More Than a Game: Sport in Our Time

A tie-in to a BBC-TV series, this handsome volume is co-authored by an athlete (long-distance runner Coe), a sports executive (Teasdale) and a producer of TV documentaries (Wickham) and covers seemingly every aspect of the subject. Refuting George Orwell's contention that sport is ``war minus the shooting,'' the writers point to golf, swimming and fencing as unwarlike games, then show the influence of sports on language (``hitting below the belt is just not cricket'') and discuss the growing use of drugs, the role of animals (from horse racing to cockfighting), the increased sophistication of sports technology, the elements that make a champion, athletes' risking of their lives and sports as an industry. The authors demonstrate that their primary concern is with the British audience, however, in their lengthy analyses of the boycotts of South African events and the 1980 Moscow Olympics as well as Britain's unintended export of violent soccer fans. Photos. (Aug.)