“[A] narrative of sport’s capacity to fasten us within unforeseen sets of social relations.... Animating the journey is the rich personal relationships with athletes and coaches that Farred brings to life.... Most striking is Farred’s subtle ability to humanize the college athletes he writes about, both within the context of sporting exploits and off-the-court endeavors.”—Ethnic and Racial Studies

“A Sports Odyssey gives us a unique glimpse into a father-son relationship through the lens of basketball. Farred’s book is a truly wonderful read for any parent who is looking to forge a stronger relationship with their children.”—James Jones, the all-time winningest men’s basketball coach at Yale University

“A delightful, knowing, and quite moving account of Farred’s multiple sports engagements. Farred brings together stories of sports and connection, winning and losing, and the beauty and impermanence of life itself in a lovely way. He moves back in time to earlier moments in sports history and his South African childhood—and across continents from Africa to England to the Ivy League universities where he has made stops. His voice is wry, intimate, feisty, and sometimes vulnerable along the way. As is true of all the best books about sports, A Sports Odyssey is really about much more than what happens on the court or the field. There is meditation on race and politics, privilege and exclusion, mythmaking and desire, masculinity and the trickiness of coming of age, and the fickleness of fandom.”—Orin Starn, Professor of Cultural Anthropology and History at Duke University, and author of The Passion of Tiger Woods: An Anthropologist Reports on Golf, Race, and Celebrity Scandal