New Books In Sports

Did you watch the game last night? No matter if you live in Australia, England, India, Ontario, or the US, chances are you’ve heard that question today. Televised sports are a constant presence in contemporary culture, providing a common set of experiences and references for people in the workplace, the...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the classic 1973 film The Sting, Robert Redford and Paul Newman lead a team of con men in an elaborate scam to take revenge on a dangerous crime boss and a corrupt cop. The final play takes place in a high-stakes poolroom, an illegal parlor for the wealthy to...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This past October, David Stern announced that he would step down as commissioner of the National Basketball Association in February 2014. In Stern’s three decades at the helm, the NBA has seen its domestic fortunes rise and ebb. Television ratings for regular-season and playoff games have declined steadily since their...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The sports pages, websites, and television channels are running their annual reviews of the year in sports.  The 10 Best Photos! The 10 Biggest Plays!  The Top 10 Athletes!  Whatever your sporting taste, there’s a year-end list for you. New Books in Sports offers a different take on the end-of-the-year...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Around 380 BC, the Greek philosopher Plato wrote in the Republic about the idealized society as having a “united influence of music and sport” where its people “mingle music with sport in the fairest of proportions.” – from the Rhythms of the Game: The Link Between Musical and Athletic Performance...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This past September an independent panel commissioned in 2009 by the British government released its 395-page report on the Hillsborough Stadium disaster of April 1989. The published findings and the accompanying release of documents confirmed what had long been charged: the deaths of 96 Liverpool fans at the grounds in...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we are talking to Declan Hill about his new book The Fix: Soccer and Organized Crime (McClelland & Stewart, 2010). Most of my research focuses on corruption and the link with organized crime. I have read commissions of inquiry, court cases, journal articles and innumerable books on the topic....Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My wife is a sports fan. Together, we have cheered from the stands at college football games and track meets, for local minor-league baseball clubs and hockey teams. We’ve spent Sunday afternoons watching the National Football League, October nights watching the World Series, and summer afternoons watching the World Cup....Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Of all American sports, baseball has contributed the greater number of folk heroes to the larger culture. Fictional characters of awe-inspiring ability, like the mighty Casey and Roy Hobbs, or quirky sages such as Casey Stengel and Yogi Berra are broadly known in a way that few representatives of other...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This past August, the saga of Lance Armstrong came to its inglorious end. The seven-time champion of the Tour de France and Olympic medalist ended his defense against charges that he had engaged in blood doping during his cycling career. In the judgment of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, the end...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the history of American sports, few athletes were as famous and hated in their day as Jack Johnson. The first African American boxing champion, Johnson was an astonishingly brash figure who flouted the prejudices held by white Americans. His 1910 victory over James J. Jeffries, the former champion dubbed...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

During the 1960s attendance fell at cricket grounds across England. Just as the Church of England lost members in droves in the same period, it appeared that this other pillar of English tradition was becoming irrelevant amidst the social and cultural developments of the times. Making the situation worse were...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There are few moments in recent sports history as riveting, perplexing, and widely debated as Zinedine Zidane’s head-butt to Marco Materazzi in the final match of the 2006 World Cup. Think of your own reaction when the referee stopped play to attend to Materazzi, and you then saw the reply...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A number of modern sports are credited to a particular 19th-century founder. The inventive work of some of these figures, like basketball’s James Naismith, American football’s Walter Camp, and judo’s Jigoro Kano, is firmly planted in history. But there are others, such as Abner Doubleday and William Webb Ellis, who...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

American women dominated the swimming competition at the London Olympics, earning a total of sixteen medals in seventeen events. This template of success was set already at the 1920 Games, the first Olympics in which American women swimmers competed. Women’s swimming races had been introduced in 1912 at Stockholm, but...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you watched the U.S. broadcast of the London 2012 Olympic Games opening ceremony, you may have heard Matt Lauer and Bob Costas mention Jim Thorpe during Sweden’s entrance. Thorpe, arguably the best all-around athlete in U.S. history, won Olympic gold in both the pentathlon and the decathlon in the...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The 2012 London Olympics are here.  To mark the event, New Books in Sports offers another of its occasional seminar episodes.  And as with any great seminar, you’ll be eager to tell people what you’ve learned.  Our slate of Olympic experts don’t offer any medal predictions.  But you will find...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

26.2 is one of the most recognizable numbers in sports. It is also a curious number. The length of the marathon race is the only distance in track that is still measured in English units. Yards have become meters. The mile is now the 1500. But the marathon remains 26...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

During this week of the 4th of July, it’s appropriate to mark America’s national holiday with a podcast about that most American of sports: college football. As past guests on the podcast have explained, widely followed, revenue-generating sports teams affiliated with universities are a distinctive feature of American sports culture,...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The one play of my football career that my father remembers most fondly came in my very first game, when I was eleven years old. Younger and smaller than the other players, I was positioned out of harm’s way at outside linebacker. But on one play, the opposing running back...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices