Pigskin Rapture: Four Days in the Life of Texas Football

In a magical four-day period in autumn 2015, both of Texas’s NFL teams played at home on different days, a major high school rivalry was set for Friday night in West Texas, and a fierce regional rivalry came to the Cotton Bowl on Saturday afternoon. Pigskin Rapture: Four Days in the Life of Texas Football captures not just the action on the field but, perhaps more importantly, the pageantry off the field as well: cheerleaders, tailgate parties, booster club rallies, homecoming coronations, skybox parties, the bar scene, and more.

Sports journalist Mac Engel and photographer Ron Jenkins and his assistant Michael Ainsworth took the ultimate football road trip: from a Texan’s game in Houston, to Odessa to cover Permian High School’s homecoming game, then to Dallas take in Texas v. Oklahoma in the Cotton Bowl, followed by every Texan’s Sunday ritual, the Dallas Cowboys at home against perhaps the best quarterback in a generation. Along the way the Pigskin Rapture team captures the sights, sounds, and smells of a state smitten with football, from K-D’s Barbecue in Midland, to the rarefied air of Cowboys owner Jerry Jones’s private box in AT & T Stadium. Here, too, are the more subtle and occasionally unseen manifestations of Texas football culture, such as a homeless man who resides on a practice field in Houston; the cavernous remains of the Astrodome; the proud high school where Andrew Luck played; the Australian woman who made the Cowboy’s cheerleading squad, having never watched an NFL game; and the hangover a West Texas town continues to endure nearly three decades following the publication of Friday Night Lights.

With hundreds of stunning full-color photographs and meticulous reporting on the games and events, this book provides both die-hard and casual football fans everything they need to feel part of the action!

Mac Engel is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Since 1998, he has covered the Texas Rangers, Dallas Stars, and Dallas Cowboys as well as colleges, high schools, and the Olympics. His Big Mac Blog was named the best blog in Texas by the Associated Press in 2012.

Fort Worth/Dallas–based contract photographer Ron Jenkins specializes in sports, covering the Dallas Cowboys, Texas Rangers, and Dallas Mavericks as well as NCAA, high school, and everything in between. His photos have been published all over the world, including in French sports magazine L’Equipe, premier German magazine Stern, and the USA’s Sports Illustrated.