Browse

This book reassess how tennis evolved from a cloistered amateur game to a more inclusive and thoroughly professionalized global sport. Tennis began in Britain in 1873. The game grew quickly along the east coast of the United States before moving west, where it found a home in California. For most of its history, tennis remained a sport that separated amateur and professional players. In the minds of the private clubs and associations that organized the game for the first half century of its existence, control rather than commercialization was paramount. The Great Depression and World War II significantly undermined the authority of those associations by introducing a new generation of less affluent and working-class players with social backgrounds different than those of the men who ran the amateur associations. The best of those athletes challenged the amateur associations about the role of money in their sport. From 1945 to 1968, they professionalized tennis with annual barnstorming tours throughout the world. The visibility, viability, and popularity of those tours finally coaxed the reluctant leaders of amateur associations to allow the opening of their major tournament venues to professional players in 1968. Almost simultaneously, sports marketers, professional promoters, and sports publishers popularized and further globalized so-called Open Tennis into much the same form it retains today.

Across North America, Native Americans and colonists played a variety of kicking games long before soccer's emergence in the late 1800s. The book explores the development and social impact of these sports through the rise of professional soccer after World War I. The various games called football encouraged men to form social bonds based on educational experience, occupation, ethnic identity, or military service and gave women an outlet as athletes. Football followed young people to college as higher education expanded in the nineteenth century. University play, the arrival of immigrants from Great Britain, and the backing of industrial firms helped spark the creation of organized soccer in the United States. By the early twentieth century, soccer communities had become established in many cities around the country. These communities served as a foundation for the growth that occurred following the end of World War I.

This book chronicles the history of Women’s Artistic Gymnastics against the backdrop of the Cold War. Accepted into the Olympic program in 1952 because it was considered uniquely appropriate for women, the sport has always been defined by the performance of femininity. Eastern bloc governments harnessed the nonthreatening nature of gymnasts to advance their political ambitions through citizen diplomacy. Yet at the same time, they were accused of flouting the amateur rule. But this was not the only rule being broken. Some also cheated by score fixing and later, age falsification. The sport became notorious for its young athletes. Their youth contributed to a power imbalance with their coaches, creating the conditions for abuse. Gymnastics was once at the forefront of women’s sport. But can a sport facing these issues, designed to promote a narrow view of gender, really be feminist? In exploring these topics, this book shows how gymnastics became a part of the cultural battlefield for Cold War supremacy. But gymnastics was not only a space for challenge. It also provided moments of international collaboration: between the international gymnastics federation and the International Olympic Committee, between gymnasts, coaches, officials, fans, and even politicians. This book argues that these global interactions charged the transformation of the sport throughout the twentieth century. It offers new insights into how sport transmits and perpetuates social ideals and the role sports, and their governing bodies, play in international relations. And with this knowledge, it suggests how women’s gymnastics might once again become the empowering, feminist experience it once was.

Over the first twenty years of the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s (UFC) history, the mixed-martial arts (MMA) promotion adamantly excluded female athletes and upheld sports media’s time-honored tradition of ignoring and undervaluing sportswomen. Yet, in the early 2010s, Ronda Rousey burst onto the MMA stage and convinced the UFC to include women, which ushered in a new fervor for female athletes in a male-dominated cultural milieu. The popularity of women in the UFC might suggest that female athletes in combat sports are breaking the barriers of a notoriously stubborn glass ceiling. However, as the first academic book analyzing the UFC as a sports media brand, Fighting Visibility urges advocates of women’s sports to consider the limits of representation for cultural change and urges caution against the celebratory discourse of women’s inclusion. Part cultural history of the UFC as a media juggernaut and part cautionary tale for the future of women as sports laborers, Fighting Visibility argues that the UFC’s promotion of diverse female athletes actually serves as a seductive mirage of progress that enables the brand’s exploitative labor practices. The UFC’s labor model disproportionately taxes female athletes, particularly women of color and gender nonnormative women, despite also promoting them at unprecedented levels. Fighting Visibility complicates a prevalent notion among sports scholars, activists, and fans that the increased visibility of female athletes will lead to greater equity in sports media and instead urges us to question who ultimately benefits from that visibility in neoliberal brand culture.

In the post–World War II period, nations and territories used international sport to codify and communicate their ideal citizenries. For the United States, black women who competed in track and field complicated these efforts. This book analyzes the ideological influence of black women track stars, examining how they destabilized dominant ideas about race, gender, sexuality, and national identity. The strivings and successes of black American track women, such as Alice Coachman, Mae Faggs, and Wilma Rudolph, at the Olympic Games and other international sporting events from 1948 to 1962 repeatedly forced white and black sport cultures in the United States to wrestle with the meaning of black women’s athleticism. Both white and black sport cultures struggled to fit black women athletes into their respective visions for the postwar American nation, reflecting and reinforcing how the Cold War, civil rights movement, and their intersection encouraged broader reconfigurations of the racial, gender, and sexual associations of ideal American identity. Ultimately, these American sport cultures marshaled racialized gender expectations to contain the threat that black women track stars embodied, interpreting and reinterpreting the meaning of their athletic efforts in ways that bolstered established hierarchies of race and gender.

A multibillion-dollar entertainment empire, the National Football League is a coast-to-coast obsession that borders on religion and dominates our sports-mad culture. But today's NFL also provides a stage for playing out important issues roiling American society. This updated and expanded edition of NFL Football observes the league's centennial by following the NFL into the twenty-first century, where off-the-field concerns compete with touchdowns and goal line stands for headlines. Richard C. Crepeau delves into the history of the league and breaks down the new era with an in-depth look at the controversies and dramas swirling around pro football today:  Tensions between players and Commissioner Roger Goodell over collusion, drug policies, and revenue, including analysis of the 2020 collective bargaining agreement  The firestorm surrounding Colin Kaepernick and protests of police violence and inequality  Andrew Luck and others choosing early retirement over the threat to their long-term health  Paul Tagliabue's role in covering up information on concussions  The Super Bowl's evolution into a national holiday Authoritative and up to the minute, NFL Football continues the epic American success story.

Male professional athletes captivate fans and profoundly influence today’s society as part of the $1.3 trillion global sport industry. Although these athletes’ lives and careers are widely reported, scholarly knowledge about the women who support them—their wives—is extremely limited. Because these women’s voices have historically been stifled, their marriages are shockingly misunderstood. Based on findings from the first and only longitudinal study on the sport marriage, this book corrects the abundance of misinformation reported by all forms of media, dispels undeserved stereotypes, and addresses inaccurate assumptions about the heteronormative sport marriage. It demonstrates how, despite major changes in society and sport since the end of the last century, the fundamental nature of the heteronormative sport marriage has not changed. Sport wives remain isolated and subordinate, even while they make significant contributions to their husbands’ careers. Identifying the sport marriage as a career-dominated marriage, the book allows us into these women’s public and private lives, including their need to conform to unwritten rules and codes, adapt to abundant power and control issues, cope with groupies from all walks of life, and find ways to deal with their oft-justified fears about their husbands’ infidelity. The book shares intimate stories about, and provides rare and unflinching insight into, what it is like to be married to these highly visible men, what it means to be a woman in the male-dominated world of professional sports, and why women remain in a sport marriage at great cost to themselves.

Before March Madness examines the power dynamics of mid-century college sports when their meaning in higher education was still uncertain, when their future in American culture was still undetermined, and when the ascendance, indeed the very survival, of the NCAA was not yet assured. The book identifies the institutional struggles of college athletics from the late 1930s to the late 1950s and the multiple stakeholders and varied interests contained therein, showing a complex, and often conflicting, view of both college sports and higher education. The NCAA’s insistence on defining college athletics solely within the big-time commercialized model opened itself to severe criticism from within the organization in the form of small liberal arts colleges, medium-size regional and state universities, and historically black colleges, as well as outside it with the creation of the NAIA. The organization, however, successfully used college basketball to both placate internal critics and stave off its external competitor. In doing so, the NCAA managed to create in the public’s mind a singular vision of college sports, often represented by college football, representing only the big-time commercialized model by creating a peace that was purchased through college basketball. The success of NCAA elites to co-opt, divide, and placate its insurgent critics mirrored the larger response of mid-twentieth-century political and economic elites in the face of unprecedented challenges resulting from the civil rights movement, second-wave feminism, and opposition to the war in Vietnam.

The book discusses a sports rivalry between two cities--Kansas City, Missouri and Oakland, California--during one of the most tumultuous periods in U.S. history, the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s. Kansas City and Oakland sought major league teams to show the rest of the world that they were no longer minor league in stature. Their efforts to attract big-league franchises pitted the two cities against each other. After they succeeded in landing those franchises, the cities’ football and baseball teams regularly fought each other--sometimes literally--on the field. By 1977 Kansas City and Oakland would be much changed from what they had been only a decade previously. Their sports teams had brought them widespread attention and athletic glory, just as they had craved. They also had done much to try to improve themselves by building not only new sports facilities but also new cultural, retail, and transportation centers. But those triumphs came at a cost amid wrenching clashes over race and labor relations, pitched battles over urban renewal, and heated controversies over the lot of professional athletes. The book tells parallel stories: that of the clashes between the cities’ sports teams, and that of the struggles of the cities themselves to show that they had become “big league” through sports and other major civic initiatives.

Existing football literature lacks an adequate history of the creation of American football, primarily because it fails to sufficiently examine individual human contributions, especially the circumstances and role of those contributions in achieving the game’s distinctive and appealing features. Walter Camp is the key person in American football’s development, almost a solitary leader in the game’s early years, influential in development of various component features of the game, and inventor of its most important rule, the downs-and-distance rule (today four downs to advance ten yards). Camp was closely involved in American football throughout his life, a generally positive experience until the game encounters a major crisis in the early 1900s, when American football and its rule makers are attacked because of the game’s perceived brutality. Conflict develops over potential solutions, and Camp is partially defeated with the help of President Theodore Roosevelt, effectively forcing inclusion of forward passing in the game.