EAGLES ENCYCLOPEDIA
The Eagles Encyclopedia, co-authored by Hall of Fame Writer Ray Didinger and local sports historian Robert S. Lyons, is the first comprehensive chronicle of the team’s history and an indispensable guide for every Eagles fan.
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Abundantly illustrated with anecdotes about players, coaches, fans and stadiums in which the team has played, The Eagles Encyclopedia recounts the greatest moments in the team’s history and vividly brings to life the men who helped to create professional football in Philadelphia.
• Starting with a description of Bert Bell’s 1933 purchase of the Frankford Yellow Jackets, the city’s first National Football League franchise, Didinger and Lyons colorfully explain the following memorable moments that helped make the Eagles one of the most exciting teams in the NFL:
• The Birds’ merger with the Pittsburgh Steelers during World War II which produced their first winning in history
• The Duffel Bag Dynasty of 1947-49 when the Eagles went to three consecutive NFL title games and won the only back-to-back championships in their history
• The 1960 NFL championship victory over the Green Bay Packers
• The brilliant careers of Chuck Bednarik, Steve Van Buren, and other Eagles in the Pro Football Hall of Fame
• The Dick Vermeil years and the first trip to the Super Bowl
• The unprecedented streak of four straight division titles under Coach Andy Reid and the ride to Super Bowl XXXIX
There’s much more in The Eagles Encyclopedia:
• A year-by-year history of the team
• Individual profiles of more than 100 players—from Swede Hanson to Donovan McNabb
• A statistical section with individual and team records, an all-time roster, and every draft pick from 1936 through 2005.
Praised by critics as “a 324-page masterwork,”… “vastly entertaining,”… “the most readable history of the team ever done,” and “a joy to read,” The Eagles Encyclopedia is a true slice of Philadelphia history.
PALESTRA PANDEMONIUM
In Palestra Pandemonium, Robert S. Lyons describes for the first time how five local college basketball powers amazingly agreed to compete at the Palestra, a venerable brick building on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania that hosted more fans at more games than any other college arena in history. Before the Big 5 officially began its round-robin schedule, some of the schools wouldn’t even speak to each other let along meet on the hardwood.
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Soon every major coach in the nation—like UCLA’s John Wooden, Kentucky’s Adolph Rupp and Indiana’s Bobby Knight—was bringing a team into the Palestra. All the great players, such as Julius Erving, Bill Bradley, and Elgin Baylor, were there. The 1957-58 Palestra All Opponent team, in fact, included three of the games all-time greats—Oscar Robinson, Jerry West, and Wilt Chamberlain.
And, of course, there were the local heroes like La Salle’s Michael Brooks and Lionel Simmons, who were National Players of the Year. La Salle’s Ken Durrett, Saint. Joseph’s Matt Goukas, Temple’s Mark Macon and Guy Rodgers, and Villanova’s Howard Porter were consensus All Americas. Villanova’s Ed Pinckney and Howard Porter and Temple’s Hal Lear were named Most Outstanding Players of the NCAA Final Four. Penn’s John Wideman was a Rhodes Scholar.
Lyons explains in colorful detail how traditional rivalries like Army-Navy or Harvard-Yale had nothing on the Big 5’s fierce battles fought before screaming fans, amidst colorful streamers, fanatic mascots, often-raunchy rollouts, banging drums and blaring bands. These games were often decided by a last-second buzzer-beater fired by some obscure walk-on whose shot sent the Palestra into tumultuous bedlam and gave the winning team’s alumni and students bragging rights for another year.
This is their unforgettable story: the coaches and players, the amazing characters, officials, and others vividly describing in their own words the intensity, the exhilaration, the emotions of 36 years of the most memorable and fascinating rivalries of the Big 5 played in the best college basketball facility in the nation—the likes of which we will never see again.
ON ANY GIVEN SUNDAY
On Any Given Sunday is the first biography ever written about the man who some
considered the greatest commissioner in the history of professional sports. It vividly portrays the life of Bert Bell, a native of Philadelphia, who has been called the most powerful executive figure in the history of professional football.
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Robert S. Lyons recounts the remarkable story of how de Benneville “Bert” Bell rejected the gentility of a high society lifestyle in favor of the tougher gridiron and rose to become the founder of the Philadelphia Eagles, co-owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers, and Commissioner of the National Football League. Along the way, he was responsible for helping to transform the game from a circus sideshow into what has become the most popular spectator sport in America.
Bell, who arguably saved the league from bankruptcy by conceiving the idea for the annual player draft, later made the historic decision to introduce “Sudden Death” overtime — a move that propelled professional football into the national consciousness. He coined the phrase “On Any Given Sunday” and negotiated the league's first national TV contract. Lyons also describes in fascinating detail Bell’s relationships with leading figures ranging from such Philadelphia icons as Walter Annenberg and John B. Kelly to national celebrities and U.S. Presidents. He also provides insight into Bell’s colorful personal life — including his hell-raising early years and his secret marriage to Frances Upton, a golden name in show business.
On Any Given Sunday is being published on the 50th anniversary of Bell's death in 1959. True to his statement “I’m a football man!” Bell was stricken with a heart attack in the final two minutes of an Eagles-Steelers contest at Franklin Field in Philadelphia, watching the game he loved, between two teams he once owned, at the stadium where he began his football career as a Penn quarterback in 1914.
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