Originally published: New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994.

October 10, 2017. The U.S. men’s soccer team loses in Trinidad and Tobago, and fails to qualify for the 2018 World Cup. Winning soccer’s greatest prize never seemed more distant. Immediate fixes—a new coach, a revamped professional league, a commitment to coaching education—won’t put the USA in the global elite. The nation is too fractious, too litigious, too wrapped up in other sports, and too late to the game. In Why the U.S. Men Will Never Win the World Cup: A Historical and Cultural Reality Check, Beau Dure shows what American soccer is really up against. Using hundreds of sources to trace more than 100 years of history, Dure delves into the culture that only recently lost its disdain for the global game and still doesn’t have the depth of soccer insight and passion that much of the world has had for generations. The difficulty isn’t any single thing—the mismanagement of failed leagues, the inability to agree on a path forward, the lawsuits that stem from an inability to agree, or the unique American culture that treasures its homegrown sports. It’s everything. And yet, Why the U.S. Men Will Never Win the World Cup is ultimately optimistic. Dure argues that with the right long-term changes, the U.S. can build a soccer environment that consistently produces quality players, strong results, and a lot more fun on the international stage. Soccer fans and skeptics alike will find this a fascinating examination of America’s past, present, and future in the beautiful game.

Gendering Bodies explains how the social world shapes our physical bodies and how our bodies shape the social world. In this remarkable investigation into contemporary ideas of gender, sociologists Crawley, Foley, and Shehan argue that bodies are constantly being gendered, that is, encouraged to participate in (heterosexual) gender conformity. This engendering influences nutrition practices, work and employment choices, diet, exercise, cosmetic surgery, sexual practices, and training - or lack thereof - in sports and fitness. This is an accessible, yet comprehensive, sociological inquiry into a theory of the gendered body.

Despite women's great strides in business, sports and politics, many women still feel ambivalent about winning. They cannot relate to what Nelson calls the Conqueror's way: domination, subjugation, humiliation of enemies. But equally unpalatable is the alternative settling for the second-class status of the Cheerleader's way, wherein women compete only with each other, only on the sidelines, and only over issues like beauty and popularity. Nelson proposes this possibility: the Champion's way. The Champions competes openly, joyously, with women or men, with respect for her rivals, and without apology for her own desire for excellence. Using personal stories, interviews with more than two hundred women, and original survey research of one thousand women and girls nationwide, Nelson presents a unique five part framework for understanding competition: it's a relationship, a process, an opportunity, a risk, and a feminist issue. In a book that will change every reader's perspective on competition, Nelson sets women on their way to competing with a whole new game plan.

A valuable reference source for professionals and academics in this field, this is an encyclopedia-dictionary of the many scientific and technical terms now encountered in kinesiology and exercise science.

Gridiron football is the king of sports – it's the biggest game in the strongest and richest country in the world. In The King of Sports, Easterbrook tells the full story of how football became so deeply ingrained in American culture. Both good and bad, he examines its impact on American society. The King of Sports explores these and many other topics: * The real harm done by concussions (it's not to NFL players). * The real way in which college football players are exploited (it's not by not being paid). * The way football helps American colleges (it's not bowl revenue) and American cities (it's not Super Bowl wins). * What happens to players who are used up and thrown away (it's not pretty). * The hidden scandal of the NFL (it's worse than you think). Using his year-long exclusive insider access to the Virginia Tech football program, where Frank Beamer has compiled the most victories of any active NFL or major-college head coach while also graduating players, Easterbrook shows how one big university "does football right." Then he reports on what's wrong with football at the youth, high school, college and professional levels. Easterbrook holds up examples of coaches and programs who put the athletes first and still win; he presents solutions to these issues and many more, showing a clear path forward for the sport as a whole.

By definition, feminism is concerned with the historical, social and political meanings of sexual difference in the human body, and the spectrum of experiences those meanings produce. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, gendered forms of violence persist, abortion remains a political issue, reproductive and cosmetic technologies and their concomitant ethical questions are proliferating, and the presence of women’s bodies in public spaces and for public consumption produces a range of anxieties about women’s well-being and the common good. Feminist scholars from across the disciplines grapple with these issues in Feminism and the Body. In so doing they continue a history of intellectual endeavor that, for centuries, has striven to identify the interplay between corporeal differences and relationships of power. This collection will take the reader on a journey into myriad domains in which a variety of discursive effects come to life in the embodied subject: from the theatres of medical surgery and law to the discussion fora of sex therapy and marriage guidance experts; from Peruvian villages of the late twentieth century to African American plays of the 1920s and 1930s; from explicitly feminist novels and films to the mainstream press and right into feminist scholarship that theorises the female body. In so doing, this collection restates and reinvigorates feminism’s long-standing, necessary and emphatic engagement with the female body.