ABSTRACT
The importance of sports to contemporary American culture is manifest. It can be measured by the many hours that fans spend riveted to television screens, by the column inches in newspapers devoted to sports, to their presence in sports bars, and by the samples of cocktail conversations. Novelists, poets, and dramatists increasingly turn to sports for motifs, and scholars are beginning to execute minute investigations of the psychological, philosophical, and social significance of sports. As in the past, twenty-first century sports mirror, sometimes reinforce, and sometimes challenge fundamental social divisions. Simultaneously sports have joined the electronic media, bureaucratic structures, and mass consumption as one of the new sinews holding together modern society.
