Floodlights and Touchlines: A History of Spectator Sport
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- $23.99
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- $23.99
Publisher Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WILLIAM HILL SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2014
Spectator sport is living, breathing, non-stop theatre for all.
Focusing on spectator sports and their accompanying issues, tracing their origins, evolution and impact, inside the lines and beyond the boundary, this book offers a thematic history of professional sport and the ingredients that magnetise millions around the globe.
It tells the stories that matter: from the gladiators of Rome to the runners of Rift Valley via the innovator-missionaries of Rugby School; from multi-faceted British exports to the Americanisation of professionalism and the Indianisation of cricket.
Rob Steen traces the development of these sports which captivate the turnstile millions and the mouse-clicking masses, addressing their key themes and commonalities, from creation myths to match fixing via race, politics, sexuality and internationalism.
Insightful and revelatory, this is an entertaining exploration of spectator sports' intrinsic place in culture and how sport imitates life – and life imitates sport.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Steen's engrossing survey of spectator sport targets its origins, motives, and appeal from the barbarism of ancient Roman gladiator games to highly hyped Olympic contests to rowdy English football brawls. Steen, a sportswriter and a journalism professor at the University of Brighton, explores sport as a unifier of nations, races, social classes and sexes, providing a dramatic distraction from conflict and boredom while tapping into our sense of merit and fair play. He crams every peak and valley into this dense history, covering such topics as gambling, professionalism, athletes as "well-paid slaves" in the worldwide arena, political propaganda, racial triumphs, and social and sexual frontiers such as transgender and homosexual advances. Written in straight-forward, non-sense style, Steen gives the reader a chance to chuckle, writing: "Spectator sport is confrontational theatre, a non-stop people's theatre where fellow thespians do their damnedest to make you muck up your lines." Given the flood of hit-and-miss sports books, Steen's transformative work on the traditions and motives of games sets it apart from the usual entries seen in the genre. B+W Photos
