Bøger i Sports & Popular Culture serien

"In the 1990s, the NBA was trying to capitalize on the latter part of the Michael Jordan era and reposition the league for an international market. Expansion franchises were granted to two Canadian cities; but while Toronto thrived thanks in large part to the drafting of Vince Carter, Vancouver badly mismanaged its team, leading eventually to the team's relocation to Memphis. Author ¡ukasz Muniowski finds in the shifting fortunes of the Vancouver/Memphis Grizzlies a significant window on a volatile moment in NBA history. He first examines the failure, both financially and culturally, of a prosperous Canadian city to support an NBA expansion team before turning to the Grizzlies' explosive rise in a relatively impoverished southern city starving for national recognition"--

"When NHL commissioner Clarence Campbell announced that Atlanta had received an NHL franchise, ownership was tasked with selling a northern game that most of the city's Black residents had never experienced. The team marketed itself to upper-middle class White residents by portraying a hockey game as an exclusive event-with the whiteness of the players themselves providing critical support for that claim. In a city that had given Hank Aaron a cool reception and had effectively guaranteed the whitening of a successful Black basketball team, the prospect of a sport with White players was an inherent draw that leaders hoped would mitigate White flight from the city and draw residents of the surrounding suburbs back to the city center. The team was ultimately marketed as the Flames, a reference to William Sherman's burning of Atlanta and the city's rise from the ashes to its rightful place as a Deep South hub of culture and economy. It wasn't a name with specific racial coding, but with the city's racial history and the Lost Cause iconography that dotted its landscape, a Civil War name could only add to the impression of a White team playing to White fans in a majority Black city. Thus the politics of civic development and race combined yet again, but this time in a form foreign to most longtime sports enthusiasts in the Deep South"--

The National Football League that celebrated its first Super Bowl in 1967 bore scant resemblance to the league of its obscure origins. In its earliest years, the league was a ragtag collection of locally supported small-town teams that generated attention only in the locales in which they played, if they were lucky. Many teams received no support at all. Only after enduring a slow, often treacherous, journey did the enterprise of professional football reach its position as the king of the sports world by the late 1960s. In From Sandlots to the Super Bowl, Craig R. Coenen recounts the NFL's ascension from a cash-strapped laughingstock to a perennial autumn obsession for millions of sports fans. It offers an in-depth summary of the NFL's early years and its struggles to build an identity. This book shows how the fledgling NFL of the 1920s and 1930s attempted to build support both on a local and national scale. Considered a sport of hooligans and lower-class athletes, professional football paled in comparison to the reputations of competing sports such as college football and professional baseball. Even more difficult for the league, developing civic support for franchises proved an almost impossible task. Teams would spring up and disappear overnight, generating hardly any notice among sports fans.Coenen shows how the league's survival depended on small town franchises being able to tap into the civic pride and larger economic interests of nearby, growing urban centers. This book also details how the league faced challenges from rival leagues, the government, and at times, itself. Finally, it documents how the NFL mastered the use of new technologies like television to market itself, generate new revenue, and secure its financial future.This book approaches the history of the National Football League not only with stats and scores but with what happened beyond the gridiron. Starting in Canton and Massillon and ending in Los Angeles with Super Bowl I, From Sandlots to the Super Bowl offers an entertaining and absorbing look at the first five decades of America's most popular professional sport.

Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore opened in 1992 as an intentional antidote to the modern multiuse athletic stadium. Home to only one sport and featuring accents of classic parks of previous generations. Oriole Park attempted to reconstitute Baltimore's past while serving as a cornerstone of downtown redevelopment. Since the gates opened at Camden yards, more than a dozen other American cities have constructed "new old" major league parks - Cleveland, Detroit, Seattle, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Atlanta, Denver, Phoenix, San Francisco, Cincinnati, Houston, Arlington, Texas, and San Diego. In Retro Ball Parks, Daniel Rosenweig explores the cultural and economic role of retro baseball parks and traces the cultural implications of re-creating the old in new urban spaces. According to Rosenweig, the new urban landscape around these retro stadiums often presents a more homogenous culture than the one the new park replaced. Indeed, whole sections of cities have razed in order to build stadiums that cater to clientele eager to enjoy a nostalgic urban experience. This mandate to draw suburban residents and tourists to the heart of downtown, combined with the accompanying gentrification of these newly redeveloped areas, has fundamentally altered historic urban centers.>Daniel Rosensweig is a professor in the Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies Program at the University of Virginia

"Sean O'Neil explores several narratives at the intersection of religion and disability across the spectrum of contemporary sports. He ties religious belief and practice to the oftentimes fragile bodies of athletes, including those with disabilities. Athletic triumph over fragility is couched in religious terms, though not always with strictly Christian connotations, and O'Neil interleaves his own limitations through an autoethnographic presentation of his battle with skin cancer and his lifelong struggle with obsessive compulsive disorder"--

Tells the story of basketball in Tennessee's southwestern-most metropolis following the 1968 assassination of Marin Luther King Jr. Keith Brian Wood examines the city through the lens of the Memphis State University basketball team and its star player turned coach, Larry Finch.

The early history of soccer in the United States has received relatively little scholarly attention. Soccer Frontiers helps to fill this gap and correct the widespread notion that soccer was unfamiliar in the United States before the late twentieth century.

Whether loved or reviled, the New York Yankees have had an impact on American culture that extends well beyond baseball. In Pinstripe Nation, Will Bishop explores the myriad of ways in which the Yankees and their successes (or spectacular failures) became interwoven with the nation's larger cultural narrative.

The nineteenth century saw the American circus move from a reviled and rejected form of entertainment to the ""Greatest Show on Earth"". Circus Life by Micah D. Childress looks at this transition from the perspective of the people who owned and worked in circuses and how they responded to the new incentives that rapid industrialization made possible.