'Will open the eyes of fans to aspects of sports they have probably never thought about. The author's thesis is that most major sports have been taken away from the people and 'Romanized,' i.e., turned into spectacles featuring a special social caste. He concentrates on track and field, baseball and basketball, demonstrating in each case how a people's pastime was transformed, in track by the 'gentlemen' who insisted on pure amateurism and in the others by monied entrepreneurs who wrested control from the players themselves. It is an enlightening study' - "Publishers Weekly".This is a 'serious and contentious history...A chapter on basketball is titled 'An Intimate Game Becomes Big Business,' and it is this kind of transformation that the author...describes in poignant detail...Mr. Vincent plausibly asserts that popular sports in nineteenth-century America' were generated from below as one answer to the crying need for organized social activity in the new urban setting' - "New York Times Book Review". 'Particularly informative on nineteenth-century sports politics...a much overlooked gem' - Steven Riess, "OAH Magazine". Ted Vincent has written many articles and radio scripts on sports history. He lives in California, where he has taught at UCLA and University of California-Berkeley. In his afterword to this Bison Book edition he notes how participatory sports in Mudville, the all-American town immortalized in the poem "Casey at the Bat," fared during the 1980s and early 90s.