional than what they were now.

But, yes, it's amazing how people, you know, get into that.

That path of, you know, idolizing the uniform and identifying with the uniform, I guess maybe a better word.

And then when you try to take them off that path, it's.

It's difficult to do.

So.

Yeah, I thank you for making me think about things outside the box, outside the story book, because it's.

It's happening everywhere in sports.

The original, the dynasty, when that starts, where these guys lived in town, they had summer jobs.

They, you know, they.

They lived the life.

I mean, they were professional athletes, but they lived the life that was similar to the people who lived there.

That's not the case now.

Right.

They don't, you know, free agency and there's all sorts of things, and there's lots of money.

But I think that the fan expectations have shifted, and it's like, okay, you know, like, that was how we attached to the team, then we're going to change that now, you know, and we're going to.

It's the team.

It's the tradition that's important.

The individuals come and go, but the team and the tradition is the thing that we're really kind of clinging to.

And, you know, I'm just shooting from the hip here.

I guess this is something that, as we're talking, is just popping into my head.

It's a very Catholic city, right?

Yeah, that's true.

And this is, you know, the whole understanding of apostolic secession is that the authority of the priest comes from this unbroken lineage that goes back to the, you know, the apostolic succession.

Right.

And the tradition is what matters.

The individuals, yes, they are couriers and everything else and important figures in this.

But the institution and what it represents is the thing that you are ideally.

Right.

Supposed to cling to and kind of not to make too much of that, but our Protestant friends might bounce around because I don't like that minister.

I don't like how they're doing things.

I'm going to go over here.

Right.

I don't know if I want to make too much of that comparison, but, boy, you wonder about if the Catholic character of a city sort of grafts on to how people kind of connect a team.

Who knows?

That could be.

It's in the DNA, you know.

Right.

The Yinzer DNA.

Yeah.

Very interesting.

So why don't you give us again the title of your book where folks can get it?

Sure.

The title is Bodies in A Religious History of Sports in America.

You can get this anywhere where you buy books online, especially Amazon or Barnes and Noble or even the Oxford University Press website.

Yeah, well, we really appreciate you coming on here and sharing your book with it.

First of all, writing the book and sharing the sports history with us, coming on here on our podcast and sharing your book with us.

And, you know, I'm sure the readers will be very.

Or listeners will be very excited to become your readers and enjoy this book, too.

And we sure appreciate you having you here today.

Thank you.

It's great talking to you.

That's all the football history we have today, folks.

Join us back tomorrow for more of your football history.

We invite you to check out our website, pigskindispatch.com not only to see the daily football history, but to experience positive football.

With our many articles on the good people of the game, as well as our own football comic strip, cleet marks comics, pigskindispatch.com is also on social media outlets, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Don't forget the Pigskin Dispatch YouTube channel to get all of my your positive football news and history.

Special thanks to the talents of Mike and Gene Monroe, as well as Jason Neff for letting us use their music during our podcast.

This podcast is part of the Sports History Network, your headquarters for the yesteryear of your favorite sport.

You can learn more@sportshistorynetwork.com.