New Books in Sports

Today I talked to Greg Hoffman about his new book Emotion By Design: Creative Leadership Lessons from a Life at Nike (Twelve, 2022).For this week’s guest Greg Hoffman, the characteristics of empathy and curiosity are central to everything from finding your place in the world, to connecting with others, and building a brand that exhibits a true sense of purpose by empowering people to realize their potential. Along the way, this episode explores both the value and limits of data-driven marketing takes on the central role of smartphones today, and goes back into Hoffman’s own backstory as a mixed-race child growing up in a nearly all-white suburb of Minneapolis. In art and sports, Hoffman found his way forward.Greg Hoffman is a global brand leader, advisor, speaker, and former Nike Chief Marketing Office. He’s now the founder and principal of the brand advisory group Modern Arena as well as a branding instructor at the University of Oregon’s Lundquist School of Business and a member of the Board of Trustees at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD).Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of nine books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His new book is Blah, Blah, Blah: A Snarky Guide to Office Lingo. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports

Monk Yun Rou was ordained in China as a Taoist monk in 2012. His writings and teachings propagate Taoist ideas and focus on environmental conservation, and political and social justice. Yun Rou began his formal martial arts training in 1980 and practiced a wide range of Chinese kung fu styles before settling on tai chi. A student of some of China’s top tai chi grandmasters, he was named Tai Chi Master of The Year at the 2011 World Congress on Qigong and Traditional Chinese Medicine and Yun Rou was the keynote speaker at the International Tai Chi Symposium in Louisville, Kentucky. Yun Rou is the author of Mad Monk Manifesto. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports

It can be hard to think of Everest as unknown anymore. While it’s certainly a challenge to climb the world’s tallest mountain, someone–with enough time and money–has a good chance of making it to the summit. A potential mountaineer can fly into Kathmandu, travel to a well-stocked base camp, be escorted up a well-trodden route by expert sherpas. There’s even Wifi at the peak.The relative ease of climbing Everest is born from almost a century of attempted expeditions up the mountain, to determine how high one could go, and what routes to take. Even the successful expedition of Norgay and Hillary was built on the efforts of those who came before.And the first expeditions, in 1921 and 1922, are the subject of Mick Conefrey’s Everest 1922: The Epic Story of the First Attempt on the World's Highest Mountain (Pegasus Books, 2022). Mick tells the story of these very first attempts to climb the mountain–including the difficulties of funding, recruitment, and travel, as well as the climb itself.In this interview, Mick and I talk about the two expeditions to Everest–including its most famous participant, George Mallory–the scientific and mountaineering controversies around it, and what makes climbing Everest different today.Mick Conefrey is an award-winning writer and documentary film maker. He created the landmark BBC series The Race for Everest to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the first ascent. His previous books include The Adventurer's Handbook: Life Lessons from History's Great Explorers (Smithsonian: 2006); Everest 1953: The Epic Story of the First Ascent (Mountaineers Books: 2014), the winner of a Leggimontagna Award; and Ghosts of K2: The Race for the Summit of the World's Most Deadly Mountain (Oneworld Publications: 2015), which won a U.S. National Outdoor Book Award.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Everest 1922. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports

Today we are joined by Douglas Booth, Dean of Adventure, Culinary Arts and Tourism at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia, Canada and Professor Emeritus at the University of Otago. He is also the author of Bondi Beach: Representations of an Iconic Australian (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022). In our conversation, we discussed the geological and climatological origins of Bondi Beach; the contested histories of iconic Australian archetypes such as surf bathers, surf life savers, and surf boarders; and what it might mean to write an autobiography of Bondi Beach.In Bondi Beach, Booth works across the boundaries of the social and physical sciences, encompassing anthropology, geography, geology, history, and hydrology. In the first two chapters of the book, he critically assesses the role of sand and storms as actors in shaping the beach, which only arose in its current instantiation 6,500 years ago. Current debates over the shape of the beach can take the “natural” as desirable, but as Booth shows in his chapters “Nature and Culture” and “Pavilion,” powerful civic forces can also help to remake the environment to suit human needs.When it comes to the beach, Booth seems to argue that the only constant is change. His chapters on the Eora (Indigenous Australians) and Berewalgal (European settler-colonists) trace the changes in beach use. Contrary to later colonial officials’ assertions, the Eora did not leave Bondi barren, nor was their use of the land static, but instead Indigenous Australians use of the land altered in response to the environment and the development of new fishing and manufacturing techniques. Eora and Berewalgal people possessed different ontological understandings of their relationship to the country. Indigenous Australians saw themselves as part of the land and as a consequence worked within its homeostatic limits. Settler-colonial people saw their role as one of management and consequently they sought policies to make the land more useful from an economic point of view, causing significant changes to the geographic and social landscape of the Bondi-Rose Bay Valley.Booth’s work challenges assumptions that underpin the historical discipline: how do we recapture the past, what facts do we include and what do we leave out, and how do organize our histories into narratives. His chapters on avatars of Australian beach culture: surf bathers, surf life savers, and surf boarders simultaneously highlight the impossibility of writing origins stories while they also highlight the various narrative possibilities of different mythological types. There is no single authoritative history of surfing in Bondi – but it is open to numerous story arcs: surfers as heroes or victims, surfers as environmental crusaders or landscape devastators, and surfers as counter-cultural icons or social problems.In his last chapter, “Autobiography” Booth writes a biography from the perspective of Bondi Beach. This “autobiography” is of Booth’s imagination, but it’s daring narrative form offers new possibilities for thinking through what the natural environment might think of man’s stewardship of space.Booth’s work has broad appeal – clearly of interest to people who are focused on sports studies, but also broadly to scholars from a range of fields, both physical and social sciences, who want to re-think the assumptions of our disciplines.Keith Rathbone is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His book, entitled Sport and physical culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, agency, and everyday life, (Manchester University Press, 2022) examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au and follow him at @keithrathbone on twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports

In the early 1990s, Tommy Morrison, a young roughneck from Jay, Oklahoma, burst onto the boxing scene to become one of the most controversial fighters of his era. Handsome, eloquent, and dynamic, Morrison parlayed destructive knockout power and a homespun personality into celebrity status throughout middle America, where boxing rarely prospered.But it was his starring role in Rocky V alongside Sylvester Stallone that propelled him to stardom–and ultimately led to his tragic downfall. His brush with Hollywood fame triggered a limitless appetite for parties, liquor, and sex. When Morrison was shockingly diagnosed with HIV in 1996, his life imploded, and his subsequent descent into drugs, prison, bigamy, and conspiracy theories made Morrison notorious long after his glory days had ended.In The Duke: The Life and Lies of Tommy Morrison (Hamilcar, 2022), Carlos Acevedo chronicles Morrison’s tumultuous life from his days as a teenaged Toughman contestant, to his victory over George Foreman, to his struggles with HIV and depression, to his death at forty-four, when his delusions finally overtook him.Paul Knepper covered the Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All was published in 2020. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports

Today we are joined by Dr. Shannon Walsh, Associate Professor of Theatre History, and author of Eugenics and Physical Culture Performance in the Progressive Era: Watch Whiteness Workout (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020). In our conversation, we discussed the origins of women’s physical culture in the United States, the role that physical culture reformers played in producing femininity and whiteness, and the possibilities for anti-racist and anti-sexist sport to reconceptualize the white supremist roots of American athleticism.In Eugenics and Physical Culture Performance in the Progressive Era, Walsh traces the beginnings of reform era physical culture, paying special attention to the way that physical culturists attempted to shape women’s bodies. She argues that their efforts hinged on using exercise to produce femininity and whiteness and that they prefigured the larger eugenic movements aimed at perpetuating the white race later in the 20th century. In each chapter she looks at different physical culturists or physical cultural movement. Her second chapter looks at Steele MacKaye and Americanised Delsarte, a physical cultural practice that combined acting, dance and exercise. Her third chapter focuses on Dudley Allen Sargent and mimetic workouts that introduced working class motions – for example wood chopping - to middle and upper-middle class men and women at Ivy League colleges.The fourth and fifth chapter work together to unpack the complicated position of women’s physical culture, femininity and motherhood. In chapter four, Walsh shows how Abby Shaw Mayhew and the YWCA articulated a genre of motherhood, which Walsh calls “social motherhood,” that reframed women’s exercise as domestic and maternal rather than grotesque and masculine. In the fifth chapter, Walsh examines Bernarr MacFadden – the Barnum of physical culture – to showcases the places where advertising, motherhood, and women’s exercise came into explicit contact.Relying on a close reading of physical culture through critical theory, these main chapters trace the intersections between exercise, femininity, motherhood, race and social class, to illustrate how debates over these issues helped to produce whiteness. Whether they were in elite educational institutions in the Northeast, Midwestern metropolises like Minneapolis, or travelling around the country these experts helped to code physical culture as specifically as womanly, middle class, white, and ultimately as unremarkable.He final body chapter, chapter six, looks at physical culture for indigenous women in three sites: the Odanah Mission School, the Model Indian School at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, and the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. Unlike their white counterparts, indigenous women were not offered significant opportunities for physical exercise and if they were it was only for the purpose of assimilation. Unsurprisingly, many indigenous girls and women challenged those expectations and were successful athletes.Keith Rathbone is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His book, entitled Sport and physical culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, agency, and everyday life, (Manchester University Press, 2022) examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au and follow him at @keithrathbone on twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports

The Crown Games were the apex of competition in ancient Greece. Along with prestigious athletic contests in honor of Zeus at Olympia, they comprised the Pythian Games for Apollo at Delphi, the Isthmian Games for Poseidon, and the Nemean Games, sacred to Zeus. For over nine hundred years, the Greeks celebrated these athletic and religious festivals, a rare point of cultural unity amid the fierce regional independence of the numerous Greek city-states and kingdoms.The Crown Games of Ancient Greece: Archaeology, Athletes, and Heroes (U Arkansas Press, 2022) examines these festivals in the context of the ancient Greek world, a vast and sprawling cultural region that stretched from modern Spain to the Black Sea and North Africa. Illuminating the unique history and features of the celebrations, David Lunt delves into the development of the contest sites as sanctuaries and the Panhellenic competitions that gave them their distinctive character. While literary sources have long been the mainstay for understanding the evolution of the Crown Games and ancient Greek athletics, archaeological excavations have significantly augmented contemporary understandings of the events. Drawing on this research, Lunt brings deeper context to these gatherings, which were not only athletics competitions but also occasions for musical contests, dramatic performances, religious ceremonies, and diplomatic summits--as well as raucous partying. Taken as a circuit, the Crown Games offer a more nuanced view of ancient Greek culture than do the well-known Olympian Games on their own. With this comprehensive examination of the Crown Games, Lunt provides a new perspective on how the ancient Greeks competed and collaborated both as individuals and as city-states.Reyes Bertolin is a professor of Classics at the University of Calgary. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports

Dr. Christopher Ives teaches in the area of Asian Religions at Stonehill College in Massachusetts. In his scholarship, he focuses on modern Zen ethics. In 2009 he published Imperial-Way Zen, a book on Buddhist social ethics in light of Zen nationalism. Currently he is engaged in research on Zen approaches to nature and Buddhist environmental ethics. He is the author of Zen on the Trail: Hiking as Pilgrimage, out now from Wisdom Publications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports

With a reputation as the hot-air balloon capital of the world and the home of the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta, the southwestern desert city of Albuquerque frequently showcases the magic and adventure of ballooning. This legacy links back to the 1880s and a man by the name of Park Van Tassel. Through his pioneering flight, Van Tassel not only opened the skies to future generations across New Mexico, but he also opened minds to the possibility of manned flight throughout the American West.A charismatic, P. T. Barnum–like showman, Van Tassel rose from obscurity to introduce the new science of ballooning and parachuting throughout the West. Van Tassel toured extensively—from California to Utah, Colorado, and Louisiana and later embarking on an international journey that took him to Hawaii, Australia, Southeast Asia, India, Africa, and beyond. Sky Rider: Park Van Tassel and the Rise of Ballooning in the West (U New Mexico Press, 2021) weaves together the many threads of Van Tassel’s extraordinary life journey, situating him at last in his rightful place among the prominent aerial exhibitionists of his time.Gary B. Fogel is an adjunct professor of aerospace engineering at San Diego State University and the CEO of Natural Selection, Inc. He is also the author or coauthor of Quest for Flight: John J. Montgomery and the Dawn of Aviation in the West and Wind and Wings: The History of Soaring in San Diego.Troy A. Hallsell is the 341st Missile Wing Historian at Malmstrom AFB, MT. The ideas expressed in this podcast do not represent the 341st Missile Wing, United States Air Force, or the Department of Defense. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports

Sports fandom isn't what it used to be. Owners and executives increasingly count on the blind loyalty of their fans and too often act against the team's best interest. Intentionally tanking a season to get a high draft pick, scamming local governments to build cushy new stadiums, and actively subverting the players have become business as usual in professional sports. In Rethinking Fandom: How to Beat the Sports-Industrial Complex at Its Own Game (Belt Publishing, 2022), sportswriter (and lifelong sports fan) Craig Calcaterra argues that fans have more power than they realize to change how their teams behave. With his characteristic wit and piercing commentary, Calcaterra calls for a radical reexamination of what it means to be a fan in the twenty-first century.Joel Tscherne is an Adjunct History Professor at Southern New Hampshire University. His Twitter handle is @JoelTscherne. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports