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Menampilkan postingan dari November, 2010

Football, Fame, and Fortune

This paper was just published in the online journal, The Other Journal, and is available here: http://bit.ly/eucRRX Here's a short excerpt: The external goods that are available through participating in football (and many other practices) include fame, fortune, status, social influence, and power. Football players at the professional level often acquire a fortune and some achieve a significant amount of fame. These goods are external to football because one could play football and even achieve excellence in the sport without receiving any of these goods. In fact, in the past this was true of many of the great players who excelled prior to the escalation of salaries and media coverage of the sport. They experienced football’s internal goods but not the external ones. This shows that the external goods are not essential to football. What is the significance of the difference between the internal and external goods when considering the relationship between football and c...

What's wrong with a potential NFL lockout?

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According to the organization American Rights at Work, plenty .  I received the following in an email today from this organization: "The NFL is preparing a 'lock out' next season unless football players agree to its demands. If there's no football season, it would impact 150,000 jobs – and cause more than $140 million in lost revenue – in each and every city with an NFL team. Local economies will be devastated. All because of the NFL's greed. It's easy to see how crushing a lockout would be... Picture a 60,000-seat football stadium... EMPTY . Now picture all the bars, restaurants, hotels, t-shirt shops, hot dog carts surrounding the stadium... CLOSED . And all of the stadium's janitors, vendors, and support staff... OUT OF WORK. But the NFL and team owners don't care, because they'll still make billions. They've already signed TV contracts that will pay out even if the season is canceled. The NFL owners' greed is unbelievable. In ditching...

Transgender in Sport

ESPN.com reported today that Kye Allums, a female to male transgender, will be referred to as a "male member of George Washington's women's basketball team." This story raises interesting questions about transgender athletes and about gender and sport issues in general. The link to the story can be found here: Transgender Kye Allums to play for GW

Should scrums be banned in rugby?

Academics at the University of Bath are currently conducting research into the biomechanical forces inherent in the rugby scrum. The rationale behind this investigation stems from a premise that the welfare of players should take precedence over all else. The debate over whether the scrum in rugby is a safe and necessary part of the game is a perennial one which seems to polarise opinion as can be seen in the comments on The Guardian's article on this . You will get veracious advocates maintaining that one of the key values of rugby compared to the majority of other sports is that it provides an avenue for all body shapes and sizes to perform. Others will state that the front row is a highly technical part of the game that requires important mental tenacity and skills that should remain. Yet the critics point to the serious injuries and long term damage that result from the impact of antagonistic forces on the neck and spine. This is reinforced by the announced retirement of Engla...