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445 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. vii (1979)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0445 and id is 1 raw text is: PREFACE Just recently a crowd estimated at 250,000 gathered in downtown Seattle to honor its professional basketball team which had just won the World Championship. Each January, 80 million people watch the Super Bowl, the contest to determine the champion of the National Football League. Every day news accounts report the signing of players' contracts in excess of one million dollars. Just as often reports are filed on the illegal recruiting of high school and college athletes, violence on and off the playing field, illegal payments to amateurs and efforts to politicize the Olympic Games. These examples tell us that sport permeates the lives of Americans and populations in other areas of the world. Nothing else save a struggle for survival seems to be able to stimulate such emotion, attraction, interest, adulation and mania as do sports. There are few persons whose lives are not touched by some aspect of the sporting life. It is only recently that scholars and insightful practitioners have been critically looking at sport. For a long time the academic community re- jected the study of sport as frivolous intellectual inquiry. Why should some- one waste his time studying childlike games such as baseball or basketball when he/she could be researching problems of greater significance? By the same token any athlete or journalist who would dare criticize the sporting enterprise would suffer a similar rejection. The athlete would be viewed as a troublemaker and the writer would be denied access to the locker room. After all, sports represent a quasi-religion, intertwined with all other institutions and reinforced by a Judeo-Christian value system, Sport is a direct representation of society. Some say it is a microcosm, others say a reflection, of society. It is neither; it is society. What we have discovered is that sport is serious activity which deserves the scrutiny of scholars and critics. Whatever is good or bad, valued or devalued, fair or foul in society is found in sport. For every athlete who rises to the top in the tradition of the American Way there are others who are restricted for the reasons other than lack of motivation. Turning a profit at the expense of the consumer is a practice not limited to manufacturing or industrial entities. Sport is serious business. Sport is not at all equivalent to the Sunday afternoon pick-up game spontaneously organized by whom- ever is present. In fact, there is rare opportunity for this within the con- temporary sport, which emphasizes high degree of organization, specializa- tion, and selective recruitment. If you are going to play ball today, you had better be good and an organization man. This issue includes the contributions of well known academics and par- ticipants in sport. Each is writing in an effort to dramatize areas in sport which need critical attention. Their writings illustrate that many of the myths associated with sport (e.g. it is good for the character development of youth) are based on questionable premises, both empirical and ideologi- cal. I would like to thank each of the contributors for their efforts and The Annals for willingness to publish an issue on this topic. JAMES H. FREY vii

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