Clearly, college rodeo has meant much to the life of Sylvia Gann Mahoney. She was a college rodeo coach herself. She married a rodeo coach. She is a founder of an intercollegiate Rodeo alumni group. Perhaps her close association with college rodeo and her obvious love for the sport is the reason she should not have written this book

Pfeiffer, George H

English

DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska

University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Great Plains Quarterly Great Plains Studies, Center for 2005 Book Review: College Rodeo: From Show to Sport George H. Pfeiffer University of Nebraska-Lincoln Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly  Part of the Other International and Area Studies Commons Pfeiffer, George H., "Book Review: College Rodeo: From Show to Sport" (2005). Great Plains Quarterly. 204. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/204 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Great Plains Studies, Center for at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Great Plains Quarterly by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. College Rodeo: From Show to Sport. By Sylvia Gann Mahoney. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004. xviii + 350 pp. Photographs, appendices, notes, index. $29.95. Clearly, college rodeo has meant much to the life of Sylvia Gann Mahoney. She was a college rodeo coach herself. She married a rodeo coach. She is a founder of an intercol-legiate Rodeo alumni group. Perhaps her close association with college rodeo and her obvious love for the sport is the reason she should not have written this book. Mahoney chronicles in slightly more than two hundred pages the history of college rodeo and its participants, one chapter devoted to each decade beginning with the 1950s. Most of the remaining pages are appendices of past individual and school championship winners. The author's choice of this chronological struc-ture makes for an unclear focus and a difficult read. Describing, as best she can, the accom-plishments of the winning individuals, teams, and coaches over the years, she seems more BOOK REVIEWS 203 intent on making sure no worthy individual is left out than on tackling some of the significant issues college rodeo faced over its history. Among these is the question of why college rodeo was started, and why it should continue to exist. Her best attempt at a justification is that it is a sport for country kids because city kids have football, tennis, and golf. She points with great pride at the fact that many college rodeo champions have gone on to highly suc-cessful professional rodeo careers without won-dering whether serving as a minor league for professional rodeo justifies its being. She boasts of the high academic standards enforced by the National Intercollegiate Rodeo Association while ignoring the fact that college rodeo's greatest institutional representation is from junior and technical colleges, many of whose students take courses with limited academic content. She ignores the fact that academic standards to compete are well below even the modest requirements of NCAA athletes. Mahoney notes that the Association was begun on a shoestring and never has had the financial resources to grow in the fashion that "big time" college sports have prospered. She notes with apparent approval that college rodeo's longest and largest advertising donor is the U.S. Tobacco Company, seeming to 8ee this sponsorship as an act of great generos-ity rather than a highly successful marketing effort, and never questioning whether hustling its products to youth is appropriate. College rodeo alumni will value this book as they relive old friendships and past successes and failures. Those wishing for a critical, pen-etrating analysis of college rodeo, however, will not find it here. GEORGE H. PFEIFFER University of Nebraska Rodeo Association Faculty Adviser University of Nebraska-Lincoln 

Book Review: College Rodeo: From Show to Sport

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Book Review: College Rodeo: From Show to Sport

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