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

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Across the ideological, class, cultural, and sporting spectrum, there seems to be a consensus that sports are, at best, distractingly vapid. This retreat by folks who love sports, and folks who revile them, and everyone in-between, has turned the sports world into easy prey for hyper-consumptive, violent, militaristic, sexist, and homophobic politics—and, ultimately, handed over the immense power of sports to some of the worst elements of our society. It’s a retreat that has concretized a self-fulfilling prophecy and self-regulating narrative that tells us just how fucked sports really are. When the sporting world reinforces its own triviality, whether purposefully or not, it gives permission for its own consistently idiotic behavior, because, well, it just “doesn’t matter” much. Hardly. My argument here is precisely the opposite: we should all—whether we watch, obsess, cheer, play, or not at all—take sports seriously, as worthy of real respect, because if we don’t, we will continue to allow them to be dominated by some of the most regrettable politics imaginable.