In a rich variety of works, The Sports Beat will examine the universal fascination sports have long occasioned: for example, in a novel about baseball (The Natural), in a play about basketball (That Championship Season), in a non-fiction chronicle of high school football (Friday Night Lights), and in a film about boxing (Raging Bull). There is much to appreciate and think about in works like these. Some of that thinking will be subversive: students will move beyond enjoying accounts of thrill and agony to consider sports as a cultural phenomenon-an activity subject to social, political, and economic forces that make the games we love more, and less, than play.