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The 1922 Federal Baseball Supreme Court ruling held that the “business of base ball” was not subject to the Sherman Antitrust Act because it did not constitute interstate commerce. This book explains why the unanimous Supreme Court opinion authored by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, which gave rise to Major League Baseball's exemption from antitrust law, was correct given the circumstances of the time. Currently a billion-dollar enterprise, professional baseball teams crisscross the country while the games are broadcast via radio, television, and Internet coast to coast. The sheer scope of this activity would seem to embody the phrase “interstate commerce.” Yet baseball is the only professional sport—indeed the sole industry—in the United States that currently benefits from a judicially constructed antitrust immunity. Using recently released documents from the National Baseball Hall of Fame, the book analyzes how the Supreme Court reached this seemingly peculiar result by tracing the Federal Baseball litigation from its roots in 1914 to its resolution in 1922, in the process uncovering significant new details about the proceedings. The book observes that while interstate commerce was measured at the time by the exchange of tangible goods, baseball teams in the 1910s merely provided live entertainment to their fans, while radio was a fledgling technology that had little impact on the sport. The book concludes that, despite the frequent criticism of the opinion, the Supreme Court's decision was consistent with the conditions and legal climate of the early twentieth century.

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.

Between 1951 and 1989, Congress held a series of hearings to investigate the antitrust aspects of professional sports leagues. Among the concerns: ownership control of players, restrictions on new franchises, territorial protection, and other cartel-like behaviors. This book chronicles the key issues that arose during the Congressional hearings and the ways by which opposing sides used economic data and theory to define what was right, what was feasible, and what was advantageous to one party or another. As the book shows, the hearings affected matters as fundamental to the modern game as broadcast rights, drafts and players' associations, league mergers, and the dominance of the New York Yankees. It also charts how lawmakers from the West and South pressed for the relocation of ailing franchises to their states and the ways by which savvy owners dodged congressional interference when they could and adapted to it when necessary.

This book is the first to document the transformation of America’s national pastime from a gender-neutral sport into a highly-gendered “man’s game.” For decades, most modern scholars of sport have assumed that baseball was, and always has been, a man’s game. Yet baseball began as a gender-neutral “blank slate” upon which adult men and women wrote their gendered narratives and then taught those narratives to their children. Baseball’s gendered future was never inevitable nor was it quickly solidified or uncontested. Every decade of the nineteenth century saw more girls and women playing and watching baseball than in previous decades. Yet the narrative of baseball as a man’s game gained momentum in each successive decade well into the twentieth century. The book describes the process through which the history of women baseball players became distorted by myth and misperception even as girls and women played on the same types of teams that boys and men did, including scholastic/collegiate, civic/pick-up, amateur/professional and factory teams. The book places the evolution of baseball’s gendered characterization into the broader context of American sport and culture, and describes how professional interests wrested control of the game’s institutional structures, culture, and social interactions from amateur interests.

This book delves into the background and what-ifs surrounding seven defining moments that redefined college sports. These changes involved fundamental issues—race and gender, profit and power—that reflected societal tensions and, in many cases, remain pertinent today: the failed 1950 effort to pass a Sanity Code regulating payments to football players; the thorny racial integration of university sports programs; the boom in television money; the 1984 Supreme Court decision that settled who could control skyrocketing media revenues; Title IX's transformation of women's athletics; the cheating, eligibility, and recruitment scandals that tarnished college sports in the 1980s and 1990s; the ongoing controversy over paying student athletes a share of the enormous moneys harvested by schools and athletic departments. A thought-provoking journey into the whos and whys of college sports history, the book reveals how the turning points of yesterday and today will impact tomorrow.

Delving into the history of gambling and corruption in intercollegiate sports, this book recounts all of the major gambling scandals in college football and basketball. The book finds that game rigging has been pervasive and nationwide throughout most of the sports' history. Naming the players, coaches, gamblers, and go-betweens involved, the book discusses numerous college basketball and football games reported to have been fixed and describes the various methods used to gain unfair advantage, inside information, or undue profit. The book's survey of college football includes early years of gambling on games between established schools such as Yale, Princeton, and Harvard; Notre Dame's All-American halfback and skilled gambler George Gipp; and the 1962 allegations of insider information between Alabama coach Paul “Bear” Bryant and former Georgia coach James Wallace “Wally” Butts; and many other recent incidents. Notable events in basketball include the 1951 scandal involving City College of New York and six other schools throughout the East Coast and the Midwest; the 1961 point-shaving incident that put a permanent end to the Dixie Classic tournament; the 1994–95 Northwestern scandal in which players bet against their own team; and other recent examples of compromised game play and gambling.

It is the early Cold War. The Soviet Union appears to be in irresistible ascendance and moves to exploit the Olympic Games as a vehicle for promoting international communism. In response, the United States conceives a subtle, far-reaching psychological warfare campaign to blunt the Soviet advance. Drawing on newly declassified materials and archives, this book chronicles how the U.S. government used the Olympics to promote democracy and its own policy aims during the tense early phase of the Cold War. The book shows how the government, though constrained by traditions against interference in the Games, eluded detection by cooperating with private groups, including secretly funded émigré organizations bent on liberating their home countries from Soviet control. At the same time, the United States appropriated Olympic host cities to hype the American economic and political system while, behind the scenes, the government attempted clandestine manipulation of the International Olympic Committee. The book also details the campaigns that sent propaganda materials around the globe as the United States mobilized culture in general, and sports in particular, to fight the communist threat.

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.

Once a winter pastime for socializing and courtship, skating evolved into the wildly popular competitive sport of figure skating, one of the few athletic arenas where female athletes hold a public profile—and earning power—equal to that of men. This book chronicles figure skating's rise from its earliest days through its head-turning debut at the 1908 Olympics and its breakthrough as entertainment in the 1930s. The book credits figure skating's explosive expansion to an ever-increasing number of women who had become proficient skaters and wanted to compete, not just in singles but with partners as well. Matters reached a turning point when British skater Madge Syers entered the otherwise-male 1902 World Championship held in London and finished second. Called skating's first feminist, Syers led a wave of women who made significant contributions to figure skating and helped turn it into today's star-making showcase at every Olympic Winter Games.

This book relives a lost moment in American postwar history, when boxing ruled as one of the nation's most widely televised sports. During the 1950s and 1960s, viewers tuned in weekly, sometimes even daily, to watch widely recognized fighters engage in primordial battle; the Gillette Cavalcade of Sports Friday Night Fights was the most popular fight show. This book follows the dual narratives of the Friday Night Fights show and the individual story of Gaspar “Indio” Ortega, a boxer who appeared on prime-time network television more than almost any other boxer in history. From humble beginnings growing up poor in Tijuana, Mexico, Ortega personified the phenomenon of postwar boxing at its greatest, appearing before audiences of millions to battle the biggest names of the time, such as Carmen Basilio, Tony DeMarco, Chico Vejar, Benny “Kid” Paret, Emile Griffith, Kid Gavilan, Florentino Fernández, and Luis Manuel Rodriguez. The book explores the factors contributing to the success of televised boxing, including the rise of television entertainment, the role of a “reality” blood sport, Cold War masculinity, changing attitudes toward race in America, and the influence of organized crime. At times evoking the drama and spectacle of the Friday Night Fights themselves, this book is a lively examination of a time in history when Americans crowded around their sets to watch the main event.

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.

Sports figures cope with a level of celebrity once reserved for the stars of stage and screen. This book looks at the legal ramifications of the cases brought by six of them—golfer Tiger Woods, quarterback Joe Montana, college football coach Wally Butts, baseball pitchers Warren Spahn and Don Newcombe, and hockey enforcer Tony Twist—when faced with what they considered attacks on their privacy and image. Placing each case in its historical and legal context, the book examines how sports figures in the United States have used the law to regain control of their image. As the book shows, decisions in the cases significantly affected the evolution of laws related to privacy, defamation, and publicity—areas pertinent to the lives of the famous sports figure and the non-famous consumer alike. It also tells the stories of why the plaintiffs sought relief in the courts, uncovering motives that delved into the heart of issues separating individual rights from the public's perceived right to know. A fascinating exploration of a still-evolving phenomenon, this book is an essential look at the legal playing fields that influence our enjoyment of sports.

At its heart, I Fight for a Living is a book about black men who came of age in the Reconstruction and early Jim Crow era--a time when the remaking of white manhood was at its most intense, placing vigor and physicality at the center of the construction of manliness. The book uses the stories of black fighters’ lives, from 1880 to 1915, to explore how working-class black men used prizefighting and the sporting culture to assert their manhood in a country that denied their equality, and to examine the reactions by the black middle class and white middle class toward these black fighters. Through these stories, the book explores how the assertion of this working-class manliness confronted American ideas of race and manliness. While other works on black fighters have explored black boxers as individuals, this book seeks to study these men as a collective group while providing a localized and racialized response to black working-class manhood. It was a tough bargain to risk one’s body to prove manhood, but black men across the globe took that chance.

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.

The art and craft of winemaking has put down roots in the Midwest, where enterprising vintners coax reds and whites from the prairie earth while their businesses stand at the hub of a new tradition of community and conviviality. This book tracks among the hardy vines and heartland terroir of wineries across Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, and Ohio. Blending history and observation, it gives us a top-down view of the business from cuttings and cultivation to sales and marketing. It also invites entrepreneurs to share stories of their ambitions, hard work, and strategies. The book's discussion is divided into three parts. It looks at wineries as places that bring people together to informally socialize with others. It then considers the wineries as having an inspiration, doing good work, and being rewarded for that effort. It also considers local wineries in the larger institutional contexts and actors. The book traces the hows and whys of progress toward that noblest of goals: a great vintage that puts their winery on the map.

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.

Nikkei Baseball examines baseball's evolving importance to the Japanese American community and the construction of Japanese American identity. Originally introduced in Japan in the late 1800s, baseball was played in the United States by Japanese immigrants first in Hawaii, then San Francisco and northern California, then in amateur leagues up and down the Pacific Coast. For Japanese American players, baseball was seen as a sport that encouraged healthy competition by imposing rules and standards of ethical behavior for both players and fans. The value of baseball as exercise and amusement quickly expanded into something even more important, a means for strengthening social ties within Japanese American communities and for linking their aspirations to America's pastimes and America's promise. Drawing from archival research, prior scholarship, and personal interviews, this book explores key historical factors such as Meiji-era modernization policies in Japan, American anti-Asian sentiments, internment during World War II, the postwar transition, economic and educational opportunities in the 1960s, the developing concept of a distinct “Asian American” identity, and Japanese Americans' rise to the major leagues with star players including Lenn Sakata and Kurt Suzuki and even managers such as the Seattle Mariners' Don Wakamatsu.

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.

Baseball is much more than the national pastime. It has become an emblem of America itself. Stories abound that illustrate baseball's significance in eradicating racial barriers, bringing neighborhoods together, and building civic pride. This book probes the less well-known but no less meaningful other side of baseball: episodes not involving equality, patriotism, heroism, and virtuous capitalism, but power—how it is obtained, and how it perpetuates itself. Exploring the founding of the National League, the book focuses on the newer Americans who sought club ownership to promote their own social status in the increasingly closed caste of late nineteenth-century America. The book's perspective on the rise and public rebuke of the Players Association shows that these events reflect both the collective spirit of working and middle-class America in the mid-twentieth century as well as the countervailing forces that sought to beat back this emerging movement that threatened the status quo. Even his take on baseball's racial integration that began with Branch Rickey's “Great Experiment” reveals the debilitating effects of the harsh double standard that resulted, requiring a black player to have unimpeachable character merely to take the field in a Major League game, a standard no white player was required to meet. Told with passion and occasional outrage, this book challenges the perspective of the well-known, deeply entrenched, hyper-patriotic stories of baseball and offers an incisive alternative history of America's much-loved national pastime.