In the postseasons of 2005, 2006 and 2007, the Oregon State Beavers baseball team achieved a seemingly impossible dream with three College World Series appearances and back-to-back titles. Firsthand insights from players and coaches and photos of pivotal moments capture the magic of Oregon State's three-season run.

In the postseasons of 2005, 2006 and 2007, the Oregon State Beavers baseball team achieved a seemingly impossible dream and forever changed the culture of Northwest sports. After nearly a century of dismissal as a wet-weather team, unable to compete with the southern baseball belt on the national stage, a run of three College World Series appearances and back-to-back titles earned the Beavers national respect. Inspired by his own coverage of the dramatic seasons, "Corvallis Gazette-Times" sportswriter Cliff Kirkpatrick recounts the program's rise to prominence and lasting legacy. Filled with firsthand insights from players and coaches and photos of pivotal moments and stands filled with orange and black, this retrospective captures the magic of Oregon State's three-season run.

Professional football today is an $8 billion sports entertainment industry--and the most popular spectator sport in America, with designs on expansion across the globe. In this astute field-level view of the National Football League since 1960, Michael Oriard looks closely at the development of the sport and at the image of the NFL and its unique place in American life. New to the paperback edition is Oriard's analysis of the offseason labor negotiations and their potential effects on the future of the sport, and his account of how the NFL is dealing with the latest research on concussions and head injuries.

For more than twenty-five years, Brian Campf collected vintage photographs and ephemera related to Oregon sports. Sporting Oregon includes approximately 350 images from Campf's extensive collection that offer an overview of the first fifty years of organized sports in Oregon, primarily baseball, football, and basketball, but also such pastimes as horse racing, track, hockey, tennis, and cricket.0In his introduction, Campf traces the origins of team sports in Oregon, using period newspaper accounts to chronicle the increasing participation in and popularity of organized sports in the state. Detailed captions provide additional information on how and where the sports developed, on team histories, and on records of games and seasons. The book features a number of images from early Oregon Agricultural College (now OSU) and University of Oregon teams.0The book's images range from historically significant (the earliest original photo of Oregon sports) and diverse (women's basketball, African American baseball) to athletes representing towns, schools, and organizations across Oregon. It is a book about sports but the images also reflect the people, places, and society of their time.0Sporting Oregon is intended for readers interested in sports history, Oregon history, vintage photography, Americana, and local history. A foreword by historian Carl Abbott and an afterword by special collections librarian John Hawk provide additional context for the visual treasure trove. Packed with images from the past that provide a fascinating lens through which to view Oregon history, Sporting Oregon's pages will be savored and lingered over by people of all ages, by scholars and casual readers alike.

In The Sport Marriage, Steven M. Ortiz draws on studies he conducted over nearly three decades that focus on the marital realities confronted by women married to male professional athletes. These women, who are usually portrayed in unflattering and/or unrealistic terms, face enormous challenges in their attempts to establish and maintain functional marital and family lives while the husband routinely puts his career first. Ortiz defines the traditional sport marriage as a career-dominated marriage, illustrating how it encourages women to contribute to their own subordination through adherence to an unwritten rulebook and a repertoire of self-management strategies. He explains how they make invaluable contributions to their husbands’ careers while adjusting to public life and trying to maintain family privacy, managing power and control issues, and coping with pervasive groupies, overinvolved mothers, a culture of infidelity, and husbands who prioritize team loyalty. He gives these historically silent women a voice, offering readers perceptive and sensitive insight into what it means to be a woman in the male-dominated world of professional sports.