Sporting Times


Book Description

Written against the backdrop of the 2012 London Olympics, this book examines the idea of 'time' in sport, using time as a conceptual lens to explore movement, bodies, sports reporting, memory, disability, technology and the role of the past and the future in sport.




Memory Man: The Life and Sporting Times of Jimmy Magee


Book Description

Jimmy Magee, whose extraordinary memory for sports trivia has led to his being dubbed the Memory Man, has the distinction of being the longest-serving sports commentator in the English-speaking world. He started his career in 1956, the year that Ronnie Delany won the 1,500 metres gold medal at Melbourne. He has covered every Olympic Games since 1972 (the London 2012 games were his eleventh!) and every soccer World Cup since 1974. He achieved worldwide notice in Munich in 1972 when he managed to breach security in the Olympic village to cover the terrorist attack on Israeli athletes. This incredible scoop was picked up by CBS in the United States and then by every television station around the world. Jimmy Magee has been present at the most iconic sporting moments in both world and Irish sport and gives his unique insight into these major sporting moments. He tells how he played five-a-side football with Gert Müller, how he almost came to blows with Nigel Benn, and why he thinks Katie Taylor is Ireland's greatest contemporary sportsperson. But what is perhaps the most striking aspect of such an accomplished career is how Jimmy managed to find the strength to keep up his cheerful persona on air as he endured immeasurable sorrow in his personal life. His beloved wife, Marie, died unexpectedly in 1989 and his son Paul, himself a footballer and sports broadcaster, tragically lost his battle with motor neuron disease in 2008 at the early age of fifty-one. Full of anecdotes, humour and poignancy, Memory Man tells all these things and more. This is a frank, open and honest book by one of Ireland's most beloved national treasures.




Qualifying Times


Book Description

This perceptive, lively study explores U.S. women's sport through historical "points of change": particular products or trends that dramatically influenced both women's participation in sport and cultural responses to women athletes. Beginning with the seemingly innocent ponytail, the subject of the Introduction, scholar Jaime Schultz challenges the reader to look at the historical and sociological significance of now-common items such as sports bras and tampons and ideas such as sex testing and competitive cheerleading. Tennis wear, tampons, and sports bras all facilitated women’s participation in physical culture, while physical educators, the aesthetic fitness movement, and Title IX encouraged women to challenge (or confront) policy, financial, and cultural obstacles. While some of these points of change increased women's physical freedom and sporting participation, they also posed challenges. Tampons encouraged menstrual shame, sex testing (a tool never used with male athletes) perpetuated narrowly-defined cultural norms of femininity, and the late-twentieth-century aesthetic fitness movement fed into an unrealistic beauty ideal. Ultimately, Schultz finds that U.S. women's sport has progressed significantly but ambivalently. Although participation in sports is no longer uncommon for girls and women, Schultz argues that these "points of change" have contributed to a complex matrix of gender differentiation that marks the female athletic body as different than--as less than--the male body, despite the advantages it may confer.




American Sporting Periodicals


Book Description

This book is the first comprehensive listing of American field sports periodicals, beginning in 1829. It includes information such as the magazine’s title, years of publication, frequency of issue, publisher, and general content. American Sporting Periodicals is a valuable reference tool for collectors and researchers of field sports in America.




Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press, Volume 2


Book Description

A thorough account of newspaper and periodical press history in Britain and Ireland from 1800-1900Provides a comprehensive history of the British and Irish Press from 1800-1900, reflected upon in 60 substantive chapters and focused case studiesSets out to capture the cross-regional and transnational dimension of press history in nineteenth-century Britain and IrelandOffers unique and important reassessments of nineteenth-century British and Irish press and periodical media within social, cultural, technological, economic and historical contextsThis is a unique collection of essays examining nineteenth-century British and Irish newspaper and periodical history during a key period of change and development. It covers an important point of expansion in periodical and press history across the four nations of Great Britain (England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales), concentrating on cross-border and transnational comparisons and contrasts in nineteenth-century print communication. Designed to provide readers with a clear understanding of the current state of research in the field, in addition to an extensive introduction, it includes forty newly commissioned chapters and case studies exploring a full range of press activity and press genres during this intense period of change. Along with keystone chapters on the economics of the press and periodicals, production processes, readership and distribution networks, and legal frameworks under which the press operated, the book examines a wide range of areas from religious, literary, political and medical press genres to analyses of overseas and migr press and emerging developments in children's and women's press.




Who's who


Book Description




Never Just a Game


Book Description

America's national pastime has been marked from its inception by bitter struggles between owners and players over profit, power, and prestige. In this book, the first installment of a highly readable, comprehensive labor history of baseball, Robert Burk describes the evolution of the ballplaying work force: its ethnocultural makeup, its economic position, and its battles for a place at the table in baseball's decision-making structure. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the growing popularity of baseball as a spectator sport and the dramatic upsurge of America's urban population created conditions that led to franchise competition, the development of rival leagues, and trade wars, in turn triggering boom-and-bust cycles, franchise bankruptcies, and league mergers. According to Burk, players repeatedly tried to use these circumstances to better their economic positions by playing one team off against another. Their successes proved short-lived, however, because their own internal divisions, exploited by management, undercut attempts to create collective-bargaining institutions. By 1920, owners still held the upper hand in the labor-management battle, but as today's sports pages show, owners did not secure a long-term solution to their labor problems.