Books in the Sport and Society series

A celebration of the fast, the strong, the agile, and the tricky throughout Chicago's storied sports history

Reveals the reality behind the glamour of college football and the tough experiences in the life of a benchwarmer. This work reflects the experiences of so many overlooked players and is of interest to those who have watched or played competitive sports.

Through the figure of Harry Hooper (1887-1974), star of four World Series championship teams and a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, Paul Zingg describes baseball's transformation from an often rowdy spectacle to a respectable career choice and entertainment institution. Zingg chronicles Hooper's rise from a sharecropper background in California to college and then to the pinnacle of his sport. Boston's lead-off hitter and right fielder from 1909 to 1920, Hooper later played for the Chicago White Sox, managed in the Pacific Coast League, and coached Princeton's team. When he retired in 1925, he held every major fielding record for an American League right fielder. Hooper's diaries, memoirs, and six decades of letters offer a rich and colorful commentary on the evolution of the game, as well as insight into the tensions between a player's public and private lives.

Before the Super Bowl, before Monday Night Football, even before the NFL, there was Red Grange. This title depicts the career of this soft spoken pioneer who helped lift pro football above its reputation as a dirty little business run by rogues and bargain-basement entrepreneurs.

Examines the myths and the realities, symbols, and rituals of "America's favorite pastime." This book details the relationships among urban politics, communities, and baseball, exploring how debates over issues such as Sunday games, ballpark construction, and the promotion of the game were shaped by Progressive Era sensibilities.

Evaluates Ali's import outside the ring as cultural icon, antiwar protestor, and narcissist.

Aims to make the reader feel the lure of the boxing ring.

Documents the ruin waiting for almost all those ill-advised enough to become professional boxers. The author confirms the legends, of crime, of swindling, of the miserable economic rewards allotted to the vast majority of fighters, and the traditional racism of the American ring.

Talks about the life, career, and impact of Rocky Marciano, the legendary heavyweight boxing champion who also stands as a powerful symbol of his times.

An inclusive narrative of golf's history and popularity in the United States

Legacy remains one of the most important issues relating to multisport mega-events across the globe and it could be argued that the development of legacy is one of the most urgent imperatives in elite sport. In this regard the Paralympics is no exception to the quest for long term legacy; however, little in the way of documentation appears to be forthcoming from the International Paralympic community in this regard. This book reviews the concept of legacy across previous Paralympic Games by providing a series of chapters under the headings of ''The Paralympic Legacy Debate'', ''Paralympic City Legacies'', ''Emerging Issues of Paralympic Legacy'' and ''Reconceptualising Paralympic Legacies''. The issues arising are discussed in terms of a meta-analysis of the author''s work and offer interesting ideas which if taken up by the International Paralympic Committee, International Olympic Committee, Bid Committees, OCOG''s and major sports could change the face of Paralympic legacy towards the positive forever.

The story of "Shoeless" Joe Jackson and his teammates purportedly conspiring with gamblers to throw the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds has lingered in collective consciousness. This interdisciplinary cultural history focuses on how it has been represented and remembered by journalists, historians, novelists, filmmakers, and baseball fans.

The Nazi Olympics is the unsurpassed expose of one of the most bizarre festivals in sport history. Not only does it provide incisive portraits of such key figures as Adolf Hitler, Jesse Owens, Leni Riefenstahl, Helen Stephens, Kee Chung Sohn, and Avery Brundage, it also vividly conveys the entire dazzling charade that reinforced and mobilized the hysterical patriotism of the German masses.