Once upon a time, sport was a contest between two individuals or teams, watched perhaps by a few people for their amusement or instruction. Soon the spectators came to be a necessary part of the activity. Today, sports events have become more like spectacles designed for audience participation. Even players seem caught up in a performance in which athletic competition plays only a part. Nostalgia for a purer age of competition seems only to feed the hunger to discover new ways to join in the sports experience. Fans, athletes, coaches, merchants and manufacturers, collectors and wannabes - we've become players all. In a book that is both scholarly and engagingly personal, Robert E. Rinehart takes us into the world of contemporary sport performances, from the Olympic Games to "The eXtreme Games," the Super Bowl to "The American Gladiators." He introduces us to sports tourism and the highly commercialized world of global sport. He analyzes the emergence of such "sports" as paint ball (with its associations to the Vietnam War) and indoor rock climbing (and its links to environmentalism and self-mastery).
He shows how sports have become theatrical events, staged for an audience that is sometimes national, even international in size. Rather than agonistic drama, Rinehart likens current sport - especially the new trash sports with their explicit audience participation - to performance art. Yet he finds that even the most hallowed of traditional sports are influenced by the new culture. A playfully intellectual - or intellectually playful - romp on the playing fields of contemporary athletic competition, this book paints a revealing portrait of the new postmodern culture of sports.
- ISBN10 0585023263
- ISBN13 9780585023267
- Publish Date December 1998 (first published 1 June 1998)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Indiana University Press
- Format eBook
- Pages 204
- Language English