Showing titles in Sociology of Sports

Everyone knows that football is violent and dangerous. But what the players who built the NFL into a $10 billion industry didn’t know—and what the league sought to shield from them—is that no amount of padding could protect the human brain from the force generated by modern football.

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. Sports fans are left deliberating not only mismanagement but also political, health, and ethical issues. In Rethinking Fandom: How to Beat the Sports Industrial Complex at Its Own Game, sportswriter and lifelong sports fan Craig Calcaterra outlines endemic problems with what he calls the sports-industrial complex.

Professional wrestling has always been wrapped in mystery. After a century of masquerading as legitimate sport, at last pro-wrestling has begun to show the potential of its form. At its core, it is live combat theatre, and no one has done more to codify and analyze this mesmerizing art form than Mike Quackenbush. To aid a generation of evolving performers to meet the demands of modern audiences, here is Toolbox - Building Better Pro-Wrestling.

The Sports Parents Solution gives you the strategies and methods you need to transform the parent culture in your team, allowing you to better support each athlete’s growth, improve your team’s performance, create an extraordinary experience for all involved—and take your program to a whole new level.

From the number-one best-selling author of This Town comes a thrillingly raw and hysterical account of the billionaires, crooks, charlatans and scoundrels that own and run the NFL. American Football - with its celebrity players, billionaire owners, and cheerleaders with flawless teeth - is more American than apple pie. Which is why celebrated New York Times journalist Mark Leibovich has chosen football as the vehicle through which to examine the troubled state of Trump’s America.

Random House presents the audiobook edition of The Secret Footballer: What Goes on Tour by The Secret Footballer. Since his first book was published in 2012, The Secret Footballer has been able to take the listener behind the scenes of footballers' lives like no other player has been or will ever be able to do. Anonymity has been a potent weapon in revealing the real world of football stars, and five years on, he has now penned the work that all his fellow professionals have been urging him to do from the start: The Secret Footballer: What Goes on Tour.

Sports media superstar Clay Travis wants to save sports from the social justice warriors seeking to turn them into another political battleground. Having ruined journalism and Hollywood, far-left-wing activists have now turned to sports. Travis argues it’s time for right-thinking fans everywhere to put down their beers and reclaim their teams and their traditions. In Republicans Buy Sneakers, Too, he replays the arguments he’s won and lays out all the battles ahead. His goal is simple: to make sports great again.

Football is the people's game. A sport accessible to everyone and enjoyed by millions around the world. But football is broken. Beneath the glamorous sheen of the Premier League, it's a game that's rusting and rotten. The growing influence and wealth of the biggest teams is harming the game, leaving fans out of pocket and other clubs clinging to survival. This isn't what football is about. Gary Neville has had a front-row seat in football for over 30 years, witnessing the sport at every level. Most of all, he's a fan. The People's Game is Gary's vision for a brighter future.

The GAA is Ireland's largest civil society organisation, woven into the fabric of families and communities - and yet most books about Gaelic games focus on the greatest players and inter-county teams. This is the Life is a book about the 99 per cent: a witty and provocative look at grassroots GAA from the most intelligent and interesting Gaelic games pundit at work today.

The Ball in the Air is reported with Bamberger’s you-are-there intimacy and captures the sweep of time. Pratima finds her way from Nepal to a university golf team in Southern California. Ryan and his father caddie in minor-league events while sleeping in tents, a preamble to Ryan’s becoming the godfather of the popular Monday Qualifier Twitter feed. Sam Reeves, born in rural Georgia during the Depression, becomes a cotton king, the oldest amateur to make the cut at the Pebble Beach National Pro-Am, and the ultimate man for all seasons.

After covering the American sports scene for 15 years, Chuck Culpepper suffered from a profound case of Common Sportswriter Malaise. He was fed up with self-righteous proclamations, steroid scandals, and the deluge of in-your-face PR that saturated the NFL, the NBA, and MLB. Then in 2006, he moved to London and discovered a new and baffling world - the renowned Premiership soccer league. Culpepper pledged his loyalty to Portsmouth, a gutsy, small-market team at the bottom of the standings. As he puts it, “It was like childhood, with beer.”

What if running in beautiful places was paradoxically contributing to the destruction of those precious environments and causing irreversible global harm to people and animals, too? In We Can’t Run Away from This, ultrarunner Damian Hall examines the impact of running in our climate and ecological emergency. Packed with insights from experts, it is an enlightening book that will prompt us all to really think about our kit, food, and travel and to identify simple changes we can make to our running and wider lives. 

The NBA has returned to prominence on the backs of phenoms like LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, and Kevin Garnett. The media promotes them, the shoe companies pay them, and America applauds. But how exactly do such players reach the pros? What do they give up to get there? And what happens to those who fall short?

As Nazi Germany launched its campaign of racial terror and pushed the world toward war, three misfits banded together to challenge Hitler’s dominance at the apex of motorsport: the Grand Prix. Their quest for redemption culminated in a remarkable race that is still talked about in racing circles to this day - but which, soon after it ended, Hitler attempted to completely erase from history.

After Grant Wahl died of an aortic aneurysm at the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, collapsing in his press seat during a quarterfinal match, tributes to Wahl poured in from around the globe. Wahl was beloved for good reason—he was kind, generous, and unflinching in the face of injustice. He was also clearly one of the best journalists covering sports of his generation. Spanning four decades of storytelling, World Class collects for the first time the finest work of Grant Wahl.

Radical gender activists are using a pseudoscientific theory of human biology to hijack sports and subvert the long-established concept of fair play - forcing women and girls to risk their safety, pushing them aside for male athletes using the excuse of “inclusivity”.

Becoming a Sustainable Runner is not just another running guide on developing the physical attributes to run faster or longer. What it will help you achieve is a newfound purpose that merges your passion for running with your concern for your health, your community, and the environment. It weaves together concepts of internal and external sustainability in a way that will help you run, think, and act in a way that is in line with your values.

In his brilliant new memoir, Pat Nevin takes us on a journey to the less glamorous side of football. From Tranmere to Kilmarnock, he plays some of the best football he's ever played. Then, in an unprecedented twist of fate, finds himself both player and Chief Executive of Scottish First Division club Motherwell.

Hockey culture: it’s a commonly used phrase inside the game, glorifying sacrifice, toughness, loyalty, and a sense of identity. Justin Davis viewed this culture as something he was lucky enough to experience. After all, he’d won a Memorial Cup after leading the tournament in scoring, and he’d been drafted by the Washington Capitals. “In my mind,” he says, “I was the normal one.” Unfortunately, after stepping outside the game, he began to recognize the racism, sexual abuse and bullying that was so deeply ingrained in the sport.

Do you want to know the best to do AAU basketball? This book holds the answers to all of your questions about the new world of AAU basketball. Inside its chapters are step-by-step directions on how to navigate the AAU basketball landscape successfully for you and your young player.