Showing titles in Sociology of Sports

“How can the NCAA blithely wreck careers without regard to due process or common fairness? How can it act so ruthlessly to enforce rules that are so petty? Why won’t anybody stand up to these outrageous violations of American values and American justice?” In the four years since Joe Nocera...

In his blistering new audiobook, Bias in the Booth, sports reporter and commentator Dylan Gwinn takes you inside the sports media spin machine to reveal what they hope you won't notice: The sports media are no different from the news and entertainment media.

In Against Football Steve Almond details why, after 40 years as a fan, he can no longer watch the game he still loves. Using a synthesis of memoir, reportage, and cultural critique, Almond asks a series of provocative questions: Does our addiction to football foster a tolerance for violence, greed, racism, and homophobia? What does it mean that our society has transmuted the intuitive physical joys of childhood--run, leap, throw, tackle--into a billion-dollar industry?

The 15 major-league managers interviewed in The Man in the Dugout represent six decades of baseball - men like Joe McCarthy of the New York Yankees and Walter Alston of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Each oral history, steeped in nostalgia and confidentiality, is a record of the triumphs and defeats of the man carrying the prime responsibility of a multimillion-dollar franchise. Here the manager is revealed as a strategist, tactician, peacemaker, politician, ego-soother, and builder of self-confidence.

John Schulian, a much-honored sportswriter for nearly forty years, takes us back to a time when our greatest athletes stood before us as human beings, not remote gods. In this compelling collection, Schulian paints prose portraits to remind fans of what today's cloistered stars won't share with them. The result is an audiobook guaranteed to stir memories for the generation that was - and to leave subsequent generations wishing they had it so good.

Pedro Martinez. Sammy Sosa. Manny Ramirez By 2000, Dominican baseball players were in every Major League clubhouse, and regularly winning every baseball award. In 2002, Omar Minaya became the first Dominican general manager of a Major League team. But how did this codependent relationship between MLB and Dominican talent arise and thrive?

The typical female sports fan remains very different from her male counterparts. In their insightful and engaging book, Sportista, Andrei S. Markovits and Emily Albertson examine the significant ways many women have become fully conversant with sports - acquiring a knowledge of and passion for them as a way of forging identities that until recently were quite alien to women.

Becoming a True Champion: Achieving Athletic Excellence from the Inside Out fills a critical need by speaking in a frank and direct voice directly to today's aspiring athletes about crucial, controversial issues and the personal choices they face. At the same time the audiobook presents them with the antidote to these negative influences - the fundamental values, attitudes and concepts, both mental and practical, that support and lead to athletic excellence.

Cards on the table - author Tim Forbes is not quite right. Want proof? How else could you explain him spending a full year of his life attending 100 uniquely different sporting events - involving 50 separate sports? Speed-dating with the entire sporting world initially revealed only painful truths, but what he ultimately learned in the most unassuming of venues had a dramatic impact on Tim’s life as a fan, a sports entrepreneur, and - however humble - an athlete.

From the beginning, ’68 was a season rocked by national tragedy and sweeping change. Opening Day was postponed and later played in the shadow of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s funeral. That summer, as the pennant races were heating up, the assassination of Robert Kennedy was later followed by rioting at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. But even as tensions boiled over and violence spilled into the streets, something remarkable was happening in major league ballparks across the country. Pitchers were dominating like never before, and with records falling and shut-outs mounting, many began hailing ’68 as “The Year of the Pitcher".

A look at how commercialization has transformed youth sports from fun into a heavily commercialized and profitable venture. Examining the youth sports economy from many sides - the major corporations, the small entrepreneurs, the coaches, the parents, and, of course, the kids - Hyman probes the reasons for rapid changes in what gets bought and sold in this lucrative marketplace. He reveals the effects on kids and profiles the individuals and communities bucking this destructive trend of commercialization.

NBC's Bob Costas has anchored football, basketball, and Summer Olympics coverage for NBC and served as a baseball play-by-play man. He is an 11-time Emmy winner and an eight-time National Sportscaster of the Year. Budd Mishkin is the senior feature correspondent and sports anchor/reporter at New York 1 and the host of the weekly profile series One on 1 with Budd Mishkin.

Bestselling author Joe Queenan's True Believers explores the world of sports fans in an attempt to understand the inexplicable: What does anyone get out of it? For Yankee, Cowboy, and Laker fans the answer is fairly clear: the return on investment is relatively high. But why do people root so...

Laduuuuuma heißt Tooooor! Südafrika ist mehr als Diamanten, Löwen, Tafelberg und Nelson Mandela. Wer wüsste das besser als der Afrika-Experte Bartholomäus Grill, der in Johannesburg eine Jugendelf trainiert hat. Geistreich und unterhaltsam führt er durch die Kap-Republik und den Kontinent, auf dem 2010 zum ersten Mal die Fußball-WM ausgetragen wird.

In You Throw Like a Girl, former Syracuse University quarterback and NFL veteran Don McPherson examines how the narrow definition of masculinity adversely impacts women and creates many "blind spots" that hinder the healthy development of men. Dissecting the strict set of beliefs and behaviors that underpin our understanding of masculinity, he contends that we don't raise boys to be men, we raise them not to be women. 

In 2019, South Africa celebrates 25 years of democracy and the freedom that turned the country from a political pariah to one warmly embraced by the world. Nowhere was the welcome more visible, or more emotional, than in sport. Vuvuzela Dawn tells the stories of that return. From Bafana...

As a columnist for Time magazine, among many other publications, Tom Callahan witnessed an extraordinary number of defining moments in American sport across four decades. He takes us from Roberto Clemente clinching his 3,000th, and final, regular-season hit in Pittsburgh; to ringside for the Muhammad Ali - George Foreman fight in Zaire; and to Arthur Ashe announcing, at a news conference, that he'd tested positive for HIV.

Only available in audio! Listen to never-before-told, behind-the-scenes anecdotes as recounted by sports journalism legend John Feinstein. Hear John's once-in-lifetime personal interactions with some of the most monumental figures and moments in sports history: from Bob Knight and “the night...

As the revenues generated by big-time college sports continue to skyrocket, virtually all of the debate involves whether (and how much) student-athletes should be paid for play. Kenneth L. Shropshire and Collin D. Williams Jr., argue that "student" has to come first: the focus should be on prioritizing a meaningful education. They draw on new research to reveal that it has become increasingly difficult for college athletes to balance school and sports, much less a social life, leading to serious economic, professional, and emotional consequences for young people.  

Football teams create playbooks, in which they draw up the plays they will use on the field. Playbooks are how teams work and why they win. This book is about a different kind of playbook: The one coaches, teams, universities, police, communities, the media, and fans seem to follow whenever a college football player is accused of sexual assault. It’s a deep dive into how different institutions - the NCAA, athletic departments, universities, the media - run the same plays over and over again when these stories break.