"Details how owners . . . have shamelessly played cities against one another to get sweetheart deals for their stadiums." — Sports IllustratedCan a sports franchise "blackmail" a city into getting what it wants—a new stadium, say, or favorable leasing terms—by threatening to relocate? In 1982, the owners of the Chicago White Sox pledged to keep the team in Chicago if the city approved a $5-million tax-exempt bond to finance construction of luxury suites at...

In the past decade, America has experienced an urban renaissance. Cities as varied as New York, Chicago and Boston are no longer seen as ungovernable and doomed to crime and blight. However, they still face formidable problems. Urban Policy Reconsidered is a comprehensive overview of the issues and problems facing our cities today and cover every important issue in urban affairs. What is poverty? What is economic development? What is education? What is crime? As well as covering all of the...

With a labour fight looming, and the NHL's participation in the Olympics hanging in the balance, The Instigator looks at how two decades of lockouts, soaring ticket prices, and on-ice tinkering have convinced many hard-core fans that the NHL's long-time commissioner Gary Bettman is the devil in disguise. In 1992, the gross revenue of the National Hockey League was US$400 million. This season, the figure will be closer to $2.8 billion-a seven-fold increase. Even if that were the only criter...

At its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, Detroit's status as epicenter of the American auto industry made it a vibrant, populous, commercial hub—and then the bottom fell out. Detroit : A Biography takes a long, unflinching look at the evolution of one of America's great cities and one of the nation's greatest urban failures. This authoritative yet accessible narrative seeks to explain how the city grew to become the heart of American industry and how its utter collapse—from ...

The decline and fall of the Montreal Expos. In 1969 the Montreal Expos played their first game. Thirty-two years later the team that once boasted baseball’s best farm system is nearly dead. In this book former Expos president Claude Brochu gets to the bottom of the Expos’ story. From his successful marketing career at Seagram’s Claude Brochu was thrust into the role of Expos president in 1986. Back then the Expos were a team with terrific potential. But as the years went by attendance bega...

“How can the NCAA blithely wreck careers without regard to due process or common fairness? How can it act so ruthlessly to enforce rules that are so petty? Why won’t anybody stand up to these outrageous violations of American values and American justice?”In the four years since Joe Nocera asked those questions in a controversial New York Times column, the National Collegiate Athletic Association has come under fire. Fans have begun to realize that the athl...

The reasons behind Detroit’s persistent racialized poverty after World War IIOnce America's "arsenal of democracy," Detroit is now the symbol of the American urban crisis. In this reappraisal of America’s racial and economic inequalities, Thomas Sugrue asks why Detroit and other industrial cities have become the sites of persistent racialized poverty. He challenges the conventional wisdom that urban decline is the product of the social programs and racial fissures ...

When the Rogers Place arena opened in downtown Edmonton in September 2016, no amount of buzz could drown out the rumours of manipulation, secret deals, and corporate greed undergirding the project. Working with documentary evidence and original interviews, the authors present an absorbing account of the machinations that got the arena and the adjacent Ice District built, with a price tag of more than $600 million. The arena deal, they argue, established a costly public financing precedent ...

This biting satire of academia and high finance by the Harvard economist "is ingenious and humorous even as it chills and cuts close to the bone" ( The New York Times).John Kenneth Galbraith served in the Kennedy administration before becoming one of the twentieth century's foremost economists and public intellectuals. In A Tenured Professor, he spins his wealth of knowledge—and knowledge of wealth—into a delightfully comical morality tale.M...

A vital narrative history of 1970s pro basketball, and the Black players who shaped the NBAAgainst a backdrop of ongoing resistance to racial desegregation and strident calls for Black Power, the NBA in the 1970s embodied the nation’s imagined descent into disorder. A new generation of Black players entered the league, among them Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Spencer Haywood, and the press and public were quick to blame this cohort for the supposed decline of pro-basketb...

**• A Boston Globe Best Book of 2015 •“A penetrating examination of how the elite college football programs have become ‘giant entertainment businesses that happened to do a little education on the side.’”—Mark Kram, The New York TimesTwo-time Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist Gilbert M. Gaul offers a riveting and sometimes shocking look inside the money culture of college football and how it has come to dominate a surprising number of colleges an...

Fair and Foul explores our love of sport, just as it reveals sport’s darker side—the influence of big business, corruption, price gouging, political maneuvering, gender bias, media grandstanding, and more. The sixth edition features a new chapter on mass media and sport, a revised introduction that lays out the two themes of the book with fresh examples, and a significantly revised chapter on college sport that asks whether or not big-time college sports are compatible with higher educatio...