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Through the heart of Hollywood cinema runs an unexpected current of progressive politics. Sports movies, a genre that has flourished since the mid-seventies, evoke the American dream and therefore represent the nation to itself in idealized form. Once considered mere credos for Reaganism's fantasies of an atomized society, movies from Rocky (1976) to Ali (2001) dream of democratic participation and recognition more than individual success, for in every case, off-field relationships take precedence over on-field competition. Arranged chronologically, Hollywood Sports Films and the American Dream is a critical study of six major sports films that re-tells the story of multiculturalism's gradual adoption in the latter third of the 20th century and rewrites contemporary understandings of the sports film. For author Grant Wiedenfeld, the mainstream's first minority heroes are paradoxically white ethnic, rural, working-class men, exemplified by Rocky, Slap Shot (1977) and The Natural (1984) and 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 and point to the limits of inclusion and participation in the post-Civil Rights era. Hannah Arendt, Jeffrey Alexander, and others inform Wiedenfeld's original analysis and commentary on the political significance of popular culture as he insists on the cinema's capabilities as an engine for democracy untethered from more conventional'democratic'institutions. Reading these familiar movies from another angle paints a fresh picture of how the United States has imagined democracy since its bicentennial and renews the political efficacy of one of the most popular genres in film history.

Contributions by Lisa Doris Alexander, Matthew H. Barton, Andrew C. Billings, Carlton Brick, Ted M. Butryn, Brian Carroll, Arthur T. Challis, Roxane Coche, Curtis M. Harris, Jay Johnson, Melvin Lewis, Jack Lule, Rory Magrath, Matthew A. Masucci, Andrew McIntosh, Jorge E. Moraga, Leigh M. Moscowitz, David C. Ogden, Joel Nathan Rosen, Kevin A. Stein, and Henry YuIn this fifth book on sport and the nature of reputation, editors Lisa Doris Alexander and Joel Nathan Rosen have tasked their contributors with examining reputation from the perspective of celebrity and spectacle, which in some cases can be better defined as scandal. The subjects chronicled in this volume have all proven themselves to exist somewhere on the spectacular spectrum—the spotlight seemed always to gravitate toward them. All have displayed phenomenal feats of athletic prowess and artistry, and all have faced a controversy or been thrust into a situation that grows from age-old notions of the spectacle. Some handled the hoopla like the champions they are, or were, while others struggled and even faded amid the hustle and flow of their runaway celebrity. While their individual narratives are engrossing, these stories collectively paint a portrait of sport and spectacle that offers context and clarity. Written by a range of scholarly contributors from multiple disciplines, The Circus Is in Town: Sport, Celebrity, and Spectacle contains careful analysis of such megastars as LeBron James, Tonya Harding, David Beckham, Shaquille O'Neal, Maria Sharapova, and Colin Kaepernick. This final volume of a project that has spanned the first three decades of the twenty-first century looks to sharpen questions regarding how it is that reputations of celebrity athletes are forged, maintained, transformed, repurposed, destroyed, and at times rehabilitated. The subjects in this collection have been driven by this notion of the spectacle in ways that offer interesting and entertaining inquiry into the arc of athletic reputations.

'This superbly written volume will appeal to sports and physical education students; researchers in foreign policy, gender studies, history, politics, sociology, and technology; and general high school and college readers who enjoy the odd sports history factoid.'– Library JournalSports have become an international spectacle that influences nations'foreign policy, world economies, and regional morale. Hundreds of billions of dollars are at stake as governments and multinational corporations rush to make sure they have a place at the table. And yet, sports come from humble beginnings. We are fascinated by who can run the fastest, lift the most weight, jump the highest, swim the farthest, and act with the most precision. The history of sports is the history of the world.Each chapter features one sport and details that sport's origins, global migration, economic forces, media influences, political environment, pop-culture inspirations, scandalous moments, and key individuals. Sports history is a tapestry of sociological variables; this text weaves them together to create a unique history book that explains not only where humanity has been, but where it might be going.

¿Qué relación puede existir entre el deporte y la geopolítica? A lo largo del siglo xx y en las primeras décadas del siglo xxi, el deporte ha ejercido un papel que sobrepasó las canchas de juego. En los dos tomos de Juegos políticos. El deporte y las pugnas que mueven el mundo se analiza ese lado oculto del deporte a partir de sucesos históricos, culturales y sociales que impactaron en el planeta.

Subkultur und Sportbetrieb: Passt das zusammen? Das fragten viele, als Skateboarding für 2020 zur Olympiadisziplin erklärt wurde. Einerseits gab es in der Geschichte dieser sportiven Praktik tatsächlich Phasen, in der sie mit »Sport« kaum zu tun hatte. Andererseits aber war Olympia schon in den 1960ern Thema. Ausgehend von Foucaults Überlegungen zur »wirklichen Historie« und orientiert an der jüngeren »praxeologischen« Kultursoziologie rekonstruiert Eckehart Velten Schäfer erstmals umfassend jene Pendelbewegung zwischen Sport- und Popkultur, in der Skateboarding zum paradigmatischen Fall dessen wurde, was man heute etwas unglücklich »Trendsport« nennt.

This book provides a holistic view of the relationship between heritage and sport. It examines four types of sport heritage: tangible immovable sport heritage (sports venues, monuments and memorials, landscapes); tangible movable sport heritage (museums and halls of fame, events, living sport heritage); intangible sport heritage (intangibility of sport heritage, institutions, existential); and goods and services with a sport heritage component (tourism, marketing, management). It offers both theoretical and applied approaches to the heritage–sport relationship and intersects with many contemporary topics in heritage, sport, tourism, events and marketing. It will be useful to students and researchers in sport tourism, sport studies, heritage studies, sport history, museum studies and sports management.

Nature sports such as skiing, climbing, and surfing have had a significant influence on Western popular culture since the mid-twentieth century and participation in such sports continues to grow. Written in a clear and accessible style, this important book provides a comprehensive philosophical analysis of nature sports. Philosophy and Nature Sports offers an engaging inquiry into how nature sports differ from mainstream sports, how these differences are related to their value as human activities, and the role of the environments in which such sports take place. Addressing the claim that the most distinctive feature of nature sports is the relationship between participants and the natural world, the book also examines a wide range of topics, such as ethics, risk, gender construction, the social role of nature sport subcultures and the aesthetic experiences of nature sports athletes. Tying these together is the question of what it is that attracts us to nature sports and why they hold meaning for us. This is a valuable resource for students and academics in fields such as alternative sports, alternative sport subcultures, sport philosophy, sport and social issues, ethics, and phenomenology. It is also a fascinating read for outdoor educators and practitioners.

Repairing the Athlete's Image: Studies in Sports Image Restoration, edited by Joseph R. Blaney, Lance Lippert, and J. Scott Smith, offers twenty-one case studies and conceptual frameworks about athletes and their organizations as they attempt to mitigate the effects of malfeasance. Employing traditional Image Restoration Theory (IRT) approaches to athletic communication (and other innovative approaches), the contributors to this volume add to our understanding of which communicative strategies work best for athletes when their reputations are sullied. This comprehensive text presents case studies of varying athletes, sports, and public relations scenarios with prescriptive advice for those attempting to repair athletic reputations. The contributors variously explore such controversies and mischief as the steroids accusations lobbed at Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, the Michael Phelps marijuana controversy, the sexual misconduct of Tiger Woods and Kobe Bryant, and other topical subjects in sports communication and image repair. While this book will be useful for athletes, coaches, managers, and agents in varying athletic endeavors and levels, it is also a dream collection for teachers and scholars of sports communication. The subjects examined in this study span country, gender, and popularity of sport (not to mention a healthy variety of types of accusations.) Repairing the Athlete's Image is an essential resource for graduate and upper-level undergraduate courses in sports communication and popular culture.

Sports and popular music are synergistic agents in the construction of identity and community. They are often interconnected through common cross-marketing tactics and through influence on each other's performative strategies and stylistic content. Typically only studied as separate entities, popular music and sport cultures mutually'play'off each other in exchanges of style, ideologies and forms. Posing unique challenges to notions of mind - body dualities, nationalism, class, gender, and racial codes and sexual orientation, Dr Ken McLeod illuminates the paradoxical and often conflicting relationships associated with these modes of leisure and entertainment and demonstrates that they are not culturally or ideologically distinct but are interconnected modes of contemporary social practice. Examples include how music is used to enhance sporting events, such as anthems, chants/cheers, and intermission entertainment, music that is used as an active part of the athletic event, and music that has been written about or that is associated with sports. There are also connections in the use of music in sports movies, television and video games and important, though critically under-acknowledged, similarities regarding spectatorship, practice and performance. Despite the scope of such confluences, the extraordinary impact of the interrelationship of music and sports on popular culture has remained little recognized. McLeod ties together several influential threads of popular culture and fills a significant void in our understanding of the construction and communication of identity in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Is the face of American baseball throughout the world that of goodwill ambassador or ugly American? Has baseball crafted its own image or instead been at the mercy of broader forces shaping our society and the globe? The Empire Strikes Out gives us the sweeping story of how baseball and America are intertwined in the export of “the American way.”From the Civil War to George W. Bush and the Iraq War, we see baseball's role in developing the American empire, first at home and then beyond our shores. And from Albert Spalding and baseball's first World Tour to Bud Selig and the World Baseball Classic, we witness the globalization of America's national pastime and baseball's role in spreading the American dream. Besides describing baseball's frequent and often surprising connections to America's presence around the world, Elias assesses the effects of this relationship both on our foreign policies and on the sport itself and asks whether baseball can play a positive role or rather only reinforce America's dominance around the globe. Like Franklin Foer in How Soccer Explains the World, Elias is driven by compelling stories, unusual events, and unique individuals. His seamless integration of original research and compelling analysis makes this a baseball book that's about more than just sports.