Results by title
5 books match the query 'Vogan, Travis'
ESPN
The Making of a Sports Media EmpireTravis Vogan
University of Illinois Press, 2015
Once a shoestring operation built on plywood sets and Australian rules football, ESPN has evolved into a media colossus. A genius for cross-promotion and its near-mystical rapport with its viewers empower the network to set agendas and create superstars, to curate sports history even as it mainstreams the latest cultural trends.
Travis Vogan teams archival research and interviews with an all-star cast to pen the definitive account of how ESPN turned X's and O's into billions of $$$. Vogan's institutional and cultural history focuses on the network since 1998, the year it launched a high-motor effort to craft its brand and grow audiences across media platforms. As he shows, innovative properties like SportsCentury, ESPN The Magazine, and 30 for 30 built the network's cultural caché. This credibility, in turn, propelled ESPN's transformation into an entity that lapped its run-of-the-mill competitors and helped fulfill its self-proclaimed status as the "Worldwide Leader in Sports."
Ambitious and long overdue, ESPN: The Making of a Sports Media Empire offers an inside look at how the network changed an industry and reshaped the very way we live as sports fans.
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Keepers of the Flame
NFL Films and the Rise of Sports MediaTravis Vogan
University of Illinois Press, 2014
NFL Films changed the way Americans view football. Keepers of the Flame: NFL Films and the Rise of Sports Media traces the subsidiary's development from a small independent film production company to the marketing machine that Sports Illustrated named "perhaps the most effective propaganda organ in the history of corporate America."
Drawing on research at the NFL Films Archive and the Pro Football Hall of Fame and interviews with media pioneer Steve Sabol and others, Travis Vogan shows how NFL Films has constructed a consistent, romanticized, and remarkably visible mythology for the National Football League. The company packages football as a visceral and dramatic sequence of violent, beautiful, graceful, and heroic gridiron battles. Historically proven formulas for presentation--such as the dramatic voiceovers once provided by John Facenda's baritone, the soaring scores of Sam Spence's rousing background music, and the epic poetry found in Steve Sabol's scripts--are still used today.
From the Vincent Price-narrated Strange but True Football Stories to the currently running series Hard Knocks, NFL Films distinguishes the NFL from other sports organizations and from other media and entertainment. Vogan tells the larger story of the company's relationship with and vast influence on our culture's representations of sport, the expansion of sports television beyond live game broadcasts, and the emergence of cable television and Internet sports media.
Keepers of the Flame: NFL Films and the Rise of Sports Media presents sports media as an integral facet of American popular culture and NFL Films as key to the transformation of professional football into the national obsession commonly known as America's Game.
Drawing on research at the NFL Films Archive and the Pro Football Hall of Fame and interviews with media pioneer Steve Sabol and others, Travis Vogan shows how NFL Films has constructed a consistent, romanticized, and remarkably visible mythology for the National Football League. The company packages football as a visceral and dramatic sequence of violent, beautiful, graceful, and heroic gridiron battles. Historically proven formulas for presentation--such as the dramatic voiceovers once provided by John Facenda's baritone, the soaring scores of Sam Spence's rousing background music, and the epic poetry found in Steve Sabol's scripts--are still used today.
From the Vincent Price-narrated Strange but True Football Stories to the currently running series Hard Knocks, NFL Films distinguishes the NFL from other sports organizations and from other media and entertainment. Vogan tells the larger story of the company's relationship with and vast influence on our culture's representations of sport, the expansion of sports television beyond live game broadcasts, and the emergence of cable television and Internet sports media.
Keepers of the Flame: NFL Films and the Rise of Sports Media presents sports media as an integral facet of American popular culture and NFL Films as key to the transformation of professional football into the national obsession commonly known as America's Game.
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LeRoy Neiman
The Life of America’s Most Beloved and Belittled ArtistTravis Vogan
University of Chicago Press, 2024
The untold story of an American hustler who upset the art world and became a pop culture icon, cutting a swath across twentieth-century history and culture.
LeRoy Neiman—the cigar-smoking and mustachioed artist famous for his Playboy illustrations, sports paintings, and brash interviews—stood among the twentieth century’s most famous, wealthy, and polarizing artists. His stylish renderings of musicians, athletes, and sporting events captivated fans but baffled critics, who accused Neiman of debasing art with popular culture. Neiman cashed in on the controversy, and his extraordinary popularity challenged the norms of what art should be, where it belongs, and who should have access to it.
The story of a Depression-era ragamuffin–turned–army chef–turned–celebrity artist, Neiman’s biography is a rollicking ride through twentieth-century American history, punctuated by encounters with the likes of Muhammad Ali, Frank Sinatra, Joe Namath, and Andy Warhol. In the whirlwind of his life, Neiman himself once remarked that even he didn’t know who he really was—but, he said, the fame and money that came his way made it all worth it. In this first biography of the captivating and infamous man, Travis Vogan hunts for the real Neiman amid the America that made him.
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LeRoy Neiman—the cigar-smoking and mustachioed artist famous for his Playboy illustrations, sports paintings, and brash interviews—stood among the twentieth century’s most famous, wealthy, and polarizing artists. His stylish renderings of musicians, athletes, and sporting events captivated fans but baffled critics, who accused Neiman of debasing art with popular culture. Neiman cashed in on the controversy, and his extraordinary popularity challenged the norms of what art should be, where it belongs, and who should have access to it.
The story of a Depression-era ragamuffin–turned–army chef–turned–celebrity artist, Neiman’s biography is a rollicking ride through twentieth-century American history, punctuated by encounters with the likes of Muhammad Ali, Frank Sinatra, Joe Namath, and Andy Warhol. In the whirlwind of his life, Neiman himself once remarked that even he didn’t know who he really was—but, he said, the fame and money that came his way made it all worth it. In this first biography of the captivating and infamous man, Travis Vogan hunts for the real Neiman amid the America that made him.
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Sports, Power, and Resistance
An Introduction to Critical Sports StudiesEdited by Thomas P. Oates and Travis Vogan
University of Illinois Press, 2026
Sports embodies and defines US culture while also shaping it and being shaped by it. Thomas P. Oates and Travis Vogan present essays focused on the intersections across sport, power, and resistance in the North American sports world.
Topics range from Black coaches in the National Football League to disordered eating within distance running to transgender athletes’ fight to participate in sports. The editors have organized the contributions into three sections. Part one probes how sports build communities that foster belonging as well as exclusion. The essays in part two explore multiple forms of resistance in sports through various performances and representations. In the final section, essayists analyze more explicit efforts to use sports as a platform for activism from various political viewpoints. Throughout, the works nurture and demonstrate a sensibility that encourages humanistic, critical, and interdisciplinary inquiry.
Wide-reaching and accessible, Sports, Power, and Resistance explores timely issues while demonstrating the value of blending perspectives to better understand the games we play and watch.
Contributors: Ali Bouterse, Adrian Burgos, Jr., Michael L. Butterworth, Noah Cohan, Douglas Hartmann, Victoria E. Johnson, Abraham I. Khan, Jason Kido Lopez, Theresa Runstedtler, Jaime Schultz, Samantha N. Sheppard, and Travers
Topics range from Black coaches in the National Football League to disordered eating within distance running to transgender athletes’ fight to participate in sports. The editors have organized the contributions into three sections. Part one probes how sports build communities that foster belonging as well as exclusion. The essays in part two explore multiple forms of resistance in sports through various performances and representations. In the final section, essayists analyze more explicit efforts to use sports as a platform for activism from various political viewpoints. Throughout, the works nurture and demonstrate a sensibility that encourages humanistic, critical, and interdisciplinary inquiry.
Wide-reaching and accessible, Sports, Power, and Resistance explores timely issues while demonstrating the value of blending perspectives to better understand the games we play and watch.
Contributors: Ali Bouterse, Adrian Burgos, Jr., Michael L. Butterworth, Noah Cohan, Douglas Hartmann, Victoria E. Johnson, Abraham I. Khan, Jason Kido Lopez, Theresa Runstedtler, Jaime Schultz, Samantha N. Sheppard, and Travers
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The Boxing Film
A Cultural and Transmedia HistoryTravis Vogan
Rutgers University Press, 2021
As one of popular culture’s most popular arenas, sports are often the subject of cinematic storytelling. But boxing films are special. There are more movies about boxing, by a healthy margin, than any other sport, and boxing accompanied and aided the medium’s late nineteenth-century emergence as a popular mass entertainment. Many of cinema’s most celebrated directors—from Oscar Micheaux to Martin Scorsese—made boxing films. And while the production of other types of sports movies generally corresponds with the current popularity of their subject, boxing films continue to be made regularly even after the sport has wilted from its once-prominent position in the sports hierarchy of the United States. From Edison’s Leonard-Cushing Fight to The Joe Louis Story, Rocky, and beyond, this book explores why boxing has so consistently fascinated cinema and popular media culture by tracing how boxing movies inform the sport’s meanings and uses from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century.
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