The King Of Sports

Gridiron football is the king of sports – it's the biggest game in the strongest and richest country in the world. In The King of Sports, Easterbrook tells the full story of how football became so deeply ingrained in American culture. Both good and bad, he examines its impact on American society. The King of Sports explores these and many other topics: * The real harm done by concussions (it's not to NFL players). * The real way in which college football players are exploited (it's not by not being paid). * The way football helps American colleges (it's not bowl revenue) and American cities (it's not Super Bowl wins). * What happens to players who are used up and thrown away (it's not pretty). * The hidden scandal of the NFL (it's worse than you think). Using his year-long exclusive insider access to the Virginia Tech football program, where Frank Beamer has compiled the most victories of any active NFL or major-college head coach while also graduating players, Easterbrook shows how one big university "does football right." Then he reports on what's wrong with football at the youth, high school, college and professional levels. Easterbrook holds up examples of coaches and programs who put the athletes first and still win; he presents solutions to these issues and many more, showing a clear path forward for the sport as a whole.

Part crusader, part comedian, Jim Murray was a once-in-a-generation literary talent who just happened to ply his trade on newsprint, right near the box scores and race results. During his lifetime, Murray rose through the ranks of journalism, from hard-bitten 1940s crime reporter, to national Hollywood correspondent, to the top sports columnist in the United States. In Last King of the Sports Page: The Life and Career of Jim Murray, Ted Geltner chronicles Jim Murray’s experiences with twentieth-century American sports, culture, and journalism. At the peak of his influence, Murray was published in more than 200 newspapers. From 1961 to 1998, Murray penned more than 10,000 columns from his home base at the Los Angeles Times. His offbeat humor and unique insight made his column a must-read for millions of sports fans. He was named Sportswriter of the Year an astounding fourteen times, and his legacy was cemented when he became one of only four writers to receive the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for coverage of sports. Geltner now gives readers a first look at Murray’s personal archives and dozens of fresh interviews with sports and journalism personalities, including Arnold Palmer, Mario Andretti, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Yogi Berra, Frank Deford, Rick Reilly, Dan Jenkins, Roy Firestone, and many more. Throughout his life, Murray chronicled seminal events and figures in American culture and history, and this biography details his encounters with major figures such as William Randolph Hearst, Henry Luce, Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, John Wayne, Mickey Mantle, Muhammad Ali, and Tiger Woods. Charming and affecting moments in Murray’s career illustrate the sportswriter’s knack for being in on the big story. Richard Nixon, running for vice president on the Eisenhower ticket in 1952, revealed to Murray the contents of the “Checkers” speech so it could make the Time magazine press deadline. Media mogul Henry Luce handpicked Murray to lead a team that would develop Sports Illustrated for Time/Life in 1953, and when terrorists stormed the Olympic village at the 1972 Munich games, Murray was one of the first journalists to report from the scene. The words of sports journalist Roy Firestone emphasize the influence and importance of Jim Murray on journalism today: “I’ll say without question, I think Jim Murray was every bit as important of a sports writer—forget sport writer—every bit as important a writer to newspapers, as Mark Twain was to literature.” Readers will be entertained and awed by the stories, interviews, and papers of Jim Murray in Last King of the Sports Page.

Argues that Billie Jean King's 1973 defeat of male player Bobby Riggs in tennis' Battle of the Sexes match helped, along with the passage of the Title IX anti-sex discrimination act, cause a revolution in women's sports.

The daring, inventive novel (a sprawling family saga set in Kentucky that combines southern gothic with the drama of horse racing) from a brilliant young author named one of The New Yorker's "20 Best Writers Under 40." Here is the ambitious, strikingly original, and dazzling new novel from a young writer whose first novel, All the Living, received passionate praise and rave reviews, and earned her one of the highly coveted spots on The New Yorker's list of the "20 Best Writers Under 40" alongside such peers as Karen Russell, Wells Tower, Téa Obreht, and Dinaw Mengestu. But where that first novel had startling ambition and scope yet strictly contained its remarkable energy within notably spare language and a pared-down setting and time frame, this new novel's energy bursts out of the gate running and gallops through generations, consuming a multitude of characters and plots. The title The Sport of Kings refers to horse racing, and the novel centres itself within that world: a connected web of humans and animals, as well as a fertile patch of land, in the heart of Kentucky. With breathtaking fluency, C.E. Morgan puts us inside the consciousness of an extraordinary range of characters who inhabit that patch of land through the years: an adolescent trying to grow up under the withering gaze of his landowner father; a brilliant black woman struggling with her seeming fate to be a household servant; a whip-smart boy who grows up in the ghetto but seeks to know more about his mysterious origins; and a girl whose uncompromising love of her family's legacy leads her to gamble with her own life. C.E. Morgan's writing has been compared to that of Marilynne Robinson and James Salter, and her ability to articulate moments fleetingly observed or sudden subtle changes in tenor and mood has a similar effect of mingled surprise and inevitability. This is writing that, even in its wildest and most southern-gothic moments, contains both the ring of truth and the thrill of discovery.

Cameron Hughes has ignited crowds at sporting events across the globe for over 25 years. It's a story of getting up, showing up, and never giving up that will move every reader. Let's spread some cheer!

A Shelf Awareness Best Book of the Year NCAA football is big business. Every Saturday millions of people file into massive stadiums or tune in on television as "athlete-students" give everything they've got to make their team a success. Billions of dollars now flow into the game. But what is the true cost? The players have no share in the oceans of money. And once the lights go down, the glitter doesn't shine so brightly. Filled with mind-blowing details of major NCAA football scandals, with stops at Ohio State, Tennessee, Texas Tech, Missouri, BYU, LSU, Texas A&M and many more, The System explores and exposes the complex, and perhaps broken, machine that churns behind the glamour of college football. With a New Afterword.

Sport governance has become an increasingly widespread subject for research and teaching in sports studies. This engaging and accessible textbook examines the governance of sport organisations in a changing political, legal, financial and socio-cultural context. It explains how sport organisations are governed, explores the issues and challenges faced by those governing sport today, and looks ahead to how sport can be governed better in the future. Covering sport at all levels, from community organisations and national governing bodies to international organisations such as the IOC and FIFA, this text examines key components of governance, such as legal and regulatory frameworks, stakeholding, performance, compliance and the reform of the non-profit sector in line with corporate governance. This text is also timely given that recent corruption scandals in sport have served to highlight the central importance of good governance in sport. Its nine chapters draw upon more than thirty international case examples across a range of sports including athletics, football, gymnastics, hockey, rowing, rugby, badminton and tennis. With extensive lists of learning activities and resources, original empirical research and insights into the politics of policymaking and implementation, this textbook is essential reading for any course on sport governance, policy, management or development.

Destination Sport is your guide to one of the world's great obsessions: to the teams, the games, the venues, the histories and the personalities that all come together to form something amazing. Matches that freeze economies. Races that stop nations. Rivalries that stretch back through centuries. This is the world of sport, electrifying and fascinating, thrilling and endlessly revealing. You can't hope to understand a nation without understanding its pastimes and passions, and that, so often, is sport. Organized into sections by world region, Destination Sport features a line-up of sports, events and sporting venues that are both familiar and obscure, from world-famous match-ups to little known quirks. There's also a focus on the world's best stadiums and a calendar of sporting events. This is the ideal book for sports lovers who want to understand the full gamut of sports around the world, watch them all on TV and perhaps even travel to join the locals in their passion. Illustrations by UK artist Paul Reid.