Читать книгу One Game at a Time. Why Sports Matter онлайн

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Big sporting events dominate cities, incite riots, and fill entire newspaper sections with relentless coverage of minutiae and gossip. Sports are the default topic of conversation at parties and bars the world over. Sports keep many families together, gives buddies something to talk about, and provide narrative shape for many of our days. Teams and players inspire devotion vastly beyond reason. There is something very deep here that even the ungodly amounts of garish marketing, ultra-nationalist tendencies, hyper-corporatism, and dislikable athletes with their tricked-out Hummers can’t extinguish: so many of us love sports, both participating and spectating, for lots of very good and very valuable reasons.

I am obviously not defending the entire breadth of the sporting world as it exists now (!): what I am doing is arguing for what sports could be. To my mind it’s not a great leap to think of a time when sports are a force for good in our culture and we condescend to those possibilities at our peril. That’s what this book is after: I’m arguing that sports can, should, and do really matter.