The Games Presidents Play: Sports and the Presidency

By John Sayle Watterson

Book Overview

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

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 080188425X
• ISBN13: 9780801884252
• Release Date: September 2006
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 1.3" x 6.1"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

The Games Presidents Play

In his latest work, "Games Presidents Play", author John Watterson has brought us an easy read and one filled with plenty of interesting anecdotes to satisfy even the most knowledgeable presidential historians. This book is clearly the perfect item for any reader with even a casual interest in the presidents and/or sporting activities in general. While there is some basic material about each man's time as the country's president, the primary focus of the book is to tell us about the athletic or sporting activities that aided the presidents in finding much-needed relaxation away from the office, while also having some influence on American culture in general on occasion. Watterson obviously begins with George Washington, and while the first president's physical strength and horsemanship are still held in great regard even today, what was interesting to this reader was Washington's fervent interest in the formal horse-racing and surrounding social functions that he often attended in Annapolis and Philadelphia. Not every president comes in for a writeup by the author -- after all, it is difficult to imagine men like John Adams or James Madison participating in anything more strenuous than an occasional horseback ride out of sheer necessity. The sporting activities of the presidents really began to gain national recognition with Theodore Roosevelt -- a man the author describes as one who "represents a melding of sports and politics that has now become commonplace." Watterson credits Roosevelt with originating what he calls "the twentieth-century sporting presidency." From there on we get a good deal more material on the sporting activities of the varios 20th century presidents, including such men as Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Gerald Ford (who actually was a very capable football lineman at the University of Michigan in the early 1930s), Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton. The stories of Clinton bending the rules of golf to suit his fancy was no surprise to this reader, and Watterson mentions that Clinton's "critics suggested that his golfing character was a mirror image" of some of his other White House misbehavior that landed him in big trouble. Again, "The Games Presidents Play" is an easy read -- well researched and well written -- by an author who has previously produced one of the best books ("College Football") written on the off-the-field history of college football. GPP would make a nice gift for any reader with even a casual interest in the American presidency. R.S. Ventura, CA