Gaming the World: How Sports Are Reshaping Global Politics and Culture

306372384

Gaming the World: How Sports Are Reshaping Global Politics and Culture
By Andrei S. Markovits, Lars Rensmann

  


Publisher:  Princeton University Press
Number Of Pages:  368
Publication Date:  2010-06-06
ISBN-10 / ASIN:  069113751X
ISBN-13 / EAN:  9780691137513


Product Description:



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.




Summary: Understanding Sports
Rating: 5

Sports Matter. The first sentence in this book gets right to the point. Sports are an integral part of our culture throughout the world. Sports connect politics, culture, education, and all of society together with more fluidity than anything else. While we know of the major changes within the world from the late 19th century to the early 20th century - the authors make note of the ever-changing world in which we are living today. Markovits and Rensmann do a wonderful job in helping all of us understand how different sports languages relate with one another and cross over into different cultures.

Early on, this book gives us a great quote from a manager from Liverpool FC Bill Shankly. He said, \"Some people think football is a matter of life or death. I don't like that attitude. I can assure them it is much more important than that!\" \"Gaming the World\" is chock full of enjoyable tidbits and fascinating facts about sports figures across the world. Why does the President throw out the first pitch on opening day of every baseball season? Why do we stand for the 7th inning stretch? How was the \"wave\" introduced to baseball? All of these, and many more questions are answered in this book.

\"Gaming the World\" also helps us to see how sports have helped to bridge the gap in race relations in our country and around the world. While it is almost common knowledge in the United States that Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in US sports in 1947, Gaming the World takes a global look at this unfortunate situation that we still deal with to this day - and more importantly, how sports has helped us to garner a better understanding from our different brothers and sisters. \"Gaming the World\" also looks at how sports have propelled women to gain more equality throughout the world. And finally, religion is yet another aspect of society that have divided people until sports was able to bring them together.

Much like the way Jim Bouton revealed to the rest of the world the inner workings of baseball with his highly controversial book \"Ball Four,\" Markovits and Rensmann show us how sports have become an international phenomenon. \"Gaming the World\" gives us an explanation of how sports have crossed into today's societies, modern cultures and the politics of the world that we live in today.



Summary: Persuasive and Engaging
Rating: 5

The new book Gaming the World: How Sports are Reshaping Global Politics and Culture is a sophisticated and welcome look at the seemingly contradictory role played by sports in furthering the diffusion of global culture while at the same time serving as a venue for those who resist and reject this spread. The book examines how professional sports have become international phenomena and why some sports are virtually universally popular (e.g. soccer) while others (e.g. American football) remain confined to certain countries and regions.

Written by renowned social scientists, Gaming the World will appeal to sports fans and non-fans as well as to academics and non-academics alike. The book is filled with illuminating examples and persuasive arguments which make for an enjoyable read. I found the metaphor of sports as languages particularly useful and compelling. Markovits and Rensmann contend that sports are like languages in that though they oftentimes share basic characteristics, they will remain unintelligible \"without a long process of acculturation and learning\". As an American, I `speak' baseball fluently but its relative cricket will always remain Greek to me.

Gaming the World is highly recommended for all those who take sports seriously but it is also a must-read for those interested in the processes of globalization and what the authors call \"cosmopolitanism\" and \"counter-cosmopolitanism\". You will enjoy this book.



Summary: A Triumph of Sport
Rating: 5

As a longtime sports fan, I live in the ESPN-centered world of quick updates and a few storylines that are beaten to death. This book is a refreshing break from that world to give a full background on the origins of sports and how they came to be so popular. Markovits and Rensmann combine their academic backgrounds with their lives as sports fan to create an approachable narrative that really helps you understand why sports are so important to so many people's lives. This book will change how you watch sports, how you think about them, and how you live them. It is absolutely worth reading and I strongly recommend it.



Summary: \"Gaming the World\" will strike evenly for sports fans, sports scholars
Rating: 5

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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