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(More customer reviews)Sports are the object of such a rabid obsession in modern society that intense discussion of them rarely needs exceed wins and losses. Indeed, as Vince Lombardi's favorite saying went: "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing."
Andrei S. Markovits and Lars Rensmann don't reject the wisdom of that famous mission statement in "Gaming the World," but they push the boundaries of sports talk far beyond the information found in a box score.
Never before has the world been as globalized as it is now in the 21st Century, and never before have sports like soccer, American football, baseball, basketball, and ice hockey been as popular as they are now throughout the West and throughout the world. Markovits and Rensmann examine these conditions through a fusion of ideas about sports and about globalization.
They consider, for instance, how forces of globalization were able to turn to soccer from a game played by English schoolboys into a ubiquitous global language, and how "other footballs" like rugby and American football survived, flourished, and carved popularities of their own. Conversely, they examine sports as an agent of globalization and modernization -- how figures like Jackie Robinson were able to help dismantle oppressive forces in society by first deconstructing them on the playing field.
Markovits and Rensmann's appraisals, though, remain candidly honest. While the cosmopolitan soccer clubs of Europe have helped ease racial tensions, the authors aren't afraid to face the harsh reality that European soccer remains an occasional bastion of racism and violence. Likewise, they confront the fact that, while women's sports have enjoyed a massive growth in popularity (especially in the U.S.), they still attract a disproportionately small share of our attention.
Throughout, the authors convey a deft understanding and respect of the forces driving sports culture, sports industry, and sports fandom. It's also quite clear that they posses a firm comprehension of the work of their contemporaries and predecessors in the academic study of sports. If they are great sports scholars, though, Markovits and Rensmann are also great sports fans, and they communicate their ideas so naturally that sports fans should find the conclusions of "Gaming the World" quite intuitive, as if they knew them all along.
For students of sports, "Gamin the World" is an essential component of any collection, and for sports fans it's an eye-opening guide to approaching a familiar interest in an entirely new way. "Gaming the World" is such a compelling exploration of a global phenomenon that even those apathetic toward sports, after reading it, might find themselves tuning into a sporting event (like this summer's ongoing World Cup) just to see what all the fuss is about.
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Professional sports today have truly become a global force, a common language that anyone, regardless of their nationality, can understand. Yet sports also remain distinctly local, with regional teams and the fiercely loyal local fans that follow them. This book examines the twenty-first-century phenomenon of global sports, in which professional teams and their players have become agents of globalization while at the same time fostering deep-seated and antagonistic local allegiances and spawning new forms of cultural conflict and prejudice.
Andrei Markovits and Lars Rensmann take readers into the exciting global sports scene, showing how soccer, football, baseball, basketball, and hockey have given rise to a collective identity among millions of predominantly male fans in the United States, Europe, and around the rest of the world. They trace how these global--and globalizing--sports emerged from local pastimes in America, Britain, and Canada over the course of the twentieth century, and how regionalism continues to exert its divisive influence in new and potentially explosive ways. Markovits and Rensmann explore the complex interplay between the global and the local in sports today, demonstrating how sports have opened new avenues for dialogue and shared interest internationally even as they reinforce old antagonisms and create new ones.
Gaming the World reveals the pervasive influence of sports on our daily lives, making all of us citizens of an increasingly cosmopolitan world while affirming our local, regional, and national identities.
