Floodlights and Touchlines: A History of Spectator Sport

Steen's engrossing survey of spectator sport targets its origins, motives, and appeal from the barbarism of ancient Roman gladiator games to highly hyped Olympic contests to rowdy English football brawls. Steen, a sportswriter and a journalism professor at the University of Brighton, explores sport as a unifier of nations, races, social classes and sexes, providing a dramatic distraction from conflict and boredom while tapping into our sense of merit and fair play. He crams every peak and valley into this dense history, covering such topics as gambling, professionalism, athletes as "well-paid slaves" in the worldwide arena, political propaganda, racial triumphs, and social and sexual frontiers such as transgender and homosexual advances. Written in straight-forward, non-sense style, Steen gives the reader a chance to chuckle, writing: "Spectator sport is confrontational theatre, a non-stop people's theatre where fellow thespians do their damnedest to make you muck up your lines." Given the flood of hit-and-miss sports books, Steen's transformative work on the traditions and motives of games sets it apart from the usual entries seen in the genre. B+W Photos (Aug.)