A rugby player finds fame and fortune in a bleak mining town, but he cannot outrun the emptiness he feels inside in Man Booker Prize–winning author David Storey’s seminal first novel On Christmas Eve, Arthur breaks his two front teeth. A teammate on the rugby pitch is too slow with a handoff, and instead of catching the ball, Art catches an opponent’s foot right in the mouth. When he regains consciousness, the match is almost over, but he keeps playing regardless. Where else would he go? His entire life, Art has only cared about sports and nothing grabs his attention quite like the lightning-fast violence of Rugby League. He knows it could kill him, but it also makes him feel alive. In this hard-bitten Yorkshire mining town, the warriors of the rugby pitch are treated like gods. Through the aggressive sport, Art finds money, friends, and countless women. But when his lust for violence begins to fade, will he have the courage to leave the game behind?

Enter into the sporting life, the world of prostitutes, pimps, madams, gamblers, bootleggers, and drag queens. From the ritzy clubs, hidden speakeasies, luxurious brothels, and down-on-their-luck dives of old to the seedy massage parlours and back alleys of today, the sporting life has always intersected with the culture of African-American hoodoo, conjure, and rootwork. Now Professor Porterfield takes you into the clandestine milieu of underworld beliefs and secret practices, and shows the impact that the sporting life has on the world of magic and spirituality. With more than 150 practical spells, charms, recipes, and authentic old-style tricks, The Sporting Life pulls back the velvet curtain that has for too long concealed the life, times, and history of the demimonde. Presenting the magic of the prostitutes of the Bible, the working girls of Storyville and Memphis, the high-stakes bettors, the magnetic madams, the persuasive pimps, the cagey corner dope dealers, and members of oppressed lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, and transgender communities of colour ? The Sporting Life is sure to startle your senses and thrill your heart. This exhaustively researched book blows open the hidden world of love, lust, vice, and danger that is the sporting life.

This Sporting Life offers an important view of England's cultural history through its sporting pursuits, carrying the reader to a match or a hunt or a fight, viscerally drawing a portrait of the sounds and smells, and showing that sport has been as important in defining British culture as gender, politics, education, class, and religion.

An introduction to the Bible's teaching on sport and a compendium of practical advice for maximising the blessings of sport while avoiding its potential dangers.

Jacques Henri Lartigue was fascinated by the ascent of sport in the early twentieth century as a fashionable pastime for the middle classes, and was himself a keen sportsman. Lartigue's entirely unposed photographs, presented album-style in this gorgeous, luxurious and delightful volume, capture both the joyous exuberance of amateur sports--racing, skiing, tennis, gymnastics, hang gliding--and the particular character of its popularity in the first half of the twentieth century. Lartigue is an absolute master at conveying the dynamism of the human body at play--the peculiar shapes it can contort into, and the gestures that can express anything from easy nonchalance to fierce focus. These photographs also serve as a historical catalogue of the paraphernalia and smart casual clothing associated with each sport. A Sporting Life is divided into five themed chapters: "The Sportsman," "Taking the Air," "Training," "Women and Children" and "Sport as Spectacle." Here, we witness how sports were transforming social relations, introducing new opportunities for expression, especially across gender lines. In an essay, historian Thierry Terret reveals the complexity of Lartigue's technical approach to photography, and looks at the issues surrounding the rise of sport in its modern incarnation as a leisure pursuit and as commerce. In a preface, novelist Anne-Marie Garat (whose own narratives often feature the themes of photography and family) provides a personal perspective on Lartigue's sports photography, also exploring the role played by sport in the development of photography itself. The book is copublished with Hermès, in celebration of its 2013 sports theme. Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894-1986) was a French photographer and painter, most famous for his photographs of the leisure activities of France's middle and upper classes. An avid photographer from the age of seven, Lartigue gained fame for his photo albums, which provide a comprehensive chronicle of the twentieth century in France and abroad, and for his official portraits.

This lively and intriguing study looks at the way sports both reflected and shaped Victorian society. Just as our own games have a lot to say about modern American culture, so sports are a prism through which we can gain valuable insights into Victorian society. The Sporting Life: Victorian Sports and Games is an engaging and perceptive account of how sport developed during Britain's heyday, who played (and who wasn't allowed to play), and what it all conveys about gender, race, imperialism, and national pride. Drawing extensively on 19th-century writings, The Sporting Life begins with a survey of sports in pre-Victorian England and the impact of industrialism in the early 19th century. We read of the effects of evangelicalism and utilitarianism, both of which first opposed sport, then used it for their own purposes. We learn of the association of sports with masculinity, an identification women challenged late in the century. Finally we learn how English sports became part of the imperial game, used to promote—and resist—the spread of Victoria's vast empire.

Volume XXIII of the distinguished annual Studies in Contemporary Jewry explores the role of sports in modern Jewish history. The centrality of sports in modern life--in popular and even in high culture, in economic life, in the media, in international and national politics, and in forging ethnic identities--can hardly be exaggerated, but in the field of Jewish studies this subject has been somewhat neglected, at least until recently. Students of American Jewish history, for example, often emphasize the role of sports in the Americanization of the immigrants, while students of Jewish nationalism pay closer attention to its appeal for the regeneration of the Jewish nation, as well as the creation of a new, healthy, Jewish body. The essays brought together in Jews and the Sporting Life expand the body of knowledge about the place sports occupied, and continue to occupy, in Jewish life. They examine the connection between sports and Jewish nationalism, particularly Zionism, and how organized Jewish sports have been an agent of nation-building. They consider the role of Jews as owners of sports teams, as amateur and professional athletes, and as fans and bettors. Other themes include sports and Jewish literature, and boxing as a sport that enabled Jewish men to prove their masculinity in a world that often stereotyped them as weak and "feminine." This volume concentrates on twentieth century developments in Israel, Europe, and the United States.

The first book to be set in the new Richler typeface, commissioned by Random House of Canada Limited and Jack Rabinovitch in memory of Mordecai. Mordecai Richler’s final book pays homage to his personal heroes and celebrates a writer’s love of sport with his trademark irascibility, humour and acuity. Even while writing his bestselling novels, Mordecai Richler nurtured his obsession with sports, writing brilliantly on ice hockey, baseball, salmon fishing, bodybuilding, and wrestling for such publications as GQ, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Inside Sports, Commentary, and The New York Review of Books. Mordecai himself chose the pieces to include in Dispatches from the Sporting Life, and together they give us an intimate portrait of a man who admired the players and prized the struggle of sport -- as much as he enjoyed skewering those who made a mockery of its principles. His encounters with Pete Rose, Wayne Gretzky and Gordie Howe (“Mr. Elbows…the big guy with the ginger-ale bottle shoulders”) are by turns bizarre, moving and uproarious. Richler travelled with Guy LaFleur’s Montreal Canadiens (“Les Canadiens sont là!”), but also with the “far-from-incomparable” Trail Smoke Eaters to Stockholm for the world hockey championships, where Canadians are “widely known, and widely disliked.” There are wonderful pieces here about Ring Lardner, George Plimpton, Hank Greenberg and lady umpires, and a marvellous essay on his unlimited enthusiasm for the all-inclusive Encyclopedia of Jews in Sports, which includes among its champions Sandy Koufax, “who may well be the greatest pitcher of all time, regardless of race, colour or creed,” as well as one Steve Allan Hertz, an infielder who played five total games in Houston in 1964 and had a batting average of .000.

In an era of rowdy teams, the Cleveland Spiders (1887-1899) were baseball's rowdiest. Managed by Oliver "Patsy" Tebeau, a quick-tempered infielder, the Spiders seemed to heap abuse of one kind or another on everyone--umpires, opposing teams, even the fans. Their aggression never brought home the pennant, but Cleveland's battles with the league's top clubs, including an 1895 Temple Cup victory over the Baltimore Orioles, are now legendary. Yet the story of the Spiders amounts to more than a 12 year free-for-all. There were top-flight players like Ed McKean, George Davis, Jesse Burkett, and Cy Young. There was the racially progressive signing of Holy Cross star Louis Sockalexis, the first American Indian in the major leagues. And then there was the team's final season, 1899, when a club ravaged by syndicalism set the standard for baseball futility.