Latrell Sprewell. Allen Iverson. John McEnroe. Even Mohammed Ali and Mike Schmidt and Michael Jordan. These are characters of our national imagination, athletes who stand as symbols of our complex relationship with professional sport. In this erudite and captivating book, bestselling author Larry Platt takes us on a tour through American sports. Offering profiles of the athletes we love (and love to hate), Platt shows that sport, more than any other nationwide pastime, is the way we come to understand—and alter—race relations, gender, and, most profoundly, how we communicate with each other in ways that are often given too little credit in the minds of intellectuals. Thought-provoking and richly written, New Jack Jocks offers a textured picture of how athletes live their lives and how we live out and define American culture by the way we come to understand their lives in and out of the halls of play.

The Sports Immortals is the first study to systematically apply the classic theories of psychology and anthropology to sport to present a model of the ways in which we create mythical figures out of actual individuals. Peter Williams begins with the theories of thinkers like Jung, Frazer, and Otto Rank and then shows their application, first to sport itself, then, more specifically, to American sport, and particularly to baseball. The result is a clear illustration of the way in which we insist on making archetypes out of our heroes, and how this process is the same today as it was in ancient Athens and before.