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“Almost an Island unto Itself”: The American Sports Exception

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The American Exception, Volume 1

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Abstract

“Almost an island unto itself.” At least until recently, that metaphor plausibly captured something exceptional about American sports (Eriksen 2007). Americans have long preferred to watch and play sports they regard as distinctly theirs—football, baseball, and basketball most notably. Out of indifference to alien games or a sense of superiority about their own, they rarely focused on the action elsewhere. Over time, the U.S. developed its own sporting system, in which a few professional sports dominated public attention and defined the common rhythms of the sporting year.

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  1. Department of Sociology, Emory University, Atlanta, USA

    Frank J. Lechner

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Lechner, F.J. (2017). “Almost an Island unto Itself”: The American Sports Exception. In: The American Exception, Volume 1. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58717-6_5

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