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Foucault, Sport, and Exercise: Power, Knowledge, and Transforming the Self
Michel Foucault’s work profoundly influences the way we think about society, in particular how we understand social power, the self, and the body. This book gives an innovative and entirely new analysis of is later works making it a one-stop guide for students, exploring how Foucauldian theory can inform our understanding of the body, domination, […]
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God, Nimrod, and the World: Exploring Christian Perspectives on Sport Hunting
GOD, NIMROD, AND THE WORLD presents the perspectives of more than two-dozen authors on the controversial sport of hunting, surveying the relationship between the blood sport and the salvation religion of Christianity. The first half of the book provides sketches of the diverse interpretations of hunting in Hebrew and Christian cultures of the last two […]
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International Sports Press Survey
The International Sports Press Survey 2011 is a comparative study on the quality of sports reporting in print media. The editors, Thomas Horky and Jörg-Uwe Nieland, present an analysis of data from 22 countries and add more specific research in 14 selected country studies. The world’s largest study of its kind helps to identify similarities […]
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Introduction to Kinesiology: Studying Physical Activity
Introduction to Kinesiology: Studying Physical Activity, Sixth Edition With HKPropel Access, offers students a comprehensive overview of the field of kinesiology and explores the subdisciplinary fields of study, common career paths, and emerging ideas that are part of this dynamic and expanding discipline. This engaging, full-color introductory text stimulates curiosity about the vast field of […]
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Kicking Center
Girls and young women participate in soccer at record levels and the Women’s National Team regularly draws media, corporate, and popular attention. Yet despite increased representation and visibility, gender disparities in opportunity, compensation, training resources, and media airtime persist in soccer, and two professional leagues for women have failed since 2000. In Kicking Center, Rachel […]
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Midnight Basketball: Race, Sports, and Neoliberal Social Policy
Midnight basketball may not have been invented in Chicago, but the City of Big Shoulders—home of Michael Jordan and the Bulls—is where it first came to national prominence. And it’s also where Douglas Hartmann first began to think seriously about the audacious notion that organizing young men to run around in the wee hours of […]
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Where Will It End: Enhancement-lympics?
The Paralympics seems to define itself as representing the below species-typical, impaired people and the Olympics are the species-typical although on the upper end of the bell curve (see my blog To define oneself as less able). In this the Paralympics follows the prevailing meaning of health which is benchmarked to the normal or species-typical […]
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Why Every U.S. Athlete Came Home a Winner
American athletes were very successful at the London 2012 Olympic Games, bringing home 46 Gold Medals. But what most viewers did not realize was that every single one of the 529 athletes representing Team USA brought home gold – along with thousands of dollars’ worth of other freebies.
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Why Gender Equality Stalled
This week is the 50th anniversary of the publication of Betty Friedan’s international best seller, “The Feminine Mystique,” which has been widely credited with igniting the women’s movement of the 1960s. Readers who return to this feminist classic today are often puzzled by the absence of concrete political proposals to change the status of women. […]
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Why Genes Aren’t Destiny
Norrbotten is so isolated that in the 19th century, if the harvest was bad, people starved. The starving years were all the crueler for their unpredictability. For instance, 1800, 1812, 1821, 1836 and 1856 were years of total crop failure and extreme suffering. But in 1801, 1822, 1828, 1844 and 1863, the land spilled forth […]
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Why We Ignore Women’s Sports
Women’s cycling is neglected throughout the year. But every Olympic season, our interest in most women’s sports peaks—only to quickly wane. With Americans set to compete for gold in London and new races on the horizon, is it finally women’s cycling time?
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Winner’s Curse? The Economics of Hosting the Olympic Games
Organizers of the London Olympics are feeling the heat for the sudden cost overruns on their already inflated $14.7 billion official budget, particularly now that government figures show Britain is still mired in recession despite all the recent Olympic spending.But those who follow Olympic spending closely say the Brits are actually doing a number of […]
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With the Words ‘I’m Gay,’ an N.B.A. Center Breaks a Barrier
In 12 seasons as an N.B.A. player, Jason Collins has never been an All-Star or a scoring leader or even a full-time starter, but on Monday he shattered one of the last great barriers in professional sports. ”I’m a 34-year-old N.B.A. center. I’m black and I’m gay,” Collins, who finished this season with the Washington […]
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Women in Intercollegiate Sport: A Longitudinal, National Study Thirty-Five Year Update
Overview on findings from women in intercollegiate sport. Findings include participation opportunities for female athletes, status of women head coaches, status of women as assistant coaches, status of women as sports information directors, status of women as athletic trainers, and status of women as administrators.
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Women’s Basketball Needs to Work to Earn an Audience
If your TV clicker skipped right past a WNBA game, one reason may have been that you mistook it for rugby — unless you figured it for dodgeball. Fact: Women’s basketball is a beautiful game surrounded by ugly atrocities, from incompetent officiating to fiscal mismanagement. Is it too much to ask for decent referees who […]
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Youth Leagues the New Target of High School Football Programs
Youth football leagues are Colorado’s modern gold mines, where young, impressionable players are discovered. Both public and private schools have long scouted these leagues, but it’s the draw of the private schools that has changed the recruiting game in metro Denver. “There’s been a drastic change in how much the private schools have gone to […]
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Youth Sports Still Struggling with Dropping Participation, High Costs and Bad Coaches, Study Finds
More American children ages 6 to 12 were physically active in 2017, but not to a healthy level, according to data published Tuesday by the Sports & Fitness Industry Association and the Aspen Institute. Youth sports advocates have for years pushed kids to play more team sports, and those efforts showed some success over the […]
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Youth Sports Study: Declining Participation, Rising Costs and Unqualified Coaches
Between skyrocketing costs, sport specialization and coaches needing training, youth sports is in the midst of a crisis, according to new data published Wednesday by the Sports & Fitness Industry Association and the Aspen Institute.Athletic participation for kids ages 6 through 12 is down almost 8 percent over the last decade, according to SFIA and […]
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Author Says Bias is Inevitable, But It Can be Faced, Uprooted.
Tuesday, Starbucks will close more than 8,000 stores in the USA to conduct employee training “to address implicit bias” and “prevent discrimination” after two black men were arrested at a Philadelphia store in April.
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Boy on Ice: The Life and Death of Derek Boogaard
The tragic death of hockey star Derek Boogaard at twenty-eight was front-page news across the country in 2011 and helped shatter the silence about violence and concussions in professional sports. Now, in a gripping work of narrative nonfiction, acclaimed reporter John Branch tells the shocking story of Boogaard’s life and heartbreaking death. Boy on Ice […]
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Brainstorm: The Flaws In The Science of Sex Differences
Female and male brains are different, thanks to hormones coursing through the brain before birth. That’s taught as fact in psychology textbooks, academic journals, and bestselling books. And these hardwired differences explain everything from sexual orientation to gender identity, to why there aren’t more women physicists or more stay-at-home dads. In this compelling book, Rebecca […]
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Celebration Capitalism and the Olympic Games
The Olympic Games have become the world’s greatest media and marketing event–a global celebration of exceptional athletics gilded with corporate cash. Huge corporations vie for association with the “Olympic Image” in the hope of gaining a worldwide marketing audience of billions. In this provocative critical study of the contemporary Olympics, Jules Boykoff argues that the […]
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Disability Sport: A Vehicle for Social Change?
This book contains a selection of papers presented at the “Disability sport: a vehicle for social change?” conference hosted by the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation Studies (CPRS) at Coventry University from 23rd – 25th August 2012. The brainchild of conference organiser Dr Ian Brittain, the conference brought together around forty academics and practitioners in […]
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Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
In this indispensable work, a brilliant thinker suggests that such vaunted reforms as the abolition of torture and the emergence of the modern penitentiary have merely shifted the focus of punishment from the prisoner’s body to his soul.
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Diversity in Sport Organizations
Diversity in Sport Organizations provides readers with a comprehensive understanding of the ways in which people differ – including race, sex, age, mental and physical ability, appearance, religion, sexual orientation, and social class – and how these differences can influence sport organizations. It offers specific strategies for managing diversity in work and sport environments, provides […]
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To Stop Cheats, Colleges Learn Their Trickery
The frontier in the battle to defeat student cheating may be here at the testing center of the University of Central Florida. No gum is allowed during an exam: chewing could disguise a student’s speaking into a hands-free cell phone to an accomplice outside.
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Too High a Price To Play
It was the unwritten story of the 2011 Women’s World Cup, which had just about every other angle covered, so captivating was the U.S. national team, so pulse-raising its comebacks and penalty kicks, so compelling the ponytailed ambassadors of our culture and values.
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UFC’s Rashad Evans Comes Out for Gay Marriage
“This isn’t a sex issue, it’s a love issue,” the former light-heavyweight champion tells Outsports about why he is petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to approve same-sex marriages.
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UK Sport Rio 2016 Funding Defended by Sports Minister
A record £347m will be available for the four-year cycle to Rio, an 11% increase on funding for London 2012. But basketball, handball, table tennis and wrestling will receive no money. “The money has been distributed extremely fairly. UK Sport went into these budgets in considerable detail,” Robertson told Sportsweek on 5 live. “It’s a […]
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Ultimate Fighting Dips a Toe Into the Mainstream
Researchers have identified some demands of Canadian National Hockey League (NHL) players, yet there is little direction for players hoping to reach the lucrative league. The objectives of this study were to identify the stages, statuses and demands in Canadian NHL players’ careers and propose an empirical career model of Canadian NHL players. In total, […]
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Unfriendly Confines: The Unsung History of America’s Low-key Hooliganism
Don’t let all of the mascots, cheerleaders, Kiss Cams and marriage proposals give you the wrong idea: US sports stadiums are often as dangerous as European ones.
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United States Tops Olympic Medal List But is Third to China and Russia In Bonus Payouts
I wrote recently about the rich medal bonuses that the Olympics’ top athletes stand to earn for their performances, and I noted that the United States’ medal bonuses – $25,000 for gold, $15,000 for silver and $10,000 for bronze – are well below those handed out by nations like Russia and Italy. But maybe the […]
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University of Texas Professor Explores Cultural Phenomenon of Doping
An expert on sports doping living in Austin wants to help guide cycling’s future and it’s not the guy who raced a bike for a living.
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US Olympic Medal Winners Get Bonuses and Tax Bill
With many countries in the world facing financial difficulties, there is greater focus on how much money governments are spending on Olympic athletes or Olympic-related events.
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Valor Christian Rockets to Success and Gains Its Share of Detractors
Sun rays pierced the fluffy clouds on a late August afternoon, illuminating Valor Christian High School with a seemingly biblical incandescence. Game night. Tailgate. A lively live band. Faces painted with Valor V’s, others with crosses. Parents in the school’s official Nike apparel mingled outside the freshly minted stadium, surrounded by scurrying 5-year-old kids, all […]
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Vancouver Not Typical Sports Riot, Sociologist Says
Riots following big sporting events have become predictable. They happen about half the time following a championship game or series, the experts say. What’s more, sports riots are now the most common type of riot in North America. But they are usually celebratory sports riots. What makes Vancouver stand out, both in 2011 and 1994, […]
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Verbal Abuse From parents, Coaches is Causing a Referee Shortage in Youth Sports
Warren Graver raised the whistle to his lips midway through the second half, bracing to shift his focus from the sideline hysterics to the girls’ soccer game at hand three years ago.
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Violence is Deeply Rooted in American Culture: An Interview with Henry A. Giroux
America’s fascination with guns is turning into an ever growing nightmare, with the latest carnage taking place last month at Sandy Hill Elementary School in Newtown Connecticut where 20 young children and six educators were killed. Yet, there is no evidence that the US is any closer to joining the rest of the civilized nations […]
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Wall Street, Penn State and Institutional Corruption
What makes institutions corrupt? Up host Chris Hayes and his panelists examine two examples from this week: Wall Street and the Penn State scandal.
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We Must Provide Equal Opportunity in Sports to Students with Disabilities
Playing sports at any level–club, intramural, or interscholastic-can be a key part of the school experience and have an immense and lasting impact on a student’s life. Among its many benefits, participation in extracurricular athletic activities promotes socialization, the development of leadership skills, focus, and, of course, physical fitness. It’s no secret that sports helped […]
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What is a Woman?
On May 24th, a few dozen people gathered in a conference room at the Central Library, a century-old Georgian Revival building in downtown Portland, Oregon, for an event called Radfems Respond. The conference had been convened by a group that wanted to defend two positions that have made radical feminism anathema to much of the […]
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What It Means to Be ‘Black in Latin America’
Between 1502 and 1866, 11.2 million Africans disembarked from slave ships in the New World during the Middle Passage. Of those 11.2 million people, only 450,000 came to the United States. The rest of the African slaves who survived the journey were taken to the Caribbean, Latin America and South America.
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What Would the End of Football Look Like? An Economic Perspective on CTE and the Concussion Crisis
The NFL is done for the year, but it is not pure fantasy to suggest that it may be done for good in the not-too-distant future. How might such a doomsday scenario play out and what would be the economic and social consequences?
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Where College Football is a Religion, and Religion Shapes College Football
Hugh Freeze takes his seat near the back of the Mississippi football meeting room, and from here, with his three daughters sitting to his left, the Rebels coach can see everything.
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The Games Warriors Play
Maasai villages devised a test of traditional skills to promote an alternative to lion hunting.
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The Good Men: Inside The All-male Group Taking on Modern Masculinity
In the hometown of Jordan Peterson, the evangelist of white male resentment, a different and thoughtful men’s movement vies to be heard. On a warm Tuesday evening, a dozen men gathered on couches at a Lululemon location in Toronto called The Local. Since last year, as an experiment to reach more male customers, the store […]
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The Hidden Officiating Crisis: How the NFL’s Problems Trickle Down to Youth Sports
Mistakes and minute scrutiny on the biggest stage, and the criticisms that follow from coaches, the media and fans, reverberate down to the lower levels. Spectators are further emboldened to go after already beleaguered refs in youth sports—driving many of them away. In Florida, says one administrator, “we’re running out of officials.” Is there any […]
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The Legacy Fallacy: The Olympics Does Not Increase Sport Participation
This is an edited version of a letter sent to UK Prime Minister David Cameron and a number of other officials with connections to the London Olympics.
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The Liberating Age of Bionics
Even if progress has been inadequate, Dr. [Hugh Herr] declines to join the doubters. “Technologists, if they’re any good, are always frustrated at what seems to be the snail’s pace,” he says. Yet “there’s a technological arc that climbs upwardly with increasing slope with time” and “It’s inconceivable to me and everyone else what the […]
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The Meaning of Football Tough
It also sounds like a false choice, an excuse for bad behavior, for diminishing bullying as hazing, and downplaying the significance of racist language in professional sports (the last a fatuous claim expertly undone by Robert Klemko in an essay for Sports Illustrated’s MMQB.com — and by Shannon Sharpe on CBS’s “NFL Today”).
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The Myth of Male Decline
Scroll through the titles and subtitles of recent books, and you will read that women have become “The Richer Sex,” that “The Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys,” and that we may even be seeing “The End of Men.” Several of the authors of these books posit that we are on the verge […]
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The N.C.A.A.’s Nod to Reality
The National Collegiate Athletic Association has acknowledged what everyone always knew — that not all college sports programs are the same.
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The NBA Standoff Pits the Elite Vs. the Elite
Kevin Garnett, 35, the Boston Celtics forward who has had a stellar career, was with the Minnesota Timberwolves in 2004 when a teammate, Latrell Sprewell, augmented the national stock of unfortunate pronouncements. Dissatisfied with a three-year, $21 million contract extension offer, Sprewell said: “I’ve got my family to feed.”Remembering the ridicule that Sprewell received, Garnett […]
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The NCAA Needs to Let Someone Else Enforce its Rules
A lawyer’s take on how to fix the National College Athletics Association’s broken, capricious system for investigating and punishing schools and student-athletes accused of impropriety
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The Payoff From Winning an Olympic Medal
When Kellogg stamped Gabby Douglas’s hard-to-forget smile on a box of corn flakes, the company kicked off a string of endorsement deals that will likely make her millions. But even without sponsors, the 16-year-old gymnast will leave London with $50,000, which is what pair of gold medals is worth in her home country.
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The Ring and The Rings: Vladimir Putin’s Mafia Olympics
Josef Stalin famously uttered the demonically cynical maxim that “the death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.” In other words, he believed that when faced with the choice of focusing on horrors small and tangible or vast and incomprehensible, humanity goes small. It is the political spawn of […]
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The Shame of College Sports
A litany of scandals in recent years have made the corruption of college sports constant front-page news. We profess outrage each time we learn that yet another student-athlete has been taking money under the table. But the real scandal is the very structure of college sports, wherein student-athletes generate billions of dollars for universities and […]
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The Slowest Generation Strikes Back
“Between being president of my honor society, volunteering at the local elementary school, job hunting, staying on top of my course load, being secretary of my sorority and trying to start a personal financial literacy seminar for women, running has become my detox time,” wrote Natasha Mighell, a University of Virginia student.
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The Sports Issue: Views from Left Field
Howard Cosell called it rule number one of the jockocracy—the idea that sports and politics don’t mix. Playing the game, and playing it well, is all that matters. And yet the closer you look, the more it becomes apparent that it’s not sports and politics that “don’t mix.” It’s sports and a certain kind of […]
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The Victims of Larry Nassar Who Dared to Come Forward First
In the summer of 2016, Rachael Denhollander was scrolling through Facebook at her home, in Louisville, Kentucky, when she happened upon the cover story of the day’s Indianapolis Star. It was an investigation into U.S.A. Gymnastics, one of the nation’s most prominent Olympic organizations, concluding that for years the federation’s top officials had mishandled allegations […]
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Title IX at 40: Most Schools Still Aren’t in Compliance
Four decades after Title IX went into place, enormous progress for women and girls has been made. But most schools in America are still not providing men and women with equal opportunities to participate and equal treatment in athletics. There’s work to be done.
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To Define Oneself as Less Able: A Prerequisite for a Paralympian?
Keith Lyons in his column gives a short history of disabled people including Paralympians that also participated in the Olympics all the way back to 1904. Very likely that was news to many given that Pistorius so dominated the coverage the last 4 years. He highlighted two disabled people that were competing in the 2012 […]
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Super Bowl Ad Will Stress Safety
To the usual lineup of beer and car commercials on Super Bowl Sunday, add this: one about player safety. For the first time, the N.F.L., currently the target of more than a dozen lawsuits accusing it of deliberately concealing information about the effects on players of repeated hits to the head, will use one minute […]
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Striving Together: Celebrating Competitiveness in Sport
With the Commonwealth Games taking place in Glasgow in 2014, sport is set to have a prominent profile in Scotland. Competitiveness in sport can draw out the best in people, but can also give rise to other behaviours which may cause concern. This report reflects on the place of competitiveness, based on the principles of […]
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Students with Disabilities Have Right to Play School Sports Obama Administration Tells Schools
When Kareem Dale, now a special advisor to President Barack Obama, was in high school, all he wanted to do was wrestle. But as a student who was partially blind, that wasn’t easy. Dale’s school made it possible for him to participate in the sport by creating a rule that wrestlers always needed to be […]
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Superhip To Supercrip: The ‘Trickle-down’ Effect of the Paralympics
Sport is seen as important for the quality of life, self-esteem, independence and social integration of people with disabilities, and the Paralympics are one expression of this importance. But what effect do they have for the “average” person with a disability?
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Tackling Injuries in the NFL
Football is a violent sport. For the last four years, about three hundred players per year suffered season-ending injuries that put them on the Injured Reserve (IR) list. These players suffer injuries that you can’t tape up and there’s no way to ‘play through the pain’. For the most part, these are serious, career threatening […]
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Teams Face Workers’ Comp Threat
National Football League teams are facing a significant threat to their finances because of a legal option available to nearly every janitor, teacher and cashier in America — workers’ compensation. Playing professional football is inherently dangerous, but the known risks do not prevent players — and former players — from filing workers’ compensation claims against […]
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Television: Inflated Assets
The Super Bowl has always been the high point of the US sports calendar but this year’s game was of a different order. The battle last month of American football’s Green Bay Packers – a team many thought had seen its best years – against the Pittsburgh Steelers in Texas was the most watched, and […]
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That New $2, $3 Fee on Cable Bill? Sports the Culprit
There’s a new wrinkle in the long-running blame game between pay-TV providers and programmers over the rising costs of TV sports. Some consumers now see separate $2-$3 charges, specifically tied to sports, on their monthly TV bills.
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The $6 Billion Heist: Robbing College Athletes Under the Guise of Amateurism
The National College Players Association (NCPA) and the Drexel University Sport Management Department published a joint study in 2013 showing that FBS football and men’s basketball players would receive an additional $6 billion between 2011-15 if not for the NCAA’s prohibition of a fair market.
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The Beautiful Game, a Beautiful Cause: Why I Root for Argentina
No sporting event on earth is more tangled up in politics than the World Cup—so we ought to support a team that epitomizes “the beautiful game” in addition to standing with a beautiful cause. Viva Argentina! Before the start of the World Cup, I broadcast my rooting interest with the obnoxious insistence of a nuclear-powered […]
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The Business of Voluntourism: Do Western Do-gooders Actually Do Harm?
Baby rescue is the ultimate volunteer experience. At Hope of Life International, a Christian mission in rural Guatemala, a rescue team springs into action when news arrives that a baby is dangerously ill in a nearby mountain village. The mission, which hosts hundreds of volunteers from North America every month, sends a caravan of Jeeps, […]
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The Case Against High-School Sports
Every year, thousands of teenagers move to the United States from all over the world, for all kinds of reasons. They observe everything in their new country with fresh eyes, including basic features of American life that most of us never stop to consider.
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The Charitable-industrial Complex
I had spent much of my life writing music for commercials, film and television and knew little about the world of philanthropy as practiced by the very wealthy until what I call the big bang happened in 2006. That year, my father, Warren Buffett, made good on his commitment to give nearly all of his […]
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The Damage Done
Peter Grant ’83 played interhall football for Notre Dame’s Grace Hall. Dave Duerson, a classmate and casual acquaintance of Grant’s from the dorm, was an All-American defensive back and an 11-year NFL veteran who won two Super Bowl rings. Their athletic careers could not have been more different. But Grant and Duerson were alike in […]
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The Enlightenment’s ‘Race’ Problem, and Ours
In 1734, Anton Wilhelm Amo, a West African student and former chamber slave of Duke Anton Ulrich of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, defended a philosophy dissertation at the University of Halle in Saxony, written in Latin and entitled “On the Impassivity of the Human Mind.” A dedicatory letter was appended from the rector of the University of Wittenberg, […]
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The Fall of Jim Tressel
An SI investigation found that Ohio State’s disgraced ex-coach, once viewed as a Model of Probity, led a program rife with alleged rules violations dating back to 2022.
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The Final Four, Travel Teams and Empty Pews: Research on Sports and Religion
The Rev. Stephen Fichter understood just how dominant a role sports has assumed in the culture when a family told him they would be out of town Good Friday to Easter Sunday to attend their child’s volleyball tournament.“It’s truly sports that has become like the religion” for many people, said Fichter, a researcher and the […]
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The Footage The NFL Won’t Show You
Every play during an NFL game is filmed from multiple angles in high definition. But there’s some footage the league keeps hidden as Reed Albergotti explains on Lunch Break.
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Sex Sells Sex, Not Women’s Sports
Last winter, champion alpine skier Lindsey Vonn won the downhill gold medal at the Vancouver Winter Olympics, the first American woman to achieve gold in this prestigious event. From 2008 to 2010, Vonn also won three consecutive World Cup championships, the first US woman and second woman ever to accomplish such a feat. For her […]
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Should Parents Nix After-school Sports?
High school athletes devote a lot of hours to practice and games. Parents and coaches say playing sports builds character and teamwork. But do sports take too much time away from the classroom? In a recent article for The Atlantic, writer Amanda Ripley makes the case against after-school sports. She joins host Michel Martin, along […]
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Shut Up And Play? Patriotism, Jock Culture, and The Limits of Free Speech
Some athletes have dared to buck the patriotic trend, and in the process have learned a tough lesson about the limits of free speech in the jockocracy. In the aftermath of Osama bin Laden’s assassination, the sports world embraced the public eruption of patriotism. From the spontaneous cheers of 40,000 fans in Philly, to amped […]
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Skating League Returns to Huntington Beach
Kick flip, varial kickflip, heel flip, “the variations are endless,” says Darrell Norman, the man behind the microphone, as kids competed during the California Amateur Skateboard League contest in Huntington Beach on Saturday. “We’re saving the world one kid at a time,” said Sonja Catalano, the league’s president.
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Smack Epidemic: How Painkillers Are Turning Young Athletes into Heroin Addicts
It is, by any measure, an epidemic. Heroin is not new or chic, but its use and abuse are spiking. According to data from the CDC and the National Center for Health Statistics, heroin-overdose deaths rose gradually from 2000 to ’10 but then almost tripled in the following three years to 2.7 deaths per 100,000 […]
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Soccer and Egypt’s “State of Emergency”
If you want to understand why Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi has declared a “state of emergency” or if you want to understand why the country’s defense minister warned Tuesday of “the collapse of the state”, you first need to understand the soccer fan clubs in Egypt—otherwise known as the “ultras”—and the role they played in […]
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Soccer Match Fixing: All the World is Staged
ON THE MORNING of Feb. 20, 2011, a man from Singapore walked into the central police station of Rovaniemi, Finland, a town that sits along the Arctic Circle. The man told officers that another Singaporean, Wilson Raj Perumal, was in Rovaniemi on a false passport. He offered no other information before leaving the station abruptly. […]
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Special Report on Oklahoma State Football: (Part 2) — the Academics
Shortly after Les Miles took over as Oklahoma State’s football coach in December 2000, he introduced an exhortation that he would use often at the end of team meetings during his four years in Stillwater. “Academics first,” Miles would say. “Football second.”
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Special Report on Oklahoma State Football: (Part 3) — the Drugs
At around 5:30 a.m. on Feb. 8, 2009, Stillwater police executed a search warrant at the off-campus residence of Oklahoma State junior wide receiver Bo Bowling. An ex-girlfriend, whom police officers found inebriated outside Bowling’s home, had told them that Bowling had marijuana in his possession. When they searched his home they found 108.6 grams […]
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Special Report on Oklahoma State football: (Part 4) — the Sex
In 2003 one of the nation’s top high school recruits pretzeled his large frame into an airplane seat and embarked on his official recruiting visit to Oklahoma State. Though several big-time schools were pursuing him intensely, the recruit was intrigued by the Cowboys. The previous year they had appeared in the Houston Bowl — their […]
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Special Report on Oklahoma State football: (Part 5) – the Fallout
It was a suffocatingly hot July afternoon in Bryan, Texas, and inside a chain restaurant on the North Earl Rudder Freeway, it wasn’t much cooler. An angular African-American waiter in his mid-20s slogged through his four-hour shift, his eyes bloodshot, his face drawn. On top of his $2.13 hourly wage he would earn barely $15 […]
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SPIEGEL Interview with Orlando Cruz ‘I Couldn’t Accept Being Gay Because I Was Too Afraid’
Orlando Cruz is the world’s first professional boxer to come out as gay. In a SPIEGEL interview, he describes the relief he has since felt and his hopes that it would make him a better boxer. He also shows some sympathy for his female admirers.
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Sport Spirituality and Religion: Muscular Christianity in the Modern Age
An overview of the key features of the ways in which the relationship between sport and religion has developed during and since the nineteenth century. In Victorian Britain, long-standing religious values began to permeate and underpin sporting endeavour but these have subsequently been modified in various ways.
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Sporting Masculinity on the gridiron: Construction, Characteristics, and Consequences
This paper draws on interviews with 81 Canadian football players and administrators across junior, university, and professional football, as well as 20 published autobiographies of football players, to examine the development and consequences of sporting masculinity. In this paper, the concept of sporting masculinity is further developed and contrasted with other masculinities, particularly hegemonic masculinity. […]
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Sports Medicine’s New Frontiers
Surgeries that were once repairs are now reconstructions, enabling athletes to return to the field sooner and even better. Novel prostheses are allowing maimed soldiers to compete at the elite level of sports. Researchers of motor skills and pain tolerance, who once relied on crude measures, now study brain imagery to analyze neural activity. Many […]
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Stanford Analyzes Athletes’ Concussions
The brains and the brawn at Stanford are teaming up to figure out how concussions are caused. Stanford researchers have turned the school’s football practices into a living laboratory in an effort to understand the mechanics of what happens to the head and neck when a head injury occurs.
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Stick Route
IT’S BEEN A WEEKLY — and sometimes daily — headline in Dallas: Tony Romo Gets Pain-Killing Injection. Ever since he fractured a rib during a Week 2 win over the 49ers, Romo’s pregame shots have been news, mostly because he plays QB for America’s Team and partly because he’s a reality show waiting to happen. […]
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Pay for play
The mission of Universities is to educate, but college sports is big business, and no one wants young athletes exploited.
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Plaintiffs’ Master Administrative Long-Form Complaint
Master complaint in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia that coalesces the claims from more than 85 lawsuits involving over than 2,000 former NFL players — from negligence and fraud to wrongful death and civil conspiracy — into a single document claiming the NFL withheld information related to head trauma suffered while playing the game.
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Playing With Fire, Barbed Wire and Beer
A year ago, Tough Mudder was a semifinalist in the Harvard Business School’s annual Business Plan Contest. A British student named Will Dean thought he could attract 500 people to run a grueling race through mud and man-made obstacles. Professors generally considered the plan too optimistic.
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