Power, prestige, and millions of dollars—these are the stakes in the sports franchise game. In this book, sports attorney Kenneth Shropshire describes the franchise warfare that pits city against city in the fierce bidding competition to capture major league teams. Rigorous research, fascinating interviews with major players, stories behind the headlines, and an insider's perspective converge in this rare view of the business side of professional sports. Shropshire portrays a complex web of motivations, negotiations, and public relations, and discusses examples from Philadelphia, the Bay Area, and Washington D.C.
Gough's practical approach asks readers to examine the effects personal character has on performance, teammates, fans, the league, and other individuals and groups in sports. Gough discusses sport's powerful cultural force, its potential for positive impact in the lives and society of those involved in it, and the ethical dimension of games. Gough also addresses the tenuous state of ethics in today's sports culture and the great potential for improvement.
Arguing that college athletics actually represent a large-scale commercial interest that is hostile to the values of higher education, the author explores the tension between big sports revenues and academics across the board in college sports.
Student athletes need to begin thinking about the agent selection process much earlier than their senior year of college. The understanding of what an agent does, why they are paid, and what should go into their selection should begin early in an athletes life. An Athletes Guide to Agents, Fifth Edition is designed to better prepare athletes and their families to screen, select, and work with an agent. It teaches families about the importance of sports agents and allows athletes and their families to be active participants instead of handing all power away to a sports agent upon signing an agency contract.
Many books have been written on the evils of commercialism in college sport, and the hypocrisy of payments to athletes from alumni and other sources outside the university. Almost no attention, however, has been given to the way that the National Collegiate Athletic Association has embraced professionalism through its athletic scholarship policy. Because of this gap in the historical record, the NCAA is often cast as an embattled defender of amateurism, rather than as the architect of a nationwide money-laundering scheme. Sack and Staurowsky show that the NCAA formally abandoned amateurism in the 1950s and passed rules in subsequent years that literally transformed scholarship athletes into university employees. In addition, by purposefully fashioning an amateur mythology to mask the reality of this employer-employee relationship, the NCAA has done a disservice to student-athletes and to higher education. A major subtheme is that women, such as those who created the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW), opposed this hypocrisy, but lacked the power to sustain an alternative model. After tracing the evolution of college athletes into professional entertainers, and the harmful effects it has caused, the authors propose an alternative approach that places college sport on a firm educational foundation and defend the rights of both male and female college athletes. This is a provocative analysis for anyone interested in college sports in America and its subversion of traditional educational and amateur principles.
