The Big Time
How the 1970s Transformed Sports in America
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
“Indispensable history.” –Sally Jenkins, bestselling author of The Right Call
A captivating chronicle of the pivotal decade in American sports, when the games invaded prime time, and sports moved from the margins to the mainstream of American culture.
Every decade brings change, but as Michael MacCambridge chronicles in THE BIG TIME, no decade in American sports history featured such convulsive cultural shifts as the 1970s. So many things happened during the decade—the move of sports into prime-time television, the beginning of athletes’ gaining a sense of autonomy for their own careers, integration becoming—at least within sports—more of the rule than the exception, and the social revolution that brought females more decisively into sports, as athletes, coaches, executives, and spectators. More than politicians, musicians or actors, the decade in America was defined by its most exemplary athletes. The sweeping changes in the decade could be seen in the collective experience of Billie Jean King and Muhammad Ali, Henry Aaron and Julius Erving, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Joe Greene, Jack Nicklaus and Chris Evert, among others, who redefined the role of athletes and athletics in American culture. The Seventies witnessed the emergence of spectator sports as an ever-expanding mainstream phenomenon, as well as dramatic changes in the way athletes were paid, portrayed, and packaged. In tracing the epic narrative of how American sports was transformed in the Seventies, a larger story emerges: of how America itself changed, and how spectator sports moved decisively on a trajectory toward what it has become today, the last truly “big tent” in American culture.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The 1970s heralded the "emergence of spectator sports as an ever-expanding mainstream phenomenon, as well as... remarkable changes in the way athletes were paid, how they played, and how they were perceived," according to this invigorating history. Sports journalist MacCambridge ('69 Chiefs) chronicles how sports became big business, noting that pro players in the late 1960s made so little they took off-season jobs ("The Pistons' Dave Bing worked as a bank teller") before a series of 1970s labor battles secured pro basketball, baseball, and football players a greater share of ballooning profits. Offering vibrant accounts of the decade's most significant contests and their social impact, MacCambridge examines the boom in women's sports in the context of the 1973 tennis match between Bobby Riggs, described here as "slouching into middle age" in his "World War II–era black horn-rimmed glasses," and Billie Jean King, who was "at once strong and feminine, resplendent in a sequined multicolored dress." Elsewhere, MacCambridge sharply analyzes the 1971 fight between the "boastful, draft-dodging" Muhammad Ali and the "sullen but respectful" Joe Frazier as a proxy battle over respectability politics ("Whom you were rooting for often said something about the sort of person you were"). Impressive in scope and vividly told, this is a winner. Correction: An earlier version of this review had the wrong year for the Muhammad Ali–Joe Frazier fight analyzed by the author.
