New Books in Sports: Recent Episodes
Marshall Poe
Interviews with Scholars of Sport about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communities. Andy Hunter is CEO and Founder of Bookshop.org. He also co-created Literary Hub. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today I talked to Earl Careton about his new book (co-authored with Jake Uitti), Earl the Twirl: My Life in Basketball (McFarland, 2023) Earl "The Twirl" Cureton was never a star player in the NBA, but then again, few people will ever be a celebrity athlete. Earl's story, instead, is about a life on the fringes of the league during its "Golden Era" of the '80s and '90s. A teammate of Julius Erving, Moses Malone, Michael Jordan, Charles Oakley, Muggsy Bogues, Hakeem Olajuwon, and more, Earl was a part of seven NBA teams in his twelve-season career. He won two championships during his career, first in 1983 with the Philadelphia 76ers, and then in 1994 with the Houston Rockets. And yet, as a professional basketball journeyman, every day was a struggle. Growing up in Detroit during race riots, Earl worked hard and became a standout player at the University of Detroit. A 6' 9" center in the pros, Earl battled with Karem Abdul-Jabbar in back-to-back NBA Finals. While many know the stories of big names like Jordan, Magic Johnson, and Larry Bird, few understand the life of a player on the outskirts of the league. This is Earl's own story, a unique perspective on the trials of a journeyman player: non-guaranteed contracts, tryouts and cuts, playing overseas, coming back from injury, and the looming "right of first refusal." Paul Knepper covered the New York Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All was published in 2020. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
The Imperial Gridiron: Manhood, Civilization, and Football at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (University of Nebraska Press, 2022) examines the competing versions of manhood at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School between 1879 and 1918. Students often arrived at Carlisle already engrained with Indigenous ideals of masculinity. On many occasions these ideals would come into conflict with the models of manhood created by the school’s original superintendent, Richard Henry Pratt. Pratt believed that Native Americans required the “embrace of civilization,” and he emphasized the qualities of self-control, Christian ethics, and retaliatory masculinity. He encouraged sportsmanship and fair play over victory. Pratt’s successors, however, adopted a different approach, and victory was enshrined as the main objective of Carlisle sports. As major stars like Jim Thorpe and Lewis Tewanima came to the fore, this change in approach created a conflict over manhood within the school: should the competitive athletic model be promoted, or should Carlisle focus on the more self-controlled, Christian ideal as promoted by the school’s Young Men’s Christian Association? The answer came from the 1914 congressional investigation of Carlisle. After this grueling investigation, Carlisle’s model of manhood starkly reverted to the form of the Pratt years, and by the time the school closed in 1918, the school’s standards of masculinity had come full circle. Bennett Koerber is a senior research associate at Taylor Research Group. He can be reached at bennettkoerber@taylorresearchgroup.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Isaac Murphy, born enslaved in 1861, still reigns as one of the greatest jockeys in American history. Black jockeys like Murphy were at the top of the most popular sport in America at the end of the nineteenth century. They were internationally famous, the first African American superstar athletes—and with wins in three Kentucky Derbies and countless other prestigious races, Murphy was the greatest of them all. At the same time, he lived through the seismic events of Emancipation and Reconstruction and formative conflicts over freedom and equality in the United States. And inevitably he was drawn into those conflicts, with devastating consequences. In Isaac Murphy: The Rise and Fall of a Black Jockey (Yale UP, 2023), Katherine C. Mooney uncovers the history of Murphy’s troubled life, his death in 1896 at age thirty-five, and his afterlife. In recounting Murphy’s personal story, she also tells two of the great stories of change in nineteenth-century America: the debates over what a multiracial democracy might look like and the battles over who was to hold power in an economy that increasingly resembled the corporate, wealth-polarized world we know today. Omari Averette-Phillips is a History Educator and an Independent scholar based in Southern California. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Surfboards were once made of wood and shaped by hand, objects of both cultural and recreational significance. Today most surfboards are mass-produced with fiberglass and a stew of petrochemicals, moving (or floating) billboards for athletes and their brands, emphasizing the commercial rather than the cultural. Surf Craft maps this evolution, examining surfboard design and craft with 150 color images and an insightful text. From the ancient Hawaiian alaia, the traditional board of the common people, to the unadorned boards designed with mathematical precision (but built by hand) by Bob Simmons, to the store-bought longboards popularized by the 1959 surf-exploitation movie Gidget, board design reflects both aesthetics and history. The decline of traditional alaia board riding is not only an example of a lost art but also a metaphor for the disintegration of traditional culture after the Republic of Hawaii was overthrown and annexed in the 1890s. In his text, Richard Kenvin looks at the craft and design of surfboards from a historical and cultural perspective. He views board design as an exemplary model of mingei, or art of the people, and the craft philosophy of Soetsu Yanagi. Yanagi believed that a design's true beauty and purpose are revealed when it is put to its intended use. In its purest form, the craft of board building, along with the act of surfing itself, exemplifies mingei. Surf Craft pays particular attention to Bob Simmons's boards, which are striking examples of this kind of functional design, mirroring the work of postwar modern California designers. Surf Craft is published in conjunction with an exhibition at San Diego's Mingei International Museum. Richard Kenvin is Director of the Hydrodynamica Project. He writes for The Surfer’s Journal and is the guest curator of the Surf Craft exhibition. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Competitive gaming, or esports - referring to competitive tournaments of video games among both casual gamers and professional players - began in the early 1970s with small competitions like the one held at Stanford University in October 1972, where some 20 researchers and students attended. By 2022, the estimated revenue of the global esports industry is in excess of $947 million, with over 200 million viewers worldwide. Regardless of views held about competitive gaming, esports have become a modern economic and cultural phenomenon. This book studies the full history of competitive gaming from the 1970s to the 2010s against the background of the arrival of the electronic and computer age. It investigates how competitive gaming has grown into a new form of entertainment, a sport-like competition, a lucrative business and a unique cultural sensation. It also explores the role of competitive gaming in the development of the video game industry, making a distinctive contribution to our knowledge and understanding of the history of video games. Zhouxiang Lu's A History of Competitive Gaming (Routledge, 2022) will appeal to all those interested in the business and culture of gaming, as well as those studying modern technological culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Scouting has been called pro baseball’s personalized way of renewing itself from year to year and a pathway to the game’s past. It takes a very special person to be a baseball scout: normal family life is out of the question because travel is a constant companion. Yet for those with the genuine calling for it, there could be no other life. Hearing the special thwack off the bat that indicates a raw prospect may be the real deal is the dream that keeps true scouts going. Scouts have the difficult task of not only discovering and signing new players but envisioning the trajectory of raw talent into the future. But the place of the traditional scout has become increasingly dire. In 2016 Major League Baseball eliminated the MLB Scouting Bureau that had been created in the 1970s to augment the regular scouting staffs of individual teams. On the eve of the 2017 playoffs that saw the Houston Astros crowned as World Series champions, the team dismissed ten professional scouts and by 2019 halved the number of all their scouts to less than twenty. More and more teams are replacing their experienced talent hunters with people versed in digital video and analytics but who have limited field knowledge of the game, driven by the Moneyball-inspired trend to favor analytics, data, and algorithms over instinct and observation. In Baseball's Endangered Species: Inside the Craft of Scouting by Those Who Lived It (U Nebraska Press, 2023), Lee Lowenfish explores in-depth how scouting has been affected by the surging use of metrics along with other changes in modern baseball business history: expansion of the Major Leagues in 1961 and 1962, the introduction of the amateur free agent draft in 1965, and the coming of Major League free agency after the 1976 season. With an approach that is part historical, biographical, and oral history, Baseball’s Endangered Species is a comprehensive look at the scouting profession and the tradition of hands-on evaluation. At a time when baseball is drenched with statistics, many of them redundant or of questionable value, Lowenfish explores through the eyes and ears of scouts the vital question of “makeup”: how a player copes with failure, baseball’s essential, painful truth. Paul Knepper covered the New York Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All was published in 2020. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
In Mallparks: Baseball Stadiums and the Culture of Consumption (Cornell UP, 2023), Michael T. Friedman observes that as cathedrals represented power relations in medieval towns and skyscrapers epitomized those within industrial cities, sports stadiums exemplify urban American consumption at the turn of the twenty-first century. Grounded in Henri Lefebvre and George Ritzer's spatial theories in their analyses of consumption spaces, Mallparks examines how the designers of this generation of baseball stadiums follow the principles of theme park and shopping mall design to create highly effective and efficient consumption sites. In his exploration of these contemporary cathedrals of sport and consumption, Friedman discusses the history of stadium design, the amenities and aesthetics of stadium spaces, and the intentions and conceptions of architects, team officials, and civic leaders. He grounds his analysis in case studies of Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore; Fenway Park in Boston; Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles; Nationals Park in Washington, DC; Target Field in Minneapolis; and Truist Park in Atlanta. Emilio J. Weber is a master’s student in the Physical Cultural Studies research group at the University of Maryland at College Park. He can be reached at ejweber@umd.edu or on twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
In this episode, the journal’s Features Editor Liberty Vittert and Editor in Chief Xiao-Li Meng dig into the data behind sports with two experts: Brian Macdonald, sports analytics at Yale (formerly Carnegie Mellon University) and Kirk Goldsberry, NBA analyst at ESPN and author of Sprawlball: A Visual Tour of the New era of the NBA. This episode is syndicated from the new Harvard Data Science Review Podcast. Published by the MIT Press, Harvard Data Science Review is an open access multidisciplinary journal that defines and shapes data science as a scientifically rigorous field based on the principled and purposed production, processing, parsing and analysis of data. If you enjoy this preview of the Harvard Data Science Review podcast, find the journal on twitter at @TheHDSR and remember to subscribe to their podcast on your favorite platform. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
“There’s a basic insecurity with Black guys my size,” Scott writes. “We can’t hide and everybody turns to stare when we walk down the street. … Whites believe that their culture is superior to African-American culture. ... We don’t accept many of [their] answers, but we have to live with them.” Ray Scott was part of the early wave of Black NBA players like Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, and later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who literally changed how the game of professional basketball is played—leading to the tremendously popular financial blockbuster the NBA is today. Scott was a celebrated 6’9” forward/center after being chosen by the Detroit Pistons as the #4 pick of the 1961 NBA draft, and then again after he was named head coach of the Pistons in October 1972, winning Coach of the Year in the spring of 1974—the first black man ever to capture that honor. Scott’s is a story of quiet persistence, hard work, and, most of all, respect. He credits the mentorship of NBA player and coach Earl Lloyd, and talks about fellow Philly native Wilt Chamberlain and friends Muhammad Ali and Aretha Franklin, among many others. Ray has lived through one of the most turbulent times in our nation’s history, especially the time of assassinations of so many Black leaders at the end of the 1960s. Through it all, his voice remains quiet and measured, transcending all the sorrows with his steadiness and positive attitude. The NBA in Black and White: The Memoir of a Trailblazing NBA Player and Coach (Seven Stories Press, 2022) is his story, told in collaboration with the great basketball writer, former college player and CBA coach Charley Rosen. Paul Knepper covered the Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All was published in 2020. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today I talked to Alan Shuback about his book Hollywood at the Races: Film's Love Affair with the Turf (UP of Kentucky, 2019) A love of the slapstick film duo Laurel and Hardy led nine-year-old Alan Shuback into a chance encounter with thoroughbred horse racing in 1957. Racing soon also became a passion, and he never abandoned either love, making a career out of the latter as a transatlantic racing journalist. More recently, with Hollywood and racing both in decline in Shuback’s eyes, he set out to document the close relationship between them during a golden era for both, encompassing the 1930s to the 1970s. In this intriguing interview, Shuback discusses anti-Semitism in the early days of Santa Anita, one of southern California’s premier racetracks, which led to the formation of rival racecourse Hollywood Park; Louis B. Mayer’s obsession with racing, producing one of America’s most powerful racing stables and nearly leading to his firing from MGM; Fred Astaire’s late-life marriage to a pioneering female jockey who was decades younger than him; and the role of films about horse racing in the broader culture. (For the record, at least 60 movies on the topic were released in the 1930s alone.) Finally, Shuback analyzes the decline of both industries. It’s a sad note, but one that leaves you grateful for the memories. Rachel Pagones was a London-based journalist at the Racing Post from 2001-2009 and a racing columnist for the Financial Times from 2003-2009. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Growing up, Muggsy Bogues was always told he should do something else, anything besides basketball. He never acknowledged his many doubters except to prove them spectacularly wrong. Twenty years after receiving his first basketball as a toddler, he stood proud—at five-foot-three—as the starting point guard for the Charlotte Hornets in the NBA. From the East Baltimore playground courts where he earned his nickname by muggin' opponents for possession of the ball to Dunbar High School where he excelled alongside future NBA players, Bogues set the tone in his early years for the great heights he'd reach professionally. In Muggsy: My Life from a Kid in the Projects to the Godfather of Small Ball (Triumph, 2022), Bogues delves deep into his life and career, reflecting on legendary battles with Michael Jordan, John Stockton, and other generational stars of ’80s and ’90s hoops. He shares far-ranging anecdotes from playoff runs in Charlotte, filming Space Jam, and even watching a young Steph Curry grow up. Conversational and clear-sighted, this is a story of uncompromising vision and fleet-footed determination during a golden era for the NBA. Paul Knepper covered the Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All was published in 2020. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
College football is a massive enterprise in the United States, and southern teams dominate poll rankings and sports headlines while generating billions in revenue for public schools and private companies. Southern football fans worship their teams, often rearranging their personal lives in order to accommodate season schedules. Andrew McIlwaine Bell's book The Origins of Southern College Football: How an Ivy League Game Became a Dixie Tradition (LSU Press, 2020) sheds new light on the South’s obsession with football and explores the sport’s beginnings below the Mason-Dixon Line in the decades after the Civil War. Military defeat followed by a long period of cultural unrest compelled many southerners to look to northern ideas and customs for guidance in rebuilding their beleaguered society. Ivy League universities, considered bastions of enlightenment and symbols of the modernizing spirit of the age, provided a particular source of inspiration for southerners in the form of organized or “scientific” football that featured standardized rules and scoring. Transported to the South by men educated at northern universities, scientific football reinforced cultural values that had existed in the region for centuries, among them a tolerance for violence, respect for martial displays, and support for traditional gender roles. The game also held the promise of a “New South” that its supporters hoped would transform the region into an industrial powerhouse. Students and townspeople alike embraced the new sport, which served as a source of pride for a region that lagged woefully behind its northern counterpart in terms of social equity and economic prowess. The Origins of Southern College Football (LSU Press, 2020) is an entertaining history of the South’s most popular sport cast against a broader narrative of the United States during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, two momentous periods of change that gave rise to the game we recognize today. Bennett Koerber is an instructor of history at Carnegie Mellon University. He can be reached at bkoerber@andrew.cmu.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Randall Balmer was a late convert to sports talk radio, but he quickly became addicted, just like millions of other devoted American sports fans. As a historian of religion, the more he listened, Balmer couldn't help but wonder how the fervor he heard related to religious practice. Houses of worship once railed against Sabbath-busting sports events, but today most willingly accommodate Super Bowl Sunday. On the other hand, basketball's inventor, James Naismith, was an ardent follower of Muscular Christianity and believed the game would help develop religious character. But today those religious roots are largely forgotten. Here one of our most insightful writers on American religion trains his focus on that other great passion—team sports—to reveal their surprising connections. From baseball to basketball and football to ice hockey, Balmer explores the origins and histories of big-time sports from the late nineteenth century to the present, with entertaining anecdotes and fresh insights into their ties to religious life. Referring to Notre Dame football, the Catholic Sun called its fandom "a kind of sacramental." Legions of sports fans reading Passion Plays: How Religion Shaped Sports in North America (UNC Press, 2022) will recognize exactly what that means. Paul Knepper covered the Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All was published in 2020. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Ben Chappell, Professor of American Studies at the University of Kansas, and author of Mexican American Fastpitch: Identity at Play in Vernacular Sport (Stanford University Press, 2021). In our conversation, we discussed the origins of Mexican American Fastpitch, his interlocutors debate over whether to open Mexican American softball tournaments to Anglo players, and how fastpitch helped Mexican Americans enact a specific and local form of cultural citizenship in the Midwest and Texas. In Mexican American Fastpitch, Chappell uses ethnographic methods to study Mexican American fastpitch in local communities stretching across the Midwest and Texas. His work took place over a decade in small towns, like Newton Kansas, and bigger cities including Austin, Houston and San Antonio. His first two chapters deal with the history of Mexican American softball and set the game alongside the larger history of Mexican habitation in the Midwest and the gender and racial politics of softball. He shows that Mexican Americans played softball from the very beginning of the game, but the oldest specifically Mexican American tournaments in the Midwest started shortly after the Second World War. The oldest – the Newton – will be seventy-five years old in 2023. These tournaments proved opportunities for Mexican American ballplayers to assert their particular citizenship despite barrioization, economic marginalization, racism, and segregation. Through a thick description of several of competitions such as the Newton and the Latin, Chappell shows how these tournaments encompass much more than the batting and fielding on and around the diamond. While softball does possess its own illusio – roughly speaking appeal – to men and women, competitors and fans; the game is only part of the reason for these tournaments’ longevity. Mexican American fastpitch players not only enjoyed a compelling sport, but also a festival that included community engagement, different foodways, and family reunions. The game’s illusio worked differently for Mexican American men and women – the latter have only more recently started to compete in these tournaments. The popularity of these tournament peaked sometime in the late 20th century and now tournament organizers face the difficult question of how to save the game. The most common debate is whether to admit Anglo teams (and thus preserve the tournament) or remain a specific site for Mexican American organization. Tournament organizers also deal with ringers from around the world, double dip scheduling, and rival sporting codes. In a final theoretical chapter, entitled “Between the Lines,” Chappell considers the particular and the universal in the experience of Mexican American fastpitch and compares it to other fastpitch communities including a very close comparison with Native American fastpitch. Chappell’s captivating account of the Mexican American softballers and their tournaments will be of interest to readers interested broadly in local sport and ball games. It should also be required reading for people with interests Mexican American history and ethnography, and sports anthropology and ethnography. Keith Rathbone is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His book, entitled Sport and physical culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, agency, and everyday life, (Manchester University Press, 2022) examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au and follow him at @keithrathbone on twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
A sweeping history of the federal legislation that prohibits sex discrimination in education, published on the fiftieth anniversary of Title IX. “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.” —Title IX’s first thirty-seven words By prohibiting sex discrimination in federally funded education, the 1972 legislation popularly known as Title IX profoundly changed the lives of women and girls in the United States, accelerating a movement for equal education in classrooms, on sports fields, and in all of campus life. Sherry Boschert's book 37 Words: Title IX and Fifty Years of Fighting Sex Discrimination (New Press, 2022) is the story of Title IX. Filled with rich characters—from Bernice Resnick Sandler, an early organizer for the law, to her trans grandchild—the story of Title IX is a legislative and legal drama with conflicts over regulations and challenges to the law. It’s also a human story about women denied opportunities, students struggling for an education free from sexual harassment, and activists defying sexist discrimination. These intersecting narratives of women seeking an education, playing sports, and wanting protection from sexual harassment and assault map gains and setbacks for feminism in the last fifty years and show how some women benefit more than others. Award-winning journalist Sherry Boschert beautifully explores the gripping history of Title IX through the gutsy people behind it. In the tradition of the acclaimed documentary She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry, 37 Words offers a crucial playbook for anyone who wants to understand how we got here and who is horrified by current attacks on women’s rights. Jane Scimeca is Professor of History at Brookdale Community College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
At the age of 18, Jonathan Little opened an online poker account with a $50 deposit. By age 21, he had about $350,000 in his account. In this episode of the Entrepreneurship and Leadership Podcast, Jonathan Little explains how he was able to parlay his poker hobby into a profession by keeping his expenses low and saving his winnings. This frugality allowed Jonathan to play in bigger games and maintain a margin of safety that has lasted his entire career. Now 37 years old, Jonathan continues to play poker professionally, recently ranking as high as the 24th best player in the world. He has written several books on poker strategy and teaches at https://pokercoaching.com. At first glance, poker and entrepreneurship might appear to be very different activities; however, seasoned pros like Jonathan show how poker at its highest level is akin to investing. Each hand is like an investment opportunity. Playing a great hand is like finding an asymmetric investment opportunity. With each win, you can choose to reinvest or take the profits. Both activities rely on the power of compounding and risk mitigation. And, perhaps most significantly, both poker and entrepreneurship require humility and patience in the face of constant uncertainty. Follow Jonathan Little at: https://twitter.com/PokerCoaching_ https://twitter.com/JonathanLittle https://pokercoaching.com/home About NBN: The NBN Entrepreneurship and Leadership podcast aims to educate, inform and entertain, sharing insights based on the personal stories of carefully selected guests—all in an informal atmosphere of unscripted conversations and open, personal accounts. Find links to past episodes here. About our Hosts: Kimon Fountoukidis: Kimon is the founder of both Argos Multilingual and PMR. He founded both companies in the mid-90s with zero capital, and both have gone on to become market leaders in their respective sectors. Kimon was born in New York and moved to Krakow, Poland in 1993. He is passionate about sharing his success with others and working entrepreneurs of all kinds to help them achieve their goals. Listen to his story here. Kimon's on Twitter here. Richard Lucas: Richard is a business and social entrepreneur who has founded or invested in more than 30 businesses, including Argos Multilingual, PMR and, in 2020, the New Books Network. Richard has been a TEDx event organiser for years, supports the pro-entrepreneurship ecosystem, and leads entrepreneurship workshops at all levels. He was born in Oxford and moved to Poland in 1991, where continues to invest in promising companies and helps other entrepreneurs realise their dreams. Listen to his story in an autobiographical TEDx talk here. Richard is on Twitter here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
A young philosopher and Guinness World Record holder in pull-ups argues that the key to happiness is not goal-driven striving but forging a life that integrates self-possession, friendship, and engagement with nature. What is the meaning of the good life? In Happiness in Action: A Philosopher's Guide to the Good Life (Harvard UP, 2022), Adam Adatto Sandel draws on ancient and modern thinkers and on two seemingly disparate pursuits of his own, philosophy and fitness, to offer a surprising answer to this age-old human question. Sandel argues that finding fulfillment is not about attaining happiness, conceived as a state of mind, or even about accomplishing one’s greatest goals. Instead, true happiness comes from immersing oneself in activity that is intrinsically rewarding. The source of meaning, he suggests, derives from the integrity or “wholeness” of self that we forge throughout the journey of life. At the heart of Sandel’s account of life as a journey are three virtues that get displaced and distorted by our goal-oriented striving: self-possession, friendship, and engagement with nature. Sandel offers illuminating and counterintuitive accounts of these virtues, revealing how they are essential to a happiness that lasts. To illustrate the struggle of living up to these virtues, Sandel looks to literature, film, and television, and also to his own commitments and adventures. A focal point of his personal narrative is a passion that, at first glance, is as narrow a goal-oriented pursuit as one can imagine: training to set the Guinness World Record for Most Pull-Ups in One Minute. Drawing on his own experiences, Sandel makes philosophy accessible for readers who, in their own infinitely various ways, struggle with the tension between goal-oriented striving and the embrace of life as a journey. Adam Adatto Sandel is a philosopher, Guinness World Record holder for Most Pull-Ups in One Minute, and an award-winning teacher. Author of the critically acclaimed book The Place of Prejudice: A Case for Reasoning within the World, Sandel has taught at Harvard University and is currently an assistant district attorney in Brooklyn. Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found at https://fifteenminutefilm.podb... and on Twitter @15MinFilm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Most Hong Kong residents nowadays only have to worry about a wandering boar or an aggressive monkey in their day-to-day lives. But for much of its history, those living in the British colony were worried about a very different form of wildlife: the South China tiger. Not that their British overlords always believed them, as John Saeki notes in his book The Last Tigers of Hong Kong: True Stories of Big Cats that Stalked Britain's Chinese Colony (Blacksmith Books: 2022). Police officers, civil servants and journalists often dismissed sightings as a case of mistaken identity by confused locals—until authorities saw tigers with their own eyes, in which case it became a much more serious problem. In this interview, John and I talk about the tiger, and its many sightings—rumored and confirmed—in the now-lost rural communities of Hong Kong. John Saeki runs the graphics desk in the Hong Kong office of the international newswire Agence France-Presse. He spends his working days writing, designing and editing maps, charts and information graphics on world news. He is also the author of the novel The Tiger Hunters of Tai O (Blacksmith Books: 2018) You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Last Tigers of Hong Kong. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
The first biography of trailblazing legislator Patsy Takemoto Mink, best known as the legislative champion of Title IX. "Every girl in Little League, every woman playing college sports, and every parent-including Michelle and myself-who watches their daughter on a field or in the classroom is forever grateful to the late Patsy Takemoto Mink."-President Barack Obama, on posthumously awarding Mink the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014 Patsy Takemoto Mink was the first woman of color and the first Asian American woman elected to Congress. Fierce and Fearless is the first biography of this remarkable woman, who first won election to Congress in 1964 and went on to serve in the House for twenty-four years, her final term ending with her death in 2002. Mink was an advocate for girls and women, best known for her work shepherding and defending Title IX, the legislation that changed the face of education in America, making it possible for girls and women to participate in school sports, and in education more broadly, at the same level as boys and men. Mink's life is wonderfully chronicled by eminent historian Judy Tzu-Chun Wu and Gwendolyn Mink, Patsy's daughter, a noted political science scholar and first-hand witness to the many political struggles that her mother had to overcome. Featuring family anecdotes, vignettes, and photographs, Fierce and Fearless offers new insight into who Mink was, and the progressive principles that fueled her mission. Wu and Mink provide readers with an up-close understanding of her life as a third-generation Japanese American from Hawaii-from her childhood on Maui to her decades-long career in the House, working with noted legislators like Shirley Chisholm, Bella Abzug, and Nancy Pelosi. They follow the evolution of her politics, including her advocacy for race, gender, and class equality and her work to promote peace and environmental justice. Fierce and Fearless provides vivid details of how Patsy Takemoto Mink changed the future of American politics. Celebrating the life and legacy of a woman, activist, and politician ahead of her time, this book illuminates the life of a trailblazing icon who made history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Games are a unique art form. Games work in the medium of agency. Game designers tell us who to be and what to care about during the game. Game designers sculpt alternate agencies, and game players submerge themselves in those alternate agencies. Thus, the fact that we play games demonstrates the fluidity of our own agency. We can throw ourselves, for a little while, into a different and temporary motivations. This volume presents a new theory of games which insists on their unique value. In Games: Agency as Art (Oxford UP, 2020), C. Thi Nguyen argues that games are an integral part our systems of communication and our art. Games sculpt our practical activities, allowing us to experience the beauty of our own actions and reasoning. Bridging aesthetics and practical reasoning, he gives an account of the special motivational structure involved in playing games. When we play games, we can pursue a goal, not for its own value, but for the value of the struggle. Thus, playing games involves a motivational inversion from normal life. We adopt an interest in winning temporarily, so we can experience the beauty of the struggle. Games offer us a temporary experience of life under utterly clear values, in a world engineered to fit to our abilities and goals.
Games also let us to experience forms of agency we might never have developed on our own. Games, it turns out, are a special technique for communication. They are a technology that lets us record and transmit forms of agency. Our games form a "library of agency" and we can explore that library to develop our autonomy. Games use temporary restrictions to force us into new postures of agency. Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about:
The hard work of balancing academics and sports when you attend college on an athletic scholarship.
Kyle’s original dream for his life after college, and where he is now.
Why you need someone to have your back, and who that person has been in Kyle’s life for the last five years.
How playing ball in the college off-season for the Savannah Bananas reminded him about the importance of having fun, and what he had liked about the sport as a kid.
How learning to dance taught him not to take himself too seriously.
Our guest is: Kyle Luigs, who is the pitcher for the Savannah Banana’s professional premier team. He also works as their camp instructor. Kyle attended the University of North Georgia on a baseball scholarship, and graduated in 2021 with a kinesiology degree. From 2018 to 2021, he played summer baseball for the Savannah Bananas on the CPL team. He played his last year of college baseball at Jacksonville State University, while working on a masters in Sports Management. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the co-producer of the Academic Life. Listeners to this episode may also be interested in:
Ballparks: A Journey Through the Fields of the Past, Present, and Future, by Eric Enders
The Savannah Bananas
University of North Georgia baseball
This discussion of How to College
This discussion about making a meaningful life
A Wonderful Life: Insights on Finding a Meaningful Existence, by Frank Martela
You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Here on the Academic Life channel, we embrace a broad definition of what it means to be an academic and to lead an academic life. We view education as a transformative human endeavor and are inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DMs us on Twitter: @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today I talked to Jamie Fahey about his book Futsal: The Indoor Game That Is Revolutionizing World Soccer (Melville House, 2021). Some 60 million people player futsal worldwide, as this five-a-side version of football (soccer) is both a fast-moving, highly-entertaining sport in its own right as well as a breeding ground for great footballers on the world stage. Played on a field somewhere between the size of a basketball and handball court, futsal is a game with “no time, no space,” requiring mental agility from those who play. As this week’s guest also notes, the equivalent would be football played with 37-a-side. As for the coaching duties involved, well, with as many as 80 substitutions a game versus the two allowed in football matches, getting the most out of your players means empowering them to make decisions on the field in real time. If by analogy, soccer is lumbering corporate bureaucracy, then futsal is five entrepreneurs in action. Jamie Fahey is a Guardian journalist with over 20 years of experience on several U.K. national newspapers. Consumed by football (soccer) and futsal since his childhood in Liverpool, Jamie has played semi-professionally and been a coach. He’s the Guardian’s primary futsal reporter, and a previously played a coach-mentor role in the English Football Association (FA). Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His newest book is Emotionomics 2.0: The Emotional Dynamics Underlying Key Business Goals. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by two guests: Dr. Fiona Crawford, a writer, editor, and researcher whose work engages with social, environmental, and sports. Dr. Crawford writes for a range of publications including Four Four Two and works frequently Football Australia. We are also joined by Dr. Lee McGowan, a researcher, writer and teacher working at the University of Sunshine Coast. Dr McGowan works on the intersections of sport, culture and community engagement. Together, they are the authors of Never Say Die: The Hundred-Year Overnight Success of Australian Women’s Football (University of New South Wales Press, 2019). In our conversation, we discussed the booms and busts of women’s football in Australia, “sliding door” moments that offered alternative possibilities for women’s football, and the obstacles facing the contemporary women’s game around the world. In Never Say Die, Crawford and McGowan both trace the history of women’s football in Australia and offer a commentary on the state of the women’s game today. The first three chapters chart the development of women’s football, emerging earliest in Queensland before being hobbled by the actions of men in state federations. In this way, the rise and fall of the early Australian game mirrored history of the famous English FA ban of women’s football. An Australian women’s led football league re-emerged in the heady days of the 1960s and 1970s, when creative and hardworking people such as Pat O’Connor, Elaine Watson, and Heather Reid opened the way for an Australia wide women’s competition. In 1974, female administrators and players organized the Australian Women’s Soccer Association, which under the leadership of “quiet achieving ground breakers” built the foundations for women’s football today. The following year they competed in the Asian Women’s Championship, but never with the same financial support as the men’s side. Of course, success brought new challenges and the Crawford Report (no relation) helped to subordinate women’s football again under the national federation: Football Australia. The latter chapters of Never Say Die deal with contemporary challenges to the women’s game including: the organization of the W-League, pay disputes between the women’s national team and the federation, injury issues among women’s footballers resulting from inadequate medical facilities and improper training, a dearth of female coaches, particularly at the top level, and the trajectory of the current Matildas. Crawford and McGowan’s comments in these chapters are vital for understanding the issues in women’s football today and have helped to shape public debate over issues such as pay disparities, an issue that has subsequently been addressed by Football Australia. In their work, Crawford and McGowan offer a compelling and rich account of women’s football in Australia. Their work is informed not only by a deep dive into the archival resources, especially the popular press, but also by interviews with many former women’s players, referees, coaches and administrators. Crawford and McGowan’s very readable and timely book will be of interest to people broadly interested in sport, especially those with a focus on women’s sport, but also to a public audience interested in the history of the Matildas before the 2023 Australian Women’s World Cup. Keith Rathbone is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His book, entitled Sport and physical culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, agency, and everyday life, (Manchester University Press, 2022) examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au and follow him at @keithrathbone on twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Randall Balmer was a late convert to sports talk radio, but he quickly became addicted, just like millions of other devoted American sports fans. As a historian of religion, the more he listened, Balmer couldn't help but wonder how the fervor he heard related to religious practice. Houses of worship once railed against Sabbath-busting sports events, but today most willingly accommodate Super Bowl Sunday. On the other hand, basketball's inventor, James Naismith, was an ardent follower of Muscular Christianity and believed the game would help develop religious character. But today those religious roots are largely forgotten. Here one of our most insightful writers on American religion trains his focus on that other great passion--team sports--to reveal their surprising connections. In Passion Plays: How Religion Shaped Sports in North America (UNC Press, 2022), Balmer explores the origins and histories of big-time sports from the late nineteenth century to the present, with entertaining anecdotes and fresh insights into their ties to religious life. Referring to Notre Dame football, The Catholic Sun called its fandom "a kind of sacramental." Legions of sports fans reading Passion Plays will recognize exactly what that means. Randall Balmer holds the John Phillips Chair in Religion at Dartmouth College. Jackson Reinhardt is a graduate of University of Southern California and Vanderbilt University. He is currently an independent scholar, freelance writer, and research assistant. You can reach Jackson at jtreinhardt1997@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @JTRhardt Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Across North America, native peoples and colonists alike played a variety of kicking games long before soccer's emergence in the late 1800s. Brian D. Bunk examines the development and social impact of these sports through the rise of professional soccer after World War I. As he shows, the various games called football gave women an outlet as athletes and encouraged men to form social bonds based on educational experience, occupation, ethnic identity, or military service. Football also followed young people to college as higher education expanded in the nineteenth century. University play, along with the arrival of immigrants from the British Isles, helped spark the creation of organized soccer in the United States—and the beautiful game's transformation into a truly international sport. A multilayered look at one game’s place in American life, From Football to Soccer: The Early History of the Beautiful Game in the United States (University of Illinois Press, 2021) refutes the notion of the U.S. as a land outside of football history. Bennett Koerber is an instructor of history at Carnegie Mellon University. He can be reached at bkoerber@andrew.cmu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest (Lexington Books, 2022) explores an annual interstate tug-of-war between two small towns along the Mississippi River. In this book, Johnston examines how media shapes place and identity of people at this festival. In writing this book, he conducted analysis of a ten year period of media coverage, and found that the experience people have while attending Tug Fest is quite different than what is said in classic novels about life on the Mississippi River. Michael O. Johnston is assistant professor of sociology at William Penn University and is a host for New Books in Sociology. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
The Least Among Them: 29 Players, Their Brief Moments in the Big Leagues, and a Unique History of the New York Yankees (Artemesia, 2021) is a most special baseball book that looks at the New York Yankees history in an original, unique, and never before written manner. Throughout their history, the New York Yankees have been defined by the legends and the successes of their most famous players. But, as part of their long history, the Yankees have also fielded players that have become lost to history. This book is those players' story, telling the unique histories of the men whose entire major league baseball career lasted but a single game with that game being played as a New York Yankee. While these players may be forgotten, their stories are compelling. Filled with a unique Yankee history, single game stats, and a love of baseball, The Least Among Them tells the story of baseball's most successful franchise in an entirely new way. Paul Knepper covered the Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All was published in 2020. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Straight from the beaches of Hawaii comes an exciting new ethnography of a community of big-wave surfers. Oahu’s Waimea Bay attracts the world’s best big wave surfers—men and women who come to test their physical strength, courage, style, knowledge of the water, and love of the ocean. Sociologist Ugo Corte sees their fun as the outcome of social interaction within a community. Both as participant and observer, he examines how mentors, novices, and peers interact to create episodes of collective fun in a dangerous setting; how they push one another’s limits, nourish a lifestyle, advance the sport and, in some cases, make a living based on their passion for the sport. In Dangerous Fun: The Social Lives of Big Wave Surfers (U Chicago Press, 2022), Corte traces how surfers earn and maintain a reputation within the field, and how, as innovations are introduced, and as they progress, establish themselves and age, they modify their strategies for maximizing performance and limiting chances of failure. Corte argues that fun is a social phenomenon, a pathway to solidarity rooted in the delight in actualizing the self within a social world. It is a form of group cohesion achieved through shared participation in risky interactions with uncertain outcomes. Ultimately, Corte provides an understanding of collective effervescence, emotional energy, and the interaction rituals leading to fateful moments—moments of decision that, once made, transform one’s self-concept irrevocably. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Should you train your kid to become a pro athlete? Why do Koreans dominate women’s golf? Why should ticket scalpers get more respect? Why are pro sports plagued by doping scandals and ruinous strikes? Learn the answers to these questions and more in my conversation with author Paul Oyer and sports economist Daniel Rascher about Paul’s new book An Economist Goes to the Game: How to Throw Away $580 Million and Other Surprising Insights from the Economics of Sports (Yale UP, 2022). Author Paul Oyer is the Mary and Rankine Van Anda Entrepreneurial Professor, professor of economics, and senior associate dean for academic affairs at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. His academic research studies the economics of organizations and human resource practices, including the use of stock options plans, non-cash benefits, and the development of the gig economy. His previous books include Roadside MBA, which extracts business lessons from the experiences of small businesses across the US, and Everything I Ever Needed to Know about Economics I Learned from Online Dating which recommends that students stop taking economics classes and spend more time on Tinder (at least I think that’s what it’s about, based on the title—I haven’t read that one yet). To supplement my ignorance, I’m joined on this podcast by my colleague Daniel Rascher. Dan is Professor and Director of Academic Programs for the Sport Management program at the University of San Francisco, where he teaches sports economics and business research methods. As President of SportsEconomics, his clients have included organizations involved in the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, MLS, PGA, NCAA, AHL, sports media, minor league baseball, Formula One racing, CART, Premier League Football, local sports commissions, and various government agencies. He has authored articles for academic and professional journals, book chapters, and a text book in the sport management and economics fields. Host Peter Lorentzen is Chair of the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new Master's program in Applied Economics focused on the digital economy. His research examines the political economy of governance in China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
In December 2020, an Israeli football club made worldwide headlines. The news that a UAE royal had bought 50 per cent of Beitar's shares shook Israel and the football world. Beitar, proclaimed by some of its own fans as 'the most racist club in the country', is a club like no other in Israel. While Israeli football as a whole is a space where Israelis of all ethnicities and foreigners can co-exist, Beitar won't even sign a Muslim player for fear of its own far-right supporters' group, La Familia. On the Border: The Rise and Decline of the Most Political Club in the World (Pitch Publishing, 2022) is the fascinating tale of a club that began as a sports movement of a liberal national Zionism party and became an overt symbol of right-wing views, Mizrahi identity and eventually hardcore racism and nationalism. The book explores the radicalisation of Beitar and the fight for the soul of the club between the racists and open-minded fans. It is also a story of Jerusalem, the most volatile place on Earth, and how the holy city and the influence of religion have shaped Beitar. Founded in 1936, the club took its name from a Zionist organization set up in 1923 by students in the capital of Latvia, Riga, following a visit by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the Zionist Revisionist and founder of the paramilitary group Irgun. Beitar’s story mirrors that of its city. For thirty years, under the British Mandate, impoverished young Mizrahim (Jews from Arab countries) had kicked a ball around Jerusalem’s Musrara neighbourhood with Arab friends. The war of 1948 changed that. Subsequent events sharpened the divide, leading to the unrepentant racism of La Familia, Beitar “ultras” who began by making monkey noises at a player from Cameroon and graduated to chants threatening death to Arabs. Employing violence and intimidation, they ensured no Muslim could play for Beitar, thereby betraying a key element of Jabotinsky’s scheme – equality for Arabs. Roberto Mazza is visiting professor at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
On this episode of Darts and Letters, we took a personal journey into virtual sport. Listen in as guest host (and regular lead producer) Jay Cockburn gets ready to enter the world of e-sports, with a lesson in Super Smash Bros from a top player and professional coach. Find out why he won’t make it (spoiler alert: he doesn’t have that reaction time he used to); but also, find out why he might not want to make it. Unfortunately, e-sports have many of the problems that ‘real’ sports do, and some are even worse. E-sports have lower pay, more stringent IP regimes, singular corporate control, and less labour organizing. However, could things be changing? Jay talks to Alexander Lee, esports and games reporter at Digiday. He takes us through the booming world of esports: the good, the bad, the repetitive stress injuries, and what to do about it. —————————-SUPPORT THE SHOW—————————- You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button. If you want to do a little more we would love it if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too. ——————-ABOUT THE SHOW—————— For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Jamie Fahey, a Guardian journalist and production editor with more than twenty years’ experience on several national newspapers and six years in regional journalism. He is also the author of Futsal: The Indoor Game that is Revolutionizing World Soccer (Melville House, 2021). In our conversation, we discussed the origins of futsal, the differences and similarities between futsal and soccer, and the future of the five-a-side game. In Futsal, Fahey blends history, journalism, memoir, coaching guides, and polemic to trace the growth of futsal from its beginnings in 1930s Uruguay and Brazil through to its global present. If futsal first developed in South America, it demonstrated how footballing ideas and practices could migrate back along imperial lines, as Brazilian super stars encouraged the propagation of the game in Europe, Asia and Africa. Brazilians from Pelé to Neymar have played futsal, promoted it in their press clippings, and Brazilians continued to dominate the game. Indeed, many international teams even today are filled with Brazilian players, as evidenced by the tongue in cheek nickname of the Italian national team: the Brazzuri. Throughout the book, Fahey demonstrates the way that futsal has influenced the 11-a-side game: including tactical developments such as the false nine and the attacking goalkeepers. At the same time, Fahey does not think of futsal solely as a laboratory for soccer, but instead makes a strong argument for the uniqueness of futsal as a sport practice and spectacle with its own value. It is a particularly intense and tactical game that appeals in its own right. He notes the recent growth of the game, with almost sixty million practitioners around the world. In his memoir-esque chapters, Fahey remarks on his own history as a coach and a player, emerging from the football filled streets of his home city of Liverpool before becoming a guide to his sons’ teams. The rich and textured urban environment of 1970s and 1980s Liverpool provided a site for him to learn foot skills, sangfroid, and tactical nous. If the English past was as a place where children learned to play in an organic way, he bemoans the relative weakness of contemporary English futsal, which suffers from the inattention of the FA, the continued strength of alternative small-sided codes, and the destruction of smaller local soccer spaces. In the final half of his book, Fahey looks at contemporary futsal practice in a range of countries including: Brazil, Iran, England and the USA. Brazil, Portugal and Spain stand out as places that have well-developed domestic futsal leagues and also are strong competitors internationally. Portuguese and Spanish clubs – in particular Barcelona and Benfica – have benefitted from their use of futsal in their youth programs. France and the United States stand out as places where futsal is developing quickly. Fahey’s very readable and engaging work will have broad appeal, but especially to people interested in futsal and soccer, sports historians, and sports scholars more generally. Keith Rathbone is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His book, entitled Sport and physical culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, agency, and everyday life, (Manchester University Press, 2022) examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au and follow him at @keithrathbone on twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Andrew Guest, Professor of Psychology and Sociology at the University of Portland, where he also serves as Director of the Core Curriculum. He is also the author of Soccer in Mind: A Thinking Fan’s Guide to the Global Game (Rutgers University Press, 2022). In our conversation we discussed the possibilities of thinking fandom, soccer as a glocal phenomenon, and whether sport builds character and provides a social good. In Soccer in Mind, Guest uses thematic chapters to address some of the biggest questions in sports studies: why do sports seem so central to many people’s identities, what is the right way to develop player talent, what is the future of sports psychology, and most importantly how can athletes and fans engage in sport in a more critical and socially conscious way? His careful approach to think about and through soccer mixes different analytical lenses including sociology, psychology, and auto-ethnography. He strives to make the familiar things in soccer strange, and the strange things in soccer more familiar. His work moves comfortably between discussions of fan culture in England, women’s football in Portland, and witchcraft in Malawi to identify the ways that aesthetics, emotion and rationality work together to shape popular engagement with the global game. He also considers the sport from the top-down and the bottom-up. His interlocutors and interview subjects range from elite women’s footballers in the US, Zanzibari soccer players called the “Women Fighters,” and disabled children in Angola. Many of his chapters are cross comparative. For example, in his chapter on player development, he looks at the influence of the technocratic Dutch model of top player development, the Ghanaian romantic model of grassroots soccer, and what he calls the Icelandic humanistic model that prioritizes broad human and social development through sport over elite access. Throughout Soccer in Mind, Guest’s work challenges easy assumptions about soccer and sports more generally. While many works challenge the value of mega-events, Guest argues that soccer might only provide a social good when we use the sport to do so attentively and intentionally. His chapter on global development initiatives shows how even well-meaning soccer NGOs can cause negative feedback loops. Participation in sports might not even encourage fair play and sportsmanship unless athletes, coaches, and fans provide a broader social basis for it. Guest’s very readable work – clearly of interest to people involved in sports studies, sports sociology and sports psychology – also has broad appeal and will prove useful in classrooms and boardrooms. Keith Rathbone is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Since the 1970s, a “Polynesian Pipeline” has brought football players from American Sāmoa to Hawaii and the mainland United States to play at the collegiate and professional levels. In Gridiron Capital: How American Football Became a Samoan Game (Duke University Press, 2022) Dr. Lisa Uperesa charts the cultural and social dynamics that have made football so central to Samoan communities. For Samoan athletes, football is not just an opportunity for upward mobility; it is a way to contribute to, support, and represent their family, village, and nation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and media analysis, Dr. Uperesa shows how the Samoan ascendancy in football is underpinned by the legacies of US empire and a set of imperial formations that mark Indigenous Pacific peoples as racialized subjects of US economic aid and development. Samoan players succeed by becoming entrepreneurs: building and commodifying their bodies and brands to enhance their football stock and market value. Uperesa offers insights into the social and physical costs of pursuing a football career, the structures that compel Pacific Islander youth toward athletic labor, and the possibilities for safeguarding their health and wellbeing in the future. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Celebrate Winter: An Olympian's Stories of a Life in Nordic Skiing (Morton Trails, 2020) by John Morton is a wonderful look back at experiences and lessons learned from over 55 years of enjoying winter. Morton has attended ten Winter Olympic Games in various capacities: athlete, coach, team leader, chief of course, and fan. He was the Dartmouth College Nordic Ski coach for 11 years and has built recreational trails for the past 30 years with over 250 projects completed. Robert Sherwood is a professor of history at Georgia Military College. He works on Swiss, Swiss-American and Sports History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Through the heart of Hollywood cinema runs a surprising current of progressive politics. Sports movies, a genre that has flourished since the mid-seventies, evoke the American dream and represent the nation to itself. Once considered mere credos for Reaganism, on closer view, movies from Rocky (1976) to Ali (2001) dream of democratic participation and recognition more than individual success. In every case, off-field relationships take precedence over on-field competition. Arranged chronologically, Hollywood Sports Movies and the American Dream (Oxford UP, 2022) tells the story of multiculturalism's gradual adoption. The mainstream's first minority heroes are paradoxically white ethnic, rural, working-class men, exemplified by Rocky, Slap Shot (1977) and The Natural (1984); Black, brown, and women characters follow in White Men Can't Jump (1992), A League of Their Own (1992), and Ali. But despite their insistence on community and diversity these popular dramas show limited faith in civic institutions. Hannah Arendt, Jeffrey Alexander, and others inform original analysis and commentary on the political significance of popular culture. Reading these familiar movies from another angle paints a fresh picture of how the United States has imagined democracy since its bicentennial. In this conversation with host Annie Berke, Dr. Grant Wiedenfeld explains his personal and familial connections to the book's subject matter, discusses why Hollywood sports films don't always have (or need) a "happy ending," and explains how the genre functions as a "civic screen" for the American public in the decades following the Vietnam War. Grant Wiedenfeld earned a PhD from Yale University in Comparative Literature and Film & Media Studies. He taught courses on sports and cinema in Yale's English Department and Film Studies Program before being hired at Sam Houston State University, where he is currently Associate Professor of Media and Culture. Previous publications include studies of Gustave Flaubert, D.W. Griffith, and André Bazin. Annie Berke is the Film Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and author of Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television (University of California Press, 2022). Her scholarship and criticism has been published in Feminist Media Histories, Public Books, Literary Hub, and Ms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Darts and Letters is a show about the politics of ideas, and this week we’re searching for progressive politics in strange places… such as pro-wrestling. There have been 37 Wrestlemanias. That’s a lot of wrestling. And a lot of entertainment for the millions of people who enjoy watching wrestling, including our host, Gordon Katic. Maybe you’re a fan, maybe not. Fans and non-fans alike have often dismissed wrestling as frivolous. But there’s more to wrestling than meets the tombstone piledriver. Pro wrestling is like a Rosetta Stone for our politics; It brought us one President, and a recent poll suggests it might give us another. On this episode, we jump from the top rope into the wild, layered, complex world of pro wrestling and the folks who love it. This is part of the week’s theme of “ideas in strange places”. Darts and Letters is doing a different theme each week until we launch the new season on September 18.
First (@10:46), Steve and Larson are the hosts of Going in Raw: A Pro Wrestling Podcast. They break down the history of Vince McMahon as a boss, character, and more — including what happens when the lines between the two become blurred inside and outside of the ring. PLUS: the full unedited interview is available on our Patreon. Subscribe today.
Next (@37:15), Brian Jansen is a lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Maine who writes on professional wrestling and labour. Wrestlers are workers, and as workers, face challenges shared by other workers — and some unique to their profession. And their fans, it turns out, are more progressive than you might think.
Then (@53:06), the Spider Baby, Terrance Griep, is the world’s first openly gay wrestler. He wrestles in the Midwest Independent Wrestling Scene. He takes us into the world of wrestling, the building and presentation of a character, the immersive theatricality that is part of the experience for both wrestlers and their fans, and the “civil war” between the profession’s old and new guard.
Finally (@1:09:30), Heather Levi is an anthropologist at Temple University who wrote her dissertation on lucha libre in Mexico. She even trained in lucha libre. She explores the fascinating world of a sport that is closely bound up with the country in which it thrives and finds a way of making meaning that brings together writers, wrestlers, and the public.
—————————-SUPPORT THE SHOW—————————- You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button. If you want to do a little more we would love if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too. —————————-CONTACT US————————- To stay up to date, follow us on Twitter and Facebook. If you’d like to write to us, email darts@citedmedia.ca or tweet Gordon directly. —————————-CREDITS—————————- Darts and Letters is hosted and edited by Gordon Katic. Our lead producer is Jay Cockburn, This episode’s assistant producer is Polly Leger, and our managing producer is Marc Apollonio. The research coordinator was David Moscrop. Our theme song was created by Mike Barber. Our graphic design was created by Dakota Koop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
The bicycle is a vestige of the Victorian era, seemingly at odds with our age of smartphones and ride-sharing apps and driverless cars. Yet we live on a bicycle planet. Across the world, more people travel by bicycle than any other form of transportation. Almost anyone can learn to ride a bike--and nearly everyone does. In Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle (Crown Publishing, 2022), journalist and critic Jody Rosen reshapes our understanding of this ubiquitous machine, an ever-present force in humanity's life and dream life--and a flash point in culture wars--for more than two hundred years. Combining history, reportage, travelogue, and memoir, Rosen's book sweeps across centuries and around the globe, unfolding the bicycle's saga from its invention in 1817 to its present-day renaissance as a "green machine," an emblem of sustainability in a world afflicted by pandemic and climate change. Readers meet unforgettable characters: feminist rebels who steered bikes to the barricades in the 1890s, a prospector who pedaled across the frozen Yukon to join the Klondike gold rush, a Bhutanese king who races mountain bikes in the Himalayas, a cycle-rickshaw driver who navigates the seething streets of the world's fastest-growing megacity, astronauts who ride a floating bicycle in zero gravity aboard the International Space Station. Two Wheels Good examines the bicycle's past and peers into its future, challenging myths and clichés while uncovering cycling's connection to colonial conquest and the gentrification of cities. But the book is also a love letter: a reflection on the sensual and spiritual pleasures of bike riding and an ode to an engineering marvel--a wondrous vehicle whose passenger is also its engine. Jody Rosen is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. His work has appeared in Slate, New York, The New Yorker, and many other publications. He lives in Brooklyn with his family. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
On the Border: The Rise and Decline of the Most Political Club in the World (Pitch Publishing, 2022) by Shaul Adar is the compelling tale of a football club sited in one of the most volatile places on earth. The book explores the radicalisation of Beitar and the fight for the soul of the club between the racists and open-minded fans. It is also a story of Jerusalem and how the holy city and the influence of religion have shaped Beitar. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Daniel Silva’s Embodying Modernity: Global Fitness Culture and Building the Brazilian Body (U Pittsburgh Press, 2022) examines the current boom of fitness culture in Brazil in the context of the white patriarchal notions of race, gender, and sexuality through which fitness practice, commodities, and cultural products traffic. The book traces the imperial meanings and orders of power conveyed through “fit” bodies and their different configurations of muscularity, beauty, strength, and health within mainstream visual media and national and global public spheres. Drawing from a wide range of Brazilian visual media sources including fitness magazines, television programs, film, and social media, Daniel F. Silva theorizes concepts and renderings of modern corporality, its racialized and gendered underpinnings, and its complex relationship to white patriarchal power and capital. This study works to define the ubiquitous parameters of fitness culture and argues that its growth is part of a longer collective nationalist project of modernity tied to whiteness, capitalist ideals, and historical exceptionalism. Patricio Simonetto a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Institute of the Americas (University College London). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today I talked to Greg Hoffman about his new book Emotion By Design: Creative Leadership Lessons from a Life at Nike (Twelve, 2022). For this week’s guest Greg Hoffman, the characteristics of empathy and curiosity are central to everything from finding your place in the world, to connecting with others, and building a brand that exhibits a true sense of purpose by empowering people to realize their potential. Along the way, this episode explores both the value and limits of data-driven marketing takes on the central role of smartphones today, and goes back into Hoffman’s own backstory as a mixed-race child growing up in a nearly all-white suburb of Minneapolis. In art and sports, Hoffman found his way forward. Greg Hoffman is a global brand leader, advisor, speaker, and former Nike Chief Marketing Office. He’s now the founder and principal of the brand advisory group Modern Arena as well as a branding instructor at the University of Oregon’s Lundquist School of Business and a member of the Board of Trustees at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD). Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of nine books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His new book is Blah, Blah, Blah: A Snarky Guide to Office Lingo. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Monk Yun Rou was ordained in China as a Taoist monk in 2012. His writings and teachings propagate Taoist ideas and focus on environmental conservation, and political and social justice. Yun Rou began his formal martial arts training in 1980 and practiced a wide range of Chinese kung fu styles before settling on tai chi. A student of some of China’s top tai chi grandmasters, he was named Tai Chi Master of The Year at the 2011 World Congress on Qigong and Traditional Chinese Medicine and Yun Rou was the keynote speaker at the International Tai Chi Symposium in Louisville, Kentucky. Yun Rou is the author of Mad Monk Manifesto. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
It can be hard to think of Everest as unknown anymore. While it’s certainly a challenge to climb the world’s tallest mountain, someone–with enough time and money–has a good chance of making it to the summit. A potential mountaineer can fly into Kathmandu, travel to a well-stocked base camp, be escorted up a well-trodden route by expert sherpas. There’s even Wifi at the peak. The relative ease of climbing Everest is born from almost a century of attempted expeditions up the mountain, to determine how high one could go, and what routes to take. Even the successful expedition of Norgay and Hillary was built on the efforts of those who came before. And the first expeditions, in 1921 and 1922, are the subject of Mick Conefrey’s Everest 1922: The Epic Story of the First Attempt on the World's Highest Mountain (Pegasus Books, 2022). Mick tells the story of these very first attempts to climb the mountain–including the difficulties of funding, recruitment, and travel, as well as the climb itself. In this interview, Mick and I talk about the two expeditions to Everest–including its most famous participant, George Mallory–the scientific and mountaineering controversies around it, and what makes climbing Everest different today. Mick Conefrey is an award-winning writer and documentary film maker. He created the landmark BBC series The Race for Everest to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the first ascent. His previous books include The Adventurer's Handbook: Life Lessons from History's Great Explorers (Smithsonian: 2006); Everest 1953: The Epic Story of the First Ascent (Mountaineers Books: 2014), the winner of a Leggimontagna Award; and Ghosts of K2: The Race for the Summit of the World's Most Deadly Mountain (Oneworld Publications: 2015), which won a U.S. National Outdoor Book Award. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Everest 1922. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Douglas Booth, Dean of Adventure, Culinary Arts and Tourism at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia, Canada and Professor Emeritus at the University of Otago. He is also the author of Bondi Beach: Representations of an Iconic Australian (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022). In our conversation, we discussed the geological and climatological origins of Bondi Beach; the contested histories of iconic Australian archetypes such as surf bathers, surf life savers, and surf boarders; and what it might mean to write an autobiography of Bondi Beach. In Bondi Beach, Booth works across the boundaries of the social and physical sciences, encompassing anthropology, geography, geology, history, and hydrology. In the first two chapters of the book, he critically assesses the role of sand and storms as actors in shaping the beach, which only arose in its current instantiation 6,500 years ago. Current debates over the shape of the beach can take the “natural” as desirable, but as Booth shows in his chapters “Nature and Culture” and “Pavilion,” powerful civic forces can also help to remake the environment to suit human needs. When it comes to the beach, Booth seems to argue that the only constant is change. His chapters on the Eora (Indigenous Australians) and Berewalgal (European settler-colonists) trace the changes in beach use. Contrary to later colonial officials’ assertions, the Eora did not leave Bondi barren, nor was their use of the land static, but instead Indigenous Australians use of the land altered in response to the environment and the development of new fishing and manufacturing techniques. Eora and Berewalgal people possessed different ontological understandings of their relationship to the country. Indigenous Australians saw themselves as part of the land and as a consequence worked within its homeostatic limits. Settler-colonial people saw their role as one of management and consequently they sought policies to make the land more useful from an economic point of view, causing significant changes to the geographic and social landscape of the Bondi-Rose Bay Valley. Booth’s work challenges assumptions that underpin the historical discipline: how do we recapture the past, what facts do we include and what do we leave out, and how do organize our histories into narratives. His chapters on avatars of Australian beach culture: surf bathers, surf life savers, and surf boarders simultaneously highlight the impossibility of writing origins stories while they also highlight the various narrative possibilities of different mythological types. There is no single authoritative history of surfing in Bondi – but it is open to numerous story arcs: surfers as heroes or victims, surfers as environmental crusaders or landscape devastators, and surfers as counter-cultural icons or social problems. In his last chapter, “Autobiography” Booth writes a biography from the perspective of Bondi Beach. This “autobiography” is of Booth’s imagination, but it’s daring narrative form offers new possibilities for thinking through what the natural environment might think of man’s stewardship of space. Booth’s work has broad appeal – clearly of interest to people who are focused on sports studies, but also broadly to scholars from a range of fields, both physical and social sciences, who want to re-think the assumptions of our disciplines. Keith Rathbone is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His book, entitled Sport and physical culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, agency, and everyday life, (Manchester University Press, 2022) examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au and follow him at @keithrathbone on twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
In the early 1990s, Tommy Morrison, a young roughneck from Jay, Oklahoma, burst onto the boxing scene to become one of the most controversial fighters of his era. Handsome, eloquent, and dynamic, Morrison parlayed destructive knockout power and a homespun personality into celebrity status throughout middle America, where boxing rarely prospered. But it was his starring role in Rocky V alongside Sylvester Stallone that propelled him to stardom–and ultimately led to his tragic downfall. His brush with Hollywood fame triggered a limitless appetite for parties, liquor, and sex. When Morrison was shockingly diagnosed with HIV in 1996, his life imploded, and his subsequent descent into drugs, prison, bigamy, and conspiracy theories made Morrison notorious long after his glory days had ended. In The Duke: The Life and Lies of Tommy Morrison (Hamilcar, 2022), Carlos Acevedo chronicles Morrison’s tumultuous life from his days as a teenaged Toughman contestant, to his victory over George Foreman, to his struggles with HIV and depression, to his death at forty-four, when his delusions finally overtook him. Paul Knepper covered the Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All was published in 2020. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Dr. Shannon Walsh, Associate Professor of Theatre History, and author of Eugenics and Physical Culture Performance in the Progressive Era: Watch Whiteness Workout (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020). In our conversation, we discussed the origins of women’s physical culture in the United States, the role that physical culture reformers played in producing femininity and whiteness, and the possibilities for anti-racist and anti-sexist sport to reconceptualize the white supremist roots of American athleticism. In Eugenics and Physical Culture Performance in the Progressive Era, Walsh traces the beginnings of reform era physical culture, paying special attention to the way that physical culturists attempted to shape women’s bodies. She argues that their efforts hinged on using exercise to produce femininity and whiteness and that they prefigured the larger eugenic movements aimed at perpetuating the white race later in the 20th century. In each chapter she looks at different physical culturists or physical cultural movement. Her second chapter looks at Steele MacKaye and Americanised Delsarte, a physical cultural practice that combined acting, dance and exercise. Her third chapter focuses on Dudley Allen Sargent and mimetic workouts that introduced working class motions – for example wood chopping - to middle and upper-middle class men and women at Ivy League colleges. The fourth and fifth chapter work together to unpack the complicated position of women’s physical culture, femininity and motherhood. In chapter four, Walsh shows how Abby Shaw Mayhew and the YWCA articulated a genre of motherhood, which Walsh calls “social motherhood,” that reframed women’s exercise as domestic and maternal rather than grotesque and masculine. In the fifth chapter, Walsh examines Bernarr MacFadden – the Barnum of physical culture – to showcases the places where advertising, motherhood, and women’s exercise came into explicit contact. Relying on a close reading of physical culture through critical theory, these main chapters trace the intersections between exercise, femininity, motherhood, race and social class, to illustrate how debates over these issues helped to produce whiteness. Whether they were in elite educational institutions in the Northeast, Midwestern metropolises like Minneapolis, or travelling around the country these experts helped to code physical culture as specifically as womanly, middle class, white, and ultimately as unremarkable. He final body chapter, chapter six, looks at physical culture for indigenous women in three sites: the Odanah Mission School, the Model Indian School at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, and the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. Unlike their white counterparts, indigenous women were not offered significant opportunities for physical exercise and if they were it was only for the purpose of assimilation. Unsurprisingly, many indigenous girls and women challenged those expectations and were successful athletes. Keith Rathbone is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His book, entitled Sport and physical culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, agency, and everyday life, (Manchester University Press, 2022) examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au and follow him at @keithrathbone on twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
The Crown Games were the apex of competition in ancient Greece. Along with prestigious athletic contests in honor of Zeus at Olympia, they comprised the Pythian Games for Apollo at Delphi, the Isthmian Games for Poseidon, and the Nemean Games, sacred to Zeus. For over nine hundred years, the Greeks celebrated these athletic and religious festivals, a rare point of cultural unity amid the fierce regional independence of the numerous Greek city-states and kingdoms. The Crown Games of Ancient Greece: Archaeology, Athletes, and Heroes (U Arkansas Press, 2022) examines these festivals in the context of the ancient Greek world, a vast and sprawling cultural region that stretched from modern Spain to the Black Sea and North Africa. Illuminating the unique history and features of the celebrations, David Lunt delves into the development of the contest sites as sanctuaries and the Panhellenic competitions that gave them their distinctive character. While literary sources have long been the mainstay for understanding the evolution of the Crown Games and ancient Greek athletics, archaeological excavations have significantly augmented contemporary understandings of the events. Drawing on this research, Lunt brings deeper context to these gatherings, which were not only athletics competitions but also occasions for musical contests, dramatic performances, religious ceremonies, and diplomatic summits--as well as raucous partying. Taken as a circuit, the Crown Games offer a more nuanced view of ancient Greek culture than do the well-known Olympian Games on their own. With this comprehensive examination of the Crown Games, Lunt provides a new perspective on how the ancient Greeks competed and collaborated both as individuals and as city-states. Reyes Bertolin is a professor of Classics at the University of Calgary. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Dr. Christopher Ives teaches in the area of Asian Religions at Stonehill College in Massachusetts. In his scholarship, he focuses on modern Zen ethics. In 2009 he published Imperial-Way Zen, a book on Buddhist social ethics in light of Zen nationalism. Currently he is engaged in research on Zen approaches to nature and Buddhist environmental ethics. He is the author of Zen on the Trail: Hiking as Pilgrimage, out now from Wisdom Publications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
With a reputation as the hot-air balloon capital of the world and the home of the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta, the southwestern desert city of Albuquerque frequently showcases the magic and adventure of ballooning. This legacy links back to the 1880s and a man by the name of Park Van Tassel. Through his pioneering flight, Van Tassel not only opened the skies to future generations across New Mexico, but he also opened minds to the possibility of manned flight throughout the American West. A charismatic, P. T. Barnum–like showman, Van Tassel rose from obscurity to introduce the new science of ballooning and parachuting throughout the West. Van Tassel toured extensively—from California to Utah, Colorado, and Louisiana and later embarking on an international journey that took him to Hawaii, Australia, Southeast Asia, India, Africa, and beyond. Sky Rider: Park Van Tassel and the Rise of Ballooning in the West (U New Mexico Press, 2021) weaves together the many threads of Van Tassel’s extraordinary life journey, situating him at last in his rightful place among the prominent aerial exhibitionists of his time. Gary B. Fogel is an adjunct professor of aerospace engineering at San Diego State University and the CEO of Natural Selection, Inc. He is also the author or coauthor of Quest for Flight: John J. Montgomery and the Dawn of Aviation in the West and Wind and Wings: The History of Soaring in San Diego. Troy A. Hallsell is the 341st Missile Wing Historian at Malmstrom AFB, MT. The ideas expressed in this podcast do not represent the 341st Missile Wing, United States Air Force, or the Department of Defense. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Sports fandom isn't what it used to be. Owners and executives increasingly count on the blind loyalty of their fans and too often act against the team's best interest. Intentionally tanking a season to get a high draft pick, scamming local governments to build cushy new stadiums, and actively subverting the players have become business as usual in professional sports. In Rethinking Fandom: How to Beat the Sports-Industrial Complex at Its Own Game (Belt Publishing, 2022), sportswriter (and lifelong sports fan) Craig Calcaterra argues that fans have more power than they realize to change how their teams behave. With his characteristic wit and piercing commentary, Calcaterra calls for a radical reexamination of what it means to be a fan in the twenty-first century. Joel Tscherne is an Adjunct History Professor at Southern New Hampshire University. His Twitter handle is @JoelTscherne. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
The global success of football icons like Samuel Eto'o, Didier Drogba and Mohamed Salah has fuelled the migratory projects of countless young men across the African continent who dream of following - literally and figuratively - in their footsteps. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic research, African Football Migration: Aspirations, Experiences and Trajectories (Manchester University Press, 2022) captures and chronicles the aspirations, experiences and trajectories of those pursuing this highly prized form of transnational migration. In doing so, the book’s three authors Dr. Paul Darby, Dr. James Esson, and Dr. Christian Ungruhe uncover and trace the myriad actors, networks and institutions that affect the ability of young people across the continent to realise social mobility through football's global production network. The book sheds critical light on the barriers to social mobility erected by neoliberal capitalism, and how these are negotiated by aspiring African footballers. It also generates original interdisciplinary perspectives on the complex interplay between structural forces and human agency, as young players navigate an industry rife with commercial speculation. While a select few reach the elite levels of the game and build a successful career overseas, the book vividly illustrates how for the vast majority, 'trying their luck' through football results in involuntary immobility in post-colonial Africa. These findings are complemented by rare empirical insights from transnational African migrants at the margins of the global football industry and those navigating precarious retirement from careers as players. African Football Migration offers essential coverage of why and how African youth and young men have become actors in the global football industry, revealing the complex implications of transnational mobility, both imagined and enacted. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Unfortunately, Dr. Christian Ungruhe was unable to join this interview. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
From its early days as a sport to build “muscular Christianity” among young men flooding nineteenth-century cities to its position today as a global symbol of American culture, basketball has been a force in American society. It grew through high school gymnasiums, college pep rallies, and the fits and starts of professionalization. It was a playground game, an urban game, tied to all of the caricatures that were associated with urban culture. It struggled with integration and representations of race. Today, basketball’s influence seeps into film, music, dance, and fashion. Hoops tells the story of the reciprocal relationship between the sport and the society that received it. In Hoops: A Cultural History of Basketball in America (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021), Thomas Aiello presents the only contemporary cultural history of the sport from the street to the highest levels of professional mens and womens competition. He argues that the game has existed in a reciprocal relationship with the broader culture, both embodying conflicts over race, class, and gender and serving a s public theater for them. Aiello places cultural icons like Bill Russell, Michael Jordan, and Kobe Bryant in the context of their times and explores how the sport negotiated controversies and scandals. Hoops belongs on the bookshelf of every reader interested in the history of basketball, sports, race, urban life, and pop culture in America. Paul Knepper used to cover the Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All was published in 2020. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Animals are both the focus of rodeo and its most invisible participants, argues University of Guelph history professor Susan Nance in Rodeo: An Animal History (U Oklahoma, 2020). Nance flips the usual script on rodeo history, focusing on the experiences of animals in rodeo's long history. Often that history is one of animals struggling to survive in a world that requires them but does not tend to their particular needs and desires. In telling this story, Nance turns rodeo, a sport often described as a triumphant expression of Western ruggedness into a story of human imperfection and stubbornness. This book tells the story of several individual animals, famous horses such as War Paint and Greasy Sal, to show the hidden side of rodeo and the animals that built the industry into a Western cultural icon. If historians are willing to consider every perspective, Nance argues, human histories became all the deeper and more honest by including their animal co-participants. Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
What is “binary nationalism” and what has it got to do with free-style skiing? The explosive popularity of Eileen Gu’s is an excellent case for understanding the common Chinese mindset. In this conversation, Professor Julie Yu-Wen Chen is joined by Professor Jiang Chang to discuss the wide popularity of freestyle skier Eileen Gu during and after the 2022 Winter Olympics. Jiang Chang will share his unique insight into Gu’s rise to a new kind of poster child in China, while at the same time, he cautions us to be mindful of the invisible hand (i.e., Chinese propaganda) in shaping Gu’s popularity. For most Chinese people, the primary framework for their perception and interpretation of the world is what Chang terms “binary nationalism.” It is nationalism, but it is very simple and is intended to be simple. In that framework, the US is the default opposite of China. Meanwhile, there has been an astonishing rise of a kind of “hero-worshiping” social atmosphere since Xi Jinping rose to power in China, where common people tend to resent elites but look up to those whom they know they could never ever surpass in status. This weird contradiction somehow paves the way for Gu’s popularity: She grew up in the US but chose to play for China in the Winter Olympics. Besides excelling in sports, she performs well educationally (which many Chinese people consider criteria for judging a person’s success in life), and she is beautiful by appearance. Gu has achieved so much that most Chinese people “heroize” her. Prof. Jiang Chang is a visiting professor of Chinese studies at the University of Helsinki. Chang is a famous media scholar and observer. He is widely published in English, Chinese, and French on topics that include journalism and propaganda, digital media cultures, and digital feminism in contemporary China. His representative works are published in leading journals such as International Journal of Cultural Studies, European Journal of Cultural Studies, and Journal of Contemporary China. Julie Yu-Wen Chen is professor of Chinese studies at the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki (Finland). Dr. Chen serves as one of the editors of the Journal of Chinese Political Science (Springer, SSCI). Formerly, she was chair of the Nordic Association of China Studies (NACS) and editor-in-chief of Asian Ethnicity (Taylor & Francis). You can find her on the University of Helsinki Chinese Studies’ website, Youtube and Facebook, and her personal Twitter. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Privilege at Play: Class, Race, Gender, and Golf in Mexico (Oxford University Press, 2019) is a book about inequalities, social hierarchies, and privilege in contemporary Mexico. Based on ethnographic research conducted in exclusive golf clubs and in-depth interviews with upper-middle-class and upper-class golfers, as well as working-class employees, Cerón-Anaya’s book focuses on the class, racial, and gender dynamics that underpin privilege. This study makes use of rich qualitative data to demonstrate how social hierarchies are relations reproduced through a multitude of everyday practices. The vast disparities between club members and workers, for example, are built on traditional class indicators, such as wealth, and on more subtle expressions of class, such as notions of fashion, sense of humour, perceptions about competition, and everyday oral interactions. The book incorporates race and gender perspectives into the study of inequalities, illustrating the multilayer condition of privilege. Although Mexicans commonly attributed racial relations a marginal role in the continuation of inequities, the book explains how affluent individuals frequently express racialized ideas to describe and justify the impoverished condition of workers. In doing so, Privilege at Play demonstrates the necessity of considering the role of racialized dynamics when studying social inequalities in Mexico. An analysis of gender relations shows how men maintain a dominant position over their fellow female golfers despite the similar upper-class origins of both male and female golf club members. This book pays particular attention to the spatial dynamics that reinforce social inequalities, arguing that the apparent triviality of space makes it a highly effective way to mark social inequalities and, hence, emphasise privilege. Rituparna Patgiri, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and the public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Rickson Gracie is one of the most fascinating professional athletes in the world. It is not hyperbole to call him a "living legend". A scion of a famed family of professional fighters, he was arguably the greatest Brazilian Jiu Jitsu practitioner of his time. He went on to fight professional mixed martial arts in Japan where he retired undefeated and achieved a level of fame that is difficult to imagine. Despite being born into an elite family in Rio de Janeiro and blessed with an incredible physique and striking good looks, Rickson Gracie has seen more than his share of difficulties. In Breathe: A Life in Flow, he reflects upon his life, including his father's unorthodox parenting decisions and how he overcame the horrific loss of his first-born son. Peter Maguire, who holds a PhD in history from Columbia University and has published several books on the Nuremberg trials and the Khmer Rouge genocide, has been a Jiu Jitsu student and friend of Rickson since the early 1990s. Together they co-authored, Breathe: A Life in Flow (Dey Street, 2021). Peter is a wonderful conversationalist and quite the storyteller. As we are both historians, surfers, and students of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and as well have both spent a fair amount of time in Cambodia and Hawai’i, I always enjoy any opportunity to chat with him. This podcast (Peter’s third appearance on the New Books Network) was no exception. We discussed the book, Rickson’s amazing life, and a range of other topics such as his interviews with survivors and perpetrators of the Khmer Rouge genocide, my brief modeling career, and the ways in which martial arts offers opportunities for personal growth. Peter Maguire is the author of several books, including of Law and War, Facing Death in Cambodia, and Thai Stick. Maguire has taught history, law, theory of war, and the history of surfing at Columbia University, Bard College, and University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He founded the Fainting Robin Foundation which provides financial support to independent scholars, writers, and thinkers whose work falls outside the mainstream. It is a scholar-led, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that rewards genuinely independent intellectual work. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
When Lily and Alex entered a packed gymnasium in Queens, New York in 1972, they barely recognized their son. The boy who escaped to America with them, who was bullied as he struggled to learn English and cope with family tragedy, was now a young man who had discovered and secretly honed his basketball talent on the outdoor courts of New York City. That young man was Ernie Grunfeld, who would go on to win an Olympic gold medal and reach previously unimaginable heights as an NBA player and executive. In By the Grace of the Game: The Holocaust, a Basketball Legacy, and an Unprecedented American Dream (Triumph Books, 2022), Dan Grunfeld, once a basketball standout himself at Stanford University, shares the remarkable story of his family, a delicately interwoven narrative that doesn't lack in heartbreak yet remains as deeply nourishing as his grandmother's Hungarian cooking, so lovingly described. The true improbability of the saga lies in the discovery of a game that unknowingly held the power to heal wounds, build bridges, and tie together a fractured Jewish family. If the magnitude of an American dream is measured by the intensity of the nightmare that came before and the heights of the triumph achieved after, then By the Grace of the Game recounts an American dream story of unprecedented scale. From the grips of the Nazis to the top of the Olympic podium, from the cheap seats to center stage at Madison Square Garden, from yellow stars to silver spoons, this complex tale traverses the spectrum of the human experience to detail how perseverance, love, and legacy can survive through generations, carried on the shoulders of a simple and beautiful game. Paul Knepper used to cover the Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All was published in 2020. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Dr. Samir Chopra, Professor of Philosophy at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and author of The Evolution of a Cricket Fan: My Shapeshifting Journey (Temple University Press, 2021). In our conversation, we discussed how Chopra became an Indian cricket fan, the unique role that cricket plays in immigrant South Asian communities in Australia and the United States, the scholarly legacy of CLR James Beyond a Boundary, and the future of global cricket since the 1980s. In The Evolution of a Cricket Fan, Chopra mixes autobiography, ethnography, memoir, exile literature, and philosophy to better understand and explain how cricket helped him recognize and reshape his own post-colonial and immigrant identity. In the process, he also shows how cricket speaks to larger global patterns such as the tension between colonialism and post-coloniality in and outside of India, the interplay of the local and the national in the subcontinent, and transcendent and ephemeral qualities of live sporting events for fans of all stripes. Chopra’s compelling work proceeds roughly chronologically recounting the experiences of a young, Indian self-avowed cricket tragic and his relationship with his own sense of identity from the 1970s until the present. In his first chapter, he tells us about his “perverse” attraction to English, Australian, and even Pakistani cricket, and his rejection of the Indian cricket team. Over the next several chapters, Chopra exhumes and examines the moments that helped bring him back to Indian cricket fandom as well as those that helped to moderate his ultimate cricket nationalism. The pathway is winding and defies easy explanation: English biases against Pakistani cricketeers lead him to a more critical view of those same English authors’ attacks on Indian players. He learns to appreciate his own national identity through the local even as his Punjabi background complicates the easy adoption of any Hindu nationalism. India’s victory in the 1983 World Cup helps him reclaim the Indian team but he struggles with the space between the genteel image of cricket he idolizes and its aggressive expression in Indian, Pakistani, Australian, and English players and fans. The latter chapters detail his life after he leaves India – living first in New Jersey, afterward Sydney, Australia, and finally back in New York City. These sections are animated by cricket’s absence and presence. In the US, Chopra despairs cricket’s invisibility and to see it, he goes to great lengths (and sometimes great distances) to watch matches. This brings him face-to-face with many Pakistani cricket fans doing the same thing and he discovers comity and confrontation, if not in equal parts. He also becomes a devotee of the early internet, discovering cricket conversations and participating avidly in them. They reflect a new and more democratic (and even at times particularly South Asian) expression of the game. Keith Rathbone is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His book, entitled Sport and physical culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, agency, and everyday life, (Manchester University Press, 2022) examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au and follow him at @keithrathbone on twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Much is known about the physical strain that athletes’ bodies are subjected to, but until recently, the role of psychological factors in risk and rehabilitation has been poorly understood. In The Mental Impact of Sports Injury (Routledge, 2021), Dr. Carly McKay bridges the gap between academic research and practical settings in an informative, yet easy to follow guide to the psychology of sports injury. Addressing risk, rehabilitation, and prevention, it outlines key considerations for researchers and practitioners across all levels of sport. Alongside the fundamentals of injury psychology, emerging areas of importance are also discussed, including training load monitoring and the technological advances that are shaping modern sport medicine. Targeted examples highlight the challenges of preventing and managing injury in grassroots, elite, and professional contexts, with chapters dedicated to the under-served communities of youth and Para sport athletes. Stepping away from traditional texts, this unique book presents the landmark literature, major concepts, and athlete insights into sports injury psychology from a totally new perspective. This interview was conducted by Jolie Ho, a PhD candidate in clinical psychology whose research focuses on social support-seeking within the context of social anxiety and anxiety disorders. Outside of research, Jolie is a follower of figure skating and tennis who has long been fascinated by the unique challenges and dynamics faced by elite athletes in high-performance environments. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
There have been other biographies of Roger Federer, but never one with this kind of access to the man himself, his support team, and the most prominent figures in the game, including such rivals as Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, and Andy Roddick. In The Master: The Brilliant Career of Roger Federer (Twelve, 2021), New York Times correspondent Christopher Clarey sits down with Federer and those closest to him to tell the story of the greatest player in men's tennis. Roger Federer has often made it look astonishingly easy through the decades: carving backhands, gliding to forehands, leaping for overheads, and, in his most gravity-defying act, remaining high on a pedestal in a world of sports rightfully flooded with cynicism. But his path from a temperamental bleach-blond teenager with dubious style sense to one of the greatest, most self-possessed, and elegant of competitors has been a long-running act of will, not destiny. He not only had a great gift. He had grit. Christopher Clarey, one of the top international sportswriters working today, has covered Federer since the beginning of his professional career. He was in Paris on the Suzanne Lenglen Court for Federer's first Grand Slam match and has interviewed him exclusively more than any other journalist since his rise to prominence. Here, Clarey focuses on the pivotal people, places, and moments in Federer's long and rich career: reporting from South Africa, South America, the Middle East, four Grand Slam tournaments, and Federer's native Switzerland. It has been a journey like no other player's, rife with victories and a few crushing defeats, one that has redefined enduring excellence and made Federer a sentimental favorite worldwide. The Master tells the story of Federer's life and career on both an intimate and grand scale, in a way no one else could possibly do. Paul Knepper used to cover the Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All was published in 2020. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Dr. Michella Marino, the Deputy Director of the Indiana Historical Bureau, a division of the Indiana State Library, and the author of Roller Derby: The History of an American Sport (University of Texas Press, 2021). In our conversation, we discussed the origins of Roller Derby, its radically progressive politics in mid-century America, and its reinvention in the 21st century. In Roller Derby, Marino charts the rise, fall, and rise again of one of America’s most unique sports. It began as an endurance competition akin to pedestrianism and weeklong cycling races and in many ways it never left those beginnings. Roller Derby always mixed sport and spectacle, eventually becoming on of the most popular entertainments in the country. Unlike any other sports at the time, Roller Derby included men and women skaters on the same team and even in some circumstances on the track at the same time. Both men and women contributed equally to the score, but changes to the game in the 1930s that made physical contact, including fighting, more common produced unease among some spectators. Roller Derby’s mixed gender composition and its violence both helped ensure its popularity with male and female fans, but also raised significant challenges to mid-century norms. To make the sport palatable to a more conservative middle America, Leo Seltzer, Roller Derby’s founder, promoted normative gender images of the skaters. Roller Derby crowned an annual king and a queen: a popularity contest that usually rewarded the most likable man and the most beautiful woman skater. Marino shows how these performative showcases both mollified critics of the game even as they limited the participation of some of the skaters – non-white and non-traditionally feminine skaters could not perform mid-century beauty in the same way. These contests also undermined the image of Roller Derby as a sport among many journalists who refused to cover it. Even so, Marino shows that most fans could see the athleticism of the skaters on the track and Roller Derby quickly became popular among in-person fans from across the social spectrum and later on television. Roller Derby was tough work. To keep his skaters happy, Seltzer instituted radically progressive, encouraging families to compete as families, equal pay for its skaters, maternity leave, and day care. When the league folded, it paid out the remaining skaters from a pension fund. The final chapter details the rejuvenation of Roller Derby as an explicitly female-led and feminist sport that continues to face challenges around the sexualization of competitors, the integration of male competitors and spectators, and the challenges and opportunities provided by becoming an Olympic sport. Fun and full of life, Marino’s Roller Derby will appeal to scholars interested in American sport, gender, and spectacle, but also to the broad audience of skaters and sports fans. Keith Rathbone is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His book, entitled Sport and physical culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, agency, and everyday life, (Manchester University Press, 2022) examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au and follow him at @keithrathbone on twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Big money NCAA basketball had its origins in a many-sided conflict of visions and agendas. On one side stood large schools focused on a commercialized game that privileged wins and profits. Opposing them was a tenuous alliance of liberal arts colleges, historically black colleges, and regional state universities, and the competing interests of the NAIA, each with distinct interests of their own. Kurt Edward Kemper tells the dramatic story of the clashes that shook college basketball at mid-century--and how the repercussions continue to influence college sports to the present day. Taking readers inside the competing factions, he details why historically black colleges and regional schools came to embrace commercialization. As he shows, the NCAA's strategy of co-opting its opponents gave each group just enough just enough to play along--while the victory of the big-time athletics model handed the organization the power to seize control of college sports. An innovative history of an overlooked era, Before March Madness: The Wars for the Soul of College Basketball (U Illinois Press, 2020) looks at how promises, power, and money laid the groundwork for an American sports institution. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Heather Dichter, Associate Professor of Sports History and Sports Management at the International Centre for Sports History and Culture at De Montfort University. She is also the author of Bidding for the 68 Olympic Games: International Sport’s Cold War Battle with NATO (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021). In our conversation, we discussed the origins of the East German sporting travel ban, the NATO alliance and the competition to host the 1968 Summer and Winter Olympics, and the role of smaller NATO members in reshaping the alliance’s border and travel regulations. In Bidding for the 68 Olympic Games, Dichter examines a little-known and understudied until now diplomatic conflict between NATO and the International Olympic Committee. In the 1950s and 1960s, NATO members struggled to balance their adherence to the Hallstein Doctrine – non-recognition of state-symbols of East Germany – with their participation in and desire to host sports mega-events. The Hallstein doctrine limited travel for East German athletes, who could only participate as members of a club or a German team, as well as banned the inclusion of the East German anthem or flag in public. The IOC’s strict claims to apoliticism and their demand that all athletes be allowed to travel to competitions made NATO’s obstruction of East German travel unpopular and untenable. In the press, NATO members pointed to the Berlin Wall as the ultimate barrier to free travel, but behind the scenes and then later in public, the alliance’s solidarity threatened to crumble as Canada, France, and the United States competed for the right to host the Olympic Games. Although the East German travel ban featured in press commentary about the 1968 Olympics, most histories of Cold War sports overlook this crucial moment in European sport. Dichter’s work moves beyond previous histories through an extensive analysis of a wide range of archives across multiple countries, including the United States, Canada, France, Switzerland, Germany and Norway. Her research includes not only newspapers, but more importantly diplomatic documents from NATO, NATO alliance members, and the IOC that enable her to better understand the diplomatic strategies pursued by the competing interests: nation-states, military alliances, sporting bodies, athletic federations and even athletes. Only through this transnational and multi-archival approach can Dichter illustrate the importance that NATO members placed on sport and explain why sport proved so difficult for them to handle despite broad agreement in other diplomatic arenas. The Bidding for the 68 Olympic Games is a fascinating account of a largely unknown and poorly understood conflict between NATO and a range of international sporting organizations, including the International Olympic Committee. It will appeal to people interested in sport, international diplomacy, and the Cold War. Keith Rathbone is a senior lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His book, entitled Sport and physical culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, agency, and everyday life, out now with Manchester University Press, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au and follow him at @keithrathbone on twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today I talked to Martin Wells about his new book No One Playing: The Essence of Mindfulness in Golf and in Life (John Hunt, 2022). To imagine you’re in control, on a golf course or otherwise in life, is “absurd” explains Martin Wells. It’s not that one gets into the zone; instead, the zone finds you. In those and other ways, this delightful book and author both honor golf as a sport and find much more in playing it that offers us insights into human nature and behavior. Want to know which emotions may help you putt better? Why there’s a thin line between humility and humiliation? Want to hear about the saga that has been Tiger Woods’ career? Then this episode is for you. Addition highlights include Jean Van de Velde’s epic 1999 Open Championship meltdown and the profound wisdom of Bobby Jones’ observation that “The length of a golf course is five inches—the space between your ears.” Martin Wells has worked as a psychotherapist in the National Health Services (NHS) for over 30. He lives in Bristol, England, and at age 70 is still a single figure handicap golfer. He’s also played senior amateur and semi-professional soccer for nearly 20 years. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of nine books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His new book is Blah, Blah, Blah: A Snarky Guide to Office Lingo. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
When I was a teenager, I spent entirely too much time at the Pontiac Silverdome watching the Detroit Pistons play basketball. In all the games I watched, it never occurred to me to wonder why a professional basketball team was playing in a cavernous, multi-purpose stadium entirely unsuited to basketball. Frank Andre Guridy begins his wonderful book The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics (U Texas Press, 2021) by examining the Houston Astrodome as both a result of and a contributor to dramatic changes in sports and society in the United States. Guridy is recognizes that the games we watch and the athletes who play them are valuable in and of themselves and the book is full of lyrical descriptions of games and athletes. But he is mostly interested in the ways sports reflected and formed American society. He argues that the economic and social forces reshaping America in the 1960s and 70s provided the context for a change in the ways sports were played, produced and consumed and that Texas served as an incubator for these changes. His book is always insightful and interesting. But his examination of the intersection of race and economics in the emergence of the NBA's San Antonio Spurs is particularly strong, as is a chapter examining the emergence of the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders as a national phenomenon. In a world where sports is again undergoing a transformation, The Sports Revolution offers a valuable lens through which to view both the dramatic changes of the 1970s and those so prominent in today's society. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Electrifying athletes like Olga Korbut and Nadia Comaneci helped make women’s artistic gymnastics one of the most popular events in the Olympic Games. But the transition of gymnastics from a women’s sport to a girl’s sport in the 1970s also laid the foundation for a system of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse of gymnasts around the world. In Degrees of Difficulty: How Women's Gymnastics Rose to Prominence and Fell from Grace (University of Illinois Press, 2021), Dr. Georgia Cervin has written “one of the first books to examine the history of women’s gymnastics as an international sport. It aims to do this in the context of international sport and global politics, as well as the social norms that have been constructed within the sport. Hence, the book fluctuates between looking inwardly at the sport and outwardly at gymnastics’ place in the world. It reviews the origins of gymnastics and its position in the Olympic movement, how it was governed and the reasons behind the rules, where the sport fits into nationalism and international relations, who teaches gymnastics and how they do so, and what it all represents about class, gender, and race…This book thus offers insights into how and why women’s gymnastics developed the way it did, including insights into how dangerous sporting cultures are created, as well as challenging what we know about the Cold War and international relations throughout this period.” This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Dr. Melcher is also a long-standing gymnastics fan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Alistair Shearer, a freelance scholar of South Asian religion and culture, and teacher of yoga and the psychology of yoga. He is also the author of The Story of Yoga: From Ancient India to the Modern West (Hurst and Co, 2020). In our conversation, we discussed the origins of yoga, the differences between mind and body yoga practices, and the fascinating individuals responsible for the transmission and reception of yoga practices around the world. The Story of Yoga is a comprehensive account of yoga practices from the Vedic period. It defines and focuses on the differences between mind yoga and body yoga. The former was and is a spiritual and older body of practice that was discussed in religious texts including the Bhagavad Gita. Its practitioners used yoga to search for transcendental experiences, magical powers, and union with the universe. By contrast, body yoga centred around asanas (postures) developed later but now dominates a $20 billion-dollar global yoga industry. Shearer’s book is roughly divided into two sections: the first deals with yoga’s always tumultuous and often humorous history. He shows how mind yoga spiritual practices spread from the movement of forest sages, tantric yogis, and rebellious brahmin. Shearer’s discussions of the original religious texts, such as Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, include linguistic analysis and close readings of the text. He carefully explains the meanings of different words, including yoga, which means union, to help to explain how the two dual and at times duelling approaches to yoga, namely mind and body yoga developed at different times, in different places, and for different purposes. From their origins in the subcontinent, both mind and body yoga spread around the world. Yoga’s internationalisation happened especially quickly during times of conflict, notably during the Islamic invasion of the subcontinent and the British Raj. The Story of Yoga includes Western colonizers who sought out yoga for scholarly and spiritual reasons, such as the Theosophical Society, but it does not neglect the perhaps more compelling and certainly more enterprising South Asians, including Swami Vivekananda, K. V. Iyer, and B. K. S. Iyengar, who developed yoga philosophies and styles and popularised them outside of India. The first section of the book also includes a long discussion of women and yogic practice, particularly in the 20th century. The second half of the book engages with contemporary issues in yoga, such as the psychology of mind yoga practices, particularly its use in mindfulness therapy, the health benefits and consequences of popular body yoga styles, and the use of yoga by nationalist’s movements in India. The Story of Yoga is a rich, very compelling, and often funny history of yoga from antiquity in South Asia to its global present. It is an ambitious and comprehensive account that includes both mind and body yoga that will appeal to scholars interested in yoga and sport, South Asian history, intellectual history, and globalisation. Keith Rathbone is a senior lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His book, entitled Sport and physical culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, agency, and everyday life, (Manchester University Press, 2022) examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au and follow him at @keithrathbone on twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
The Mind-Body Problem is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Janko Tipsarevic, who is a former professional tennis player with a career-high singles ranking of world no. 8 and founder and CEO of Tipsarevic Tennis Academy in Belgrade, Serbia. This conversation gives behind-the-scenes insights on what it takes to achieve excellence in professional sports, what mindset is needed to reach one’s true potential and a penetrating and inspirational window into the psychology of professional tennis that resonates with all of us. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Jethro Binns was rated 84th in the world squash rankings. A terrible accident on court cut his career short, later he founded Squashskills, which is now the world's leading online squash training resource.
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About your host Richard Lucas Richard is a business and social entrepreneur who founded, led and/or invested in more than 30 businesses, Richard has been a TEDx event organiser, supports the pro-entrepreneurship ecosystem, and leads entrepreneurship workshops at all levels: from pre-schools to leading business schools. Richard was born in Oxford and moved to Poland in 1991. Read more here.
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Power and Politics in World Athletics: A Critical History (Routledge, 2021) by Jörg Krieger provides the first detailed history of one of the most powerful international sport organisations, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), since 2019 known as World Athletics. The book critically assesses the internal power relations within the IAAF by focusing on the IAAF leadership. Based on extensive archival research, Power and Politics in World Athletics offers a nuanced analysis of the institutionalized strategies that developed as a reflection of the IAAF’s interests and aims to create a broader understanding of the global sport system. With only six presidents in over a century of existence, the IAAF’s leaders had profound impacts on other international institutions, national stakeholders and sporting participants. Through four sections, the book identifies various key turning points in the history of the governing body of athletics, and explores the IAAF’s foundation, the policies of past IAAF presidents, and controversial issues such as doping, corruption and manipulation through a socio-historical lens. The book shows that while anyone could take part in athletics, policies enacted by each president served to ostracize those groups who did not fit into the IAAF’s vision of an equal playing field. This book is essential reading for anyone with an interest in sport history, sport sociology, the politics of sport, sport management, sport governance, or international organisations. Hannah Borenstein is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. Her dissertation research is an ethnographic study about women long distance runners from Ethiopia. I also do freelance writing about the intersections of sports, race, gender, politics, and labor, and consult on a range of projects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Several high-profile cases of sexual harassment and assault have helped the #MeToo movement in China continue to make impacts on a society that is highly controlled and surveilled. Most recently, tennis star Peng Shuai’s saga has accused former top Chinese Communist Party leader, Zhang Gaoli of sexual assault. Although Peng did not say that she is part of the #MeToo movement, her speaking out has given fresh impetus to the campaign. Joining us to talk to Julie Chen about the #MeToo movement in China is Dusica Ristivojević, Kone Foundation Bold Initiatives Senior Researcher at the University of Helsinki. Dušica works in the areas of interdisciplinary Chinese studies, media studies, and international relations. Recently, she published a co-authored journal article on the #MeToo movement in China. See Jing Xiong and Dušica Ristivojević (2021) #MeToo in China: How do the Voiceless Rise Up in an Authoritarian State? in Politics & Gender. Julie Yu-Wen Chen is Professor of Chinese Studies at the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki (Finland). Dr. Chen serves as one of the editors of the Journal of Chinese Political Science (Springer, SSCI). Formerly, she was chair of Nordic Association of China Studies (NACS) and Editor-in-Chief of Asian Ethnicity (Taylor & Francis). You can find her on University of Helsinki Chinese Studies’ website, Youtube and Facebook, and her personal Twitter. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by William J. Morgan, Professor Emeritus at the University of Southern California, and the author of Sport and Moral Conflict: A Conventionalist Theory (Temple University Press, 2020). In our conversation, we discussed three theories of sports ethics (formalism, internalism/interpretivism, and conventionalism.) We looked at how sports philosophers use historical controversies as test cases for their philosophical theories, but also applied those philosophical approaches to contemporary sports issues including the use of performance enhancing drugs and the payment of college athletes. Sport and Moral Conflict takes sport as a moral laboratory and Morgan wrote it as an extended conversation between theories of sports ethics. Each chapter addresses a different sports philosophical theory: formalism, a broad internalism that centres metaphysical methods, a broad internalism that uses a discourse method, and finally a conventionalist ethical theory of sport. He also outlines what he calls the two duelling conceptions of sport in the early 20th century, an amateur world guided by British public school athletes and a professional world of American scientific sportsmen. These two different sporting conceptions, according to Morgan, shape much of the athletic debate the age. Understanding the different world views of these two schools provides for conventionalists a way of comprehending contemporary moral controversy in sport. The bulk of Morgan’s book is an extensive and fairhanded analysis of alternative theories of sports ethics; the depth of his investigation defies easy summary. He looks closely at formalism and internalism, offering appraisals of these theories that highlight both their successes and their failures. For example, formalists like Bernard Suits not only succeeded in developing very plausible definitions of sports, but in their emphasis on the written rules of sport, also failed to appropriately consider the rules beyond the written rules that guide competitive performances. A close look at a range of test cases allow Morgan to interrogate the different sports philosophy approaches. In 1887, a baserunner that crossed home plate, tackled and held down the catcher which allowed two other runners to score. Was this behaviour permissible, even if it was technically not a rule violation? A formalist approach would have difficulty in dealing with these kinds of rules violation; by contrast, internalists and conventionalists stress the subtextual rules that shape athletes’ behaviours. The baserunners in 1887 were called out. Keith Rathbone is a senior lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His book, entitled Sport and physical culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, agency, and everyday life, (Manchester University Press, 2022) examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au and follow him at @keithrathbone on twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
In 2016, amid an epidemic of police shootings of African Americans, the celebrated NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick began a series of quiet protests on the field, refusing to stand during the U.S. national anthem. By “taking a knee,” Kaepernick bravely joined a long tradition of American athletes making powerful political statements. This time, however, Kaepernick’s simple act spread like wildfire throughout American society, becoming the preeminent symbol of resistance to America’s persistent racial inequality. Critically acclaimed sports journalist and author of A People’s History of Sports in the United States, Dave Zirin chronicles “the Kaepernick effect” for the first time, through interviews with a broad cross-section of professional athletes across many different sports, college stars and high-powered athletic directors, and high school athletes and coaches. In each case, he uncovers the fascinating explanations and motivations behind a mass political movement in sports, through deeply personal and inspiring accounts of risk-taking, activism, and courage both on and off the field. A book about the politics of sport, and the impact of sports on politics, The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World (New Press, 2021) is for anyone seeking to understand an essential dimension of the new movement for racial justice in America. Paul Knepper covered the Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All was published in 2020. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about: Dante Stewart’s path through college and into his current graduate school, playing football for Clemson, why former college athletes need to advocate for current student players’ rights, why he chose to go into the seminary at Emery, his grandmother, and a discussion of Shoutin’ in The Fire: An American Epistle. Our guest is: Dante Stewart, who is a graduate student, writer, and speaker. His voice has been featured on CNN, The Washington Post, Christianity Today, Sojourners, The Witness: A Black Christian Collective, Comment Magazine, and more. As an up and coming voice, he writes and speaks into the areas of race, religion, and politics. He received his B.A. in Sociology from Clemson University. He is currently studying at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta, Ga. He is the author of Shoutin’ in The Fire: An American Epistle. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, co-producer of the Academic Life. She is a historian of women and gender. Listeners to this episode may also be interested in: --The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou, by Maya Angelou --The poem Kitchenette Building, by Gwendolyn Brooks --Cables to Rage, by Audre Lorde --Notes of a Native Son, by James Baldwin --The Fire Next Time, by James Baldwin -- Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates --the Smithsonian Folkway’s recording of The World is Not A Pleasant Place to Be, by Nikki Giovanni --Salvation: Black People and Love, by bell hooks --What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction, by Toni Morrison --Breathe: A Letter To My Sons, by Imani Perry -- Dante Stewart’s articles referenced in this episode can be found here --The Candler School of Theology at Emory University: http://candler.emory.edu/index.html --Clemson College Athletics You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DM us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
From beer labels to literary classics like A River Runs Through It, trout fishing is a beloved feature of the iconography of the American West. But as Jen Brown demonstrates in Trout Culture: How Fly Fishing Forever Changed the Rocky Mountain West (U Washington Press, 2017), the popular conception of Rocky Mountain trout fishing as a quintessential experience of communion with nature belies the sport's long history of environmental manipulation, engineering, and, ultimately, transformation. A fly-fishing enthusiast herself, Brown places the rise of recreational trout fishing in a local and global context. Globally, she shows how the European sport of fly-fishing came to be a defining, tourist-attracting feature of the expanding 19th-century American West. Locally, she traces the way that the burgeoning fly-fishing tourist industry shaped the environmental, economic, and social development of the Western United States: introducing and stocking favored fish species, eradicating the less favored native "trash fish," changing the courses of waterways, and leading to conflicts with Native Americans' fishing and territorial rights. Through this analysis, Brown demonstrates that the majestic trout streams often considered a timeless feature of the American West are in fact the product of countless human interventions adding up to a profound manipulation of the Rocky Mountain environment. Troy A. Hallsell is the 341st Missile Wing historian at Malmstrom AFB, MT. The ideas expressed in this podcast do not represent the 341st Missile Wing, United States Air Force, or Department of Defense. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today I talked to Ben Guest about his new book Zen and the Art of Coaching Basketball: A Namibian Odyssey (2021). Pressure plays, buzzer-beaters, and mindfulness meditation: A team of teenagers goes for the championship in Namibia’s professional basketball league. Ben Guest takes a high school coaching gig on the other side of the world. On the first day of practice one of the ten players can’t complete a simple defensive slide. Follow their journey over two seasons as the team loses a heartbreaker in the high school league championship game and then take their talents to Namibia’s professional league, the KBA. Guest models a different way of coaching: meditation, team-led decision making, and surrendering to what is. This expertly-told memoir includes cameos from Coach K and Bob Knight, and a detour through the Mississippi Delta, until we find ourselves on the biggest stage of Namibian basketball: The KBA Finals. Paul Knepper covered the Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All was published in 2020. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Rebecca Joyce Kissane, Professor of Sociology at Lafayette University, and Sarah Winslow, Professor of Sociology at Clemson University, who together are the authors of Whose Game?: Gender and Power in Fantasy Sports (Temple University Press, 2020). In our conversation, we discussed why people play fantasy sports, how men and women experience fantasy sports differently, and what possibilities might exist for real transformation of the masculinist sports world. Whose Game is an incisive analysis of the classed and gendered politics of fantasy sports. Kissane and Winslow take fantasy sport seriously and unpack the ways in which fantasy sports reify and reproduce the class and gendered relations of power in social networks, workplaces and families. They argue that fantasy sports privilege behaviours typically coded male such as competitiveness, the pursuit of dominance, and the need for control. They examine how those elements of fantasy gameplay shape men’s and women’s experiences of playing fantasy sports. Kissane and Winslow develop the concept of jock statsculinity, as a mediated form of fantasy sports masculinity that challenges more normative notions of hegemonic masculinity. Through fantasy sports, a wider range of men can participate in traditionally masculinity activities, including competition and banter, without regard to their physical capabilities. Fantasy sports thus open normative masculinity to a wider range of people than hegemonic masculinity. At the same time, Kissane and Winslow stress that not all men have equal access to jock statsculinity – white, professional men are much more likely to take part in it. Women who want to participate in the fantasy sports world learn to navigate the space as a powerfully masculine and hetero normative space. Fantasy sports ostensibly offer women an opportunity to compete with men on a level playing field, but those spaces and the common behaviours there are coded as male. Women who play fantasy sports may face harassment, but they almost always experience marginalization and belittlement. Nevertheless, for many women, fantasy provides a way to win some of the social benefits of masculinity and/or transgress them. Fantasy sports offer both men and women new opportunities to build connections with their relatives, co-workers, and people with similar interests, but in the realm of fantasy sport, both men and women prioritize building relationships with other men. At the same time, as Kissane and Winslow point out, even though they occupy a privileged position in the fantasy sports world social structure, men also suffer from their engagement with jock statsculinity. Men report much higher rates of emotional impact from fantasy sport. Many men spend considerable amounts of time – perhaps too much time away from their loved ones - setting their line-ups and researching matchups. Whose Game is a wide-ranging analysis and discussion of many of the key issues facing both male and female fantasy sports fans from two leading sports sociologists. Their work will be of general interest to sports fans, but particularly useful for people teaching about sports sociology, gender and politics. Keith Rathbone is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
"They don't know me. They don't know what I'm capable of." Diagnosed with pervasive developmental disorder, a form of autism, as a toddler, Anthony Ianni wasn't expected to succeed in school or participate in sports, but he had other ideas. As a child, Ianni told anybody who would listen, including head coach Tom Izzo, that he would one day play for the Michigan State Spartans. Centered: Autism, Basketball, and One Athlete's Dreams is the firsthand account of a young man's social, academic, and athletic struggles and his determination to reach his goals. In this remarkable memoir, Ianni reflects on his experiences with both basketball and the autism spectrum. Centered, an inspirational sports story in the vein of Rudy, reveals Ianni to be unflinching in his honesty, generous in his gratitude, and gracious in his compassion. Sports fans will root for the underdog. Parents, teachers, and coaches will gain insight into the experience of an autistic child. And everyone will triumph in the achievements of Centered. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Both a symbol of the Mubarak government’s power and a component in its construction of national identity, football served as fertile ground for Egyptians to confront the regime’s overthrow during the 2011 revolution. With the help of the state, appreciation for football in Egypt peaked in the late 2000s. Yet after Mubarak fell, fans questioned their previous support, calling for a reformed football for a new, postrevolutionary nation. In Egypt’s Football Revolution: Emotion, Masculinity, and Uneasy Politics (U Texas Press, 2021), Carl Rommel examines the politics of football as a space for ordinary Egyptians and state forces to negotiate a masculine Egyptian chauvinism. Basing his discussion on several years of fieldwork with fans, players, journalists, and coaches, he investigates the increasing attention paid to football during the Mubarak era; its demise with the 2011 uprisings and 2012 Port Said massacre, which left seventy-two fans dead; and its recent rehabilitation. Cairo’s highly organized and dedicated Ultras fans became a key revolutionary force through their antiregime activism, challenging earlier styles of fandom and making visible entrenched ties between sport and politics. As the appeal of football burst, alternative conceptions of masculinity, emotion, and politics came to the fore to demand or prevent revolution and reform. The book is available for purchase for customers in Europe and the Middle East from Combined Academic Books. Quote CSFS2021 at check-out for 30% discount; and for customers in the US at the University of Texas Press. Quote UTXROMEGY at check-out for 20% discount. Paul Knepper used to cover the Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All was published in 2020. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
The battle between Marvelous Marvin Hagler and Thomas Hearns is remembered as one of the greatest fights of all time. But in the months before the two finally collided on April 15, 1985, there was a feeling in the air that boxing was in trouble. The biggest name in the business, Sugar Ray Leonard, was retired with no logical replacement in sight, while the American Medical Association was calling for a ban on the sport. With Hagler–Hearns looking like boxing's last hurrah, promoter Bob Arum embarked on one the most audacious publicity campaigns in history, hyping the bout until the entire country was captivated. Arum's task was difficult. He'd spent years trying and failing to make Hagler a star, while Hearns was a gifted but inconsistent performer. Could Arum possibly get a memorable fight out of these two moody, unpredictable warriors? The Hagler–Hearns fight is now part of history, but The War: Hagler-Hearns and Three Rounds for the Ages (Hamilcar Publications, 2021) by Don Stradley explores the many factors behind the event, and how it helped establish what many feel was boxing's greatest era. No book, not even George Kimball’s classic, Four Kings, has focused solely on this legendary fight involving two of those "Four Kings" that boxing fans have revered for their skills and willingness to take on challenges that many fighters do not take in today's boxing landscape. With additional commentary from many who were there, Stradley shows the unlikely path taken by two fighters searching for greatness. They didn't care how many punches they endured, as long as it led to stardom. When the fight was over, however, each learned that fame inflicted its own kind of damage. Paul Knepper covered the Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All was published in 2020. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
We’re celebrating our one-year anniversary with this interview, and so I wanted to introduce a special guest for today: Nur Nasreen Ibrahim, talented writer, journalist and dear friend. We’re going to talk—mostly—about Nur’s latest work: an essay for the collection Horse Girls: Recovering, Aspiring, and Devoted Riders Redefine the Iconic Bond (Harper Perennial: 2021), edited by Halimah Marcus. Horse Girls confronts, investigates, and fleshes out the trope of the “horse girl”: the idea that all a young girl wants is to learn how to ride a horse, famous in from “Black Beauty” to “My Little Pony”. And Nur’s essay talks about her experiences riding horses growing up in Pakistan: bringing in themes of colonialism, the urban-rural divide, and growing up. But, also, we’ll talk about Nur’s experience as a writer, both in the United States and in Pakistan, and her path to literature. Nur is a journalist, writer, and producer based in New York City. Originally from Lahore, Pakistan, she writes speculative and literary fiction, as well as personal essays. Her fiction and nonfiction has been included in anthologies and collections from Harper Perennial, Catapult, Hachette India, Platypus Press, The Aleph Review, Salmagundi magazine, Barrelhouse, and more. She is a two-time finalist for The Salam Award for Imaginative Fiction. She is a 2021-2023 recipient of the Lighthouse Writers Book Project Teaching Fellowship. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Jessica Luther, a freelance investigative journalist, and Kavitha Davidson, a sport and culture writer with the Athletic, who together are the authors of Loving Sports When They Don’t Love You Back: Dilemmas of the Modern Fan (University of Texas Press, 2020). Our free-flowing conversation covered the use of indigenous American imagery by sporting teams in the United States, athletes and domestic violence, and falling out of love and into love with sports. Loving Sports When They Don’t Love You Back is a comprehensive book that examines fourteen issues facing contemporary sports fans, including: football and CTE, doping, racist mascots, unequal pay, LGBTQ+ participation, representation in sports media, domestic violence, bad owners, the NCAA and amateurism, and the cost of building stadiums and hosting mega-events like the Olympics and World Cup. Rather than ‘sticking to dribbling,’ Luther and Davidson demonstrate the inherent politics of sports culture. In each chapter, they address the different ways that sports influence political issues and showcase how some athletes, organizers and fans have responded to the failure of sporting life to live up to our expectations. For example, in their chapter on racist mascots, Luther and Davidson trace out the human costs of awful caricatures like Chief Wahoo, but also highlight how even teams that work closely with American Indian groups still open the door for native people’s disparagement by their rival fans. Their work is both aimed at people who might feel left out of sporting life, including women, people of color, or LGBTQ+ fans. Their chapter on representation in sports media, for example, offers an innovative oral history of media figures from marginalized groups. At the same time, they also address issues facing all sports fans including how to justify (or not) watching the NFL and college football when so many players are suffering from CTE. Their work offers fresh critiques of sports from within a progressive and capitalist framework. In their chapters on the MLB’s free market system, they note that it has done a better job of producing competitive parity than the NFL’s salary cap and they also point out that it benefits players whose salaries are constrained by the cartelization of the leagues. They strongly critique the NCAA’s approach to player compensation and I look forward to hearing them both more in the future on Name, Image and Likeness rights. They take seriously the problems of stadium building, especially gentrification, but still consider the possibilities for people’s enjoyment of a new arena. Their chapter “Watching Women’s Basketball When People Tell You You’re the Only One” offers hope for fans who want to support a league with genuinely revolutionary potential. Loving Sports When They Don’t Love You Back is a wide-ranging analysis and discussion of many of the key issues facing sports fans from two leading sports writers. Their work will be of general interest to sports fans, but particularly useful for people teaching about sports history, sociology or politics. Keith Rathbone is a senior lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His book, entitled Sport and physical culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, agency, and everyday life, (Manchester University Press, 2022) examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au and follow him at @keithrathbone on twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Petr Roubal, Senior Researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History in the Czech Academy of Sciences, and author of Spartakiads: The Politics of Physical Culture in Communist Czechoslovakia (Karolinum Press/Institute of Contemporary History, 2019). In our conversation, we discussed the genealogy of the Spartakiad gymnastics movement, the use of the Spartakiad during the Communist period and how those uses changed over time, and the reception of the Spartakiad by the Czech public. In Spartakiads, Roubal argues that the Spartakiad can be seen as more than a communist ritual. It was also as a particular Czech nationalist celebration whose popularity made it a central feature of Czech society across the 20th century that resisted postwar Sovietization and subsequently became a costly endeavour for the socialist state. He shows that the Spartakiad was not a sui generis development, but built upon the popular pre-war Sokol movement, one of the key institutions of Czech nationalism before the First World War. When the Communists took power, they had to deal with the popularity of the Sokol movement and its Slets. They attempted to introduce state socialist values into the gymnastics rituals, but their symbolic aims changed over time, especially after the Prague Spring and Normalization. The 1970 Spartakiad was the only time that the socialist state cancelled a Slet. These festivals cost the state immensely in terms of money and time. Hundreds of thousands of participants and spectators needed to be accommodated, fed, and transported from villages, and towns across the country to Prague every five years. Yet, the benefits of the Spartakiad were far from clear and elites and the popular class resisted, adopted, adapted, and celebrated the Spartakiad. Indeed, the Spartakiad’s influence in Czech society and on the socialist state defy simple analysis and Roubal does not hesitate to bring the theories of Foucault, Bakhtin, and other critical theorists to help unpack the power of the movement. Spartakiads: The Politics of Physical Culture in Communist Czechoslovakia is a rich analysis (and a fun read) about postwar socialist Czech society that will be of interest broadly, but especially to scholars of popular culture in postwar Europe and sports historians. Keith Rathbone is a senior lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His book, entitled Sport and physical culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, agency, and everyday life, (Manchester University Press, 2022) examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au and follow him at @keithrathbone on twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
The Plant-Based Athlete: A Game-Changing Approach to Peak Performance (HarperOne, 2021) by Matt Frazier and Robert Cheeke reveals the incontrovertible proof that the human body does not need meat, eggs, or dairy to be strong. Instead, research shows that a consciously calibrated plant-based diet offers the greatest possible recovery times, cell oxidation, injury prevention, and restorative sleep, and allows athletes to train more effectively, with better results. However, committing to a plant-based diet as an elite athlete, first-time marathoner, or weekend warrior isn't as simple as swapping vegetables for meat. Even the slightest food adjustments can impact performance. That's why Matt Frazier, founder of No Meat Athlete, and Robert Cheeke, founder of Vegan Bodybuilding, wrote this groundbreaking book, to guide those interested in making this important shift in how to do so with the best, most transformative results. The Plant-Based Athlete offers readers:
A persuasive body of evidence for adopting a plant-based lifestyle, with key information about how macronutrients, micronutrients, and calories fuel a body running on plant foods
An entire chapter devoted to protein - why plant sources of protein are preferable over meat, and how plant protein can be used to increase strength, muscle mass, and power
60+ delicious and nutritious plant-based recipes, including Veggie Burger Patties, Garden Meatballs, Summer Pasta Salad, Vegan Mac & Cheese, French Toast, Acai Bowl, and a High-Energy Smoothie
Insights from winning plant-based athletes in nearly every sport including champion ultrarunners Rich Roll and Scott Jurek; former NFL player David Carter; champion boxers Yuri Foreman, Unsal Arik, Cam Awesome, and Vanessa Espinoza; and Olympic-level swimmers, cyclists, figure skaters, sprinters, and more.
A Day in the Life of a Plant-Based Athlete - examples of what, when, and how different athletes eat to fuel their varied workouts
An instant classic and mainstay on health and fitness shelves everywhere, The Plant-Based Athlete is the ultimate invitation for joining the growing community of athletes who use plants to power their workouts and their every day. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
In July 1947, not even three months after Jackie Robinson debuted on the Brooklyn Dodgers, snapping the color line that had segregated Major League Baseball, Larry Doby would follow in his footsteps on the Cleveland Indians. Though Doby, as the second Black player in the majors, would struggle during his first summer in Cleveland, his subsequent turnaround in 1948 from benchwarmer to superstar sparked one of the wildest and most meaningful seasons in baseball history. In intimate, absorbing detail, Luke Epplin's Our Team: The Epic Story of Four Men and the World Series That Changed Baseball (Flatiron Books, 2021) traces the story of the integration of the Cleveland Indians and their quest for a World Series title through four key participants: Bill Veeck, an eccentric and visionary owner adept at exploding fireworks on and off the field; Larry Doby, a soft-spoken, hard-hitting pioneer whose major-league breakthrough shattered stereotypes that so much of white America held about Black ballplayers; Bob Feller, a pitching prodigy from the Iowa cornfields who set the template for the athlete as businessman; and Satchel Paige, a legendary pitcher from the Negro Leagues whose belated entry into the majors whipped baseball fans across the country into a frenzy. Together, as the backbone of a team that epitomized the postwar American spirit in all its hopes and contradictions, these four men would captivate the nation by storming to the World Series - all the while rewriting the rules of what was possible in sports. Paul Knepper covered the Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All was published in September 2020. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Conventional wisdom about running is passed down like folklore (and sometimes contradicts itself): the right kind of shoe prevents injury—or running barefoot, like our prehistoric ancestors, is best; eat a high-fat diet—and also carbo load before a race; running cures depression—but it might be addictive; running can save your life—although it can also destroy your knee cartilage. Often it's hard to know what to believe. In Running Smart: How Science Can Improve Your Endurance and Performance (MIT Press, 2021), Mariska van Sprundel, a science journalist and recreational runner who has had her fair share of injuries, sets out to explore the science behind such claims. In her quest, van Sprundel reviews the latest developments in sports science, consults with a variety of experts, and visits a sports lab to have her running technique analyzed. She learns, among other things, that according to evolutionary biology, humans are perfectly adapted to running long distances (even if our hunter-gatherer forebears suffered plenty of injuries); that running sets off a shockwave that spreads from foot to head, which may or may not be absorbed by cushioned shoes; and that a good sports bra controls the ping pong–like movements of a female runner's breasts. She explains how the body burns fuel, the best foods to eat before and after running, and what might cause “runner's high.” More than fifty million Americans are runners (and a slight majority of them are women). This engaging and enlightening book will help both novice and seasoned runners run their smartest. Mariska van Sprundel is a freelance science journalist who has written for Runner's World and other publications. The creator of The Rational Runner, a blog about science and running, she is a running instructor for recreational runners at a Utrecht athletics club. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Philippe Vonnard, Senior SNSF Researcher at the University de Lausanne, and the author of Creating a United Europe of Football: The Formation of UEFA (1949-1961) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). In our conversation, we discussed the role UEFA played in the production of European identity, the global origins of the European confederation, and how European sports bureaucrats were able to navigate the Cold War. In Creating a United Europe of Football, Vonnard explains the rise of UEFA through a close examination of the rarely utilized UEFA archives. His work pushes past a prosopography of European football bureaucrats – such as Stanley Rous, Ottorino Barassi, Ernst Thommen – and instead situates UEFA’s emergence in the rise of the global football and the Cold War. He argues that rather than simply a movement of European football officials, UEFA was also inspired by the South American confederation (CONMEBOL, founded 1916) provided an impetus and model for UEFA. Vonnard does not shy away from the details of the FIFA Executive: he shows how debates over the reorganization of FIFA necessitated the creation of a European confederation to promote officers to the Executive Committee. A new cadre of European football officials, however, opted for a more expansive confederation with independent financial resources rather than a minimalist association organized only to decide that limited question. A more extensive UEFA fought alongside and with FIFA as a major sports stakeholder. UEFA’s professionalism and scope expanded over the 1950s as it responded to issues and opportunities. As UEFA organized a ever wider series of competitions, it crowded out nascent challenges to its control over European football. It succeeded where other political, cultural, and economic unions failed, producing a genuine European-wide organization that formed and operated successfully across the Cold War East-West divide. Vonnard explains the qualities of leadership and strategies that made possible their achievements. Creating a United Europe of Football is a fascinating work from an important francophone sports historian. Now in English translation it provides a compelling read for people interested in the continental conversations about football’s role in European identity and the rise of sports diplomacy during the Cold War. There is also a free French version pour les francophones. https://www.peterlang.com/view/title/65151 Keith Rathbone is a senior lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His book, entitled Sport and physical culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, agency, and everyday life, (Manchester University Press, 2022) examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
In the Cards is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Fred Gitelman, world-champion bridge player and co-founder of Bridge Base Online. This wide-ranging conversation provides behind-the-scenes insights into the world of professional bridge, the psychological stress of top-flight competition, and how the human mind can compute amazing feats of memory. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
How is it possible for a town to exist where the median household income is about $73,000, but the median home price is about $4,000,000? In Aspen and the American Dream: How One Town Manages Inequality in the Era of Supergentrification (U Chicago Press, 2021), Dr. Jenny Stuber digs into the "impossible" math of Aspen, Colorado by exploring how middle-class people have found a way to live in this supergentrified town. Interviewing a range of residents, policymakers, and officials, Stuber shows that what resolves the math equation between incomes and home values in Aspen, Colorado—the X-factor that makes middle-class life possible—is the careful orchestration of diverse class interests within local politics and the community. She explores how this is achieved through a highly regulatory and extractive land use code that provides symbolic and material value to highly affluent investors and part-year residents, as well as less-affluent locals, many of whom benefit from an array of subsidies—including an extensive affordable housing program—that redistribute economic resources in ways that make it possible for middle-class residents to live there. Stuber further examines how Latinos, who provide much of the service work in Aspen and who tend to live outside the town, fit into the social geography of one of the most unequal places in the country. Overall, Stuber argues that the Aspen's ability to balance the interests of its diverse class constituencies is not a foregone conclusion; rather, it is the result of efforts by local stakeholders—citizens, government, developers, and vacationers—to preserve the town’s unique feel and value, and "keep Aspen, Aspen" in all its complex dynamics. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant,” was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, placemaking, and collective representation as it is presented in everyday social life. He is currently studying the social representations that media create and reconstruct about two annual festivals that occur during the summer months along the banks of the Mississippi River. You can learn more about him on his website, Google Scholar, follow him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or email him at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Who is the most interesting man in the world? The guy from the Dos Equis beer ads? Nope, it’s Buzzy Kerbox. This haole kid from O’ahu, Hawai’i burst into the professional surfing scene as a teenager in the mid-1970s and won the World Cup of Surfing in 1978, one of the first surf contests to be broadcast on ABC’s “Wide World of Sports”. Buzzy was part of the generation that invented the idea of being a “professional surfer”. In 1979 he was in Australia on the professional surfing world tour when he got a message to call a certain Bruce Weber in New York City. The famous fashion photographer has seen a photo of Buzzy in a surfing magazine and wanted to fly him to New York as soon as possible to shoot him for Vogue. This surfer, who still hates to wear shoes, soon became a top model working with the likes of Cindy Crawford and Elle McPherson. As Buzzy continued to compete as a pro surfer, Ralph Lauren personally selected him to be the face of Polo. By the 1990s, Buzzy had retired from professional surfing but continued to seek out adventure in the ocean. He and famed water-man Laird Hamilton had some hair-raising antics in Europe, including death defying paddleboard crossings of the English Channel and an ill-fated paddle from Corsica to Elba. The two then went on to pioneer tow-in surfing, revolutionizing big wave surfing. At age 60, Buzzy competed in the infamously grueling Moloka’i to O’ahu paddle board race. Buzzy has written an autobiography, Making Waves. The book is a gorgeous collection of photographs, memoir, journal entries, history, and interviews. His surf stories will thrill people who don’t even know which side of the board to wax. For other conversations about the history of surfing, check out my interviews Scott Laderman, Chas Smith, and Peter Maguire in the New Books Network archives. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Richard Mills, Senior Lecturer in History at the University of East Anglia, and the author of The Politics of Football in Yugoslavia: Sport, Nationalism and the State (I. B. Tauris/Bloomsbury, 2018). In our conversation, we discussed the origins of football in Yugoslavia, the missed possibilities for postwar Yugoslav unity through sport, and football’s role in the disintegration of the Yugoslav state in the 1990s. In The Politics of Football in Yugoslavia, Mills investigates the rise and fall of Yugoslavia through the lens of sport. His work proceeds chronologically, beginning in the early Twentieth Century with the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. He traces the politicization of sport as the Kingdom integrated imported sporting codes and local Sokol organisations into their state building program. He continues into the Second World War and the Liberation, showing how football served the forces of collaboration and resistance. Tito’s Yugoslavia mobilized football across the country to help foment Yugoslavian identity and revitalize young socialist men, but the state also faced challenges that emerged from ethnic divisions within the Yugoslav sporting world. In his final chapters, Mills demonstrates how football played a central role in the push and pull that led to the dissolution of the Yugoslavian state through a close examination of the activities of supporter’s organisations and the Yugoslav football federation. Throughout Mills makes use of an impressive multi-archival approach that makes use of materials from elite and local clubs, national libraries, geographic explorations, and oral histories. His diverse source base allows him to show the influence of football beyond the biggest clubs (Red Star Belgrade, Hajduk Split, etc…) and in the internal and external border lands of the Yugoslav state. Although this is a kind of ‘national’ history, showcasing the making and unmaking of a multi-ethnic nation-state, his work does not ignore the transnational and geopolitical elements of Yugoslavian football, including wartime tours of the Mediterranean, and two postwar tours of Croatian communities in Australia. The Politics of Football in Yugoslavia is an award-winning book in sports history and an excellent and readable resource for people wanting to know more about the rise and fall of Yugoslavia during the Twentieth Century. Keith Rathbone is a senior lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His book, entitled Sport and physical culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, agency, and everyday life, (Manchester University Press, 2022) examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Greg Larson, author of Clubbie: A Minor League Baseball Memoir (University of Nebraska, 2021). In Clubbie, Larson shares his unique perspective from his two-year stint as clubhouse attendant for the Aberdeen IronBirds, a Class A short-season affiliate of the Baltimore Orioles. Larson’s starry-eyed perceptions about the game were quickly erased by the reality of a job that was time-consuming and thankless. Larson brings the reader into the minor-league clubhouse, showing how young baseball professionals are literally playing for their jobs on a day-to-day basis. As the clubhouse attendant, Larson was charged with doing laundry, making sure the players had food after the game, and keeping players supplied with equipment. He writes about the scams run by food concession officials, and also describes some of the ingenious ways he added to his own bank account. Players had to pay clubhouse dues on a limited salary, and while Larson made more than the players, broken bats, deals with beer distributors and other team staff members helped him survive. Larson spent a year living out of a converted equipment closet at Ripken Stadium to save on living expenses, and his observations are memorable. Larson’s vivid portraits of Alan Mills, Gary Allenson, Matt Merullo and Brian Graham — and himself — create a fascinating look at baseball from the bottom, looking up. Bob D’Angelo earned his master’s degree in history from Southern New Hampshire University in May 2018. He earned his bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Florida and spent more than three decades as a sportswriter and sports copy editor, including 28 years on the sports copy desk at The Tampa (Fla.) Tribune. He is currently a digital news producer for Cox Media Group. Bob can be reached at bdangelo57@gmail.com. For more information, visit Bob D’Angelo’s Books and Blogs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
The Eastern Professional Basketball League (1946-78) was fast and physical, often played in tiny, smoke-filled gyms across the northeast and featuring the best players who just couldn’t make the NBA—many because of unofficial quotas on Black players, some because of scandals, and others because they weren’t quite good enough in the years when the NBA had less than 100 players. In Boxed out of the NBA: Remembering the Eastern Professional Basketball League (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021), Syl Sobel and Jay Rosenstein tell the fascinating story of a league that was a pro basketball institution for over 30 years, showcasing top players from around the country. During the early years of professional basketball, the Eastern League was the next-best professional league in the world after the NBA. It was home to big-name players such as Sherman White, Jack Molinas, and Bill Spivey, who were implicated in college gambling scandals in the 1950s and were barred from the NBA, and top Black players such as Hal “King” Lear, Julius McCoy, and Wally Choice, who could not make the NBA into the early 1960s due to unwritten team quotas on African-American players. Featuring interviews with some 40 former Eastern League coaches, referees, fans, and players—including Syracuse University coach Jim Boeheim, former Temple University coach John Chaney, former Detroit Pistons player and coach Ray Scott, former NBA coach and ESPN analyst Hubie Brown, and former NBA player and coach Bob Weiss—this book provides an intimate, first-hand account of small-town professional basketball at its best. Paul Knepper used to cover the Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All was published in September 2020. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Stephen Allen, Associate Professor of History at California State University, Bakersfield, and the author of A History of Boxing in Mexico: Masculinity, Modernity and Nationalism (University of New Mexico Press, 2017). In our conversation, we discussed the origins of boxing in Mexico, the local and transnational logics of its development, and the racial dynamics underpinning Mexican nationalism. In A History of Boxing in Mexico, Allen investigates the rise of Mexican boxing through the lives of five of its greatest champions: Rodolfo Casanova, Raul “Raton” Macias, Vincente Saldivar, Rubén Olivares, and José Nápoles. Through these five case studies, Allen raises questions about the nature of Mexican masculinity, pushing past stereotypes of machismo to address changes in both its performative and affective qualities over time. Allen’s work deftly engages with the historiography of boxing, anthropology, and ethnography in order to recapture the local, familial, and sporting environment that these five boxers inhabited. He shows how Mexican elites, including politicians in the governing PRI Party, sought to use boxing to modernize working class men. Each of these five examples, however, used the state’s investment in the sport in their own ways, becoming at times successful and at times failed avatars of masculinity. In addressing what he calls the first two golden ages of Mexican boxing, Allen moves from the hyper-local, focusing on Tepito, a neighborhood in Mexico City, to the national, and finally to the transnational, drawing in the Chicano community in Los Angeles. He demonstrates the important role that new media, notably film and television, played as boxers reshaped their image for new times and audiences. His athletes performed their masculinity in the context of changing international conversations about race and gender, particularly during the 68 Olympics, the Civil Rights Movement and the Sexual Revolution, but also in the context of the success and failure of the Mexican economy from the 1940s until the 1970s. Allen’s work provides a model for a connected sports history; readers interested in transnational Latin American identities, masculinity and boxing will be particularly interested in reading it. Keith Rathbone is a senior lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled Sport and physical culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, agency, and everyday life, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. It will come out with Manchester University Press in 2022. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Alan McDougall, Professor of History at the University of Guelph, and the author of Contested Fields: A Global History of Modern Football (University of Toronto Press, 2020). In our conversation we discussed football’s role in global migrations from the 19th to the 21st century, global football’s changing economic conditions from grassroots pastime to neo-liberal ‘big business,’ and the many roles that spectators and stadiums have played in shaping the game. In Contested Fields, McDougall offers an innovative history of football since 1863. Rather than proceed chronologically, examining football emanating from England outward only colonial lines, his work is organized thematically with chapters on: migrations, money, competitions, gender, race, space, spectators, and confrontations. Through his themed chapters, McDougall draws together parallel phenomenon that typically appear only in national histories. For example, his chapter on spaces looks at the development of stadiums and their uses in diverse national and international contexts. In the chapter on confrontations, he traces the similarities and differences between the ways states – including authoritarian, democratic, post-colonial and developing -- used football for political ends. Throughout McDougall’s thematic approach allows him to transcend the usual conventions of football writing. For instance, although incisive commentary on gender emerges in many sections of the book, he uses his chapter on the gender politics of football inside and outside of Europe to rewrite the origins of the game. Eschewing the language of ‘women’s football’ he reframes the games origins as a history of resistance and oppression. Similarly, his chapter on spectatorship pushes past the more common discussion of hooliganism to draw on the transnational links between fan movements around the globe. An pioneering and pithy account, pitched to people interested in global and transnational histories, readers interested in sport and sports studies will undoubtedly find its approaches and conclusions insightful. Keith Rathbone is a senior lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled Sport and physical culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, agency, and everyday life, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. It will come out with Manchester University Press in 2021. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Shake and Bake is the story of Archie Clark, one of the top playmaking guards in the 1970s pre-merger NBA. While not one of the game’s most recognized superstars, Clark was a seminal player in NBA history who staggered defenders with the game’s greatest crossover dribble (“shake and bake”) and is credited by his peers as the originator of today’s popular step-back move. Signed as the Lakers third-round draft pick in 1966, Clark worked his way into the starting lineup in his rookie year. But Clark was more than a guaranteed double-double whenever he stepped on the floor. He was a deep-thinking trailblazer for players’ rights. Clark often challenged coaches and owners on principle, much to the detriment of his career and NBA legacy, signing on as a named litigant in the seminal Robertson v. NBA antitrust case that smashed the player reserve system and jump-started the modern NBA. Paul Knepper used to cover the Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All was published in September 2020. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
In 1976, the San Francisco Giants headed north of the border and became the Toronto Giants - or so the sportswriters of the time would have you believe. In The Giants and Their City: Major League Baseball in San Francisco, 1976-1992 (Kent State UP, 2021), the journalist and scholar Lincoln Mitchell explains how the team and the city narrowly avoided what seemed in the moment to be an inevitable fate. Mitchell tells the story of a baseball team in a period of transition, much like the city it called home, and of the players, owners, managers, politicians, and fans, who fought to keep the Giants in the city by the bay. The team was often mediocre, and San Francisco itself ailing in the aftermath of the tumultuous and often violent late 1970s. Together, both team and town searched for a new direction as America entered the Reagan years. The Giants and Their City is a history of a baseball team, but more than that, it's a story about the identity of a city, the people who live there, and those stick with a team through thick and thin, or in San Francisco's case, through cold wind and a terrible mascot. Lincoln Mitchell can be heard on the "Say It Ain't Contagious Podcast," a show about baseball, politics, and social justice. Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Working Out Desire: Women, Sport, and Self-Making in Istanbul (Syracuse UP, 2020) examines spor merakı as an object of desire shared by a broad and diverse group of Istanbulite women. Sehlikoglu follows the latest anthropological scholarship that defines desire beyond the moment it is felt, experienced, or even yearned for, and as something that is formed through a series of social and historical makings. She traces Istanbulite women’s ever-increasing interest in exercise not merely to an interest in sport, but also to an interest in establishing a new self—one that attempts to escape from conventional feminine duties—and an investment in forming a more agentive, desiring, self. Working Out Desire develops a multilayered analysis of how women use spor merakı to take themselves out of the domestic zone physically, emotionally, and also imaginatively. Sehlikoglu pushes back against the conventional boundaries of scholarly interest in Muslim women as pious subjects. Instead, it places women’s desiring subjectivity at its center and traces women’s agentive aspirations in the way they bend the norms which are embedded in the multiple patriarchal ideologies (i.e. nationalism, religion, aesthetics) which operate on their selves.
Working out Desire presents the ways in which women’s changing habits, leisure, and self-formation in the Muslim world and the Middle East are connected to their agentive capacities to shift and transform their conditions and socio-cultural capabilities. Sertaç Sehlikoğlu is a Senior Research Associate and Primary Investigator at the Institute for Global Prosperity, University College London. Alize Arıcan is an incoming Postdoctoral Fellow at Rutgers University's Center for Cultural Analysis. She is an urban anthropologist focusing on futurity, care, and migration in Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
At almost any international sporting event in which the US competes, it is now common (and appropriate) to remark on the composition of the American team’s ethnic and racial diversity. It is now accepted that a competitor with “USA” on their jersey/uniform does not have to “look” a certain way in order to represent the country . They can be African American, Latino/a, Asian American, Native American, or any other racial or ethnic background. For many decades of Olympic/international competition, this was not the case. It is the challenge to these limitations that Cat Ariail discusses in her work, Passing the Baton: Black Women Track Stars and American Identity (University of Illinois Press, 2020). Here, by examining the careers and importance of women such as Alice Coachman, Mae Faggs, and Wilma Rudolph, the author demonstrates the tensions and opportunities created by the US’ desire to triumph against Eastern-bloc foes (both on the field of athletic competition, as well as in international diplomacy). Ultimately, it was the talent of these competitors that overcame many discriminatory assumptions and forced the nation’s sports cultures (both white and African American) to broaden the notion of who could don the USA moniker in Olympic venues such as Melbourne and Rome. While eventually coming to accept, grudgingly, the notion that African American women should compete on behalf of the USA, not all barriers fell, as Ariail argues in her chapters on Wilma Rudolph. Here, she focuses on the fact that Rudolph “looked” the way a US female athlete should. Further, her “performance” closely mirrored what was expected of white female athletes (this, in turned, required the covering up of Rudolph being an unwed mother). Still, she looked the part, and this made it possible for more African American women, and eventually white females, to gain acceptance so as to be able to compete for the US in track and field. This work provides an excellent overview of the talent and determination it took for female athletes from schools such as Tennessee State University to challenge, and surmount, many, though not all, of the limitations that the sporting culture of post-World War II US society placed on them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today on New Books in History, Juergen Martschukat, professor of North American History at Universitat Erfurt, talks about his new book, The Age of Fitness: How the Body Became a Sign of Success and Performance (Polity Press, 2021), to celebrate its translation into and publication in English with Polity Press, this year, 2021. The book was originally published in 2019, by S. Fischer, in German. We live in the age of fitness. Hundreds of thousands of people run marathons and millions go jogging in local parks, work out in gyms, cycle, swim, or practice yoga. The vast majority are not engaged in competitive sport and are not trying to win any medals. They just want to get fit. Why this modern preoccupation with fitness? In this new book, Jurgen Martschukat traces the roots of our modern preoccupation with fitness back to the birth of modern societies in the eighteenth century, showing how the idea of fitness was interwoven with modernity's emphasis on perpetual optimization and renewal. But it is only in the period since the 1970s, he argues, that the age of fitness truly emerged, as part and parcel of our contemporary neoliberal era. Neoliberalism enjoins individuals to work on themselves, to cultivate themselves in body and mind. Fitness becomes a guiding principle of social life, an era-defining network of discourses and practices that shape individuals' actions and self-conceptions. The pursuit of fitness becomes a cultural repertoire that is deeply ingrained in our institutions and way of life. This wide-ranging book shows how deeply fitness is inscribed in modern societies, and how important fitness has become to success or failure, recognition or exclusion, in a society that sets great store by self-responsibility, performance, market, and competition. It will be of great value not only to those interested in sport and fitness, but also to anyone concerned with the conditions of success and failure in our societies today. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today I talked to Dave Seminara about his book Footsteps of Federer: A Fan’s Pilgrimage Across 7 Swiss Cantons in 10 Acts (Post Hill Press, 2021) Dave Seminara is a writer, former diplomat, and passionate tennis fan. His writings have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and dozens of other publications. His two previous books are Bed, Breakfast & Drunken Threats: Dispatches from the Margins of Europe and Breakfast with Polygamists: Dispatches from the Margins of The Americas. Who do so many tennis fans revere Roger Federer? His success and talent are givens at this point, but not to be overlooked says Seminara is Federer’s sportsmanship, humor and vulnerability. This is a guy, after all, who might smash racquets during matches as a junior player but who would also sit and cry for as long as an hour after a losing match. In a country without America’s hero worship of celebrities, Federer remains low-key off-court and always meticulous. This episode ranges from Federer stories and details to a look at the other big names in men’s tennis, with sunny Federer a contrast with intense, even grim Rafa Nadal (on court) and Novak Djokovic’s eyes-wide focus while receiving serve in particular. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
In the spring of 1942, the United States government forced 120,000 Japanese Americans from their homes in California, Oregon, Washington, and Arizona and sent them to incarceration camps across the West. Nearly 14,000 of them landed on the outskirts of Cody, Wyoming, at the base of Heart Mountain. Behind barbed wire fences, they faced racism, cruelty, and frozen winters. Trying to recreate comforts from home, many established Buddhist temples and sumo wrestling pits. Kabuki performances drew hundreds of spectators—yet there was little hope. That is, until the fall of 1943, when the camp’s high school football team, the Eagles, started its first season and finished it undefeated, crushing the competition from nearby, predominantly white high schools. Amid all this excitement, American politics continued to disrupt their lives as the federal government drafted men from the camps for the front lines—including some of the Eagles. As the team’s second season kicked off, the young men faced a choice to either join the Army or resist the draft. Teammates were divided, and some were jailed for their decisions. Bradford Pearson's The Eagles of Heart Mountain: A True Story of Football, Incarceration and Resistance in World War II America (Atria, 2021) honors the resilience of extraordinary heroes and the power of sports in a sweeping and inspirational portrait of one of the darkest moments in American history. Paul Knepper used to cover the Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All was published in September 2020. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
On October 2nd, 1977, Glenn Burke, outfielder for the Los Angeles Dodgers, made history without even swinging a bat. When his teammate Dusty Baker hit a historic home run, Glenn enthusiastically congratulated him with the first ever high five. But Glenn also made history in another way--he was the first openly gay MLB player. While he did not come out publicly until after his playing days were over, Glenn's sexuality was known to his teammates, family, and friends. His MLB career would be cut short after only three years, but his legacy and impact on the athletic and LGBTQIA+ community would resonate for years to come. New York Times bestselling author Andrew Maraniss tells the story of Glenn Burke: from his childhood growing up in Oakland, his journey to the MLB and the World Series, the joy in discovering who he really was, to more difficult times: facing injury, addiction, and the AIDS epidemic. Packed with black-and-white photographs and thoroughly researched, never-before-seen details about Glenn's life, Singled Out: The True Story of Glenn Burke (Philomel Books, 2021) is the fascinating story of a trailblazer in sports--and the history and culture that shaped the world around him. Paul Knepper used to cover the Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All was published in September 2020. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Bruce Berglund, author of The Fastest Game in the World: Hockey and the Globalization of Sports (University of California Press, 2020). In this sweeping look at hockey, Bruce Berglund examines how a niche sport became a global favorite. Hockey has crossed cultures from North America to Europe and Asia, and has been a political flashpoint several times, most notably during the Summit Series of 1972 and the “Miracle on Ice” at the 1980 Winter Olympics. Berglund’s research combs the archives of Central and Eastern Europe, and he gives a thorough overview of hockey from its beginnings in the nineteenth century. The impact of players like Wayne Gretzky, the influence of youth leagues and the emergence of women in the sport are areas that Berglund explores. Berglund weaves his research with his own personal experiences with hockey to create a compelling narrative. An “anxious child of the Cold War,” Berglund examines the rise of the Soviet hockey team — the Red Machine — and how it took over the international game. Berglund also explores the beginnings of hockey, which descended from a game called bandy. He demonstrates that hockey, while a passion for fans in Canada, has spread worldwide. The Stanley Cup, long a Canadian point of pride, now resides in Tampa, Florida, showing how even in warm-weather climates, hockey has made inroads. Bob D’Angelo earned his master’s degree in history from Southern New Hampshire University in May 2018. He earned his bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Florida and spent more than three decades as a sportswriter and sports copy editor, including 28 years on the sports copy desk at The Tampa (Fla.) Tribune. He can be reached at bdangelo57@gmail.com. For more information, visit Bob D’Angelo’s Books and Blogs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Imagine a rodeo rider atop a bucking bronco, hat in hand, straining to remain astride. Is the rider in your mind's eye white? Is the person male? Popular imaginings and high level, televised, professional rodeo circuits have created a stereotyped image of who rodeo is by and for, but it is far too limited an image, and one that does not reflect reality. In Rodeo as Refuge, Rodeo as Rebellion: Race, Gender, and Identity in the American Rodeo (University Press of Kansas, 2020), Dr. Elyssa Ford, an associate professor of history at Northwest Missouri State University, paints a very different image of rodeo than what Western myth would have one believe. Ford argues that rodeo has, from its creation, both a vehicle for rebellion and a place of refuge for groups of people told they didn't belong in the American West, let alone in Western rodeo. From Hawaiian ranching culture to Black and gay rodeo, men and women have used professional riding as a powerful expression of self in a nation that has often tried to deny their very personhood. Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
America and Canada both saw historic sports milestones in 1993. While the Dallas Cowboys and Chicago Bulls reigned supreme, the Toronto Blue Jays won a second consecutive World Series on a walk-off homer, and the Montreal Canadiens emerged as the last Canadian team to win a Stanley Cup. While stars like Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky and Joe Montana overcame physical and emotional challenges to make history, teams were performing unprecedented feats, from the Buffalo Bills' unrivaled comeback on Wild Card Weekend to the Baltimore Orioles' unveiling of their transformative ballpark design during All-Star Week. Drawing on original interviews with dozens of former players and coaches, David Ostrowsky's Pro Sports in 1993: A Signature Season in Football, Basketball, Hockey and Baseball (McFarland, 2020) revisits an exceptional sports year for fans across North America, with memorable stories involving some of the most iconic sports figures of the 1990s. Paul Knepper was born and raised in New York and currently resides in Austin. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers Who Almost Won It All, is available on Amazon and other sites. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Dennis Frost’s More than Medals: A History of the Paralympics and Disability Sports in Postwar Japan is a history of disability sports in modern Japan. The 1964, 1998, and upcoming Paralympics are important case studies, but Frost’s interests go far beyond this pinnacle of international, competitive disability sports. More than Medals explores the history and development of disability sports, highlighting Japan as an international actor, Oita prefecture as a domestic and international disability sports mecca, and most of all the ongoing tension between two visions of the purpose of disability sports: one which is primarily rehabilitative and the other which emphasizes elite athletic competition. This, as Frost shows, is fundamental to understanding the dynamics of accessibility and inclusivity in disabled sports. More than Medals will appeal to readers interested in the history of Japan, sports, and mega-events such as the Paralympics, as well as to those interested in disability studies. Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese and East Asian history in the Graduate School of Humanities, Nagoya University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
In 1524, Pope Clement VII gave two condemned criminals to his physician to test a promising new antidote. After each convict ate a marzipan cake poisoned with deadly aconite, one of them received the antidote, and lived—the other died in agony. In sixteenth-century Europe, this and more than a dozen other accounts of poison trials were committed to writing. Alisha Rankin tells their little-known story. At a time when poison was widely feared, the urgent need for effective cures provoked intense excitement about new drugs. As doctors created, performed, and evaluated poison trials, they devoted careful attention to method, wrote detailed experimental reports, and engaged with the problem of using human subjects for fatal tests. In reconstructing this history, Rankin reveals how the antidote trials generated extensive engagement with “experimental thinking” long before the great experimental boom of the seventeenth century and investigates how competition with lower-class healers spurred on this trend. Alisha Rankin's The Poison Trials: Wonder Drugs, Experiment, and the Battle for Authority in Renaissance Science (U Chicago Press, 2021) sheds welcome and timely light on the intertwined nature of medical innovations, professional rivalries, and political power. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Many scholars have interrogated the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese-Americans during WWII – with an eye to understanding the particular type of racism that allowed the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt to punish based on heritage rather than any particular action or crime. Bradford Pearson’s new book The Eagles of Heart Mountain: A True Story of Football, Incarceration, and Resistance in World War II America (Atria/Simon and Schuster, 2021) provides a political history of the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during WWII by, first, going back in time to highlight the complex history of how Japanese (and Chinese) Americans first came to the West coast in the 17th century and the nuances of the racism they encountered over the centuries. Once Pearson establishes the origins of Anti-Asian-American racism, he follows several teenagers who played football both free and incarcerated. These nisei, American citizens of Japanese heritage, had their education and participation in a sport that has come to define what is “American” interrupted by the transports, relocations, and imprisonments that placed families in concentration camps across the United States. Pearson uses their role in a football team created in one concentration camp – Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Cody, Wyoming – to document racism and discrimination but also sports competition as a means of escapism and regaining dignity. Pearson, the former features editor of Southwest: The Magazine and a journalist who has published in the New York Times, Esquire, Time, and Salon, uses foundational works in history and political science, his own oral histories, government surveillance files, and archives associated with Heart Mountain, to create a relevant history for considering how we define citizenship in the U.S., the role of the legislature and courts in establishing and maintain white supremacy, American acceptance of incarceration based on race, and the importance of fully contextualizing American public figures such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Earl Warren. Susan Liebell is an associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Why Diehard Originalists Aren’t Really Originalists recently appeared in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage and “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” was published in the Journal of Politics (July 2020). Email her comments at sliebell@sju.edu or tweet to @SusanLiebell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
In the fall of 1918, a fever gripped Boston. The streets emptied as paranoia about the deadly Spanish flu spread. Newspapermen and vigilante investigators aggressively sought to discredit anyone who looked or sounded German. And as the war raged on, the enemy seemed to be lurking everywhere: prowling in submarines off the coast of Cape Cod, arriving on passenger ships in the harbor, or disguised as the radicals lecturing workers about the injustice of a sixty-hour workweek. War Fever: Boston, Baseball, and America in the Shadow of the Great War (Basic Books, 2020) explores this delirious moment in American history through the stories of three men: Karl Muck, the German conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, accused of being an enemy spy; Charles Whittlesey, a Harvard law graduate who became an unlikely hero in Europe; and the most famous baseball player of all time, Babe Ruth, poised to revolutionize the game he loved. Together, they offer a gripping narrative of America at war and American culture in upheaval. Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD Candidate in History at Queen's University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today the salary cap is an NBA institution, something fans take for granted as part of the fabric of the league or an obstacle to their favorite team’s chances to win a championship. In the early 1980s, however, a salary cap was not only novel but nonexistent. The Cap: How Larry Fleisher and David Stern Built the Modern NBA (University of Nebraska Press, 2020) tells the fascinating, behind-the-scenes story of the deal between the NBA and the National Basketball Players Association that created the salary cap in 1983, the first in all of sports, against the backdrop of a looming players’ strike on one side and threatened economic collapse on the other. Joshua Mendelsohn illustrates how the salary cap was more than just professional basketball’s economic foundation—it was a grand bargain, a compromise meant to end the chaos that had gripped the sport since the early 1960s. The NBA had spent decades in a vulnerable position financially and legally, unique in professional sports. It entered the 1980s badly battered, something no one knew better than a few legendary NBA figures: Larry Fleisher, general counsel and negotiator for the National Basketball Players Association; Larry O’Brien, the commissioner; and David Stern, who led negotiations for the NBA and would be named the commissioner a few months after the salary cap deal was reached. As a result, in 1983 the NBA and its players made a novel settlement. The players gave up infinite pay increases, but they gained a guaranteed piece of the league’s revenue and free agency to play where they wished—a combination that did not exist before in professional sports but as a result became standard for the NBA, NFL, and NHL as well. The Cap explores in detail not only the high-stakes negotiations in the early 1980s but all the twists and turns through the decades that led the parties to reach a salary cap compromise. It is a compelling story that involves notable players, colorful owners, visionary league and union officials, and a sport trying to solidify a bright future despite a turbulent past and present. This is a story missing from the landscape of basketball history. Paul Knepper used to cover the Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All was published in September 2020. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
What meaning does a daily soccer game in a public Los Angeles park have for a group of Latino men and the ethnographer who studied them? In today’s episode, we talk with Dr. David Trouille, Assistant Professor of Sociology at James Madison University, about the ten years of fieldwork behind his new book Fútbol in the Park from the University of Chicago press. In a thoughtful self-reflexive conversation, David tells us how a neighborhood campaign against the players initially drew him to the community of Latino soccer players that are the subject of his book. He describes how he built relationships with the men over time on and off the field, and how the social space of the games created social ties that were essential to their ability to find work. While surrounding well-to-do mostly white communities accepted the men as workers in their homes, they simultaneously resisted their visible presence in the park. David tells us how this stigmatization, combined with national discourses constructing Latino men as “bad hombres” created dilemmas in how to write about his research. He explains how he made difficult decisions to only partially anonymize the men but not write about their immigration status, and ultimately describe the men as complex and real human beings, including writing about their drinking and occasional fighting. For more information about Ethnographic Marginalia, please click here. Alex Diamond is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Texas, Austin. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
In 1933, Maurice Wilson — First World War hero, drifting veteran, and amateur aviator, lands in the aerodrome at Purnea in British India. His goal is to be the first man to climb Mt. Everest. And nothing — not his complete lack of climbing experience, the lack of official permission, and the efforts of British civil servants — will stop him. Ed Caesar’s The Moth and the Mountain: A True Story of Love, War, and Everest (Avid Reader/Simon & Schuster, 2020) tells Wilson’s tale, tracing his story from the First World War, through drifting across the English-speaking world to his sudden drive to climb the world’s tallest mountain. He buys a biplane, flies to India, sneaks into Tibet and attempts to climb Everest, only to succumb to the elements on its slopes in 1934, like so many before and after. In this interview, Ed and I talk about the story of Maurice Wilson, and the two stages of his quest to Everest’s summit: the flight to India, and the climb up the mountain’s slopes. We discuss how the geopolitical situation of the day affected his travels, and where Ed’s interest in this failed summit attempt comes from. Ed Caesar is an author and a contributing writer to The New Yorker. Before joining The New Yorker, he wrote stories for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Outside, and the Smithsonian Magazine, He has reported from a wide range of countries, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kosovo, Russia, and Iran. His first book, Two Hours: The Quest to Run the Impossible Marathon (Penguin UK: 2015), was awarded a Cross Sports Book of the Year award. He can be found on Twitter at @edcaesar and Instagram at @byedcaesar. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Moth and the Mountain. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. In his day job, he’s a researcher and writer for a think tank in economic and sustainable development. He is also a print and broadcast commentator on local and regional politics. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Although nearly every other television form or genre has undergone a massive critical and popular reassessment or resurgence in the past twenty years, the game show’s reputation has remained both remarkably stagnant and remarkably low. Scholarship on game shows concerns itself primarily with the history and aesthetics of the form, and few works assess the influence the format has had on American society or how the aesthetics and rhythms of contemporary life model themselves on the aesthetics and rhythms of game shows. In Truth and Consequences: Game Shows in Fiction and Film (University Press of Mississippi, 2020), author Mike Miley seeks to broaden the conversation about game shows by studying how they are represented in fiction and film. Writers and filmmakers find the game show to be the ideal metaphor for life in a media-saturated era, from selfhood to love to family to state power. The book is divided into “rounds,” each chapter looking at different themes that books and movies explore via the game show. By studying over two dozen works of fiction and film—bestsellers, blockbusters, disasters, modern legends, forgotten gems, award winners, self-published curios, and everything in between—Truth and Consequences argues that game shows offer a deeper understanding of modern-day America, a land of high-stakes spectacle where a game-show host can become president of the United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Baseball has been Japan's most popular sport for over a century. In The Sportsworld of the Hanshin Tigers: Professional Baseball in Modern Japan (University of California Press, 2018), anthropologist William Kelly analyzes Japanese baseball ethnographically by focusing on a single professional team, the Hanshin Tigers. For over fifty years, the Tigers have been the one of the country’s most watched and talked-about professional baseball teams, second only to their powerful rivals, the Tokyo Yomiuri Giants. Despite a largely losing record, perennial frustration, and infighting among players, the Tigers remain overwhelming sentimental favorites in many parts of the country. This book analyzes the Hanshin Tiger phenomenon, and offers an account of why it has long been so compelling and instructive. Professor Kelly argues that the Tigers represent what he calls a sportsworld —a collective product of the actions of players, coaching staff, management, media, and millions of passionate fans. The team has come to symbolize a powerful counter-narrative to idealized notions of Japanese workplace relations. The Tigers are savored as a melodramatic representation of real corporate life, rife with rivalries and office politics familiar to every Japanese worker. And playing in a historic stadium on the edge of Osaka, they carry the hopes and frustrations of Japan’s second city against the all-powerful capital. John W. Traphagan, Ph.D. is Professor and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today I talked to Daniel Lieberman about his book Exercised: How We Did Not Evolve to Exercise and What to Do about It (Pantheon, 2021). In the book Lieberman explodes 12 different myths, chief among them we’re supposed to want to exercise. Much of the conversation explores differences between Westerners and their lifestyles, including of course exercise, versus the daily energy expenditures of non-Westerners and especially people in Africa. It provides insights to show how aging and senescence are not necessarily linked, and offers some ways in which we might enjoy exercise more. Daniel E. Lieberman is the Lerner Professor of Biological Sciences in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. He received degrees from Harvard and Cambridge Universities. Lieberman studies and teaches how and why the human body is the way it is, and how our evolutionary history affects health and disease. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we speak to Ronald Hutton, Professor of History at the University of Bristol, in the United Kingdom about the twentieth anniversary, and concomitant reissue, of the extremely important The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford UP, 2019). The author of over a dozen books and myriad articles, Professor Hutton’s work is both prodigious and percipient. We chat about the importance of the book and the reason for its reissue. Hutton brings witchcraft out of the shadows. The Triumph of the Moon is the first full-scale study of the only religion England has ever given the world--modern pagan witchcraft, otherwise known as wicca. Meticulously researched, it provides a thorough account of an ancient religion that has spread from English shores across four continents. For centuries, pagan witchcraft has been linked with chilling images of blood rituals, ghostlike druids, and even human sacrifices. But while Robert Hutton explores this dark side of witchery, he stresses the positive, reminding us that devotion to art, the natural world, femininity, and the classical deities are also central to the practice of wicca. Indeed, the author shows how leading figures in English literature--W.B. Yeats, D.H. Lawrence, and Robert Graves, just to name a few--celebrated these positive aspects of the religion in their work, thereby softening the public perception of witchcraft in Victorian England. From cunning village folk to freemasons and from high magic to the black arts, Hutton chronicles the fascinating process by which actual wiccan practices evolved into what is now a viable modern religion. He also presents compelling biographies of wicca's principal figures, such as Gerald Gardner, who was inducted into a witch coven at the age of 53, and recorded many clandestine rituals and beliefs. Ronald Hutton is known for his colorful, provocative, and always thoroughly researched studies on original subjects. This work is no exception. It will appeal to anyone interested in witchcraft, paganism and alternative religions. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
The birth of the modern-day NBA is often attributed to Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Michael Jordan and David Stern. In From Hang Time to Prime Time: Business, Entertainment, and the Birth of the Modern-Day NBA (Atria Books, 2020), Pete Croatto pays homage to those legendary figures, while putting their contributions to the game in the context of some of the cultural, business and technological forces that built the NBA into a pop culture juggernaut. Croatto examines how the ABA/NBA merger, CBS’s personality-driven coverage of key players, the expansion of cable television, the emergence of hip-hop culture and a brilliant marketing team at NBA Entertainment transformed a fledgling league searching for its identity into a global phenomenon. The breadth and depth of this thoroughly researched book (Croatto interviewed over 300 sources) is staggering, and yet, the author managed to present the narrative in a breezy, easy to read narrative. From Hang Time to Prime Time has something for everyone, appealing to die-hard and casual basketball fans alike. The reader will learn about building a business, marketing a product, music, fashion, technology and more. Paul Knepper was born and raised in New York and currently resides in Austin. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers Who Almost Won It All, is available on Amazon and other sites. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today I talked to Melissa Harper about her book The Ways of the Bushwalker: On Foot in Australia (University of Washington Press, 2020). Australians have always loved to step out in nature, whether off-track or along a marked route. Bushwalking – an organised long-distance walk in rugged terrain that requires maps and camping equipment, or a family day out – is one of our most popular pastimes. This landmark book, now updated, was the first to delve into its rich and sometimes quirky history.
From the earliest days of European settlement, colonists found pleasure in leisurely strolls through the bush, collecting flowers, sketching, bird watching and picnicking. Yet over time, walking for the sake of walking became the dominant motive. Walking clubs proliferated, railways organised mystery hikes attended by thousands, and Paddy Pallin established his equipment business. Bushwalking – serious walking – was invented.
Whether you are inclined to put on your walking boots and pack your sleeping bag, or would rather stay in a luxury hut, this surefooted and witty book reveals how the ordinary act of walking can become extraordinary.
Melissa Harper is a senior lecturer in communications and arts at the University of Queensland. She has published widely on the history of walking in Australia, including the acclaimed first edition of Ways of the Bushwalker. She wrote the chapter about the billy in Symbols of Australia and is currently working on a history of fine dining. Bede Haines is a solicitor, specialising in litigation and a partner at Holding Redlich, an Australian commercial law firm. He lives in Sydney, Australia. Known to read books, ride bikes and eat cereal (often). bede.haines@holdingredlich.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Heather Dichter, Associate Professor of Sports History and Sports Management at DeMontfort University and fellow at the international Centre for Sports History and Culture. She is also an author in and the editor of Soccer Diplomacy: International Relations and Football since 1914 (University Press of Kentucky, 2020). In our conversation, we discussed the origins of soccer diplomacy, the diplomatic role of different actors (including large and small states, international sporting organizations, and individual athletes), and whether winning matters for sports diplomats. In Soccer Diplomacy, Dichter joins ten other scholars in a critical examination of soccer diplomacy and soccer-as-diplomacy, tracing out the ways that soccer provided a space for international exchange and how states have proactively promoted soccer to achieve diplomatic aims. Dichter shot for a wide geographic spread and each article in the book details a different angle of sports diplomacy from around the world, including some of the usual powerhouses such as Brazil, or historiographically important ones including South Africa, but more commonly from unusual places such as Iceland, Chile, and Australia. They uncover a range of successful and failed diplomatic projects, illustrating not only the way that sports contributed to the cultural brand of a country, but more importantly the way that soccer could be mobilized by states, organizations, and even individuals to achieve particular diplomatic goals. Surprisingly, many of the diplomatic ventures initially began as sporting ones; governments only joined in reluctantly once their diplomatic possibilities became evident. Others however were whole cloth inventions of states that saw sports diplomacy as one of the few ways they could achieve their geopolitical aims. Each of the essays in this volume offers insights into soccer’s diplomatic potential and scholars interested in sport diplomacy should read it. Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled Sport and physical culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, agency, and everyday life, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. It will come out with Manchester University Press in 2021. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Paul Knepper, author of the book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All (McFarland, 2020). Knepper, a first-time author who has a background in law and was an unabashed Knicks fan during the 1990s, takes a look at a talented, tough New York Knicks squad that was always in contention to win an NBA title but never reached the pinnacle. Drawing on more than 88 interviews with players, coaches and executive, Knepper traces the rise of a team that reached the playoffs for 14 consecutive seasons and made it to the NBA Finals twice. The Knicks thrived under the intense coaching of Pat Riley and Jeff Van Gundy, who in appearance presented different looks but were nearly mirror images of one another in terms of ability, intensity and attention to detail. The Knicks had colorful players and heated rivalries. They were unable to get past the Chicago Bulls, who dominated the 1990s, and also had memorable battles with the Indiana Pacers and Miami Heat. Knepper brings the reader into the locker room and the front office, bringing the players to life with personality sketches. The Knicks were led by Patrick Ewing, a dominant force on a team that lacked a consistent second shooter. Knepper takes the reader back to a time when basketball in New York was passionate and exciting. Bob D’Angelo earned his master’s degree in history from Southern New Hampshire University in May 2018. He earned his bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Florida and spent more than three decades as a sportswriter and sports copy editor, including 28 years on the sports copy desk at The Tampa (Fla.) Tribune. He can be reached at bdangelo57@gmail.com. For more information, visit Bob D’Angelo’s Books and Blogs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Harvey Araton’s new book Our Last Season: A Writer, a Fan, a Friendship (Penguin, 2020), reads like a mix between Tuesdays with Morrie and a sequel to his book When the Garden was Eden (which chronicled the New York Knicks’ early-70s title teams). It’s a book about friendship, aging and of course, basketball. Harvey Araton is one of New York's--and the nation's--best-known sports journalists, having covered thousands of Knicks games over the course of a long and distinguished career. But the person at the heart of Our Last Season, Michelle Musler, is largely anonymous--except, that is, to the players, coaches, and writers who have passed through Madison Square Garden, where she held season tickets behind the Knicks bench for 45 years. In that time, as she juggled a successful career as a corporate executive and single parenthood of five children, she missed only a handful of home games. The Garden was her second home--and the place where an extraordinary friendship between fan and sportswriter was forged. That relationship soon grew into something much bigger than basketball, with Michelle serving as a cherished mentor and friend to Harvey as he weathered life's inevitable storms: illness, aging, and professional challenges and transitions. During the 2017-18 NBA season, as Michelle faces serious illness that prevents her from attending more than a few Knicks games, Harvey finally has the chance to give back to Michelle everything she has given him: reminders of all she's accomplished, the blessings she's enjoyed, and the devoted friend she has been to him. Paul Knepper was born and raised in New York and currently resides in Austin. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers Who Almost Won It All, is available on Amazon and other sites. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Travis Vogan, Associate Professor of Journalism and American Studies at the University of Iowa, and the author of ABC Sports: The Rise and Fall of Network Sports Television (University of California Press, 2018). In our conversation, we discussed the special role that ABC Sports played in the promotion of sports television, the innovations of sports broadcasting executive Roone Arledge, and the collapse of network sport broadcasting in the cable-TV era. In ABC Sports, Vogan traces the cultural impact of ABC Sports rise in the 1950s until its demise in the 1990s. Under the aegis of Roone Arledge, ABC developed a innovative approach to sports programming that changed viewers experiences for the better. They foregrounded narrative, introduced documentary style reporting, developed new film and recording practices. Along the way, the network produced iconic sports programming such as Wide World of Sports and Monday Night Football. They nurtured a range of media personalities including Howard Cosell who helped the network navigate some of the eras most fraught sports coverage including the Munich Olympics Massacre. Their influence revolutionized the aesthetic experience, widening sports TV audiences, transformed the Olympics into a mega-event, introducing new media processes to the fledgling ABC News channel, and propelled ABC from America’s third place network to the top of the charts in the 1970s. Their reliance on costly but glossy production ultimately undid the ABC Sports division. In the 1980s and 1990s, the birth of cable television, especially ESPN, and a hostile takeover of their parent company ended Arledge’s era of sports television innovation but its legacies remain relevant today. Vogan’s work offers insights into the interplay between sports and the media, and it offers insightful ways to think about how the two shaped viewers experiences and provided models for other media enterprises to change the wider media landscape. This book will be of interest to all who study sports and media studies. Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled Sport and physical culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, agency, and everyday life, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. It will come out with Manchester University Press in 2021. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
For many of its participants, the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) offered them an opportunity to change their lives, yet few were as transformed as that of Isabel “Lefty” Alvarez. As Kat D. Williams details in Isabel “Lefty” Alvarez: The Improbable Life of a Cuban-American Baseball Star (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), playing in the league gave her the chance for a new start in a different country. Williams highlights the role Lefty’s mother María played in encouraging her to take up sports as a way of escaping their family’s slide into poverty. Lefty’s involvement with baseball coincided with a unique period of opportunities for women in the sport, one that she embraced first by playing for an all-Cuban team then by signing a contract with the AAGPBL. Though a knee injury and the demise of the AAGPBL ended her professional career, Lefty remained in the United States after its demise, finding employment and becoming an active participant in the AAGPBL reunions that began in the 1980s. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Surfers are the ultimate bad boys, living the counter-culture life of decadence and hedonism as they travel the world in search of the perfect wave, partying hard along the way. So, it’s not surprising that these social misfits and dropouts created a sub-culture tied to drugs. While most might associate surfing Jeff Spicoli with smoking marijuana in Fast Times at Ridgemont High or hippies dropping acid in late 1960s Hawai’i, Chas Smith argues that cocaine and surfing are much more intertwined. Actually, it’s not so much surfing as the “surf industry”, the fashion industry’s big money marketing of the surfing lifestyle. In this exploration of the commodification of counter-culture, Chas Smith illustrates the lines from The Clash song: “They think it’s funny, turning rebellion into money”. But like a coke binge, the surf industry has come crashing down and once massive international corporations have gone bankrupt. More gonzo journalism than academic history, Cocaine + Surfing: A Sordid History of Surfing’s Greatest Love Affair (Rare Bird, 2018) is a wild thrill ride through several decades of surfing’s love affair with addiction. Irreverent, cynical, and surprisingly erudite, Chas Smith tells us time and time again that he hates being a surf journalist and despise the surfing industry. “I was supposed to have waved goodbye to this shallow end of the swimming pool years ago. I was supposed to be a Pulitzer Prize-winning war reporter by now, spilling valuable words on the plight of Syrian refugees while dodging bullets. Or maybe in the White House briefing room being shouted down by the press secretary for speaking truth to power. Or front row at the Fendi show in Paris, across from Anna Wintour … anywhere but here.” But there he is. Bopping about Southern California’s heart of the surfing industry. Driving from surf industry event to surf industry event, surrounded by increasingly desperate surf industry figures grinding their jaws and trying to get into the bathroom to snort a few lines. All the while, he sardonically observes the surfing industry’s free fall as he gulps down yet another vodka cocktail. Doing his best to find meaning in perhaps the shallowest subculture we could imagine. He is a detached and disgusted observer of the surf industry’s apocalypse who delivers his dispatches in insightful and often hilarious prose. Even if you don't know which side on the surfboard to wax, you’ll find it hard not to be drawn into Chas Smith’s history of surfing. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford, 2018). When he’s not quietly reading or happily talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Steven M. Ortiz’ new book The Sport Marriage: Women Who Make It Work (University of Illinois Press, 2020) offers an in-depth analysis of and perceive insight into what is means to be an athlete’s wife in a male-dominated institution of professional sports. Ortiz draws from three decades of research that focuses on the experience of women who are married to male professional athletes. He found that these women were faced with enormous challenges as they attempted to establish and maintain their family and marriage. He found that the traditional sport marriage is career dominated and that the men prioritized their careers over everything else. Women who were married to pro-athletes were encouraged to own their subordination by following unwritten rules and strategically managing their self. These women were expected to contribute their emotional and physical labor to their husbands’ careers while adjusting to public life and trying to maintain the privacy of their family life. They were expected to manage power and cope with pervasive groups, over-involved mothers, a culture of infidelity, and husbands who prioritize team loyalty over all. Steven M. Ortiz is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Oregon State University. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant“, was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, and collective representation as it is presented in everyday social interactions. You can learn more about him on his website, Google Scholar, follow him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or email him at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Grégory Quin, maître d’enseignement et de recherche à l’Institut des sciences du sport de l’Université de Lausanne, and he is the author and editor of Des Réseaux et des Hommes: Participation et Contribution de la Suisse à l’Internationalisation du Sport (1912-1972) (Éditions Alphil-Presses universitaires suisses, 2019). Thanks to funding from the Swiss government, this volume is available as an e-livre for free. https://www.alphil.com/index.php/auteurs/vonnard-philippe/des-reseaux-et-des-hommes.html In our conversation we discussed Switzerland’s particular role in world sport, the sportification of skiing in Switzerland, and Ernst Thommen’s position as FIFA mediator, bringing Germany back into global football after World War II. In Des Réseaux et des Hommes, Quin joins nine other scholars in a critical examination of Switzerland’s sports history. While Switzerland plays host to many international sports organizations and while Swiss people have been overrepresented in the ranks of international sportocrats, there is still much to know about how Switzerland and Swiss people came to play such an important role in the sports world. This book is divided into two sections. The first part investigates the role of networks (réseau) that helped to shape Swiss sports. These networks included a range of domestic organizations: sporting, commercial (such as hoteliers), and governmental. They also included international networks, but especially with neighbouring Italy, France, and Germany. The second half of the book looks at Swiss individuals (hommes) and their role in what Barbara Keys called the international sporting community (and what Quin et al. call the communauté internationale sportive.) They uncover a host of Swiss men – inevitably men – who worked in international organizations. Their language skills and their experience negotiating the different levels of Swiss government made them ideal sports bureaucrats. They served groups like the IOC and FIFA for a variety of motives, but also predictably in the service of Swiss notions of diplomacy and soft power. Each one of these essays in this volume offers enticing insights into the growth of international sport and its ongoing and particular Swiss character. Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled Sport and physical culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, agency, and everyday life, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. It will come out with Manchester University Press in 2021. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Out of the carnage of World War II comes an unforgettable tale about defying the odds and finding hope in the most harrowing of circumstances. Wheels of Courage: How Paralyzed Veterans from World War II Invented Wheelchair Sports, Fought for Disability Rights, and Inspired a Nation (Center Street, 2020) tells the stirring story of the soldiers, sailors, and marines who were paralyzed on the battlefield during World War II-at the Battle of the Bulge, on the island of Okinawa, inside Japanese POW camps-only to return to a world unused to dealing with their traumatic injuries. Doctors considered paraplegics to be "dead-enders" and "no-hopers," with the life expectancy of about a year. Societal stigma was so ingrained that playing sports was considered out-of-bounds for so-called "crippled bodies." But servicemen like Johnny Winterholler, a standout athlete from Wyoming before he was captured on Corregidor, and Stan Den Adel, shot in the back just days before the peace treaty ending the war was signed, refused to waste away in their hospital beds. Thanks to medical advances and the dedication of innovative physicians and rehabilitation coaches, they asserted their right to a life without limitations. The paralyzed veterans formed the first wheelchair basketball teams, and soon the Rolling Devils, the Flying Wheels, and the Gizz Kids were barnstorming the nation and filling arenas with cheering, incredulous fans. The wounded-warriors-turned-playmakers were joined by their British counterparts, led by the indomitable Dr. Ludwig Guttmann. Together, they triggered the birth of the Paralympic Games and opened the gymnasium doors to those with other disabilities, including survivors of the polio epidemic in the 1950s. Much as Jackie Robinson's breakthrough into the major leagues served as an opening salvo in the civil rights movement, these athletes helped jump-start a global movement about human adaptability. Their unlikely heroics on the court showed the world that it is ability, not disability, that matters most. Off the court, their push for equal rights led to dramatic changes in how civilized societies treat individuals with disabilities: from kneeling buses and curb cutouts to the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. Their saga is yet another lasting legacy of the Greatest Generation, one that has been long overlooked. Drawing on the veterans' own words, stories, and memories about this pioneering era, David Davis has crafted a narrative of survival, resilience, and triumph for sports fans and athletes, history buffs and military veterans, and people with and without disabilities. Paul Knepper was born and raised in New York and currently resides in Austin. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers Who Almost Won It All is available on Amazon and other sites. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
When Jeremy Lin shot (pardon the pun) to stardom with his unexpected scoring run with the New York Knickerbockers in 2012 many aficionados of basketball were surprised that an Asian American (Lin is of Taiwanese extraction) played this sport at such a high level. While “Linsanity” did not last, it fueled important questions about the relationship between a particular community and a sport that, at least at the collegiate and professional levels, does not feature many players of this specific ethnic background. While the NBA is not overcrowded with players of Asian descent, the sport is quite popular in places like China (not without controversy, however) and elsewhere in Asia. What roles has the game played in the lives of individuals and communities of Asian Americans in the United States? The answer to that question can be found in Joel Franks’ wonderful monograph Asian American Basketball: A Century of Sport, Community and Culture (McFarland, 2016). The historical record of the sport in Asian American communities, on both coasts, is extensive and of great significance. The sport permitted athletes of such backgrounds with an opportunity to travel and compete against teams of other ethnic groups. More importantly, it permitted both young men and women with a chance to challenge stereotypical notions held about Asian Americans. Franks’ work takes readers from cities such as Seattle and Boston, to the camps for Japanese Americans during World War II, to the hardwoods of high schools, colleges, and yes, even the NBA. All told, the story is similar to works such as that by Ignacio Garcia (who writes about basketball and Mexican Americans in Texas) in that it demonstrates that communities of different backgrounds have utilized “American” games in ways to claim citizenship, space, and recognition within US society. In this regard, as Frank argues, this work continues the process of democratizing US sports history. There is more to this story than the black/white dichotomy (though it is, no doubt, critical). There have been “other” athletes participating in “our” games; and using them not only for recreation, but for their own communal and social purposes. This work adds yet one more layer to the story of American sport. Jorge Iber is a professor of history at Texas Tech University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Barbara Keys, Professor of US and International History at Durham University, and author and editor of The Ideals of Global Sport: From Peace to Human Rights (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). In our conversation, we discussed the origins of Olympism’s moral claims, the nexus between sport and human rights, and why it can be hard to understand the human costs of contemporary mega-events. In The Ideals of Global Sport, Keys joins nine scholars in a critical examination of what she calls the “liturgy” of Olympism: namely that international sports “promote peace;” “teach fair play and mutual understanding;” “combat racial, ethnic gender, religious, and national discrimination;” “fight poverty;” “protect the environment;” and promote human rights.” A series of thematic articles, each chapter touches on one or more of the above themes. The authors come from a wide range of disciplines, including history, political science, and anthropology. Their different theoretical perspectives allow them to raise a host of questions about Olympism’s most grandiose claims. These scholars do more than simply test the so-called “moral” defenses of sport. They also try to understand why “so many people make (such moral claims) and why so may people believe them…. The claims are important far beyond the question of their veracity: they constitute a system of meaning and a way of imagining the international. As a set of beliefs, the shape behaviour and practice.” The Ideals of Global Sport is divided into two parts. Part 1 examines the core Olympic ideals of friendship, anti-discrimination, democratization, and peace. Simon Creak, Joon Seok Hong, and Roland Burke find very little evidence for strong links between any of these official Olympic values and instead point to the way that these ideals have been mobilized to serve particular political agendas. Robert Skinner’s chapter on anti-Apartheid sport posits that sport played a role in a much larger anti-discrimination movement. In a provocative second half, scholars address the intersection between sport and human rights. Jules Boykoff illustrates the human cost of mega-events. Susan Brownell investigates different metrics for understanding the “human rights impact” of sport. In her own chapter, Keys paints a picture of sports and human rights organizations working with and against each other for mutual and opposite goals. Sporting group wanted to reframe human rights away from enumerated ideals and towards more marketable language, but other organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are also increasingly interested in partnering with FIFA and the IOC. Each one of these essays in this volume offers enticing insights into the ways that power and human rights intersect in the sports sphere and scholars interested in those themes are strongly encouraged to read this book. Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled Sport and physical culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, agency, and everyday life, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. It will come out with Manchester University Press in 2021. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
At first, Miles Furling plays football to fit in. By eighth grade he realizes that he is both gay and a football player. After an unsuccessful attempt at honesty, he hides who he is and puts all his energy into being a successful high school linebacker. Now it’s the early 2000’s, and Miles earns a full football scholarship to King College, which is known as having the worst Division One football program and one of the best academic programs In the country. When he arrives for the recruiting visit, Miles is shocked to hear one of the country’s top recruits, the brilliant Reshawn McCoy, taking what looks like an illegal bribe. Nobody knows why he chose King, but Reshawn, who is assigned as Miles’s roommate, refuses to talk about it. Turns out he’s also struggling to be something he’s not and focuses on his research about the school’s slave-owning founders. The decisions they make will change both their lives. Corey Sobel is a graduate of Duke University, where he was a scholarship football player and received the Anne Flexner Award for Fiction and the Reynolds Price Award for Scriptwriting. He has reported on human rights abuses in Burma, served as an HIV/AIDS researcher in Kenya, and consulted for the United Nations and other humanitarian organizations. The Red Shirt (UP of Kentucky, 2020), his debut novel, was longlisted for the 2020 Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. He has written for numerous publications, including HuffPost, Esquire.com, and Chapel Hill News. He lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife, his cat, and his dog, and works at writing research reports for humanitarian organizations. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Rescued in 2010 from the small creek that runs next to Doubleday Field in Cooperstown, New York, a simple baseball launched an epic quest that spanned the United States and beyond. For eight years, "The Hall Ball" went on a journey to have its picture taken with every member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, both living and deceased. Ralph Carhart visited 34 states, Puerto Rico and Cuba, hundreds of graves, the spots where baseball legends’ ashes were spread and even the cryogenic lab where Ted Williams is frozen. The goal? To enshrine the first crowd-sourced artifact ever donated to the Hall. Part travelogue, part baseball history, part photo journal, The Hall Ball: One Fan’s Journey to Unite Cooperstown Immortals with a Single Baseball (McFarland) tells the full story for the first time. The narratives that accompany the ball's odyssey are as funny and moving as any in the history of the game. The Hall Ball also provides a rarely before seen history of the origins of baseball. Paul Knepper was born and raised in New York and currently resides in Austin. His first book titled The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers Who Almost Won It All is due out in October. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
A few years ago, I came across an article entitled “‘Who Do I Root for Now?’: The Impact of Franchise Relocation on the Loyal Fans Left Behind: A Case Study of Hartford Whaler Fans,” by Craig G. Hyatt. This essay focused on the void left in the lives of aficionados of a team that, like the jilted lover in a relationship, must now suffer and find a way to move forward in life without the object of one’s affection. In terms of sports, the pain is even more traumatic when the team that left its fans behind then proceeds to win a title; which they never accomplished in their former city. Thus, the unique pain of folks in places such as Harford (when the former-Whalers won the Stanley Cup as the Carolina Hurricane) and Quebec (when the former-Nordiques won the same trophy as the Colorado Avalanche). Ron Snyder’s The Baltimore Stallions: The Brief, Brilliant History of the CFL Champion Franchise (McFarland, 2020) presents a similar story, but with a twist, wherein the jilted lovers of the Colts enjoyed a brief fling with another object of affection, though it played a different type of football, until their ex (the NFL) spurned yet another city (in this case, Cleveland) and rushed back into the arms of Marylanders in the guise of the Ravens. While many in Baltimore had stated that, as to the NFL, they would embrace the league again (to quote the Raven), “nevermore,” as soon as the racier league and brand of football came knocking, all of the bad blood that had existed between the city, state and the league was put aside for a new love affair (and the Stallions were dropped like a hot potato). Snyder does an excellent job of reviewing the two years of the team’s existence, and provides insight into what the Stallions meant to the city and its fans as a (temporary) replacement for the Colts. In many ways, the CFLers mirrored important aspects of the Colts’ history: the players were viewed as “working class,” and embraced the city’s blue collar image, for example. Additionally, the team also won a title (the only US-based team to ever win the Grey Cup), as the Colts had on more than one occasions. Thus, the CFLers earned a place in the heart of many fans in the city, only to be then cast off (and sent back to Montreal) when a “sexier” team courted Baltimore. Overall, this is an excellent work that displays the connection between a city and its team, and the impact that franchise relocation can have on a metropolis’ psyche. Baltimore was jilted when the Colts left, embraced the Stallions as a substitute for a brief time, and then moved on to bigger and better things with the arrival of the Ravens. The fact that another city had to suffer the loss of its team is justified, given that the Browns got to keep their colors, logo, and history, and were guaranteed a “replacement” for the “original” franchise in just a few short years. A small price for the folks in Ohio to pay for helping the spurned people of Baltimore. Jorge Iber is a professor of history at Texas Tech University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Shanghai’s status as a bustling, international place both now and in the past hardly needs much introduction, although the centrality of horse racing to the earlier incarnation of the city’s cosmopolitanism is less known. Taking activities at the erstwhile Shanghai Race Club as a lens through which to examine life in the city, Jay Carter’s Champions Day: The End of Old Shanghai (W W Norton) offers a rich and revealing portrait of multiple colourful lives lived in ‘Old Shanghai’, and their demises. Carter’s narrative moves elegantly between trackside life and events and characters in the wider city, depicting the colourful lives of Shanghai’s colonial settlers, Chinese residents and the dynamics of racism and exclusion as well as hybridisation which existed between them. The Champions Day races, it turns out are also not the only landmark event to transport us into worlds of these people, and by focusing our attention on a single day –12 November 1941 – Carter also gleans a wealth of detail from a posthumous birthday celebration for the founding father of Chinese nationalism, and a funeral procession for china’s wealthiest woman. Occurring on the same day as the marquee races, all these events in the author’s deft hands are windows into a world soon to disappear in a maelstrom of global events. James Carter, professor of history at Saint Joseph’s University, is the author of two previous books on Chinese history and is a Fellow of the National Committee on US-China Relations. Ed Pulford is a Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Jorge Iber, Professor of History and Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Science at Texas Tech, and Mario Longoria, a long-time author and educator who received his PhD in English in 2014. The two are the authors of Latinos in American Football: Pathbreakers on the Gridiron, 1927 to the Present (McFarland and Co Publishers, 2020). In our conversation we discussed the origins of Latino American football, the role of World War II and the Civil Rights movement in expanding opportunities for Latino sportsmen, and the ongoing obstacles to Latino participation in the game that many love. In Latinos in American Football, Iber and Longoria recover the history of Latino participation in American football at the high school, college, and professional level. Although each chapter includes a series of case studies of Latino players, often undergirded by interviews conducted by the two scholars over thirty years, their work does more than recount histories on the field. They instead contextualize Latinos determination to play gridiron football within the broader history of migration, assimilation, and liberation. Iber and Longoria’s account encompasses football across America and to a lesser extent in Cuba and Mexico. They illustrate the early days of Latino football when Latino athletes challenged stereotypes of physical inferiority and mental incapability – the first Latin professional football player was Cuban Ignacio Molinet who played football for Cornell in the 1920s before being hired by the forerunner of the Philadelphia Eagles in 1927. Over the next hundred years, Latino’s presence in the gridiron game expands almost inexorable alongside their demographic expansion. Nevertheless, even as Latino footballers won great and growing acclaim on the field and on the sidelines, they faced significant obstacles to their participation including being overlooked by NFL and NCAA coaches despite their talent, poorly financed schools and athletic programs, and prejudice from opponents and referees. Latinos in American Football will appeal broadly to people interested in sports history, but also particularly to anyone interested in the history of American football and in Latinos place in American society. Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled A Nation in Play: Physical Culture, the State, and Society during France’s Dark Years, 1932-1948, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
There are two key elements of today’s professional baseball that are informed by Lou Hernandez’s wonderful book Bobby Maduro and the Cuban Sugar Kings (McFarland, 2019): the increased presence of Latinos both on the field and off in MLB, and the interest of MLB to promote its game internationally, particularly in places such as Latin America. The life and career of Bobby Maduro sheds light on both of these topics. First, Maduro was greatly responsible for the Cuban League’s recognition by professional baseball (in the US). Within this framework, many Americanos played baseball in Cuba, and were exposed to the level of talent not only from that nation, but from elsewhere in the Spanish-speaking baseball world. This helped open the door to even more Latinos to make it into the higher levels of the minors, as well as eventually into the Majors. Second, Maduro was responsible for bringing AAA-level competition to Cuba. With the positive response of the fans (even in the midst of revolutionary turmoil), it did seem that, someday, the Sugar Kings’ slogan would come to fruition: “Un paso mas, y llegamos” (“One more step/level, and we’ll arrive”) meaning that Havana would have had its own MLB franchise before cities such as Montreal and Toronto. Unfortunately, as with so many other tragic results of the Castro dictatorship, that dream is now not only on hold, but it is surely dead for at least one or two more lifetimes. Bobby Maduro almost made that dream a reality. An examination of his career, and that of the Sugar Kings, provides great contextualization to the realities of MLB in the early 21st century. Hernandez’s book accomplishes this task very effectively. Jorge Iber is a professor of history at Texas Tech University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Sasha Abramsky, author of Little Wonder: The Fabulous Story of Lottie Dod, the World’s First Female Sports Superstar (Akashic Books, 2020). Lottie Dod is not a familiar name among casual sports fans but should be. She won the first of her five Wimbledon titles when she was 15 and dominated tennis before walking away. Sticking to one game, she believed, was “appalling.” Dod then took up golf, winning a major women’s golf title. She also won a silver medal in archery at the 1908 Olympics. Dod also dabbled in skating, endurance bicycling, mountain climbing and even toboggan racing. Unlike Babe Didrikson Zaharias, Dod, however, was born before the golden age of sports, so few people have seen photographs or videos from her prime. Garbo-esque in later life, Dod kept to herself after her sports career. But her achievements sprang from the belief that there were no obstacles in her path. Abramsky, a freelance journalist who specializes in politics, is also an obsessive tennis fan. He stumbled upon Dod while visiting Wimbledon’s museum and was enchanted by her ability and career. Abramsky combines descriptive writing with research that pulls back the curtain to reveal an athlete whose feats remain stunning 60 years after her death and more than a century after her glory days. Bob D’Angelo earned his master’s degree in history from Southern New Hampshire University in May 2018. He earned his bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Florida and spent more than three decades as a sportswriter and sports copy editor, including 28 years on the sports copy desk at The Tampa (Fla.) Tribune. He can be reached at bdangelo57@gmail.com. For more information, visit Bob D’Angelo’s Books and Blogs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
In Deportes: The Making of a Sporting Mexican Diaspora (Rutgers University Press, 2020), Professor José Alamillo, a specialist in Chicana/o Studies, Labor, and Sports history, examines the powerful way Mexican Americans have used sports to build transnational networks for personal and community empowerment across the United States and Mexico before the 1960s. In this meticulously researched book, Alamillo illustrates how sports intersect in the making of a Latina/o identity, civil rights activities, and community. A crucial part of the work centers on the term “Mexican Diaspora” to demonstrate how people of Mexican descent have maintained their cultural identity through sport. Alamillo finds that a sporting Mexican diaspora served as a transnational sporting network, a gendered sporting experiencing, a racial project, a system of displacement, and a consciousness embedded in hybrid sporting identities. This work is not just a study of boxing, baseball, tennis, or softball. It is a pathbreaking study that connects labor, gender, and sport to demonstrate how Mexican-origin people and the sports industry engaged national conversations of immigration, civil rights, and nationalism. For listeners interested in learning more about the power of sports in shaping the lived experience, they will not be disappointed in Deportes: The Making of a Sporting Mexican Diaspora. Tiffany Jasmin González, Ph.D. is the Postdoctoral Fellow in Women’s History at the Newcomb Institute of Tulane University. You can follow Tiffany on Twitter @T_J_Gonzalez Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Sixteen athletes from eleven sports arenas. Each chapter tells a different story, as each superstar shares the habit that helped them accomplish their goals and reach the pinnacle of their profession. Sports fanatic or not. Guaranteed to tap into your athletic edge, Jeremy Bhandari's Trust the Grind: How World-Class Athletes Got to the Top (Mango Publishing, 2020), is made for sports fans and nonfans alike. Fans of professional athletes get an in-depth look at their heroes’ climb to the top; those less passionate about sports have the chance to read the secrets of success from some of the most talented people in the world. Both learn pivotal life lessons, and can immediately instill these particular traits and habits into their own lifestyle. A ‘success habit’ point of view. Learn the secrets behind success, and what it takes to remain on top. With Trust The Grind, you will learn about the value that comes with becoming disciplined, staying driven, setting goals, identifying your “why”, staying active and eating right, making sacrifices, obsessing over your passion, and more. Rather than harping on the remarkable accolades and astonishing statistics, this story is formulated to teach individuals what it takes to be great in any desired field. Paul Knepper was born and raised in New York and currently resides in Austin. He used to cover basketball for Bleacher Report and his first book titled The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers Who Almost Won It All is due out this year. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Sports scholars Danyel Reiche and Tamir Sorek’s edited volume, Sport, Politics, and Society in the Middle East (Oxford University Press, 2019), makes a significant contribution to what remains a largely understudied, yet critically important segment of Middle Eastern political and social life. It does so by discussing in eleven chapters multiple aspects and consequences of the region’s incestuous relationship between sports and politics. These range from corruption, the role of the private sector, an emphasis on elite sports and projection of the state at the expense of grassroots sports to battles for identity expressed among others in memories to how sports chants in Israel reflect society’s political and social moods as well as it fault lines, the struggle of women to overcome deeply entrenched social modes and how social media helps them with branding. The edited volume is not only an at times ethnographic dive into Middle Eastern sports’ multiple facets but also in many ways a mapping of how much remains to be explored. This is a volume that should attract the attention of anyone who is interested in the Middle East, sports and/or gender issues as well as readers whose focus is a specific country like Turkey, Israel, Palestine or Jordan or a group of nations like the Gulf states. Whatever one’s preference is, Reiche and Sorek have produced a volume rich in texture, insight and breadth that is likely to prompt the reader to think differently about the political and societal importance of Middle Eastern sports. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Kathleen Bachynski, Assistant Professor of Public Health at Muhlenberg College, and author of No Game for Boys to Play: The History of Youth Football and the Origins of a Public Health Crisis (University of North Carolina Press, 2019). In our conversation, we discussed the intersection of public health and American football, the difficulty in assessing and quantifying sports injuries, and the way that football organizers were able to mete out responsibility for broken bones, torn ligaments, and brain trauma to a wide range of participants. At its core, Bachynski’s work addresses the issue of whether or not football is safe for children. In No Game for Boys to Play, Bachynski examines American football from its origins from the perspective of a public health specialist and an historian. Her work illuminates the ways in which football came to shape and be shaped by hegemonic discourses of masculinity, frequently to the detriment of its players' health. Her work focuses on youth football – both in Pop Warner league and in high schools and considers a wide scope of medical issues rather than being limited to discussions of traumatic brain injury. She argues that an ethical response to youth football is to prohibit all dangerous contact (tackle football, cross checks in hockey, boxing) for children under age 18. Bachynski’s combination of historical studies, epidemiological investigations, and public health research brings a new perspective to the history of football. Her engagement with a wide range of actors; including players, parents, coaches, doctors, legislators, equipment manufacturers, insurance agencies, and tort lawyers; showcases the importance of football to broader conversations about American masculinity, educational standards, and national defense. It also challenges teleological perspectives that might suggest that football safely has improved over time. While dental and traumatic spinal injuries are less severe, children are more likely to suffer traumatic brain injuries despite (or perhaps because of) increasing standardization of safety equipment including helmets. No Game for Boys to Play is the winner of the 2020 North American Society for Sport History Monograph Book Award and so should be read by a wide audience. Her work will especially appeal to scholars interested in the overlap between histories of medicine and sport. Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled A Nation in Play: Physical Culture, the State, and Society during France’s Dark Years, 1932-1948, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
In her incisive study Baseball as Mediated Latinidad: Race, Masculinity, Nationalism, and Performances of Identity (Ohio State University Press, 2020), Jennifer Domino Rudolph analyzes major league baseball’s Latin/o American players—who now make up more than twenty-five percent of MLB—as sites of undesirable surveillance due to the historical, political, and sociological weight placed on them via stereotypes around immigration, crime, masculinity, aggression, and violence. Rudolph examines the perception by media and fans of Latino baseball players and the consumption of these athletes as both social and political stand-ins for an entire culture, showing how these participants in the nationalist game of baseball exemplify tensions over race, nation, and language for some while simultaneously revealing baseball as a practice of latinidad, or pan-Latina/o/x identity, for others. By simultaneously exploring the ways in which Latino baseball players can appear both as threats to American values and the embodiment of the American Dream, and engaging with both archival research and new media representations of MLB players, Rudolph sheds new light on the current ambivalence of mainstream American media and fans towards Latin/o culture. David-James Gonzales (DJ) is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is a historian of migration, urbanization, and social movements in the U.S., and specializes in Latina/o/x politics and social movements. Follow him on Twitter @djgonzoPhD. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
The game of basketball is perceived by most today as an “urban” game with a locale such as Rucker Park in Harlem as the game’s epicenter (as well as a pipeline to the NBA). While that is certainly a true statement, basketball is not limited to places such as New York City. In recent years scholars have written about the meaning of the game (and triumphs on the hardwood) to other groups, such as Asian Americans (Kathleen Yep and Joel Franks) and Mexican Americans (Ignacio Garcia). To this important literature one can now add an examination of the sport in the lives of Native Americans, through Wade Davies' Native Hoops: The Rise of American Indian Basketball, 1895-1970 (University Press of Kansas, 2020). The game, as Davies notes, was not just something imposed upon Natives in locales such as the Indian Industrial Training School in Kansas (and elsewhere). The game provided linkages to the Native past, and was embraced as a way to “prove their worth” within a hostile environment designed to strip students of all vestiges of their cultural inheritance. The sport provided both young men and women with an opportunity to compete against members of other institutions (both Native and white) and to challenge notions of inferiority and inherent weaknesses. Davies’ work does an excellent job of detailing the role of the sport in the lives of individuals, schools, and eventually, Native communities. Additionally, it examines how these players competed against sometimes seven opponents (the five players on the court and the two officials) to claim their rightful place on the court. They also often had to deal with the taunts and racism of crowds at opposing gyms. Still, most of these schools managed to field competitive teams that created their own “Indian” style of basketball that proved quite difficult to defeat. Wade Davies is professor of Native American studies at the University of Montana, Missoula. Jorge Iber is a professor of history at Texas Tech University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
For decades, statisticians, social scientists, psychologists, and economists (among them Nobel Prize winners) have spent massive amounts of precious time thinking about whether streaks actually exist. After all, a substantial number of decisions that we make in our everyday lives are quietly rooted in this one question: If something happened before, will it happen again? Is there such a thing as being in the zone? Can someone have a “hot hand”? Or is it simply a case of seeing patterns in randomness? Or, if streaks are possible, where can they be found? In The Hot Hand: The Mystery and Science of Streaks (Custom House, 2020), Wall Street Journal reporter Ben Cohen offers an unfailingly entertaining and provocative investigation into these questions. He begins with how a $35,000 fine and a wild night in New York revived a debate about the existence of streaks that was several generations in the making. We learn how the ability to recognize and then bet against streaks turned a business school dropout named David Booth into a billionaire, and how the subconscious nature of streak-related bias can make the difference between life and death for asylum seekers. We see how previously unrecognized streaks hidden amidst archival data helped solve one of the most haunting mysteries of the twentieth century, the disappearance of Raoul Wallenberg. Cohen also exposes how streak-related incentives can be manipulated, from the five-syllable word that helped break arcade profit records to an arc of black paint that allowed Stephen Curry to transform from future junior high coach into the greatest three-point shooter in NBA history. Crucially, Cohen also explores why false recognition of nonexistent streaks can have cataclysmic results, particularly if you are a sugar beet farmer or the sort of gambler who likes to switch to black on the ninth spin of the roulette wheel. Paul Knepper was born and raised in New York and currently resides in Austin. He used to cover basketball for Bleacher Report and his first book titled Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers Who Almost Won It All is due out this year. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by John Harney, Associate Professor of History and Chair of the Asian Studies Department at Centre College, and author of Empire of Infields: Baseball in Taiwan and Cultural Identity, 1895-1968 (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). In our conversation, we discussed the origins of baseball in Taiwan, the role of baseball in the Japanese imperial system, and the complicated nature of Taiwanese national identity. In Empire of Infields, Harney engages with the historiography of baseball in Taiwan. He argues that baseball was not necessarily a place for the formation of a Taiwanese nationalist identity, nor was it a space for colonial resistance to the Japanese, but instead it was a site for mutual engagement and cultural genesis with the Japanese and different groups of Taiwanese people. He considers Taiwanese baseball transnationally within the larger frames of the Japanese imperial nation-state and the Kuomintang’s retrocession Sinicization project. He shows how and why indigenous Taiwanese players travelled the empire, young Japanese and ethnically Chinese Taiwanese people competed in the same international high school baseball competitions, and postwar Japanese students won the Little League World Series. His discussion of Taiwanese identity encompasses the islands diverse populations throughout the twentieth century. He focuses less on baseball as resistance and instead is interested in the way that baseball helped to produce lasting connections between Taiwan and Japan. In the postwar, Chiang Kai-Shek responded ambivalent to the Taiwanese game. Baseball offered the regime ties to the United States and opportunities to compete internationally, but it also threatened to produce Taiwanese nationalism that would undermine their argument for continued rule of the mainland. Taiwan’s post-imperial connections with Japan remained important as Taiwanese baseball remained linked with the metropole. Taiwanese players competing in Japan and Japanese news regularly appearing in their erstwhile colony. Although Harney’s work proceeds largely chronologically, he balances between two periods: the era of Japense colonialism (1895-1945) and the postwar period (1945-1968). Within each section, his work moves thematically, engaging with related issues of Taiwanese nationalism, Japanese educational systems, race under empire, the Cold War, and the trans-Pacific histories of sports. Empire of Infields will appeal to readers interested in Taiwanese, Chinese, and Japanese history as well as people fascinated by international baseball. Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled A Nation in Play: Physical Culture, the State, and Society during France’s Dark Years, 1932-1948, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Allan Downey, Associate Professor of History and Indigenous Studies at McMaster University, and author of The Creator’s Game: Lacrosse, Identity, and Indigenous Nationhood (University of British Columbia Press, 2018). In our conversation, we discussed the origins of lacrosse, the cultural genocide of North America’s indigenous nations, and the games use as a site of empowerment and resistance. In The Creator’s Game, Downey examines the role that lacrosse played and continues to play in the construction of settler-colonial and indigenous identity in Canada. He illustrates the way that the Canadian settler-colonial state appropriated the indigenous tradition of lacrosse to help promote white, masculine identities in the 19th century and how First Nation’s people used the game at the same time to reassert their own notions of indigenous identity, including ideas of pan-indigeneity and nested sovereignty. Downey’s work relies upon a wide range of sources including archival documents, extensive secondary source materials, and oral histories. He also makes use of indigenous epistemologies, taking seriously creation stories, medicine rituals, and the orenta power of physical objects. Throughout he mobilizes new methodologies as a way of explaining the special role of lacrosse among indigenous communities, including writing his own subjectivity as an indigenous person and lacrosse player into his history with chapter framing conversations with the trickster/transformer Usdas. Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled A Nation in Play: Physical Culture, the State, and Society during France’s Dark Years, 1932-1948, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Dr Jonathan Gelber, author of the book Tiger Woods’s Back and Tommy John’s Elbow: Injuries and Tragedies That Transformed Careers, Sports and Society (Skyhorse Publishing, 2019). Gelber is an orthopedic surgeon with the Olmstead Medical Center in Rochester, Minnesota. A long time athlete, Gelber examines several athletes through the prism of the “Cobra Effect, ”a phenomenon that occurs when an attempted solution to a problem results in an unintended consequence. And sometimes, that solution might even make the original problem worse. Drawing on his vast medical background, Gelber looks at athletes such as Len Bias, Hank Gathers, Magic Johnson, Dale Earnhardt Sr., Lyle Alzado and more. And, of course, Tiger Woods and Tommy John. The situation of every athlete Gelber examines, he asserts, usually has two effects: the obvious one, and a secondary outcome that was unexpected. The flawed evangelism of Alzado, who used steroids and later had brain cancer, or the death of Bias, which resulted in a change in drug laws in the United States, are two pieces of a fascinating narrative that is certain to provoke more discussion about athletes, sports and society. Bob D’Angelo earned his master’s degree in history from Southern New Hampshire University in May 2018. He earned his bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Florida and spent more than three decades as a sportswriter and sports copy editor, including 28 years on the sports copy desk at The Tampa (Fla.) Tribune. He is currently a digital news producer for Cox Media Group. Bob can be reachedatbdangelo57@gmail.com. For more information, visit Bob D’Angelo’s Books and Blogs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (Random House, 2020) Until the End of Time gives the reader a theory of everything, both in the sense of a “state of the academic union”, covering cosmology and evolution, consciousness and computation, and art and religion, and in the sense of showing us a way to apprehend the often existentially challenging subject matter. Greene uses evocative autobiographical vignettes in the book to personalize his famously lucid and accessible explanations, and we discuss these episodes further in the interview. Greene also reiterates his arguments for embedding a form of spiritual reverie within the multiple naturalistic descriptions of reality that different areas of human knowledge have so far produced. John Weston is a University Teacher of English in the Language Centre at Aalto University, Finland. His research focuses on academic communication. He can be reached at john.weston@aalto.fi and @johnwphd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Dr. Mitchell Nathanson, author of the book Bouton: The Life of a Baseball Original (University of Nebraska Press, 2020). Nathanson, a professor of law at the Jeffrey S. Moorad Center for the Study of Sports at Villanova University, examines the life of Jim Bouton, a journeyman pitcher whose 1970 book, “Ball Four,” was a lightning rod for controversy and became one of the best sports books of all time. Nathanson examines the dynamics behind the crafting and publishing of “Ball Four,” Bouton’s diary of the 1969 major league baseball season. He examines the contributions of Leonard Shecter, the former New York Post sportswriter who helped shape Bouton’s narrative. More importantly, Nathanson presents a more well-rounded portrait of Bouton, a free-thinking man who marched to his own beat and was not afraid to buck the establishment. Bouton’s youth, his early successes with the New York Yankees and fall from grace are chronicled. Well-researched with interviews from key figures in his lifetime, “Bouton” provides context and reveals the man behind a work that was vilified fifty years ago as a “kiss-and-tell” book but is now lauded as a sports classic. Nathanson brings fresh perspective and delivers an unvarnished, critical view of Bouton. Bob D’Angelo earned his master’s degree in history from Southern New Hampshire University in May 2018. He earned his bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Florida and spent more than three decades as a sportswriter and sports copy editor, including 28 years on the sports copy desk at The Tampa (Fla.) Tribune. He is currently a digital news producer for Cox Media Group. Bob can be reached at bdangelo57@gmail.com. For more information, visit Bob D’Angelo’s Books and Blogs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Fantasy sports have the opportunity to provide a sporting community in which gendered physical presence plays no role—a space where men and women can compete and interact on a level playing field. Whose Game?: Gender and Power in Fantasy Sports (Temple UP, 2020) shows, however, that while many turn to this space to socialize with friends or participate in a uniquely active and competitive fandom, men who play also depend on fantasy sports to perform a boyhood vision of masculinity otherwise inaccessible to them. Authors Rebecca Kissane and Sarah Winslow draw on a rich array of survey, interview, and observational data to examine how gender, race, and class frame the experiences of everyday fantasy sports players. This pioneering book examines gendered structures and processes, such as jock statsculinity—a nerdish form of masculine one-upmanship—and how women are often rendered as outsiders. Ultimately, Whose Game? demonstrates that fantasy sports are more than just an inconsequential leisure activity. This online world bleeds into participants’ social lives in gendered ways—forging and strengthening relationships but also taking participants’ time and attention to generate negative emotions, stress, discord, and unproductivity. In this interview, Dr. Kissane, Dr. Winslow, and I discuss displays of masculinity, “jock statsculinity” as a type of hybrid masculinity, and connections to social networks, exclusionary practices, and heterosexuality. Whose Game? is an excellent analysis of how fantasy sports contributes to the production and reproduction of gender in leisure activities. Likewise, the book contributes to the literature on the intersection of gender, class, and sexuality in sport. I recommend this book for students, professors, and anyone else interested in sociology of sport, gender and masculinity, media, and sexuality. Dr. Rebecca Kissane is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Lafayette College and Editor-in-Chief of Sociology Compass. Dr. Sarah Winslow is the Senior Associate Director of the Honors College, Director of the National Scholars Program, and Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminal Justice at Clemson University. Krystina Millar is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University. Her research interests include gender, sociology of the body, and sexuality. You can find her on Twitter at @KrystinaMillar. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post–Civil War era to the present day. The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery’s influence on specific institutions, such as Princeton University, Harvard University, Oberlin College, Emory University, and the University of Alabama. Though the roots of Slavery and the University stem from a 2011 conference at Emory University, the collection extends outward to incorporate recent findings. As such, it offers a roadmap to one of the most exciting developments in the field of U.S. slavery studies and to ways of thinking about racial diversity in the history and current practices of higher education. Today I spoke with Leslie Harris about the book. Dr. Harris is a professor of history at Northwestern University. She is the coeditor, with Ira Berlin, of Slavery in New York and the coeditor, with Daina Ramey Berry, of Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (Georgia). Adam McNeil is a History PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by David Block, author of Pastime Lost: The Humble, Original and Now Completely Forgotten Game of English Baseball (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). Block is a baseball historian whose research has focused on the origins of the game. Pastime Lost was a finalist for the 2020 Seymour Medal, awarded by the Society for American Baseball Research to the best book of baseball history or biography published the preceding year. His previous book, Baseball before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game, won the 2006 Seymour Medal as well as the 2006 North American Society for Sport History book award. It is considered the definitive study of baseball's origins. In Pastime Lost, Block painstakingly recovers the origins of baseball games through a close reading of a wide variety of 18th-century sources including newspaper clippings, novels, and diaries. He also does a statistical analysis of those sources. He discovers that English baseball was a popular folk sport for more than two hundred years, predominantly in the home counties, but also being played as widely as Scotland and Wales. The game enjoyed widespread acceptance among men and women, elites such as Frederick, the Prince of Wales, and ordinary people, especially in the countryside. By the middle of the 19th century, English baseball faded under increased challenges from other ball games including rounders, bat and ball, and cricket. By the first half of the twentieth century, English baseball largely vanished and is now almost completely forgotten. Nevertheless, it is the likely parent of many popular ball games today – even as Block argues, American baseball. Block’s Pastime Lost, which mixed rich historical investigation with Bill Bryson-esque rollicks across the English countryside, will appeal to readers interested in the long history of bat and ball games. Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled Sport and physical culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, Agency, and Everyday Life, examines physical culture in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
When a group of private equity bigwigs purchased the Philadelphia 76ers in 2011, the team was both bad and boring. Attendance was down. So were ratings. The Sixers had an aging coach, an antiquated front office, and a group of players that could best be described as mediocre. Enter Sam Hinkie -- a man with a plan straight out of the PE playbook, one that violated professional sports' Golden Rule: You play to win the game. In Hinkie's view, the best way to reach first was to embrace becoming the worst -- to sacrifice wins in the present in order to capture championships in the future. And to those dubious, Hinkie had a response: Trust The Process, and the results will follow. The plan, dubbed "The Process," seems to have worked. More than six years after handing Hinkie the keys, the Sixers have transformed into one of the most exciting teams in the NBA. They've emerged as a championship contender with a roster full of stars, none bigger than Joel Embiid, a captivating seven-footer known for both brutalizing opponents on the court and taunting them off of it. Beneath the surface, though, lies a different story, one of infighting, dueling egos, and competing agendas. Hinkie, pushed out less than three years into his reign by a demoralized owner, a jealous CEO, and an embarrassed NBA, was the first casualty of The Process. He'd be far from the last. Drawing from interviews with nearly 175 people, Yaron Weitzman's Tanking to the Top: The Philadelphia 76ers and the Most Audacious Process in the History of Professional Sports (Grand Central Publishing, 2020) brings to life the palace intrigue incited by Hinkie's proposal, taking readers into the boardroom where the Sixers laid out their plans, and onto the courts where those plans met reality. Full of uplifting, rags-to-riches stories, backroom dealings, mysterious injuries, and burner Twitter accounts, Tanking to the Top is the definitive, inside story of the Sixers' Process and a fun and lively behind-the-scenes look at one of America's most transgressive teams. Paul Knepper is an attorney and writer who was born and raised in New York and currently resides in Austin. He used to cover basketball for Bleacher Report and his first book about the New York Knicks Teams of the 1990s is due out this year. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
When John Beilein arrived at University of Michigan in 2007, the once-proud men's basketball program was adrift after the fallout from a scandal and failing to reach the NCAA Tournament for nine straight seasons. Beilein slowly re-built the program on the foundation of a strong culture, which emphasized teamwork, integrity and discipline. During his twelve years in Ann Arbor, Beilein became the program's all-time winningest coach, reached two national championship games, won four Big Ten championships and produced eight NBA first-round draft picks. He left Michigan for the NBA in 2019 as the greatest coach in school history. In an age of ethical lapses throughout college basketball, Beilein succeeded without a hint of impropriety. As much a teacher as a coach, he consistently identified undervalued recruits, taught them his innovative offensive system and carefully developed them into better players--an approach to the game that drove his unprecedented rise from high school junior varsity coach to head coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers. In his new book John Beilein at Michigan: A Basketball Revival (McFarland, 2020), Tim Rooney examines his tenure at Michigan in detail for the first time. Paul Knepper is an attorney and writer who was born and raised in New York and currently resides in Austin. He used to cover basketball for Bleacher Report and his first book about the New York Knicks Teams of the 1990s is due out this year. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
The city of Chicago is one of the US' most diverse cosmopolitan areas. Given the array of people who live in the city, it is reasonable to assume that the goals of the various communities differ in regard to sport and its social functions. Gerald R. Gems' new book, Sport and the Shaping of Civic Identity in Chicago (Lexington Books, 2020) provides readers with an extensive overview of how the diverse stakeholders of the metropolis have "used" sport in their neighborhoods (as well as the broader community) to claim their share of athletic life in the Windy City. Gems' research enlightens readers as to how, for example, African Americans, Latinos, and others, have played certain sports and used such endeavors to challenge assumptions about their respective groups' racial/ethnic, physical and intellectual capabilities. Additionally, the study provides insight into how women and members of different class and religious groups have done likewise. Finally, the work considers how the aficionados of the city's pro-sport franchises, particularly the denizens of the "Friendly Confines" have created a unique identity that is recognized nationwide. All in all, Gems' research enables those of us who live elsewhere to see how sport has helped to shape daily life among the numerous and varied communities that make the city of Chicago. Jorge Iber is a professor of history at Texas Tech University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy (MIT Press, 2020), Matt Cook and a few collaborators dive deeply into more than 75 paradoxes in mathematics, physics, philosophy, and the social sciences. As each paradox is discussed and resolved, Cook helps readers discover the meaning of knowledge and the proper formation of concepts―and how reason can dispel the illusion of contradiction. The journey begins with “a most ingenious paradox” from Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance. Readers will then travel from Ancient Greece to cutting-edge laboratories, encounter infinity and its different sizes, and discover mathematical impossibilities inherent in elections. They will tackle conundrums in probability, induction, geometry, and game theory; perform “supertasks”; build apparent perpetual motion machines; meet twins living in different millennia; explore the strange quantum world―and much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Travis Bell, Janelle Applequist, and Christian Dotson-Pierson to discuss their new book CTE, Media, and the NFL: Framing a Public Health Crisis as a Football Epidemic (Lexington Books, 2019). In our conversation, we discussed public misconceptions about Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, the media’s problematic connection of CTE with the NFL and concussions, and the league’s efforts to produce alternative histories of CTE. In CTE, Media, and the NFL, Bell, Applequist and Dotson-Pierson use media theory to unpack reporting on CTE. They explain the long history of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, beginning with punch-drunk diagnosis among interwar boxers to the first female brain with confirmed CTE from a victim of domestic violence. Through a close reading of over seven hundred articles from six American newspapers, painstakingly coded for dozens of variables, they show how the media wrote about it. In these stories football plays a specific role in shaping American notions of masculinity, an athlete’s gender shapes reporting on their head injuries, and the celebrity framing the shape of the narrative. The authors use earlier studies of the HIV/AIDs crisis and Big Tobacco’s battle to obfuscate the link between smoking and cancer to better understand the dangers of CTE coverage. They argue that the media’s framing of CTE as a health crisis, and the onslaught of incomplete information about the disease, has led to an availability cascade of problematic or wrong information. Most notably – CTE is linked with concussions in the reporting but is caused by all kinds of head trauma. The NFL’s efforts to muddle the science of CTE proved less effective than Big Tobacco’s and now the league may be over-connected to CTE to the detriment of athletes in other sports, military veterans, and even victims of domestic abuse whose stories are largely ignored. Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled A Nation in Play: Physical Culture, the State, and Society during France’s Dark Years, 1932-1948, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Many books have been written about Willis Reed, Bill Bradley, Walt Frazier, Dave DeBusscherre and the other great players on the New York Knicks championship teams of the 1970s, though much less attention has been focus on the orchestrator of those teams: Red Holzman. Holzman was a fantastic player and scout before compiling 613 wins (a number which hangs in the rafters at Madison Square Garden) over 14 seasons as the coach of the Knicks. Holzman was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame and was named one of the top 10 coaches in NBA History. But not much is known about the soft-spoken and private Holzman, as he was the type of person to downplay his own accomplishments. Former MSG president Dave Checketts once said, “Red was the finest human being I’ve ever known.” In Red Holzman: The Life and Legacy of a Hall of Fame Basketball Coach (Sports Publishing, 2019), author Mort Zachter has taken on the challenge of sharing this coach’s incredible story. From humble beginnings as the son of immigrant parents growing up in Brooklyn, Holzman paved a path of excellence at every level. From his time in the Navy to breaking into the NBA and his rise through the coaching channels, author Zachter leaves no stone unturned. With interviews with those who played with, against, and for Red, including Bill Bradley, Phil Jackson, Bob Cousy, and Walt "Clyde" Frazier to name a few, the life of a basketball pioneer—one that has since been held quiet—is shared for the first time. Paul Knepper is an attorney and writer who was born and raised in New York and currently resides in Austin. He used to cover basketball for Bleacher Report and his first book about the New York Knicks Teams of the 1990s is due out this year. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McMaster University, provides a unique sociological analysis of how critics confront the different types of uncertainty associated with their practice. The book explores how reviewers get matched to books, the ethics and etiquette of negative reviews and ‘punching up’, along with professional identities and the future of criticism. The book is packed with interview material, coupled with accessible and easy to follow theoretical interventions, creating a text that will be of interest to social sciences, humanities, and general readers alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Nicholas Blincoe’s More Noble Than War: A Soccer History of Israel-Palestine (Bold Type Books, 2019) is a beautifully narrated and written history of a century of conflict between pre-state Jews and Palestinians and Israeli Jews and Israeli Palestinians after the establishment of the state. It is a story that goes far beyond the history of the conflict, the mirror images of developments in Jewish and Palestinian society, and the internecine ideological infighting and power struggles within the two communities. It paints in graphic detail the incestuous and inseparable relationship between sports and politics and the importance of soccer, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa, in identity and nation formation as well as nation building. It also demonstrates in graphic detail how first Jews and then Palestinians exploited soccer to first achieve international recognition of their struggles and then as nations by dispatching teams to tour other countries and being granted membership in world soccer body FIFA. In doing so, Israelis and Palestinians set an example that decades later became a key pillar of the Algerian liberation struggle in the 1950s and 1960s with the National Liberation Front (FLN)’s creation of its own national soccer team that put its fight for independence on the world map. The skeletal facts of Blincoe’s tale have long been known. The significance of Blincoe’s contribution is that he puts flesh on the skeleton by weaving the facts into a meticulously researched and reported, easily accessible narrative in which he brings key players and ideological trends to life. It’s a tale that is all fact but reads like a thriller. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies and the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Roger Gilles, Director of the Honors College and Professor of Writing at Grand Valley State University, and author of Women on the Move: The Forgotten Era of Women’s Bicycle Racing (University of Nebraska Press, 2018). In our conversation, we discussed the rise of women’s velodrome racing in the American Midwest in the 1890s, the business of six-day cycling, and the gender politics of women’s racing. In Women on the Move, Gilles recovers the history of women’s cycle racing in the 1890s. Female scorchers like Tillie “The Terrible Swede” Anderson, Lizzie Glaw, and Dottie Farnsworth barnstormed across the Midwest from Oklahoma City to Pittsburgh. Their sport proved to be popular, even more so than men’s endurance six-day events. They raced on steeply banked short tracks, pedalled at speeds up to 30 miles per hour, braved severe injuries from crashes, dealt with wardrobe malfunctions, and won enormous prizes. They were America’s first famous female athletes. Gilles’ work traces the intersections that gave rise to women’s bicycle racing in the 1890s. Tillie Anderson and the other racers navigated the cycling boom, which followed the invention of the safety bike; the rise of the suffrage movement; the increasing industrialization of midwestern cities; the migration of millions of Europeans to the United States; and the gender politics of the Victorian era. The craze ended almost as quickly as it began in the early 20th century – replaced by automobile racing, undermined by charges of fixing, undercut by lower revenues, and damaged by the increasingly strategic and tactical insight of the racers that made the sport more professional but less exciting for spectators. Women on the Move restores women’s racing to the pantheon of 19th century American sport and will appeal to readers interested in the overlap between cycling, sports business, migration, and gender. Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled A Nation in Play: Physical Culture, the State, and Society during France’s Dark Years, 1932-1948, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Brad Balukjian, author of the book The Wax Pack: On the Open Road in Search of Baseball’s Afterlife (University of Nebraska, 2020). A combination of Charles Kuralt and Lawrence Ritter, Balukjian’s work examines 14 baseball players pulled from a pack of 1986 Topps baseball cards. Balukjian takes the reader on a cross-country tour to meet these now-retired players, who have dealt with being out of the spotlight in different ways. Some stories have a melancholy tone, while others demonstrate that life does not end when a player hangs up his uniform for the last time. Balukjian is a savvy observer of people, and his interactions with the former players are sprinkled with personal observations and the author’s own personal issues. There is a chapter devoted to each player, plus a narrative of Balukjian’s visit with former employees at the Topps factory in Duryea, Pennsylvania. Balukjian owns a Ph.D. in entomology from the University of California at Berkeley, and he spent a year in Tahiti working on his doctorate. He currently is director of the Natural History and Sustainability Program and teaches biology at Merritt College in Oakland, California. Regardless of his academic standing, Balukjian remains a baseball fan at heart and still remembers the excitement of opening cards during the wax pack era. Not only did Balukjian thumb through a pack of cards; he met most of the men pictured on them and shared their compelling stories. Bob D’Angelo earned his master’s degree in history from Southern New Hampshire University in May 2018. He earned his bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Florida and spent more than three decades as a sportswriter and sports copy editor, including 28 years on the sports copy desk at The Tampa (Fla.) Tribune. He is currently a digital news producer for Cox Media Group. Bob can be reached at bdangelo57@gmail.com. For more information, visit Bob D’Angelo’s Books and Blogs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
The 1949-50 CCNY Beavers basketball team were one of the unlikeliest of champions in sports history. CCNY was a tuition-free in Harlem, New York, intended to give working class students the best education possible. The school was comprised of minorities, many of whom were the immigrants or children of immigrants. In 1949-50, the CCNY squad, led by legendary coach Nat Holman, shocked the basketball world by becoming the first and only school to win the N.I.T. and N.C.A.A. tournaments in the same scene. At a time when college basketball was much more popular in New York than the fledgling NBA, the CCNY boys became the talk of the town and heroes to millions. The following season, several members of the CCNY team, including the entire starting five, were arrested as part of a massive point shaving scandal that had engulfed the entire collegiate basketball scene in New York City. Overnight, the CCNY boys went from heroes to villains. Their dreams of playing in the NBA were dashed and gambling scandal became a stigma which attached to them for the rest of their lives. The scandal was so persuasive that many members of the New York Police Department were caught up in it, leading to the resignation of the chief of police and the mayor. Matthew Goodman's The City Game: Triumph, Scandal, and a Legendary Basketball Team (Ballantine Books, 2019) is not just a book about basketball. It is a journey through life in New York City in the late 1940s and early 1950s, a window into how big cities ran in the mid-20th century, an inside look at the world of sports gambling, a story of corruption, and ultimately, a tale of working class people and the decisions they are faced with. Through the use of meticulous research, Goodman delves into the complex characters of the basketball players involved and how the scandal affected their lives moving forward. The reader is left to ponder one crucial question: Would I have taken the money had I been in their position? Paul Knepper is an attorney and writer who was born and raised in New York and currently resides in Austin. He used to write about basketball for Bleacher Report and his first book about the New York Knicks Teams of the 1990s is due out this year. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years working on a PhD, or if you’re a faculty member whose career has basically consisted of higher ed, switching isn’t so easy. PhD holders are mostly trained to work as professors, and making easy connections to other careers is no mean feat. Because the people you know were generally trained to do the same sorts of things, an easy source of advice might not be there for you. Thankfully, for anybody who wishes there was a guidebook that would just break all of this down, that book has now been written. Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers (Stylus Publishing, 2020) by Kathryn E. Linder, Kevin Kelly, and Thomas J. Tobin offers practical advice and step-by-step instructions on how to decide if you want to leave behind academia and how to start searching for a new career. If a lot of career advice is too vague or too ambiguous, this book corrects that by outlining not just how to figure out what you might want to do, but critically, how you might go about accomplishing that. Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
The so-called Sabermetrics revolution in baseball that began in the 1970s, popularized by the book—and later Hollywood film—Moneyball, was supposed to represent a triumph of observation over intuition. Cash-strapped clubs need not compete for hyped-up prospects when undervalued players provide better price per run scored. Q.E.D., right? In Scouting and Scoring: How We Know What We Know About Baseball (Princeton University Press, 2019), historian of science Christopher J. Phillips rejects his titular dualism. He shows us that baseball can be, in the words of seminal anthropologist and noted Tampa Bay Rays fan Claude Lévi-Strauss, “good to think with.” Both traditional amateur scouts and statistically-savvy scorers rely on metrics and bureaucracy to make their judgments count, as it were. Some like to say that baseball is quantitative at its core, but by tracing the co-evolution of the sport’s competing data sciences—with episodes that bear witness to the development of the modern press and digital computers—Phillips crafts a compelling narrative sure to delight baseball fans and historians of the human sciences alike. kidding Mikey McGovern is a PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science. He is writing a dissertation on how people used discrimination statistics to argue about rights in 1970s America, and what this means for histories of bureaucracy, quantification, law, politics, and race. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Andrew R. M. Smith, author of No Way But To Fight: George Foreman and the Business of Boxing (University of Texas Press, 2020). In our conversation, we discussed Foreman’s career, the role of race in American sports, and how boxing helped give rise to athletic mega-events. In No Way But To Fight, Smith traces the intersections between Foreman’s life, the racial politics of sports during the Civil Rights era, the intensification of boxing’s commercialization, the complexities of black masculinities, and the internationalization of sports mega-events. He shows that from his upbringing in Houston’s Fifth Ward to his role as a spokesman for the Foreman Grill, Foreman always fought to redefine himself along with the times. Smith’s telescoping view showcases a Foreman that played with different personalities - including American patriot, soul man, and evangelical preacher - in order to achieve success at distinct stages of his life. Although Smiths work proceeds chronologically, it focuses heavily on Foreman’s first boxing career, the period between Foreman’s Gold Medal fight in 1968 to his defeat in 1977 to Jimmy Young. Based on a close reading of newspaper articles, advertising materials, and interviews with the boxer, he paints vivid pictures of the snapshots of Foreman’s life. The pugilist pursued different strategies throughout his career in and outside of the ring – some more sensible than others such as not drinking water the day before a fight. He also showcases the way fighting created pathways for a young man from one of Houston’s roughest neighborhoods to achieve global fame and fortune. No Way But To Fight will appeal to readers interested in the links between money, race, and prize fighting in the United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
College sport is a multi-billion dollar industry. The men and women who lead the teams in the most important conferences often make millions of dollars between their coaching salaries and endorsement deals. But what about the athletes themselves? Most get a “free ride” (tuition, food and board), but is that sufficient? Given that the majority of the athletes in the major sports (read that to be football and men’s basketball) are African American, what type of recompense are they getting for their toil and sweat on the gridiron and the hardcourt? Since the overwhelming majority of these men do not make it to the NFL or the NBA, are they benefiting from being student-athletes, or are they being taken advantage of by schools and universities that make money off of their efforts and provide little in return? It is important questions such as these that John N. Singer addresses in his book, Race, Sports, and Education: Improving Opportunities and Outcomes for Black Male College Athletes (Harvard Education Press, 2019). By interviewing athletes, Singer gets to the heart of the debate about the value (or not) of collegiate athletics. Many of the subjects interviewed did benefit, but they relate how the machinery of college athletics still continues to exploit its principal workers: African American young men. Singer’s work opens the door to the voices of such individuals, and they have much to say about the current (sorry) state of things, and how the athletes themselves can work (with concerned faculty and administrators) to bring about change. Jorge Iber is a professor of history at Texas Tech University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Maria Veri, Associate Professor of Kinesiology at San Francisco State University, and Rita Liberti, Professor of Kinesiology at California State University, East Bay. Together they are the authors of Gridiron Gourmet: Gender and Food at the Football Tailgate (University of Arkansas Press, 2019), one of the most compelling books on sports studies to come out this year. In our conversation, we discussed the origins of tailgating in the United States, the way that tailgate gender roles changed throughout the 20th century; the interplay between the gender of tailgaters, cooking technologies, and food ways of tailgating; and the future possibilities and current limitations of the tailgating community. In Gridiron Gourmet, Liberti and Veri trace the long history of American tailgate practices and use that history to unpack tailgating in several sites across the contemporary USA. They base their study on a wide range of sources, including newspaper, cartoon, television shows, cookbooks, and ethnographic and observational research in locations as varied as the Bay Area, Buffalo, and Louisiana. They discover how the practices of tailgating shifted from one emphasizing feminine domesticity in the first half of the 20th century to the valorisation of hyper masculinity in the 1970s. Their work is organized thematically with chapters on technology and spectacle; gender, class and cooking; race, gender, and class on the black top; and the creation of long-term tailgating communities. Considered together their research shows how tailgating provides men with “culinary cover” to enact traditionally female role such as cook and even nurturer in the shadow of the stadium. Innovative tailgaters further expand their roles through creative reconstruction of masculine identities, even as not all people are able to equally participate in the tailgate lots. Gridiron Gourmet will appeal to scholars broadly interested in sports studies, American football, food studies, and cultural studies. Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled A Nation in Play: Physical Culture, the State, and Society during France’s Dark Years, 1932-1948, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Seán Crosson, leader of the Sport and Exercise Research Group at NUI Galway, co-director of the MA in Sports Journalism and Communication, and Professor at the Huston School of Film and Digital Media. He is also the author of Gaelic Games on Film: From Silent Films to Hollywood Hurling, Horror, and the Emergence of Irish Cinema (Cork University Press, 2019). In our conversation, we discussed the first depictions of Gaelic Games on film; American and British portrayals of hurling and Gaelic football that popularized and subverted Irish stereotypes; the role of the Gaelic Games in promoting Irish Nationalism, and the contemporary subversion of conservative notions of Irishness through representations of the games since the 1960s. Along the way, we discussed numerous popular films such as Knocknagow (1918), The Quiet Man (1952), and The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006). In Gaelic Games on Film, Crosson traces out the use of Irish sports in Irish, American, and British cinema. His analysis engages with different kinds of cinema, including dramas, silent and horror films, as well as non-fiction accounts in documentaries and newsreels. Many of these accounts challenged the normative description of hurling and Gaelic football presented by the Gaelic Athletic Association. Depictions of Gaelic games in American and British films relied upon and subverted stereotypes about the Irish, especially their supposed propensity to violence, to both situate Irish nationhood within its international context with its closest neighbours and to manage the integration of Irish migrants leaving the country in great numbers in the middle of the twentieth century. Their Irish cinema counterparts, who with few exceptions took to cinema work a little later, following the redevelopment of the Irish film industry after independence, used hurling and Gaelic football to both articulate and critique notions of Irish masculinity, religiosity, and conservativism. Here Crosson points out that the popularity and legibility of sports contributed to the development of Irish cultural institutions such as the National Film Institute of Ireland and Gael Linn, who both produced newsreels of the Gaelic Games to sell to cinemas around the country and benefitted from the popularity of those movies. Listeners interested in seeing some clips of the films in question can watch another interview with Crosson here. Crosson’s work offers innovative perspectives on the interplay between histories of sport and cinema. This book will appeal to readers interested in Irish, sports, and film studies. Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled A Nation in Play: Physical Culture, the State, and Society during France’s Dark Years, 1932-1948, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Evan Friss, an associate professor of history at James Madison University, historicizes the bicycle’s place in New York City’s social, economic, infrastructural and cultural politics. On Bicycles: A 200-Year History of Cycling in New York City (Columbia UP, 2019) curates a history of the key moments and individuals who worked to integrate the bicycle and the bicyclist into the urban fabric. Friss explores the long-standing debate over what a bicycle is—cars and walkers, he contends, had specific places on city streets. The bicycle was a different story. New Yorkers strove to define and redefine the relationship among New York City, its people, and their bicycles. Beginning with the fad of velocipedes and the arrival of the first modern bicycles on city streets in the second half of the nineteenth century, On Bicycles highlights key moments in cycling history. With each era, a diverse cohort of cyclists and municipal officials tasked with integrating—or banning—bicycles from city streets. Cyclists turned to bikes as a form of exercise as recreation, as a liberating technology, and as transportation. In Friss’s capable telling, cycling is a window into the nature of transportation, streets, and urban life. Kara Murphy Schlichting is an assistant professor of history at Queens College, CUNY and author of New York Recentered: Building the Metropolis from the Shore. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
The thriving metropolis of Chicago was the land of opportunity for a wide variety of ethnic groups. As individuals from nations where soccer reigned began arriving in the area, they instituted teams and leagues that supported “their” game. Ultimately the sport grew, and with the passage of time, eventually developed a following among native-born sons and daughters of these immigrants (including the development of high school teams throughout the city and leagues affiliated with the parks movement). The sport was also an attraction for athletes who worked at various corporations; a mechanism whereby employers often tried to increase the loyalty of their workers. Additionally, there were players and associations that challenged employer dominance by creating teams that favored unions and even radical political affiliations (such as the communists). Gabe Logan’s new book The Early Years of Chicago Soccer, 1887-1939 (Lexington Books, 2019) shows why the sport was significant to a substantial percentage of the population of Chicago, and how it was utilized to build associations of various kinds: be they ethnic, union, or political. Jorge Iber is a professor of history at Texas Tech University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Earl Campbell was a force in American football, winning a state championship in high school, rushing his way to a Heisman trophy for the University of Texas, and earning MVP as he took the Houston Oilers to the brink of the Super Bowl. Asher Price's exhilarating blend of biography and history, Early Campbell: Yards After Contact (University of Texas Press, 2019) chronicles the challenges and sacrifices one supremely gifted athlete faced in his journey to the Hall of Fame. The story begins in Tyler, Texas, and features his indomitable mother, a crusading judge, and a newly integrated high school, then moves to Austin, home of the University of Texas (infamously, the last all-white national champion in college football), where legendary coach Darrell Royal stakes his legacy on recruiting Campbell. Later, in booming, Luv-Ya-Blue Houston, Campbell reaches his peak with beloved coach Bum Phillips, who celebrates his star runner’s bruising style even as it takes its toll on Campbell’s body. Drawing on new interviews and research, Asher Price reveals how a naturally reticent kid from the country who never sought the spotlight struggled with complex issues of race and health. In an age when concussion revelations and player protest against racial injustice rock the NFL, Campbell’s life is a timely story of hard-earned success—and heart-wrenching sacrifice. Paul Knepper is an attorney and writer who was born and raised in New York and currently resides in Austin. He used to write about basketball for Bleacher Report and his currently working on his first book about the New York Knicks Teams of the 1990s is due out next year. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous―and easier to share than ever. We associate charts with science and reason; the flashy visuals are both appealing and persuasive. Pie charts, maps, bar and line graphs, and scatter plots (to name a few) can better inform us, revealing patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. In short, good charts make us smarter―if we know how to read them. However, they can also lead us astray. Charts lie in a variety of ways―displaying incomplete or inaccurate data, suggesting misleading patterns, and concealing uncertainty―or are frequently misunderstood, such as the confusing cone of uncertainty maps shown on TV every hurricane season. To make matters worse, many of us are ill-equipped to interpret the visuals that politicians, journalists, advertisers, and even our employers present each day, enabling bad actors to easily manipulate them to promote their own agendas. In How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information (W. W. Norton, 2019), data visualization expert Alberto Cairo teaches us to not only spot the lies in deceptive visuals, but also to take advantage of good ones to understand complex stories. Public conversations are increasingly propelled by numbers, and to make sense of them we must be able to decode and use visual information. By examining contemporary examples ranging from election-result infographics to global GDP maps and box-office record charts, How Charts Lie demystifies an essential new literacy, one that will make us better equipped to navigate our data-driven world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
All aficionados of baseball are familiar with the pathbreaking role of Jackie Robinson in reintegrating the game back in 1947. What many fans are less familiar with are the issues that Latinos of color endured both in the minor leagues and the Majors starting back in the 1950s. How difficult was it for a mulato, a person who had never endured (or even heard of) Jim Crow, to come to grips with the “peculiarities” of life in the United States, while simultaneously trying to learn a new language as well as trying play well enough in order to move up the various rungs of a particular franchise’s farm system? The story of Major League great (as a player and manager) Felipe Alou sheds light on this important topic. Alou started playing organized baseball late in life (early teens), endured poverty and hardship in his native Dominican Republic, and then helped to break down barriers of language and perception throughout his long career on the field and in the dugout. All the while, he played with skill, dignity, and intelligence; helping to shatter the stereotypes that professional baseball (and many in the United States) embraced about Spanish-speakers. Felipe utilized his position as a player, coach, and manager to help various clubs win ball games; but he also did even more important things. He challenged the notion that Latinos are lazy and not tactical in their approach and understanding of baseball. By doing this, he has opened many possibilities for the current and upcoming generation of Latinos in the game. No longer are Spanish-surnamed players merely perceived as athletes, now they have Alou, and others, to look toward as role models for entering into the off-the-field aspect of the game. The book, Alou: My Baseball Journey (University of Nebraska Press, 2018), which is co-authored with Peter Kerasotis, documents the life, struggles, and successes of this great ambassador of the game of baseball. Jorge Iber is a professor of history at Texas Tech University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Rodeo is one of the indelible images of culture in the American West. The John Wayne-like cowboy tenaciously hanging on to the bucking bronc is a classic vision of what it means to be in the West. In Outriders: Rodeo at the Fringes of the American West (University of Washington, 2019), author and University of Idaho historian Rebecca Scofield argues that rodeo performance has also long-been a means of asserting “Western-ness” for people excluded from narratives about the region. From women rodeo riders to African American and gay performers, Scofield writes about the ways professional rodeo has been a means of inclusion into Western stories, and how professionalization of the sport has also excluded riders from its ranks. Among the stories Scofield tells are the incarcerated Texas rodeo performers who put their bodies on the line both for the coerced spectacle, as a means of entertaining visitors, and as a method of asserting their rights and humanity within a dehumanizing system. The meaning of rodeo has been contested and contingent throughout the twentieth century, and is about much more than clowns, cowboys, and angry steer. Outriders may exist on the fringes of traditional Western stories, but they are central to the constantly changing image of the American West. Stephen Hausmann is an Assistant Professor of US History at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. He teaches courses on modern US history, environmental history, and Indigenous history and is currently working on his book manuscript, an environmental history of the Black Hills of South Dakota and Wyoming. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
1978 was the year that changed San Francisco forever, writes Lincoln A. Mitchell in San Francisco Year Zero: Political Upheaval, Punk Rock and a Third-Place Baseball Team (Rutgers University Press, 2019). After the long hangover from the heady 1960s and summer of love, San Francisco was, by the late ‘70s, a city in transition and a city in crisis. The election of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay American elected official, and the re-election of left-wing mayor George Moscone seemed to indicate a rejection of political centrism and an embrace of leftist municipal politics. That all changed in November when an assassin’s bullet killed both leaders, bringing Diane Feinstein to power and putting the city on a path to economic inequality and broadly liberal social politics. Behind the political chaos, the culture of the Grateful Dead was giving way to the punk rock scene, and a mediocre-yet-lovable Giants team was capturing the hearts of its fans and banishing all fears of a possible relocation to the east coast. 1978 created today’s San Francisco, for good and ill, and Mitchell tells the story of a city he loves in vivid detail and a keen sense of narrative. San Francisco has long been an easy city to stereotype – San Francisco Year Zero urges readers to embrace the complications hidden just out of sight below the city’s foggy surface. Stephen Hausmann is an Assistant Professor of US History at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. He teaches courses on modern US history, environmental history, and Indigenous history and is currently working on his book manuscript, an environmental history of the Black Hills of South Dakota and Wyoming. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Dr. Derrick E. White's new book Blood, Sweat, and Tears: Jake Gaither, Florida A&M, and the History of Black College Football (University of North Carolina Press, 2019) chronicles the development of black college football in the twentieth century, and is among the first comprehensive histories of black college athletics. Using the biography of Alonzo “Jake” Gaither and the history of the football program at Florida A&M University (FAMU), Dr. White shows how black college football and its supporters created successful programs during segregation by relying on a network of athletic enthusiasts in the media, on campuses, and in the community. White is the author of The Challenge of Blackness: The Institute of the Black World and Political Activism in the 1970s (Florida, 2011) and has published articles in New Politics, The Journal of African American History, the C.L.R. James Journal, The Journal of African American Studies, and The Florida Historical Quarterly. He's also the co-host “The Black Athlete Podcast” with Professor Louis Moore of Grand Valley State University. You can find him on Twitter @blackstar1906. Adam McNeil is a History PhD Student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Trevor Thompson, a journalist who has reported on association football in Australia and around the world since the 1980s. He is also the author of Playing for Australia: The First Socceroos, Asia, and World Football (Fair Play Publishing, 2018). In our conversation, we discussed the limitation of Australia’s connection with British football in the interwar period, Australia’s Asian football connections, and the future for Australian football in the Asia-Pacific. In Playing for Australia, Thompson investigates the Asian context of some of Australia’s earliest international soccer matches. He notes that Australia’s engagement with Asian football did not start in with their adherence to the Asian Football Confederation in 2006. Instead, Thompson illustrates the long durée history of Australian connections in Asia-Pacific football. In 1922, Australia competed in their first internationals against New Zealand. The next year, a side from China visited Australia touring Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria. Over the next decade, Australian teams mostly competed against teams from Asia and South Asia and representative teams from Australia also travelled multiple times to the Dutch East Indies, Singapore, and Malaya. Thompson’s revision of Socceroos early years raises tantalizing possibilities for what Australian football might have looked like had its early organizers been more ambitious, cosmopolitan, aware, united, and even more Asian. He argues that Aussie cultural fealty to Great Britain slowed the growth of Aussie football during the crucial decades of its international expansion. The ignorance of early organizers, the disunity of state soccer federations, and the arrogance of the FA caused Australia to miss their chance to compete in the first two World Cups. This book will appeal to readers interested in Australian, Asian, and sports history. Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled A Nation in Play: Physical Culture, the State, and Society during France’s Dark Years, 1932-1948, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might called "fundamental research." Their authors--dedicated researchers one and all--provide the scholarly stuff upon which many non-fiction trade books are based. So when you are reading, say, a popular history, you are often reading UP books at one remove. Of course, some UP books are also bestsellers, and they are all well written (and, I should say, thoroughly vetted thanks to the peer review system), but the greatest contribution of UPs is to provide a base of fundamental research to the public. And they do a great job of it. How do they do it? Today I talked to Kathryn Conrad, the president of the Association of University Presses, about the work of UPs, the challenges they face, and some terrific new directions they are going. We also talked about why, if you have a scholarly book in progress, you should talk to UP editors early and often. And she explains how! Listen in. Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not necessarily make us good teachers. Jessamyn Neuhaus’s Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers (West Virginia University Press, 2019) helps us to identify and embrace that geekiness in us and then offers practical, step-by-step guidelines for how to turn it to effective pedagogy. It’s a sharp, slim, and entertaining volume that can make better teachers of us all. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Noah Cohan, Lecturer in American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, and the author of We Average Unbeautiful Watchers: Fan Narratives and the Reading of American Sport (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). In our conversation, we discussed the nature of sports narrative, the way that fictional and non-fictional accounts can illuminate the lived experiences of fans, and the role sports blogs have played in reshaping sports narratives beyond the capitalist and competitive frameworks promoted by major leagues such as the NBA and the MLB. In We Average Unbeautiful Watchers, Cohan investigates “the behavior of American sports fans to understand (its) cultural relevance beyond mere consumerism.” He argues that sports contain all the elements of traditional stories: beginnings, middles, ends, plots, characters, rising action, declension, and a causal trajectory. These narrative pieces allow fans to enact “consumptive, receptive, and appropriative” activities that are “fundamentally acts of narrative interpretation and (re-) creation.” Creative fans transform sporting activities into spaces for self-reflection and authorship and in doing so fundamentally remake sports to suit their individual agendas. Cohan investigates five different types of sports narratives: fictions, fictional memoirs, memoirs, film, and blogs. These narratives include classics in the field, such as Don DeLillo’s Underworld, and Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, but he mostly engages with relatively novel accounts such as Matthew Quick’s narrative metafiction Silver Linings Playbook, Scott Raab’s memoir of the early 2000s Cleveland Cavaliers, The Whore of Akron and the feminist sports blog Power Forward. These diverse genres of athletic storytelling allow Cohan to comment on how fans have used fictional and non-fictional accounts to build their own identities, address questions of social inequity, work through mental illness, and appreciate sports in new ways. His work also suggests that a more flexible understanding of fandom might allow us to rethink sports in meaningful ways, improving the way we play games, as well as open up new pathways to fandom, making it more inclusive for women, people of color, and LGBTQ people. Cohan’s work will appeal to a broad range of scholars, but especially to those with an interest in the intersections between sports, literature, and narrative. Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled A Nation in Play: Physical Culture, the State, and Society during France’s Dark Years, 1932-1948, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au.
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One. Two. Three. That’s as long as it took to sear the souls of a dozen young American men, thanks to the craziest, most controversial finish in the history of the Olympics—the 1972 gold-medal basketball contest between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the world’s two superpowers at the time. The U.S. team, whose unbeaten Olympic streak dated back to when Adolf Hitler reigned over the Berlin Games, believed it had won the gold medal that September in Munich—not once, but twice. But it was the third time the final seconds were played that counted. What happened? The head of international basketball—flouting rules he himself had created—trotted onto the court and demanded twice that time be put back on the clock. A referee allowed an illegal substitution and an illegal free-throw shooter for the Soviets while calling a slew of late fouls on the U.S. players. The American players became the only Olympic athletes in the history of the games to refuse their medals. Of course, the 1972 Olympics are remembered primarily for a far graver matter, when eleven Israeli team members were killed by Palestinian terrorists, stunning the world and temporarily stopping the games. One American player, Tommy Burleson, had a gun to his head as the hostages were marched past him before their deaths. In his new book Three Seconds in Munich: The Controversial 1972 Olympic Basketball Final(University of Nebraska Press, 2019), David A. F. Sweet relates the horror of terrorism, the pain of losing the most controversial championship game in sports history to a hated rival, and the consequences of the players’ decision to shun their Olympic medals to this day. Paul Knepper is an attorney and writer who was born and raised in New York and currently resides in Austin. He used to write about basketball for Bleacher Report and is currently working on his first book, tentatively titled: No Layups Allowed: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Combative New York Knicks Teams of the 1990s. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep.
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Today we are joined by Rob Ruck, Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh, and the author of Tropic of Football: The Long and Perilous Journey of Samoans to the NFL (The New Press, 2018). In our conversation, we discussed the origins of football in American Samoa, the disproportionate representation of Samoans in Division 1 college football and the NFL, and the cultural origins of Samoan sporting success. In Tropic of Football, Ruck addresses the paradox of Samoan accomplishment in American football. Samoans are roughly forty times more likely than non-Samoans to compete in the NFL. Ruck argues that their capabilities do not come from any genetic predisposition, but from the particularities of the Samoan way, the so-called fa’a Samoa, which emphasizes a warrior mentality, strong work ethic, rigid social hierarchy, deep family ties, and competition without fear. At the same time, Ruck also finds influences from outside of Samoa, including: the US Armed Forces, the Church of Latter Day Saints, and a range of savvy football recruiters willing to look beyond their usual hunting grounds in the Midwest and South. Fa’a Samoa propelled a wide range of footballers to success, including the first Samoan in the NFL, Al Lolotai, Junior Seau, and Troy Polamalu and Ruck’s analysis traces Samoan sporting triumphs in three locations: American Samoa, Hawaii, and California. In American Samoa, football battles divided competing villages but also provided the whole island with a sense of pride as an increasing number of men left with athletic scholarships to pursue education on the mainland. In Hawaii, the “Polynesian Pipeline” delivered footballers for annual battles between Honolulu’s top private schools and their north shore rivals, helping to create a rich multicultural web of sporting connections across the island. In California, the children of US marines used football as a way to integrate into American high school life, but they also brought a distinctly Samoan energy that appealed to coaches. In each case, as the fortunes of Samoan footballers rose, they also faced challenges associated with the loss of the fa’a Samoa in the face of Americanization and globalization. Even as Samoans provided outsize influence to America’s leading American football institutions, Ruck’s work also examines the long-term costs of football in Samoa. The same hyper-masculine culture that empowers Samoan footballs to play with no fear (no fefe), also stops them from reporting injuries. This is especially important as the threat of chronic traumatic encephalitis becomes better known. The growing medical crisis of CTE parallels other Samoan health emergencies associated with Americanization, including widespread diabetes and obesity. Much more than a sports history, Ruck’s work will appeal to scholars interested in American football, but also those interested in immigration/migration studies, Hawaiian history and US imperial history. Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled A Nation in Play: Physical Culture, the State, and Society during France’s Dark Years, 1932-1948, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au.
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The game of basketball is not necessarily associated with Mexicans or Mexican Americans. In Mexico, soccer (futbol) is the number one sport, followed by baseball. There is even professional (and collegiate) American football. In some parts of the country, however, due to the geography, another sport, hoops has become a major part of community life. One such locale is the state of Oaxaca. When Oaxacans began coming to the United States in large numbers in the 1970s, they brought “their” game with them to locales such as Los Angeles. The sport has now become a tool to (re)create community among Oaxacans in southern California, and elsewhere. The book Transnational Sport in the American West: Oaxaca California Basketball (Lexington Books, 2019) by Bernardo Ramirez Rios documents the importance of this sport to the community north of the border, as well as a mechanism to retain/strengthen ties to the homeland they have left behind. Jorge Iber is a professor of history at Texas Tech University.
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Shortly after the conclusion of the Women's World Cup earlier this summer, a friend suggested to me that it signaled the long-awaited arrival of soccer as a mainstream sport in the U.S. I thought a second, remembering the commercials around the game and the way the television cameras shot the crowd. Then I responded that I thought it wasn't really the long-awaited arrival of soccer, but the emergence of women's sports into the mainstream of American culture. This is something of an exaggeration. But the summer of the World Cup is perhaps a perfect time to think through the position of women's sports in global society. Nancy Lough and Andrea N. Geurin do just that in their new edited Routledge Handbook of the Business of Women's Sport (Routledge, 2019). Lough and Guerin bring together forty different authors to survey the status of women's sports in 2019. The essays range from discussions of the history of women's sports to analyses of media representation of women in sports to the economics and management of women's sports. Collectively, it is a remarkable accomplishment. Lough and Guerin offer a comprehensive survey of the field while pointing to future questions and topics of research. The coverage is scholarly, but with an eye to the political and sports culture in which women's sports exists. Anyone interested in understanding the business of women's sports should start here. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. He’s the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Past series, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994, published by W. W. Norton Press, and (with Abigail Perkiss) Changing the Game: Title IX, Gender and Athletics in American Universities, to be published by W. W. Norton in November 2019.
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Today we are joined by Roy Hay, Honorary Fellow at Deakin University, and the author of Aboriginal People and Australian Football in the 19th Century: They Did Not Come From Nowhere (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019). In our conversation, we discussed the origins of Australian Rules Football, indigenous competition in cricket and footy in the mid and late-19th century in rural Victoria, and the Marngrook debate. In Aboriginal People and Australian Football in the 19th Century, Hay offers an extensively researched account of indigenous participation in Australian Rules Football from the origins of the game through the early twentieth century. Using the newspaper archives available on the Trove database, Hay delves into the sports pages of local Victorian presses and recovers a wide range of Aboriginal athletes competing inside of the missions and in local and regional competitions across rural Victoria. His work rediscovers Aboriginal excellence despite the typically negative depictions of indigenous Australians common in the colonial archives. Hay’s work challenges the narrative of sports civilizing mission. Instead, he creates a compelling story of widespread Aboriginal agency as indigenous athletes competed on their own terms despite systematic bias from the white sporting establishment, especially from the VFL/VFA that barred any competition between Melbournian and aboriginal teams. Hay’s work will appeal to scholars interested in the role of sports in Australia or in the interplay between sports and colonial governments. In a final chapter, Hay raises questions about the influence of Marngrook on the origins of Australian football that will be essential reading to scholars of Australian sport. Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled A Nation in Play: Physical Culture, the State, and Society during France’s Dark Years, 1932-1948, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au.
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Vanessa Heggie talks about the history of biomedical research in extreme environments. Heggie is a Fellow of the Institute for Global Innovation at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of Higher and Colder: A History of Extreme Physiology and Exploration(University of Chicago Press, 2019). During the long twentieth century, explorers went in unprecedented numbers to the hottest, coldest, and highest points on the globe. Taking us from the Himalaya to Antarctica and beyond, Higher and Colder presents the first history of extreme physiology, the study of the human body at its physical limits. Each chapter explores a seminal question in the history of science, while also showing how the apparently exotic locations and experiments contributed to broader political and social shifts in twentieth-century scientific thinking. Unlike most books on modern biomedicine, Higher and Colder focuses on fieldwork, expeditions, and exploration, and in doing so provides a welcome alternative to laboratory-dominated accounts of the history of modern life sciences. Though centered on male-dominated practices—science and exploration—it recovers the stories of women’s contributions that were sometimes accidentally, and sometimes deliberately, erased. Engaging and provocative, this book is a history of the scientists and physiologists who face challenges that are physically demanding, frequently dangerous, and sometimes fatal, in the interest of advancing modern science and pushing the boundaries of human ability. Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.
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As my first guest, I’d would like to introduce Susan Brownell, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Missouri – St Louis, one of the authors of The Anthropology of Sport: Bodies, Borders, Biopolitics (University of California Press, 2018). During the course of the interview, we covered the subfield of sport anthropology, the marginalization of traditional games, the recent Caster Semenya case, and the contemporary transnationalism of sport. In The Anthropology of Sport, understandably, the authors enlighten us about what the subfield entails, how anthropology is well suited to dissect the nature of sport, and provide us with ample anecdotes and observations of the world of sport through an ‘anthropological gaze.’ The chapters are structured in a way that cover all the relevant aspects in the study of sport, including history, class, race/ethnicity, sex/gender, nationalism, and globalization. Two important additions to the field of sport studies include a chapter on sport, health, and the environment (3), as well as sport as a cultural performance (6). In the former, which can be taken as a foundational text on the subject, the history of sport medicine and non-Western perspectives on sport and the body are enlightening, with anecdotes about the history of yoga and the Falun Gong movement. In the latter, the performative turn and ritual theory are used to dissect the contemporary global sport mega-event infrastructure. In conclusion, the authors point out that “more than any other form of human activity, sport embodies some of the fundamental questions that anthropology poses” (258), and this book lives up to its lofty title. Brownell, Besnier, and Carter’s work is a new text in a yet undefined field – it may be the start of something new. If interested in the global nature of sport today, The Anthropology of Sport is a necessary read. Tom Fabian is a PhD candidate at the University of Western Ontario (London, Ontario, Canada) and an assistant professor of sport management at St. Francis Xavier University (Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada). His field, broadly, is the sociocultural history of sport, and he focuses on the globalization of folk games. Specifically, he is interested in the safeguarding of folk games through the UNESCO heritagization process, as well as the trend of adopting traditional games as national sports. Secondary research interests include the histories of the Universiade, volleyball, and Hungarian water polo. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at tfabian@uwo.ca.
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In the late ’90s and early 2000s, the Portland Trail Blazers were one of the hottest teams in the NBA. For almost a decade, they won 60 percent of their games while making it to the Western Conference Finals twice. However, what happened off-court was just as unforgettable as what they did on the court. When someone asked Blazers general manager Bob Whitsitt about his team’s chemistry, he replied that he’d “never studied chemistry in college.” And with that, the “Jail Blazers” were born. Built in a similar fashion to a fantasy team, the team had skills, but their issues ended up being their undoing. In fact, many consider it the darkest period in franchise history. While fans across the country were watching the skills of Damon Stoudamire, Rasheed Wallace, and Zach Randolph, those in Portland couldn’t have been more disappointed in the players’ off-court actions. This, many have mentioned, included a very racial element—which carried over to the players as well. As forward Rasheed Wallace said, “We’re not really going to worry about what the hell [the fans] think about us. They really don’t matter to us. They can boo us every day, but they’re still going to ask for our autographs if they see us on the street. That’s why they’re fans and we’re NBA players.” In his book Jail Blazers: How the Portland Trail Blazers Became the Bad Boys of Basketball (Sport Publishing, 2018), Kerry Eggers, who covered the Trail Blazers during this controversial era, goes back to share the stories from the players, coaches, management, and those in Portland when the players were in the headlines as much for their play as for their legal issues. Paul Knepper is an attorney and writer who was born and raised in New York and currently resides in Austin. He used to write about basketball for Bleacher Report and is currently working on his first book about the New York Knicks teams of the 1990s. You can reach him at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep.
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Today we are joined by Stephen Hardy, retired professor of kinesiology and affiliate professor of history at the University of New Hampshire, and Andrew Holman, professor of history at and the director of Canadian studies at Bridgewater State University. Hardy and Holman are the co-authors of Hockey: A Global History (University of Illinois Press, 2018). In our conversation, we discussed the popularization of the Montreal game in the 19th; the rise of divergent styles of hockey in Canada, the USA, and Europe; and the increasing commercialization of hockey. In Hockey, Hardy and Holman offer a comprehensive and engaging history of the fastest game from it’s origins in a series of stick based contests, including early hockey, bandy, and polo through to the development of our contemporary commercial hockey best exhibited by the NHL and KHL. Their work offers an innovative periodization that gives order to the tensions and contradictions inherent in the disorderly expansion and contraction of the global game. They chose to concentrate on the convergences and divergences of the hockey world beginning with the codification and spread of the Montreal game in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Their second section addresses the expansion of hockey beyond Montreal throughout the rest of Canada, the northern US, and Europe. The third part of Hockey covers 1920 until 1972, a period of divergence in which American, Canadian, and European hockey leagues developed unique cultural characteristic expressed through national rules and styles. The final section of the book analyses the convergence hockey through the lens of globalization and commercialization. Hardy and Holman’s work will appeal to scholars interested in the spread of hockey but more broadly to people interested in how different cultural products diffuse through the creation of global networks. Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled A Nation in Play: Physical Culture, the State, and Society during France’s Dark Years, 1932-1948, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au.
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Brenda Elsey and Joshua Nadel’s new book, Futbolera: A History of Women and Sports in Latin America (University of Texas Press, 2019), uncovers the hidden history of the arrival of physical education for girls in the late-nineteenth century, it’s expansion beyond schools, and the subterranean struggles of girls and women to play and expand access and support for sports across Latin America. While sports has often been sidelined in histories of gender, class, nationalism, and the so-called Social Question in the region, Elsey and Nadel show how women’s involvement in sports animated eugenic debates over healthy citizens, nationalism, and proper motherhood in government, the Church, and the press. Beginning with women’s sports clubs in schools and moving to charity events, informal play, and regional leagues, women began to take up previously denied national and international pastimes much earlier than previously acknowledged. With women’s sports facing opposition, underfunding, neglect, silence, and outright outlawing (in the case of futbol in Brazil) throughout the twentieth century and up to the current World Cup, the authors show how generations of women athletes’ struggles and memories wove together a vibrant history of play, competition, and resilience. Despite the title, the book explores women’s involvement in tennis, track, gymnastics, basketball, and futbol (soccer), and medical and media debates over which activities were “properly” or “improperly” feminine for women’s psychology, bodies, and futures as mother’s. It covers case studies in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Costa Rica, and El Salvador. Jesse Zarley will be an assistant professor of history at Saint Joseph’s College on Long Island, where in Fall 2019 he will be teaching Latin American, Caribbean, and World History. His research interests include borderlands, ethnohistory, race, and transnationalism during Latin America’s Age of Revolution, particularly in Chile and Argentina. He is the author of a recent article on Mapuche leaders and Chile’s independence wars. You can follow him on Twitter.
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Wrigley Field is one of a handful of sports stadiums to have transcended its athletic purpose to become a true American landmark. Nestled in its neighborhood on the north side of Chicago, the park may be a throwback to a bygone era of baseball, but a recent renovation has positioned it for a long future. Gregory H. Wolf has edited Wrigley Field: The Friendly Confines at Clark and Addison, a new volume from the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR). Wolf is a professor of German studies and holder of the Dennis and Jean Bauman Endowed Chair in the Humanities at North Central College in Naperville, Ill. He is a member of SABR, for which he has edited nine books. Nathan Bierma is a writer, instructional designer, and voiceover talent in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His website is www.nathanbierma.com.
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Chris Donnelly's new book Doc, Donnie, The Kid and Billy Brawl: How the 1985 Mets and Yankees Fought For New York’s Baseball Soul (University of Nebraska Press, 2019) focuses on the 1985 New York baseball season, a season like no other since the Mets came to town in 1962. Never before had both the Yankees and the Mets been in contention for the playoffs so late in the same season. For months New York fans dreamed of the first Subway Series in nearly thirty years, and the Mets and the Yankees vied for their hearts. Despite their nearly identical records, the two teams were drastically different in performance and clubhouse atmosphere. The Mets were filled with young, homegrown talent led by outfielder Darryl Strawberry and pitcher Dwight Gooden. They were complemented by veterans including Keith Hernandez, Gary Carter, Ray Knight, and George Foster. Meanwhile the Yankees featured some of the game’s greatest talent. Rickey Henderson, Dave Winfield, Don Mattingly, and Don Baylor led a dynamic offense, while veterans such as Ron Guidry and Phil Niekro rounded out the pitching staff. But the Yankees’ abundance of talent was easily overshadowed by their dominating owner, George Steinbrenner, whose daily intrusiveness made the 1985 Yankees appear more like a soap opera than a baseball team. Steinbrenner’s antics were highlighted by a bizarre relationship with the erratic Billy Martin, who he hired for a fourth time after firing manager Yogi Berra just 16 games into the season. Paul Knepper is an attorney and writer who was born and raised in New York and currently resides in Austin. He used to write about basketball for Bleacher Report and is currently working on his first book about the New York Knicks teams of the 1990s. You can reach him at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep.
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Today we are joined by Bonita Mersiades, former Head of Public Affairs with the Football Federation Australia, and author of Whatever It Takes: The Inside Story of the FIFA Way (Powderhouse Press, 2018). In our conversation, we discussed the 2018/2022 Australian World Cup bid, the future of global football, and the FIFA way. In Whatever It Takes, Mersiades offers an insiders account into the Australian bid, unpacking the political and personal ambitions that drove the process. The Football Federation Australia, one of the country ’s most powerful executives, and the Commonwealth government worked together to develop a case for an Australian World Cup. They produced an attractive sales pitch that included new stadiums across the country, partnerships with state governments, and potential celebrity endorsements from Aussie movie stars. The bid cost the Australian taxpayers over 50 million dollars, much of that money paid to consultants, but in front of the secretive Executive Committee, the their bid received only one vote. Whatever It Takes documents how the Australian bid failed so completely. Mersiades showcases how the Australian bid – seen by many as the dirty bid – was compromised and highlights how the World Cup bid process can implicate federation officials, journalists, and sportsmen. Mersiades’ account pulses. Few escape her vivid recollections as she deftly weaves her short chapters full with rich conversations with top FIFA officials, including Sepp Blatter; arguments with jet setting former soccer stars; interviews with journalists from around the globe; and interrogations from FBI investigators. Anyone interested in the inner workings of sports most powerful and at times secretive organizations should read Mersiades insiders account. Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled A Nation in Play: Physical Culture, the State, and Society during France’s Dark Years, 1932-1948, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au
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Today we are joined by Gregg Bocketti, Professor of History at Transylvania University, and author of The Invention of the Beautiful Game: Football and the Making of Modern Brazil(University Press of Florida, 2016). In our conversation, we discussed the transplantation of European sports to Brazil, the rising success of the Brazilian national team in the 1920s and 1930s, and the development of O Jogo Bonito style of play. In The Invention of the Beautiful Game, Bocketti takes on the traditional nationalist narrative of Brazilian football, which suggests that their successful teams of the interwar and postwar era, which occurred following the shift from foot-ball to futebol in Brazil, arose from the countries specific cultural and racial heritage. Brazilian soccer’s triumphs emerged from the successes of its racial democracy. Bocketti’s unique organization illustrates the contradictions in this national myth through five thematic chapters. He analyses the grafting of European sports in Brazil, the role of elite clubs in Rio and Sao Paulo played in shaping Brazilian social classes, the internationalization of Brazilian football, the function of women and respectability in shaping the fan environment, and the rise of O Jogo Bonito (the beautiful game) style of play. He shows that the so-called beautiful game era did not inaugurate uncomplicated gender and racial relations in sports. Similarly, the elite sportsmen that founded Brazil’s most esteemed sporting clubs were neither as close-minded as previous histories assume and even as players of color made their appearance on the Brazilian National Team, white, upper class men maintained their influence throughout the Vargas era. Bocketti’s work will appeal to readers interested in Brazilian soccer but also more broadly to people in the fields of Brazilian and Latin American history and scholars of sports during the 19th and 20th centuries. Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled A Nation in Play: Physical Culture, the State, and Society during France’s Dark Years, 1932-1948, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au
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Today we are joined by Alexander Barnes, who co-wrote Play Ball! Doughboys and Baseball during the Great War (Schiffer Publishing, 2019) with Peter F. Belmonte and Samuel O. Barnes. Blending sports and military history, the authors revisit the national pastime and the Doughboys who were fervent fans. Using primary sources and rare photographs, Barnes and his co-authors tell a compelling tale. Keeping soldiers occupied during the lull between military battles was always a goal for commanders, and what better diversion for red-blooded American men than baseball? Play Ball! takes readers to the front lines of the Great War, where games were sometimes played within shouting — and shooting — distance of the enemy. The authors are baseball fans and historians of World War I. Al Barnes served in the Marines and Army National Guard for 30 years and had a tour of duty during Desert Storm. He currently is the historian for the Virginia National Guard Command. Al’s son, Sam Barnes, earned his bachelor’s degree in history from James Madison University, and works as an archivist at Army Logistics University in Virginia. Peter Belmonte is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and also served in Desert Storm. He earned his master’s degree in history from California State University, Stanislaus. Together, these three historians provide a new window into baseball overseas during the Great War. Bob D’Angelo is a digital content editor with Cox Media Group. He earned his master’s degree in history from Southern New Hampshire University in May 2018. Bob earned his bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Florida and spent more than three decades as a sportswriter and sports copy editor, including 28 years on the sports copy desk at The Tampa (Fla.) Tribune. Bob can be reached at bdangelo57@gmail.com. For more information, visit Bob D’Angelo’s Books and Blogs.
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Ask a Brooklynite over the age of fifty and they’ll likely tell you that baseball’s golden age ended the day the Dodgers and Giants packed up and headed for the West Coast. Not so argues Lincoln A. Mitchell in his new book, Baseball Goes West: The Dodgers, the Giants, and the Shaping of the Major Leagues(Kent State UP, 2018). Mitchell, a political scientist at Columbia University and sports writer, makes a compelling case for the modern era of baseball only beginning with baseball’s expansion westward during the mid-twentieth century. Prior to this move, the sport was intensely regional and blindingly white. In the years that followed, several more franchises moved west of the Mississippi and many more nonwhite players entered the league, bringing a more diverse – and much larger – fanbase with them. Rather than an ending, the relocation of the Dodgers and Giants simply meant a shift in baseball’s center of gravity, as New York lost its crown as the sport’s home base and the game truly became a national pastime. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana.
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“A race can mean more than a race,” Roger Robinson writes in his new book, When Running Made History. “It can show that human beings are still capable of attaining pure beauty through arduous endeavor.” Written as a personal history, elite runner and literary scholar Roger Robinson expresses the vast and often untold history of running as seen through his own eyes. Whether it was the Boston Marathon in 2014, the 1948 Olympic games in London, or the 1988 World Cross-Country Championships, Roger Robinson was there. Using descriptive literary prose, Robinson captures running’s most historic moments while considering their significance and impact on the world. Robinson considers how running has changed, grown, and led to positive social and cultural change, definitively showing readers that running has and will continue to make history. Roger Robinson is a literary scholar, award-winning writer, and longtime elite runner. He has represented England and New Zealand in world championships, set records as a master at the Boston, New York, Vancouver, and other marathons, and returned after a knee replacement to set records in the over-seventy age group. He is the author or editor of works such as the Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature and was a senior writer for Running Times. Robinson has published often in Runner’s World, Canadian Running, and European magazines. He lives in New York state and Wellington, New Zealand, with his wife, running pioneer Kathrine Switzer. Colin Mustful has an M.A. in history from Minnesota State University, Mankato, and is currently a candidate for an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Augsburg University. You can learn more about his work at his website: www.colinmustful.com.
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Today we are joined by Ron Keurajian, author of the book Baseball Hall of Fame Autographs: A Reference Guide (Second Edition)(McFarland, 2018). Keurajian is a commercial banker by trade but has spent 35 years documenting and cataloging autographs. This second edition, which expands on his original 2012 work, contains more than 100 new pages of information, and he analyzes 988 autographs. That includes autographs and forgeries of every baseball Hall of Famer, from Hank Aaron to Robin Yount. Keurajian also devotes a chapter to autographs of the top 50 players not in the Hall Fame, plus a chapter about the signatures of the infamous 1919 Black Sox who fixed the 1919 World Series. Digging into probate, court, military and deed records in more than 30 states, Keurajian provides historical perspective behind every autograph. He does not mince words when it comes to exposing forgeries and backs up his assertions with evidence. Many of the autographs shown in the book are reproduced from the Hall of Fame archives and includes the collections of Frederick Long and August Hermann. “The autograph hobby is not for the faint of heart,” Keurajian writes, while cautioning the novice collector to be careful and “collect what you like, but don’t bite off more than you can chew.” It’s sound advice, an Keurajian is a collector and student of signatures who speaks from experience. Bob D’Angelo was a sports journalist and sports copy editor for more than three decades and is currently a digital national content editor for Cox Media Group. He received his master’s degree in history from Southern New Hampshire University in May 2018. He is the author of Never Fear: The Life & Times of Forest K. Ferguson Jr. (2015), reviews books on his blog, Bob D’Angelo’s Books & Blogs, and has reviewed books for Sport In American History. Can be reached at bdangelo57@gmail.com.
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In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Press) is undergoing a Massive Online Peer-Review (MOPR) process, where everyone can make comments on his manuscript. Additionally, his book will be Open Access (OA) since the date of publication. We discuss with him how do MOPR and OA work, how he managed to combine both of them and how these initiatives can contribute to the democratization of knowledge. You can participate in the MOPR process of The Good Drone through this link: https://thegooddrone.pubpub.org/ Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices within social movements mobilize and radicalize heavily aggrieved collectives.
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Keith Gave spent six years in the NSA during the Cold War, but his most daring mission may have come later, while working as a sports writer. In the late 1980s, Gave was asked by the Detroit Red Wings to reach behind the Iron Curtain and initiate contact with the team's newest draft picks, two players on the Soviet Union's famed Red Army hockey club. His hazardous quest helped pave the way for an unforgettable era in hockey, one that would eventually feature five former Soviet players playing together in Detroit, leading their team to an elusive Stanley Cup championship. Some sensitive and bizarre details of how the Russian Five was assembled were never disclosed before Gave told all in his book The Russian Five: A Story of Espionage, Defection, Bribery and Courage (Gold Star Publishing, 2018), and in the documentary The Russian Five, for which Gave served as a producer. Gave, who covered hockey for the Detroit Free Press for 15 years, talks about how a hockey beat writer ended up writing a real-life spy thriller. Nathan Bierma is a writer, instructional designer, and voiceover talent in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His website is www.nathanbierma.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by César Brioso, author of the book Last Seasons in Havana: The Castro Revolution and the End of Professional Baseball In Cuba (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). Blending the love for baseball fans in Cuba had during the 1950s with the political upheaval that led to Fidel Castro’s rise to power in 1959, Brioso weaves a fascinating tale. Brioso focuses on the last two seasons of the Havana Sugar Kings of the International League (1958-1959) and the last three seasons of the Cuban League (1958-1961). In the 1950s, Havana was a city teeming with rabid baseball fans, swanky hotels, luxurious casinos, and warm, tropical weather. Influential baseball men in Cuba like Bobby Maduro believed Havana was on the short list to earn a major league franchise when baseball expanded. But what happened politically signaled the death knell for those dreams. Castro may have been a big sports fan, but political events in Cuba would take “a sinister turn” as he and the Communists in his regime tightened their grip on the Caribbean island. Brioso’s extensive research, plus more than 20 interviews with former players, Maduro’s son, and even a man who spent a year as the batboy for the transplanted Sugar Kings in Jersey City, New Jersey, gives the reader a unique perspective about Cuba. Former major leaguers interviewed included Orlando Peña, Pedro Ramos, Cookie Rojas and Luis Tiant. Bob D’Angelo was a sports journalist and sports copy editor for more than three decades and is currently a digital national content editor for Cox Media Group. He received his master’s degree in history from Southern New Hampshire University in May 2018. He is the author of Never Fear: The Life & Times of Forest K. Ferguson Jr. (2015), reviews books on his blog, Bob D’Angelo’s Books & Blogs, and has reviewed books for Sport In American History. Can be reached at bdangelo57@gmail.com.
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Today we are joined by Natalie Koch, Associate Professor of Geography at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, and editor of Critical Geographies of Sport: Space, Power, and Sport in Global Perspective (Routledge, 2017). In our conversation, we discuss the growing field of critical sports geography, the role of sports in authoritarian regimes, and the neo-liberalization of sports. In Critical geographies, Koch joins other scholars to address a wide range of sports issues, including the demolition of South Korea’s Dongdaemun baseball stadium, professional wrestling in the territorial era in the United States, and the identity politics of the Gaelic Athletic Association. An emphasis on space and the ways that space embodies power and power relations, underpins the volume’s diverse offerings and draws them into fruitful conversation with each other. The collected essays fall into two categories: the first half of the book examines sports, geopolitics, and the state. Here Koch offers her own fascinating analysis of authoritarian leaders – including Mao Zedong, Vladimir Putin, and Sheikh Zayed – and their use of sports to promote the legitimacy of their regime and their own cult of personality. Koch is especially careful to differentiate between the distinct masculine discourses at work in China, Russia, and the United Arab Emirates and the way those discourses made use of the divergent topographies of their countries: tundra, desert and massive river delta. The second half of the book deals with sports, community, and urban space. Here authors address the opportunities and limitations offered by sports as a tool of social assimilation and integration; the role stadium projects play in the neo-liberalization of public spaces; and the problematic politics of megaevents. In a coda, Koch and David Jansson provoke further questions by gesturing towards the role social justice can play in critical sports geography. Each one of these essays in this volume offers enticing insights into the ways that power and space intersect in the sports sphere. Geographers interested in the field of critical sports geography should read this book but scholars generally interested in questions of sports, power, and space are also encouraged to check out this compelling work. Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled A Nation in Play: Physical Culture, the State, and Society during France’s Dark Years, 1932-1948, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au
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Today we are joined by Danyel Reiche, Associate Professor of Comparative Politics at the American University of Beirut, and the author of Success and Failure of Countries at the Olympic Games (Routedge, 2016) In Success and Failure, Reiche provides a playbook for National Committees that want to win more medals. Reiche’s fascinating work moves beyond the macro level analysis of international sports success to offer concrete policy initiatives for the 21st century. Previous studies have shown that GDP, population size, and even political or cultural ideologies can grant some countries athletic advantages – for example geography plays a large role in determining the winners at the Winter Games – but Reiche illustrates that these factors are not the only ones that matter. Why is Germany so successful at the luge while snowy Sweden seems to unsuccessful. The key to winning medals, Reiche’s WISE formula suggests, lay in (W) investing in female athletes, (I) institutionalization of a nation’s sports management, (S) specialization in specific sports, and the (E) early adoption of new sports or sports practices. In developing his WISE formula, Reiche called upon a wide array of secondary source material as well as his own original research in sports in the Middle East. Along the way, he offers a thorough examination of sports policies, programs, and pitfalls around the world as case studies. His examinations leads us from the institutionalization of sports in Australia to the achievements of the Chinese women’s weight lifting team. Only the United States seems to defy easy categorization. Danyel Reiche’s compelling book should be required reading for sports bureaucrats around the world but will also be of interest to scholars and lay readings fascinated by the Olympic Games. Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled A Nation in Play: Physical Culture, the State, and Society during France’s Dark Years, 1932-1948, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au
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The Super Bowl is a singular spectacle in American culture. More than just a championship football game, the Super Bowl has become an unparalleled display of nationalism, consumerism, and culture. But despite its impact in the United States, the Super Bowl has never caught on around the world the way many Americans might assume. Peter Hopsicker and Mark Dyreson look at the magnitude of the Super Bowl as a cultural event in the United States, and the relative lack of interest in the Super Bowl worldwide, in A Half Century of Super Bowls: National and Global Perspectives on America's Grandest Spectacle (Routledge, 2018). Peter Hopsicker is a professor of kinesiology at Penn State University Altoona. Mark Dyreson is a professor of kinesiology and history at Penn State University and managing editor of the International Journal of the History of Sport. Both are members of Penn State's Center for the Study of Sports in Society. Nathan Bierma is a writer, instructional designer, and voiceover talent in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His website is www.nbierma.com.
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It rose against the Texas sun in all its architectural audacity: a domed stadium big enough to cover a baseball field. When it opened in 1965, the Houston Astrodome defied engineering precedent and forever changed professional sports. Today, its legacy today is complicated, and its future remains uncertain. Robert Trumpbour and Kenneth Womack tell the story of this groundbreaking building in The Eighth Wonder of the World The Life of Houston's Iconic Astrodome (University of Nebraska Press, 2016). The book won the Seymour Medal from the Society for American Baseball Research in 2017. Trumpbour is professor of communications at Penn State University. He is also the author of The New Cathedrals: Politics and Media in the History of Stadium Construction (Syracuse Univ. Press, 2006). Womack is a dean and professor of English at Monmouth University, and the author of several books, including Long and Winding Roads: The Evolving Artistry of the Beatles (Bloomsbury, 2007). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the body politic.” There are significant implications of these ideas for how we live and work at the contemporary university, and we discussed some of those in our conversation. This is a great book to read and to teach with! Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Grant Farred, Professor of Africana Studies and English at Cornell University. Farred is the author of The Burden of Over-Representation: Race, Sport, and Philosophy(Temple University Press, 2018), which explores three sporting ‘events’: an uncharacteristic outburst from Jackie Robinson’s at a spring training game in New Orleans, Francois Pienaar and Nelson Mandela’s celebration after the 1995 Rugby World Cup, and the ethereal presence of Derrida in the stands of the 2010 Soccer World Cup in South Africa. He concentrates on these three happenings in order to raise questions about (over)representation in sports, the event, reconciliation and conciliation, the curse of service, the interplay between love and suffering, and coloniality and post-coloniality. In The Burden of Over-Representation, Farred re-interprets these moments using the work of philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, and most consistently Jacques Derrida. He also interweaves his analysis with larger discussions of literary theory, Hamlet, Judith Butler, Marx, and the Bible. His novel approach offers new avenues to approach physical culture – sport enables him to actualize Derridian critiques in new ways. “To think sport philosophically.” Instead of a passive and suffering Robinson, Farred sees a man cursed by his call to service, in part complicit in his own objectification, and in one moment exposed through a split second of Fanoninan profanity. Pienaar’s negation of Mandela’s congratulations (“No, thank you, Mr. President”), returned the divisive history of apartheid into a moment of national unity. Pienaar’s power in the face of the powerless President, his self-immolation in his moment of greatest triumph, displayed the limits of Mandela’s policy of reconciliation in a nation still riven by economic, political, and social inequity. Farred “sees” Derrida, or perhaps only his ghostly echo, at the World Cup in South Africa. Thinking through the spectral allows Farred to not only reframe the pied-noir philosopher as African thinker, but also show the spectrality of the state, and explain the presence of seventeen Frenchmen of Algerian descent on the Algerian team. The Burden of Over-Representation – as rich in philosophical insights as it is in humor – will be of interest to scholars fascinated by the connection between sports and philosophy, critical theory, race, and colonialism/post-colonialism. Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled A Nation in Play: Physical Culture, the State, and Society during France's Dark Years, 1932-1948, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Howard W. Rosenberg, author of Ty Cobb Unleashed: The Definitive Counter-Biography of the Chastened Racist (Tile Books, 2018). In this deeply researched volume, Rosenberg achieves what many biographers have failed to do: to put Cobb into the context of his times. That means seeing Cobb... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Questions about freedom of the press, defamation, libel and slander have been in the news quite a bit lately. Bad Lies (Mascot Books, 2017) tells the story of Eddie Bennison, who is over 50 when he makes it into the professional golf circuit. In two years, he wins millions of dollars in... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Jenifer Parks, Associate Professor of History at Rocky Mountain College. Parks is the author of The Olympic Games, the Soviet Sport Bureaucracy, and the Cold War: Red Sport, Red Tape (Lexington Books, 2016), which asks how Soviet bureaucrats maneuvered the USSR into the Olympic movement and... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Jack Gilden, author of the book Collision of Wills: Johnny Unitas, Don Shula, and the Rise of the Modern NFL (University of Nebraska Press, 2018). In this groundbreaking book, Gilden takes the reader back to the Baltimore Colts of the mid-1960s, led by the best... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Antonio Sotomayor, Assistant Professor and Librarian of Latin American and Caribbean studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Sotomayor is the author of The Sovereign Colony: Olympic Sport, National Identity, and International Politics in Puerto Rico (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), which asks the question... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by David George Surdam, co-author with Michael J. Haupert of the book The Age of Ruth and Landis: The Economics of Baseball during the Roaring Twenties (University of Nebraska Press, 2018). In this work, which blends a liberal mix of sports and economics, Surdam and Haupert... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Skip Desjardin, author of the book September 1918: War, Plague, and the World Series (Regnery History, 2018). In this work, which blends sports and history together, Desjardin looks at the historic and turbulent events of September 1918 that affected Boston. The Red Sox won their... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Gerald Gems, Professor of Kinesiology at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois, and the author of several books on sports history including Sport in American History: From Colonization to Globalization (2017), Sport and the American Occupation of the Philippines (2016), and Blood and Guts to... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Gregory Snyder, an Associate Professor of Sociology at Baruch College, City University of New York (CUNY), and author of Skateboarding LA: Inside Professional Street Skateboarding (New York University Press, 2017). In Skateboarding LA, Snyder explores the world of professional street skateboarding in order to explain... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Jesse Berrett, author of Pigskin Nation: How the NFL Remade American Politics (University of Illinois Press, 2018). Berrett is a high school history teacher at University High School in San Francisco. He earned a PhD in History at the University of California, Berkeley, and has... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
We all know baseball as one of America’s fondest pastimes, but did you know there’s a version of the sport designed specifically for the blind? It’s called Beep Ball, and the players, with the exception of the pitcher, are all visually impaired. Founded by the National Beep Ball Association in... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Averell “Ace” Smith, The Pitcher and the Dictator: Satchel Paige’s Unlikely Season in the Dominican Republic (University of Nebraska Press, 2018). Smith is a political consultant and a lifelong baseball fan who became enamored with the game when he bought a copy of the 1956... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Kevin Simpson, the author of Soccer under the Swastika: Stories of Survival and Resistance during the Holocaust (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2016). In Soccer under the Swastika, Simpson recovers a largely forgotten history of the sports during Holocaust. Through a close reading of wartime memoirs,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Amy Bass, author of the book One Goal: A Coach, A Team, and the Game that Brought a Divided Town Together (Hachette Books, 2018). This is the fourth book for Bass, who is director of the honors program and a professor of history at the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by David Rapp, author of the book Tinker to Evers to Chance: The Chicago Cubs and the Dawn of Modern America (University of Chicago Press, 2018). Rapp spent 30 years as a journalist in the Washington. D.C., area and was the former editor of Congressional Quarterly,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
The concept of late-night basketball gained prominence in the late 1980s when G. Van Standifer founded Midnight Basketball League as a vehicle upon which citizens, businesses, and institutions can stand together to prevent crime, violence, and drug abuse. The concept ignited and late-night basketball leagues were developed in dozens of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Sridhar Pappu, author of the book The Year of the Pitcher: Bob Gibson, Denny McLain and the End of Baseball’s Golden Age (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017). Pappu is The Male Animal columnist for The New York Times, and his work has appeared in Sports Illustrated... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Monica Mattfeld’s Becoming Centaur: Eighteenth-Century Masculinity and English Horsemanship (Penn State University Press, 2017) explores the complex relationship between men and their horses, and reflects upon how these interactions defined a man’s gendered and political positions within society. Focusing on training manuals, memoirs, images, satires, and other rich materials produced... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Paul Hensler, author of the book The New Boys of Summer: Baseball’s Radical Transformation in the Late Sixties (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017). Paul is a baseball historian and a member of the Society for American Baseball Research. He has also written The American League in... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Brett L. Abrams, author of the book Terry Bradshaw: From Super Bowl Champion to Television Personality (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). It is part of a series called Sports Icons and Issues in Popular Culture. Abrams, an archivist of electronic records in Washington. D.C., does more... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
We are joined by Paul Beston, author of the book The Boxing Kings: When American Heavyweights Ruled The Ring (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017.) Beston links together the long string of American heavyweight champions from the late 19th century until the 1990s, touching on the big names of John L Sullivan,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by Adam J. Criblez, author of the book Tall Tales and Short Shorts: Dr. J, Pistol Pete, and The Birth of the Modern NBA (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). In his second book, Criblez tells the story of the most maligned decade of professional basketball the 1970s.... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are joined by David A. Goldstein, author of the book Alley-Oop To Aliyah: African American Hoopsters in The Holy Land (Skyhorse Publishing, 2017.) Goldstein explores the story of the African-American professional basketball players who practice their craft in the Israeli Basketball Premier League, and what that means as... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
The meaning assigned to architecture is complex and varied. Urban architecture is often stripped of meaning when people abandon the neighborhoods or are absent of meaning at the time of their inception. This leaves the people who inhabit the terrain to assign their own meaning to the architecture. Jeffrey Kidder,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
If you were a cadet at West Point and knew with virtual certainty that upon graduation you would be sent into the teeth of the Vietnam war, what would you do? Well, if you were Tom Carhart and five of his buddies, you’d decide to have one last hurrah and... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Steven McQueen was known as a great action star, but he also sometimes had a reputation for being troublesome on the set. Don Nunley worked with him as a prop man on Le Mans, a pet project of McQueen’s set around the 24-hour endurance auto race in France. This book... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
“Boxing has always attracted writers because it issues a standing challenge to their powers of description and imagination, and also a warning–really a promise–that no matter how many layers of meaning you peel away there will always be others beneath them” (1). Over the past half-century boxing has endured a... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
As I write this, the women’s basketball team for the University of Connecticut is in the midst of a 107 game winning streak. It’s quite reasonable to assert that Geno Auriemma will end his career as the most successful coach in basketball history. In the excitement of setting so many... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
The 2017 Six Nations rugby tournament concluded this weekend. England successfully defended its championship, despite losing the last match against a strong Ireland side in Dublin–England’s only loss of the competition. Meanwhile, the new Super Rugby season just began, with clubs traveling between Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and now... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Covering sporting activities from ancient times right up to the modern day, Ronojoy Sen’s Nation at Play: A History of Sport in India (Columbia University Press, 2016) is at once broad in its scope, yet detailed in its analysis of key events. From football, to the Olympics, to cricket the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
For more than 50 years, Huntsville prison put on an annual rodeo throughout the month of October to entertain prisoners, locals, and visitors from across the nation. In his new book Convict Cowboys: The Untold History of the Texas Prison Rodeo (University of North Texas Press, 2016), Sam Houston State... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Many scholars of baseball and American sports have focused on Ty Cobb as an integral and controversial character in the history of baseball. However, scholars have ignored the ways in which the story of Ty Cobb intersects with ideas of turn-of-the-century masculinity and honor. Steve Tripp in his new book... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Carroll Pursell‘s From Playgrounds to PlayStation: The Interaction of Technology and Play (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015) explores how play reflects and drives the evolution of American culture. Pursell engagingly examines the ways in which technology affects play and play shapes people. The objects that children (and adults) play with... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Roman Sieler’s Lethal Spots, Vital Secrets: Medicine and Martial Arts in South India (Oxford University Press, 2015) is a fine-grained ethnographic study of varmakkalai–the art of vital spots, a South Indian practice that encompasses both martial and medical activities. The interview explores how varmakkalai relates to the wider field of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Jessamyn R. Abel’s new book carefully traces the rise and transformations of an internationalist worldview in modern Japan, from its withdrawal from the League of Nations and admission into the UN, to successive attempts (both failed and successful) to host the Olympics in Tokyo, to important wartime and postwar conferences... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Bob Mionske is a Portland, Oregon based attorney whose practice focuses on representing cyclists. He gained his cycling experience at the highest levels, riding twice as a member of the United States Olympic racing team in 1988 and 1992. Mionske was inspired to write Bicycling and the Law: Your Rights... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Since the birth of the modern Olympics movement in the late nineteenth century, its leaders have attempted to maintain a strict separation of athletics and politics. Former International Olympic Committee president Avery Brundage once stated, “We actively combat the introduction of politics into the Olympic movement.” But this attempt to... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
In the introduction to Embodied Nation: Sport, Masculinity, and the Making of Modern Laos (University of Hawaii Press, 2015), historian Simon Creak writes that Laos, a country that has never won an Olympic medal, may seem an unlikely place to study the history of sport. Yet from the uplands of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
At the start of The Grand Old Man of Baseball: Connie Mack in His Final Years, 1932-1956, the third volume of Norman L. Macht’s biography of baseball legend Connie Mack, the Philadelphia A’s which he owned and managed had just lost the 1931 World Series to the St. Louis Cardinals.... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Leading up to this year’s NBA Finals, sports media outlets offered their take on the most important storylines of the series between the Cavaliers and Warriors. Who will claim his place as the game’s greatest current player, LeBron James or Stephen Curry? How will Cleveland fill the role of underdog?... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Is there a figure in sports more admired and beloved than Muhammad Ali? Widely revered not only as one of boxing’s greatest champions but also as one of the rare athletes to speak out on political issues, Ali holds a place at the pinnacle of sports heroes. In their new... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
March Madness is big business. Each year the NCAA collects $700 million for television rights to the men’s college basketball tournament, under the terms of a 14-year, $10.8 billion contract with CBS and Turner Broadcasting. The two networks, in turn, bring in just over a billion dollars each year in... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Adam Kucharski, who won the 2012 Wellcome Trust Science Writing Prize, has delivered another winner in an area rife with both winners and losers. The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math Are Taking the Luck Out of Gambling (Basic Books, 2016) is a brilliant, fascinating, and sometimes slightly terrifying look... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Alexander Wolff is the author of The Audacity of Hoop: Basketball and the Age of Obama (Temple University Press, 2015). Wolff is a senior writer at Sports Illustrated. On the eve of the college basketball championship, The Audacity of Hoop suggests that the game is more than just shooting hoops.... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
In The People’s Game: Football, State and Society (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Alan McDougall looks at football from the top-down and bottom-up: as a tool of the state, as forming regional identities in East Germany and in a reunified Germany, and as a popular pastime. Although characterized by mediocrity compared... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
In anticipation of Super Bowl 50, Sports Illustrated and WIRED magazines teamed up to speculate about the state of football fifty years from now, at the time of Super Bowl 100. Of course, the big question that arises when considering the future of the football is whether the sport will... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Gambling and sports have been in the news lately in the US. Authorities in Nevada and New York have shut down the fantasy sports operatorsDraftKings and FanDuel in their states, judging that their daily fantasy games constitute illegal gambling. Both companies had already come under scrutiny this past October, when... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
How would you write your sports memoir? Maybe you’d recall a memorable trip to the stadium when you were young, or even getting an autograph from one of your favorite players. Was there a notable victory – or defeat – that marked your days as a player? Or are the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
In her new book, Playing for God: Evangelical Women and the Unintended Consequences of Sports Ministry (NYU Press, 2015), Annie Blazer shows through archival research and participant-observation how the paradigm of sports ministry transformed from one centered on celebrity male athletes using their fame to explicitly call audiences to conversion... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
When ESPN anchor Stuart Scott passed away from cancer this past January, he was widely hailed for his innovative style, which mixed heavy does of African American slang and pop culture references. His signature phrases are now commonly used terms in the American lexicon: “As cool as the other side... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
David George Surdham is the author of The Big Leagues Go to Washington: Congress and Sports Antitrust, 1951-1989 (University of Illinois Press, 2015). Surdham is Associate Professor of Economics at Northern Iowa University. Just back from the Major League Baseball All-Star break, Surdham has written a book for sports lovers.... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
The Tour de France is happening right now! The 2015 edition started on July 4th and will continue until July 26th. I’m excited to be able to share this interview with Eric Reed about his new book, Selling the Yellow Jersey: The Tour de France in the Global Era (University... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
The health of former NFL players has received plenty of attention in recent years. The suicides of Junior Seau and Dave Duerson, along with stories of retired players in only their 40s and 50s affected by dementia and ALS, have revealed the toll that a professional football career can take... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
A new chapter in the history of the Olympic Games appears to be opening. As one city after another has dropped out of the bidding for the 2022 Winter Games, the International Olympic Committee has been faced with the prospect that no one might be willing to host its wonderful,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
One of the most enduring film genres is the sports movie. From the earliest attempts at narrative motion pictures to the present day, movies devoted to athletic competition are both popular and lasting. In The Sports Film: Games People Play (Wallflower Press, 2014), Bruce Babington presents an historical overview of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
When he died from AIDS in 1993, Arthur Ashe was universally hailed as a man of principle, grace, and wisdom–a world-class athlete who had transcended his game. But a closer look at Ashe’s life reveals a more complex picture. Certainly, Ashe was an admirable figure. When tennis tournament organizers barred... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Once upon a time, before baseball drew crowds to America’s ballparks and English workers spent their Saturdays at the football grounds, one of the most popular spectator events in both countries was watching people walk. Pedestrianism had its start outdoors, as walkers set off on long-distance treks for the simple... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
The history of globalization is found in more than international political organizations and multinational corporations, free-trade agreements and foreign direct investments, satellite communications and special export zones. When looking at the forces that have driven globalization over the last decades, we must also look to football and especially the World... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
In industrial parks, converted warehouses, and pole barns across the country, a fitness revolution is taking place. It’s a revolution, according to J.C. Herz, that’s leading us not so much forward as back, into what she calls “the primal future of fitness.” This future is one in which fitness connects... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Passion. Flair. Instinct. Improvisation. As the World Cup advances to the knockout stage, you’ll hear these terms associated with the football styles of Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico rather than those of Belgium and Germany. As historians Roger Kittleson and Joshua Nadel explain, the soccer cultures of Brazil and other countries... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Last weekend was the NFL Draft, the annual event when teams select college players who have shown the talent to advance to the professional ranks. Staged at New York’s Radio City Music Hall, broadcast live on two cable networks, and surrounded by ceaseless media attention and analysis, the Draft is... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Imagine a boxing gym. What probably comes to mind is a large, run-down room on the upper floor of an old brick building, somewhere in a trash-strewn, depressed neighborhood. The room echoes with the thud of the heavy bag, the rat-tat-tat of the speed bag, the quick whisks of the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Does God care who wins the game? According to a recent survey, plenty of American fans think so. The Public Religion Research Institute found that a quarter of fans said that they had prayed to God for a favorable outcome to a game. Add in those who practice some personal... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Twenty years ago, when I was studying abroad in Europe, the only way to keep track of my teams back in the US was to sneak looks in The International Herald Tribune at the newspaper kiosk (the price of the paper was beyond my meager budget). Twelve years after that,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Each year, following the end of the NFL season, there is a blizzard of activity as teams with disappointing records fire their head coaches and look for the new leader who will turn things around. This year, seven teams fired their coaches and spent the next weeks searching for a... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
The 22nd Winter Olympics are underway. It’s safe to say that the lead-up has not gone smoothly. Of course, there have been the obligatory cost overruns, crony contracts, displacement of locals, and environmental despoliation–all the problems we’ve seen with past Olympics. But this year’s games have come with new wrinkles.... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
This week’s episode features Sam Miller and Jason Wojciechowski, editors of the Baseball Prospectus’ 2014 (Wiley, 2014), a yearbook that both previews the upcoming baseball season and provides readers a look into the state of the art in baseball analysis, both in terms of advanced statistical metrics and, increasingly, subjective... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
One of the great dynasties of American sports are the UCLA men’s basketball teams of the 1960s-70s. In a twelve-year span, the Bruins won ten national collegiate championships. They had four undefeated seasons, and in one stretch, from 1971-1974, the teams won 88 straight games. UCLA’s teams featured some of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
If you’re younger than 45 or so, you probably don’t remember the “Battle of the Sexes.” This tennis match, between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King, is one of the iconic moments in American history of the 1970s. It represented a breakthrough moment for women in sports, a symbol of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
It’s that time of year when the panels of experts on sports call-in shows shout opinions on the best and worst of the past twelve months. To finish the year, New Books in Sports offers its own panels of experts. But rather than arguing over the biggest matches and plays... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Kevin Kerrane‘s Dollar Sign on the Muscle: The World of Baseball Scouting (CreateSpace, 2013) represents the first major study of the history and practice of professional baseball scouting. Based on Kerrane’s ethnographic research with the Philadelphia Phillies during the 1981 season, the book provides an inside look at one of sports’ least understood... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
The Atlantic magazine recently asked its readers to name the greatest athlete of all time. The usual suspects were present among the nominees: Jesse Owens, Pele, Wayne Gretzky, Don Bradman. Given that these were readers of The Atlantic, there were some more thoughtful answers as well: Canadian athlete and cancer-research... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
In 1967, an official of the French basketball federation lamented the team’s poor finish at that year’s European Championships in Finland. The French team finished sixth in their group of eight, and then lost in the first game of the knockout stage. The official noted that Europe’s top teams, such... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
One of the most crowded sections of the sports library is the one devoted to autobiographies and memoirs. The shelves here are constantly adding new titles, by both legends and bit players. For instance, the past week has brought the release of new memoirs by Manchester United midfielder Paul Scholes... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Many fans store a vast collection of sports images in their brains. With just a moment’s glance at a picture, even a slice of the picture, they can recognize the athletes, the season, the game, the particular play that the photographer captured. I experienced this recently when one of my... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
In 2010, for the first time, an African nation hosted the FIFA World Cup. The advertisements surrounding the tournament used graphics and sounds intended to conjure the image of a vibrant, exotic land. In fact, though, the African-ness of the South African World Cup was pretty thin, when not wholly... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Throughout the centuries, in cultures around the world, people have played games. But it has only been in the modern age, in the last 250 years or so, that people have competed in and watched sports. Modern sports are distinct in practice and purpose from the ball games of Mayan... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Two guys are watching Premier League highlights, when onto the TV screen comes Rory Delap, then with Stoke City, doing one of his renowned throw-ins from the touchline directly into the box. One guy, a native of the American Midwest who’d been raised on baseball, basketball, and hockey, is amazed... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
In October 2007, journalist Eric Simons sat in the stands of Memorial Stadium in Berkeley, Calif., to watch his beloved University of California Bears take on Oregon State University in football. If Cal won, it almost certainly would be ranked No. 1 in the country. Instead, Simons agonized as Cal’s quarterback struggled... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Scholars have pointed to various historical ingredients they see as necessary for the development of modern sport: political changes that allowed people to form associations, the rise of competitive capitalism, an emphasis on calculation and measurement, the advance of secularization. But this attention to economic, social, and political factors has... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
The sixth season of the Indian Premier League recently concluded, and once again off-field problems cast light on the league’s growing pains. For the fifth year in a row, no Pakistani players were selected for the league’s teams, while other foreign cricketers were withdrawn by their national boards at various... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
What did you read as a young sports fan? Maybe the sports pages in the local newspaper, or a glossy illustrated magazine? Did your school’s library carry biographies of famous athletes written for children, or did you go straight to the books for adults to satisfy the desire for more... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
WorldCat is the largest online catalog in the world, accessing the collections of more than 72,000 libraries in 170 countries and territories. Using the catalog, a subject search of particular sports turns up the following tally of book titles in the world’s libraries: Boxing: 5164, Hockey: 7083, Cricket: 10,881, Horse... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
I have never been to the Super Bowl, and I will probably never will. I’ve never been to a World Cup match or an Olympic event. I’ve never been to the Final Four or the Rose Bowl. I’ve never been to the Stanley Cup playoffs or the Champions League, the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Azzurri, cyclists, boxers, Berlusconi, Balotelli, strapping Fascist men preparing to bear arms, strapping Fascist women preparing to bear children, the shirtless Duce, Ferraris, Vespas, doping scandals, World Cup celebrations, Serie A officials on the take, Il Grande Torino, and the barefoot marathoner Abebe Bikila. You find all this and more... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
In 2008, when entertainment magnate Lalit Modi launched the Indian Premier League, he took a title that was new to the world of cricket: Commissioner. Modi’s idea for the structure of the IPL had American origins. He had studied in the United States in the mid-1980s, where he encountered the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Did you watch the game last night? No matter if you live in Australia, England, India, Ontario, or the US, chances are you’ve heard that question today. Televised sports are a constant presence in contemporary culture, providing a common set of experiences and references for people in the workplace, the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
In the classic 1973 film The Sting, Robert Redford and Paul Newman lead a team of con men in an elaborate scam to take revenge on a dangerous crime boss and a corrupt cop. The final play takes place in a high-stakes poolroom, an illegal parlor for the wealthy to... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
This past October, David Stern announced that he would step down as commissioner of the National Basketball Association in February 2014. In Stern’s three decades at the helm, the NBA has seen its domestic fortunes rise and ebb. Television ratings for regular-season and playoff games have declined steadily since their... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
The sports pages, websites, and television channels are running their annual reviews of the year in sports. The 10 Best Photos! The 10 Biggest Plays! The Top 10 Athletes! Whatever your sporting taste, there’s a year-end list for you. New Books in Sports offers a different take on the end-of-the-year... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
“Around 380 BC, the Greek philosopher Plato wrote in the Republic about the idealized society as having a “united influence of music and sport” where its people “mingle music with sport in the fairest of proportions.” – from the Rhythms of the Game: The Link Between Musical and Athletic Performance... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
This past September an independent panel commissioned in 2009 by the British government released its 395-page report on the Hillsborough Stadium disaster of April 1989. The published findings and the accompanying release of documents confirmed what had long been charged: the deaths of 96 Liverpool fans at the grounds in... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Today we are talking to Declan Hill about his new book The Fix: Soccer and Organized Crime (McClelland & Stewart, 2010). Most of my research focuses on corruption and the link with organized crime. I have read commissions of inquiry, court cases, journal articles and innumerable books on the topic.... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
My wife is a sports fan. Together, we have cheered from the stands at college football games and track meets, for local minor-league baseball clubs and hockey teams. We’ve spent Sunday afternoons watching the National Football League, October nights watching the World Series, and summer afternoons watching the World Cup.... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Of all American sports, baseball has contributed the greater number of folk heroes to the larger culture. Fictional characters of awe-inspiring ability, like the mighty Casey and Roy Hobbs, or quirky sages such as Casey Stengel and Yogi Berra are broadly known in a way that few representatives of other... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
This past August, the saga of Lance Armstrong came to its inglorious end. The seven-time champion of the Tour de France and Olympic medalist ended his defense against charges that he had engaged in blood doping during his cycling career. In the judgment of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, the end... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
In the history of American sports, few athletes were as famous and hated in their day as Jack Johnson. The first African American boxing champion, Johnson was an astonishingly brash figure who flouted the prejudices held by white Americans. His 1910 victory over James J. Jeffries, the former champion dubbed... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
During the 1960s attendance fell at cricket grounds across England. Just as the Church of England lost members in droves in the same period, it appeared that this other pillar of English tradition was becoming irrelevant amidst the social and cultural developments of the times. Making the situation worse were... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
There are few moments in recent sports history as riveting, perplexing, and widely debated as Zinedine Zidane’s head-butt to Marco Materazzi in the final match of the 2006 World Cup. Think of your own reaction when the referee stopped play to attend to Materazzi, and you then saw the reply... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
A number of modern sports are credited to a particular 19th-century founder. The inventive work of some of these figures, like basketball’s James Naismith, American football’s Walter Camp, and judo’s Jigoro Kano, is firmly planted in history. But there are others, such as Abner Doubleday and William Webb Ellis, who... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
American women dominated the swimming competition at the London Olympics, earning a total of sixteen medals in seventeen events. This template of success was set already at the 1920 Games, the first Olympics in which American women swimmers competed. Women’s swimming races had been introduced in 1912 at Stockholm, but... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
If you watched the U.S. broadcast of the London 2012 Olympic Games opening ceremony, you may have heard Matt Lauer and Bob Costas mention Jim Thorpe during Sweden’s entrance. Thorpe, arguably the best all-around athlete in U.S. history, won Olympic gold in both the pentathlon and the decathlon in the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
The 2012 London Olympics are here. To mark the event, New Books in Sports offers another of its occasional seminar episodes. And as with any great seminar, you’ll be eager to tell people what you’ve learned. Our slate of Olympic experts don’t offer any medal predictions. But you will find... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
26.2 is one of the most recognizable numbers in sports. It is also a curious number. The length of the marathon race is the only distance in track that is still measured in English units. Yards have become meters. The mile is now the 1500. But the marathon remains 26... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
During this week of the 4th of July, it’s appropriate to mark America’s national holiday with a podcast about that most American of sports: college football. As past guests on the podcast have explained, widely followed, revenue-generating sports teams affiliated with universities are a distinctive feature of American sports culture,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
The one play of my football career that my father remembers most fondly came in my very first game, when I was eleven years old. Younger and smaller than the other players, I was positioned out of harm’s way at outside linebacker. But on one play, the opposing running back... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Two days before this year’s Champions League final between Chelsea and Bayern Munich, the top two women’s clubs in Europe played on the same pitch, at Munich’s Olympic Stadium, in the final match of the Women’s Champions League. In a pairing of the defending champion, Olympique Lyon, and the club... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
The NBA Finals are under way, with the Oklahoma City Thunder facing the Miami Heat. Network executives and the sports punditocracy are elated with the match-up. Ratings for Game 1 of the series were up more than 10 per cent over last year, as casual fans tuned in to see... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
There are a lot of balls in my house. Baseballs, soccer balls, tennis balls, footballs, basketballs, volleyballs. We have Wiffle balls, Nerf balls, and Super Balls. My children and I occasionally use the balls for their intended purposes. We play catch in the yard, or shoot baskets in the driveway.... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
It’s springtime in the American Midwest. The playoffs for the NBA title and hockey’s Stanley Cup are moving into the later rounds, and the new baseball season has already produced history-making performances and rising stars. But the students in my sports history class don’t want to talk about any of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
In the summer of 1957, Robert Lipsyte answered a classified ad. He was an English major who needed some cash, and The New York Times was looking for an editorial assistant. He went to work on the night shift in the sports department, serving as a copyboy for the surly... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Mention the name Bill Veeck to a baseball fan and what will likely come to mind is the back-and-white image of three-foot, seven-inch Eddie Gaedel at the plate of a Major League game, swimming in his St. Louis Browns uniform, the opposing catcher having just caught a pitch well over... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
There are three Americans in the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame. One is Horace Wilson, the professor of English who brought his students outside for a game in 1872, thus introducing baseball to Japan. Another is Wally Yonamine, the Hawaii-born Nisei who played professional baseball in Japan in the 1950s... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Two weeks from now the National Football League will hold its annual draft of college football players. For the league’s teams, the draft is the chance to re-stock their rosters with fresh young talent, basing their choices on reams of analytical reports and hours of dissected game films. The players,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
As a young, patriotic American, I was torn by the boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. On the one hand, I knew already as an eleven-year-old, long before Ronald Reagan had uttered the phrase, that the Soviet Union was the Evil Empire. Their invasion of Afghanistan in December... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Coming to terms with the limitations of our own sporting achievement is one of the hardest things many of us have to do in life. A couple of years ago, after one too many serious injuries, I realised that I would never again line up on the rugby pitch waiting... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Alabama-Auburn. Maple Leafs-Canadiens. Boca Juniors-River Plate. Carlton-Collingwood.Fenerbahce-Galatasaray. Great rivalries are the catalysts of national sporting cultures. They are the high point of a season, fueling emotions as well as ticket sales and media hype. The most famous rivalries typically have bearing for league standings and championships. But many are also... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
During his tenure as a university lecturer, the novelist (and former football goalkeeper) Vladimir Nabokov instructed his students that the reader of literature needed three things: imagination, memory, and a dictionary. This advice applies as well for the reader of Gideon Haigh‘s essays on cricket, collected in Sphere of Influence:... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
On the Minnesota rinks where I spent many days of my childhood, the skates made the man–or the boy, to be more accurate. Hockey skates had a boot of tough leather and a reinforced toe to protect against sticks and pucks, like work boots mounted on thick, sharp, rounded blades.... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Howard Cosell was fond of saying that American television in the 1970s was dominated by three C’s, representing each of the broadcast networks: revered CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, NBC’s late-night talk show host Johnny Carson, and Cosell himself, the marquee sports announcer for the ABC network. Cosell was known... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
It’s the English Premier League’s birthday! On this day twenty years ago, all twenty-two clubs of the First Division resigned from the 104-year-old Football League and declared their plans to create a new, breakaway league.A lucrative television deal with Sky Sports followed soon after, bringing plenty of seed money to... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Here is a quiz. What is your idea of the perfect sports-watching experience: a) watching your team crush its rival in a one-sided, humiliating contest, or b) watching two top-quality opponents, neither of which you support, in an epic, closely fought match, highlighted by brilliant individual performances? Your answer to... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
For years, the morning skate was a Christmas Day ritual for my father and me.After the presents had been unwrapped and before the morning service, my dad and I walked to the nearby city park and took to the ice. We’d take a few runs down the empty rink, trading... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
As several guests on this podcast have told us, sports have been fundamentally connected with the major developments of modern history: urbanization, class conflict, imperialism, political repression, globalization. The history of bicycle racing brings in another key ingredient of the modern age: technology. The sport began only with the invention... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
The integration of baseball is most often cast in terms of black and white, but biographer Adrian Burgos, Jr.— a professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign– is out to change that. In his new biography, entitled Cuban Star: How One Negro-League Owner Changed the Face of Baseball (Hill and... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
In the celebrity firmament that circles around us, sports stars are among the brightest lights. Kobe, Tiger, Messi, Márta, Sachin, and Serena can be recognized from most points on the globe.But other stars are visible only in certain lands: Yuna Kim, Barbora Strycova, Sebastien Chabal, Andres Guardado, Israel Folau, Buster... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
“I’m sure if it wasn’t for Joe Louis,” acknowledged Jackie Robinson, “the color line in baseball would not have been broken for another ten years.” To Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis was an inspiration and an idol. “I just give lip service to being the greatest,” said Ali in 1981, after... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
I am a fan of the end-of-the-year, double-size issues of magazines–full of photographs, lists of the best and worst of the year, notable quotes, and vignettes about the year’s events. This week’s podcast follows in the spirit of those year-end special issues. The episode is thicker than usual, but it... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
“We live in the age of globalization, with the interconnection of markets, technology, and cultures making the world a smaller place.” Sure.Tell that to the guys on my local sports radio show. For them, the world is bounded by the Big Ten and the North Division of the National Football... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
On November 10, 2009, Robert Enke stepped in front of an express train at a crossing in the German village of Eilvese. At age 32, Robert left behind a young family: he and his wife, Teresa, had just adopted a baby girl only six months earlier. And Robert was also... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
The Victor’s Crown brings to vivid life the signal role of sport in the classical world. Ranging over a dozen centuries–from Archaic Greece through to the late Roman and early Byzantine empires–David Potter’s lively narrative shows how sport, to the ancients, was not just a dim reflection of religion and... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
The 107th World Series is underway, with the St. Louis Cardinals and the Texas Rangers vying for the championship of Major League Baseball. The Cardinals’ star, Albert Pujols, has already entered the record books, joining Hall-of-Famers Babe Ruth and Reggie Jackson as the only players ever to hit three home... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Here’s a sport quiz for you. Name a world-class athlete who hailed from the state of Nebraska: an Olympic champion, a hall of famer, someone who was among the very best at his or her game. (And no sneaking over to Google!) If you’re stumped, as I was, you’ll find... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
It’s October. In the American sports calendar, that means it’s time for the baseball playoffs. My team, the Minnesota Twins, wasn’t even close this year, going from first place last year to the cellar this year. But I gained some measure of consolation last week in watching A-Rod strike out... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
There are beautiful sports photos, and dramatic sports photos. There are sports photos that are funny, and others that are poignant. There are photos that capture athletic brilliance, and tenacity, and passion. But there are few images from the modern history of sports that have transcended the games, photos that... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
This past summer Germany hosted the 2011 FIFA Women’s World Cup. The 32 matches drew more than 800,000 fans, while the total number of foreign tourists visiting Germany increased by nine per cent over the previous summer. The German government’s commissioner for tourism proudly declared that the success of the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
With the NBA in the midst of a labor disagreement, players from the world’s premier basketball league are scattering in different directions to maintain their skills (and get paid). This past summer, a number of NBA players returned to their roots, so to speak, by playing in summer leagues in... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
When I was a kid, I used to pore over an illustrated history of American sports that I had received as a birthday gift. The oversized, hardcover book featured some of the iconic images of 20th-century sports: Lou Gehrig standing humbly at home plate on his day of tribute, teammates... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
My Little League baseball career spanned the late Seventies and early Eighties. During those summers, I always set aside the afternoon in August when the championship game of the Little League World Series was broadcast on ABC’s “Wide World of Sports.” There was a thrill to watching kids my own... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
A couple of days ago I had an unusual experience. I was staying in a hotel in Kampala, with a stunning view of the southern reaches of the Ugandan capital and the northern edge of Lake Victoria. It was the weekend, and in Africa that usually means football (soccer, to... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
The instructor of my freshman physics course fit the stereotype of a physics professor: unkempt white hair, black glasses case in the breast pocket of his short-sleeved shirt, thick German accent, and a tendency to mumble to himself while mulling over formula on the chalkboard. I was not his most... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Last spring’s Cricket World Cup was a major global event. Estimates of the television audience for the final matches ranged from 400 million to one billion, while the website ESPNcricinfo.com had an average audience, throughout the entire 43-day tournament, of 72,000 people per minute. But for most American sports fans,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Most modern sports have some creation myth that usually links them to an almost-sacred place of origin. Baseball has its Cooperstown. Golf its St. Andrews. Basketball its Springfield College. If you are a football fan, whether of the All Blacks or the Springboks, the Magpies or the Swans, the Longhorns... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
When sports fans list the greatest games, they talk about close contests, outstanding performances, and dramatic finishes. Think of game six of the 1975 World Series between the Red Sox and the Reds, or Boston College’s 47-45 win over the University of Miami in 1984, capped by Doug Flutie’s miraculous... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
“Isn’t it funny?” once mused Buck O’Neil, the sage of Negro League baseball. “Everybody remembers going to their first baseball game with their father. They might not remember going to their first day of school, . . . or their first Thanksgiving dinner. But they always remember going to the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
My older daughter is twelve years old. Like many girls her age, she has spent countless hours on the soccer field. She has played volleyball and run cross-country at her school. She was the catcher for her Little League baseball team. Now she is taking up fencing. My daughter is... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
It is the summer of discontent for fans of the National Football League. What will they do if team owners and players cannot reach a labor agreement before the fall season? The satirists at The Onion have offered their speculations: fans of the Green Bay Packers will gather by the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Corruption in big-time college sports recently claimed another victim: Ohio State football coach Jim Tressel. Once regarded as a paragon of integrity, Tressel is now seen as one more example of a coach who recruited star players and built a successful program with the benefit of illegal gifts from boosters.... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
I have the habit of reacting audibly when reading good works of non-fiction. Members of my household and strangers on airplanes have been startled by my hmms and huhs of surprise, my ews and ughs of disgust, and my wows of disbelief. I put my whole vocabulary of interjections to... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Chances are, if you were one of the 700 million people who watched the 2010 World Cup, you likely heard mention of the soccer games that prisoners on Robben Island played during the decades of apartheid rule. The stories of these soccer matches on the barren island, played by political... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
When we think of sports and the Cold War, what typically comes to mind are steroid-fueled East German swimmers, or the Soviets’ controversial basketball win at the Munich games, or Mike Eruzione’s game-winning goal in 1980 (or Paul Henderson’s goal in 1972, if you’re so inclined). What we don’t think... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Here’s a simple–or should we say simplistic?–line of political reasoning: communities are made of people; people can either be sick or healthy; communities, therefore, are sick or healthy depending on the sickness or health of their people. This logic is powerful. It explains success: “We lost the war because we,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
I imagine the guys who first faced Bill Russell felt like I did when I had to guard Antoine Carr in high school. I “held” Carr to 32 points. But no dunks! Russell’s opponents in college and the NBA rarely fared any better. Sports talk is full of hyperbole, but... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports