New Jack Jocks: Rebels, Race, and the American Athlete

Latrell Sprewell. Allen Iverson. John McEnroe. Even Muhammed Ali, Mike Schmidt, and Michael Jordan. These are characters of our national imagination, athletes who symbolize our complex relationships with professional sports.
In this book, author Larry Platt takes us on his own unique tour through American sports. Culled from a decade of writing about our games and the people who play them, Platt offers exclusive profiles of the athletes we love - and love to hate. Here is McEnroe, still haunted by his incendiary artistic temperament at middle age; here is Magic Johnson, striving to enact his "Black Plan" to save inner-cities; here is Sprewell, speeding along in his turbo-charged sports car, perplexed by just how he came to be considered a villain in our daily sports narrative. In these and other profiles, Platt shows that sport, more than any other nationwide pastime, is the way we come to understand - and alter - race relations, gender, and, most profoundly, how we communicate with each other in ways often ignored by social commentators.