Examines how sports map the social, political, and cultural landscapes of the modern South. This title explores the symbols that have shaped southern regional identities since the Civil War. It includes essays that tackle gender and race relations in intercollegiate athletics and address the popularity of NASCAR in the southern states.

Before the Super Bowl, before Monday Night Football, even before the NFL, there was Red Grange. Catapulted into the public eye in 1924 by scoring four touchdowns in twelve minutes for the University of Illinois, the "Galloping Ghost" went on to a trailblazing career as a professional player, star of Hollywood films, and broadcaster. He, Babe Ruth, and Jack Dempsey were among the nation's most heralded figures during the "golden age of sport" of the 1920s, and he was also on the cover of Sports Illustrated when that magazine did a special issue in 1991 on the greatest moments in 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...

Recruited for his combination of size and speed, George Mills had the potential to become an outstanding college football player--but it never happened. A View from the Bench reveals the reality behind the glamour of college football and the tough experiences in the life of a benchwarmer. Mills was a solid player who loved the game, but he had only one chance in nearly five years at making Nebraska's starting team. He found little time or energy for academics after hours of drills, weight lifting, and team meetings. Now, with complete candor, Mills lays bare the true meaning of...

From the first intercollegiate game--Rutgers vs. Princeton in 1869--through the 2003 season, Quirk's guide compiles the complete records of all 117 Division 1-A collegiate football teams.

"The End of Baseball As We Knew It draws on the records of the Major League Baseball Players Association and interviews with ballplayers, journalists, and labor executives to give this insider's view of the famous shift in power from management to players that set the standard in labor relations not just in baseball, but in all professional sports.

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 our collective consciousness for more than eighty years. With baseball so closely linked to American values and ideals, the Black Sox Scandal of 1919 disenchanted baseball fans, changed the way Americans felt about the national pastime, and fostered changes in the game.

Daniel A. Nathan's wide-ranging, interdisciplinary cultural history is less concerned with the details of the scandal than with how it has been represented and remembered...

Born the tenth child of a poor Southern sharecropper and barely able to read or write, Jesse Owens would nevertheless go on to win an unprecedented four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, becoming an international superstar overnight and exploding Hitler's myth of Aryan supremacy in the process. William J. Baker's Jesse Owens is the most complete and probing biography of Owens ever written, vividly detailing the successes and failures of this complex and troubled but ultimately indomitable figure who transcended his own athleticism and became an American icon.

In this entertaining cultural history, Moss explores the circumstances that led to the establishment of the country club as an American social institution and its inextricable connection to the ancient, imported game of golf. Moss traces the evolution of country clubs from informal groups
of golf-playing friends to country estates in the suburbs and eventually into public and private daily-fee courses, corporate country clubs, and gated golfing communities. The book shows how these developments reflect shifts in American values and attitudes toward health and sport, as well as changing...

How and why Americans chose baseball over its early rival, cricket, as the national pastime

George B. Kirsch takes us back to amateur playing fields around the country to re-create the excitement of the early matches, the players, clubs, and their fans. As a narrative history, "Baseball and Cricket" places the growing popularity of the two sports within the social context of mid-nineteenth-century American cities. The book's comparative analysis follows baseball's transition from a leisure sport to a commercialized, professional enterprise and offers the first complete discussion of the...