One Game at a Time: Why Sports Matter

“The spirit of Walt Whitman, cheered on by the ghost of A. J. Liebling, moves Matt Hern&;s pen in this street-tough but joyful celebration of bodies electric and hopes defiant. The bottom line? Be kind, be tough.&; —Mike Davis, author of In Praise of Barbarians

Sports are serious stuff. Football, basketball, tennis, mixed martial arts, and beyond: these are arenas of immense power, with mass appeal, yet far too many of us have abandoned the sporting world as a legitimate site of contestation and innovation. Why? What do we gain by handing over the power of sports to the world of hyper-consumption, militarism, violence, sexism, and homophobia—the worst elements of our culture? As Matt Hern suggests, not a whole lot.

On the basis of his forty-plus years of sports fanaticism, Hern makes an impassioned and entertaining plea for a more active engagement with sports, both physically and intellectually. His eye is critical, and his analysis is sharp, but this book is more than a critique—it&;s a celebration of what sports have taught us, and a map of how much more we still have to learn. Matt Hern is a former sportswriter and a radical urbanist whose writing has been published on six continents.

Fun, engaging, and fast-paced, One Game at a Time is for anyone willing to get their head into the game.

Matt Hern lives and works in east Vancouver, where he founded the Purple Thistle Center and Car-Free Vancouver Day. A former sportswriter and a radical urbanist whose writing has been published on six continents and in ten languages, he is the author of Common Ground in a Liquid City

(AK Press, 2010), which was shortlisted for the Vancouver Book Award.