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Reviewed by:
  • How We Can Save Sports: A Game Plan by Ken Reed
  • Ronald A. Smith
Reed, Ken. How We Can Save Sports: A Game Plan. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. Pp. 204. $32.00, hb. $31.99, ebook.

Ken Reed, author of How We Can Save Sports, is a sport marketer, a sport studies professor, and, like Dick Crepeau of the North American Society for Sport History, writes regular commentary for the Huffington Post. He is on a crusade to change the way organized sport in America is carried out. As sports policy director for Ralph Nader’s “League of Fans,” he favors consumer protections for the highly developed commercialized and professionalized sport from youth to the professional leagues. Reed leans on Nader to serve both fans and sport participants by modifying the greed and egos of the present owners of sport. Reed’s “Game Plan” is to bring about citizen activism to reform sport. What he is most interested in is reforming the “win-at-all-costs” and “profits-at-all-costs” of the dominant sport scene. Like the plethora of sport reformers, such as the writer of this review, he acknowledges he will have tough sledding when billions can be made from the present sport scene.

Reed’s book, a League of Fans project, begins with a forward by Ralph Nader, who has for decades advocated power to the fans and a desire to organize sport for the benefit of fans and participants. Unfortunately for half the population, Nader refers positively to the ancient Olympics and its numerous fans who were spectators and watched events for free. He does not recognize that the ancients allowed only men into their arenas. This book is not restricted to men only, although about 90 percent of the individuals cited in the volume are male figures associated with sport. We seldom hear the voices of females associated with sports for all and general reform of sports such as Billie Jean King, Donna Lopiano, or Bernice Sandler, who gave the impetus to Title IX federal legislation.

Reed devotes an entire chapter on community ownership of professional sport franchises. Here the Green Bay Packers are given accolades for fan ownership of the team dating back nearly a century. This reduces the exploitation by team owners demanding taxpayer money to build new stadiums under the threat of leaving for greater profits in other locations. He follows this chapter with a condemnation of football’s efforts to reduce concussions and the degenerative brain disease, chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), so prevalent in those who have participated in football from youth sports to the professional level. “It may be ten years, twenty years, or thirty years,” Reed predicts, “before middle school and high school football’s gone, but it will be gone” (51). Historians would be cautious to make such predictions, but this is not a history: it is a book on advocacy.

Relative to youth sport, Reed would like to return to a period when kids would “play sports with friends, and have fun” (53). He wants to take parental egos out of youth sports, with less emphasis on winning and more on the young people’s enjoyment of the game. To this end, he emphasizes the need for a national coaching-education program for sports outside the educational system and a greater emphasis on a broad- based sport participation program in schools rather than an emphasis solely on the varsity programs. The enjoyment from a number of sports would be stressed rather than the growing early specialization on a single sport. [End Page 366]

Turning to college sport, Reed believes, erroneously, that “major college sports have long transitioned from Education Sport, where educational concerns trump commercial concerns” (71). Unfortunately, Reed does not know intercollegiate sport history, for the first contest between Harvard and Yale was sponsored commercially by a railroad, and professional coaches, and other professional practices became common shortly after the Civil War. He also cites the often-cited untruth that college athletes “don’t see a dime” from their blood and sweat, when, in fact, there are thousands of dollars of dimes benefitting athletes from athletic scholarships (including tuition, fees, room...

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