Long before journalist George Plimpton donned shoulder pads for Paper Lion, sportswriters were stepping onto the field, arena, track and ring. This first-of-its-kind anthology of participatory sportswriting collects 48 pieces from the Gilded and Golden Age greats. Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Frances Elizabeth Willard, John Muir, Jack London, Zane Grey, Ernest Hemingway, Ring Lardner, Bill Tilden, Bobby Jones, Helen Mills, Paul Gallico, and many more prowled America's sporting grounds with pen in hand in a time when, as Grantland Rice put it, "a flame...lit up the sporting skies and covered the world."

Most of us will never know what it's like to parachute out of a Cessna, tend goal for the Boston Bruins, burn rubber on a NASCAR track, scale Everest, or quarterback the Detroit Lions. So it's our good fortune when dauntless literary journalists actually play the sports they cover--returning with firsthand tales from "inside the ropes." Here, in the tradition popularized by George Plimpton, is participatory sportswriting at its finest and most far-out. Editor Zachary Michael Jack fields a dream team of today's best sports journalists, hotshots, and rising stars in search of the game behind the.

Today’s professionals recognize the need to elevate written communication beyond argument-driven pedantry, political polemic, and obtuse pontification. Whether the goal is to write the next serious work of best-selling nonfiction, to develop a platform as a public scholar, or simply to craft clear and concise workplace communication, The Art of Public Writing demystifies the process, showing why it’s not just nice, but necessary, to connect with those inside and outside one’s area of expertise. Drawing on a diverse set of examples ranging from Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species to Steven Levitt’s Freakonomics, Zachary Michael Jack offers invaluable advice for researchers, scholars, and working professionals determined to help interpret field-specific debates for wider audiences, address complex issues in the public sphere, and successfully engage audiences beyond the Corner Office and the Ivory Tower.

A handful of star athletes, along with their promoters and journalists, created America's sports entertainment industry during the 1920s, the Golden Age of American sports. The period had an extraordinary impact, profoundly changing individual sports, establishing the secular religion of sports and sports heroes, and helping bond disparate social and regional sectors of the country. It's when sports became a cornerstone of modern American life. Heroes and Ballyhoo profiles the ten most prominent Golden Age heroes and describes their effect on sports and society. Babe Ruth saved baseball after the Black Sox Scandal. Boxer Jack Dempsey made the "sweet science" a respectable sport. Red Grange single-handedly set professional football on a path to eventual success. Knute Rockne helped transform college football from a game to a colossal enterprise. Bobby Jones changed golf into a spectator sport, and Walter Hagen sparked the first national interest in professional golf. Bill Tilden put tennis on the front of the sports section. Tennis player Helen Wills Moody joined swimmer Gertrude Ederle in empowering women athletes. Johnny Weissmuller astonished international swimming before becoming Tarzan. The book also explores the ballyhoo artists--sportswriters, promoters, and press agents--who hyped the stars to a receptive public. Simultaneously, the spectators established themselves as the focus of popular sports. The personalities and events of the 1920s thus created today's entertainment conglomerate of heroes, promoters and advertisers, fans, arenas--and money. Sports as a profit center started with the Golden Age's heroes and PR artists, and the public's obsessive interest in sports helped shape America's emerging mass society. Heroes and Ballyhoo tells the story of what was both a symptom and a cause of modern America.

Offers accessible and informative essays about the social impact and historical importance of boxing around the globe.

This baseball classic that Ernest Hemingway called "beautifully observed and incredibly conceived" includes a foreword from Jane Leavy and never-before-seen content from the Plimpton archives. The first of Plimpton's remarkable forays into participatory journalism, Out of My League chronicles with wit, charm, and grace what happens when a self-professed amateur has the chance to answer every fan's question: could he strike out a major league star? Plimpton's inspired idea -- to get on the mound and pitch a few innings to the All-Stars of the American and National Leagues -- begins as a fun-filled stunt and comes to a deeply hellish, nearly humiliating end. This honest and hilarious tale features Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Whitey Ford, Ralph Houk, and other baseball greats and is "a baseball book such as no one else ever wrote, and one of the best ever."-New York Herald Tribune

In February 1913 young firebrand activist "General" Rosalie Gardiner Jones defied convention and the doubts of better-known suffragists such as Alice Paul, Jane Addams, and Carrie Chapman Catt to muster an unprecedented equal rights army. Jones and "Colonel" Ida Craft marched 250 miles at the head of their all-volunteer platoon, advancing from New York City to Washington, DC in the dead of winter, in what was believed to be the longest dedicated women's rights march in American history. Along the way their band of protestors overcame violence, intimidation, and bigotry, their every step documented by journalist-embeds who followed the self-styled army down far-flung rural roads and into busy urban centers bristling with admiration and enmity. At march's end in Washington, more than 100,000 spectators cheered and jeered Rosalie's army in a reception said to rival a president's inauguration. This first-ever book-length biography details Jones's indomitable and original brand of boots-on-the-ground activism, from the 1913 March on Washington that brought her international fame to later-life campaigns for progressive reform in the American West and on her native Long Island. Consistently at odds with conservatives and conformists, the fiercely independent Jones was a prototypical social justice warrior, one who never stopped marching to her own drummer. Long after retiring her equal rights army, Jones advocated nonviolence and fair trade, authored a book on economics and international peace, and ran for Congress, earning a law degree, a PhD, and a lifelong reputation as a tireless defender of the dispossessed

The spring issue of each year includes the program of the society's annual convention.

Presents an anthology of the best sports writing published in 2014, selected from American magazines and newspapers.