“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.