The Sports Immortals: Deifying the American Athlete

After presenting as groundwork an overview of the classic theorists - seminal thinkers such as Jung, Rank, Frazer, Jessie Weston, and Ernest Becker - The Sports Immortals goes on to show how the sports public creates heroes and villains in precisely the same way the Greeks filled Olympus with archetypal deities. It shows why Babe Ruth was a hero and Joe Jackson a villain, despite the fact that the former admired and learned from the latter; it explains why John L. Sullivan and Jim Corbett, who were both "gods," were such different "gods." The historical scope of this study extends from that era - the era of Sullivan, in the late nineteenth century - to the present.