Sports Culture

“How can the NCAA blithely wreck careers without regard to due process or common fairness? How can it act so ruthlessly to enforce rules that are so petty? Why won’t anybody stand up to these outrageous violations of American values and American justice?” In the four years since Joe...

Will Castro, star of Velocity Channel's Unique Rides and one of the most popular car customizers in America, has achieved the American Dream, finding great success doing something he loves. He has worked with marquee names in entertainment, and Unique Hustle is packed with anecdotes of some of the biggest names in sports, music, film, and television.

In Championship Culture, you learn the seven essentials for building a championship culture through a fun and exciting story. This story is about Pillar #2 in the 12 Pillars of Peak Performance and is the third book.

With every touchdown, home run, and three-pointer, star athletes represent an American dream that only an elite group blessed with natural talent can achieve. However, Kimball concentrates on what happens once these modern warriors meet their untimely demise. As athletes die, legends rise in their place.

Crack of the Bat takes listeners from the 1920s to the present, examining the role of baseball in the development of the radio industry and the complex coevolution of their relationship. Despite cable television’s ubiquity, live video streaming, and social media, radio remains an important medium through which fans engage with their teams.

Schieber, Spieler und Rebellen: Der Bundesligaskandal erschüttert das Land, die Nationalelf um Beckenbauer und Netzer spielt Zauberfußball im Wembley-Stadion und wird Europameister, Willy Brandt übersteht das Misstrauensvotum, die RAF hält Deutschland in Atem, die Band Ton Steine Scherben liefert den Sound für Aufbruch und Protest. Stan Libuda und Rio Reiser sind die Träumer, die die Leser durch ein aufregendes Jahr begleiten und ein Schlaglicht werfen auf die Anatomie der bundesdeutschen Gesellschaft.

In Mallparks, Michael Friedman observes that just as cathedrals represented power relations in medieval towns, and skyscrapers epitomized those within industrial cities, sports stadiums exemplify urban America at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Smart Ball follows Major League Baseball's history as a sport, a domestic monopoly, a neocolonial power, and an international business. MLB's challenge has been to market its popular mythology as the national pastime with pastoral, populist roots while addressing the management challenges of competing with other sports and diversions in a burgeoning global economy. Baseball researcher Robert F. Lewis II argues that MLB for years abused its legal insulation and monopoly status.

The heart-pounding story of an unlikely band of ragtags who took on Hitler's Grand Prix driver.

Is the face of American baseball throughout the world that of goodwill ambassador or ugly American? Has baseball crafted its own image or instead been at the mercy of broader forces shaping our society and the globe? The Empire Strikes Out gives us the sweeping story of how baseball and America are intertwined in the export of “the American way."

Americans have always loved guns. This special bond was forged during the American Revolution and sanctified by the Second Amendment. It is because of this exceptional relationship that American civilians are more heavily armed than the citizens of any other nation. Or so we're told. In The Gunning of America, historian Pamela Haag overturns this conventional wisdom. American gun culture, she argues, developed not because the gun was exceptional but precisely because it was not.

A colorful look at how modern presidents play sports, have used sports to play politics, and what our fan-in-chief can often tell us about our national pastimes. POWER PLAYERS tells all the great stories of presidents and the sports they played, loved and spectated as a way to better understand...

In Preparing Student Athletes to Win, I help you shift from envisioning to planning your sports program, so that you see success in six months, one, three, or five years. Move at a pace that is comfortable for you, while creating an army of people waiting to volunteer, donate, or transfer into your sports program, so that they can join your culture of excellence.

Find over a thousand of astounding fun facts in this combination audiobook -- a treasure chest for trivia buffs. Want to be surprised with the truth? Discover how you've been misled for years? Get a kick out of coincidences? Learn about the U.S. state that no longer exists -- the man who was...

In the spring of 2013, a study showed that despite huge economic problems, 27 states were awarding their highest salaries to college football coaches. College football has doubled in size in the last decade thanks to generous tax breaks, lavish TV deals, and corporate sponsors eager to slap their logos on everything from scoreboards to footballs and uniforms. In one recent year, the 10 biggest programs took in $800 million from football, with profit margins far surpassing those of Fortune 500 companies.

Take a rollicking tour through the sports world of 1996, when debuts, comebacks, movies, and pop culture crossover changed the sports landscape forever. From college to the Olympics to the pros; from the NBA to golf, tennis, and boxing, 1996 was home to athletes and teams who were among the best marketed, most beloved, colorful, and greatest in history. Sportswriter and author Jon Finkel uncovers the stories behind the stories while interviewing a who's who of '96ers to reveal in thrilling detail how their collective influence on sports and pop culture still resonates to this day.

For the Birds offers listeners a glimpse behind the binoculars and reveals birders to be important allies in the larger environmental conservation movement. With a wealth of data from in-depth interviews and over three years of observing birders in the field, environmental sociologist Elizabeth Cherry argues that birders learn to watch wildlife in ways that make an invaluable contribution to contemporary conservation efforts. She investigates how birders develop a “naturalist gaze” that enables them to understand the shared ecosystem that intertwines humans and wild animals.

Every kindergarten soccer player gets a trophy. Many high schools name dozens of seniors as valedictorians - of the same class. Cars sport bumper stickers that read "USA - Number 1." Prizes proliferate in every corner of American society, and excellence is trumpeted with ratings that range from "Academy Award winner!" to "Best Neighborhood Pizza!" In Everyone’s a Winner, Joel Best - acclaimed author of Damned Lies and Statistics - shines a bright light on the increasing abundance of status in our society and considers what it all means.

The millions of fans who watch World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) programs each year are well aware of their role in building the narrative of the sport. #WWE: Professional Wrestling in the Digital Age explores the intersections between media, technology, and fandom in WWE's contemporary programming and business practices. In the Reality Era of WWE (2011 to the present), wrestling narratives have increasingly drawn on real-life personalities and events that stretch beyond the story-world created and maintained by WWE.

Pro basketball player Rasheed Wallace often exclaimed the pragmatic truth "Ball don't lie!" during a game. It is a protest against a referee's bad calls. But the slogan, which originated in pickup games, brings the reality of a racialized urban playground into mainstream American popular culture.