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The Big Time
How the 1970s Transformed Sports in America
Description
A captivating and entertaining look at sports in the 1970s, when sports moved from the margins to the mainstream of American culture.
Every decade brings change, but as Michael MacCambridge chronicles in THE BIG TIME, no decade in American sports history featured such convulsive cultural shifts and completely transformed the sports landscape as the 1970s.
More than politicians, musicians or actors, the decade in America was defined by its most exemplary athletes. The sweeping changes in American life and culture were seen in the collective experience of Billie Jean King and Muhammad Ali, Henry Aaron and Julius Erving, Jack Nicklaus and Chris Evert, among others, who spent the decade redefining the role of athletes and athletics. The Seventies witnessed the emergence of spectator sports as an ever-expanding mainstream phenomenon, as well as dramatic changes in the way athletes were paid, portrayed, and packaged. It also witnessed a hard-won revolution, as women were involved in sports in unprecedented numbers, both as athletes and spectators. In telling the sweeping story of how American sports changed over the decade, a larger story emerges: of how America itself changed, experiencing a cable-wired, modernity of perpetual leisure and entertainment, in which sports played a newly central role.
Every decade brings change, but as Michael MacCambridge chronicles in THE BIG TIME, no decade in American sports history featured such convulsive cultural shifts and completely transformed the sports landscape as the 1970s.
More than politicians, musicians or actors, the decade in America was defined by its most exemplary athletes. The sweeping changes in American life and culture were seen in the collective experience of Billie Jean King and Muhammad Ali, Henry Aaron and Julius Erving, Jack Nicklaus and Chris Evert, among others, who spent the decade redefining the role of athletes and athletics. The Seventies witnessed the emergence of spectator sports as an ever-expanding mainstream phenomenon, as well as dramatic changes in the way athletes were paid, portrayed, and packaged. It also witnessed a hard-won revolution, as women were involved in sports in unprecedented numbers, both as athletes and spectators. In telling the sweeping story of how American sports changed over the decade, a larger story emerges: of how America itself changed, experiencing a cable-wired, modernity of perpetual leisure and entertainment, in which sports played a newly central role.
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Praise
"Many books promise to reveal 'how Washington really works.' THE BIG BREAK actually does—by zooming in not on the principals—the politicians and talking heads—but instead on the worker bees: the staffers who make our capital work each day, a hard-to-decipher mix of craven opportunists and the true believers who are sometimes one and the same. [It] can only be understood through the eyes of Ben Terris, one of the most principled and perceptive reporters in Washington, who masterfully guides us through the destabilizing decade that followed the first Black presidency."—Wesley Lowery, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author of American Whitelash: A Changing Nation and The Cost of Progress