Don't Stick to Sports

A significant examination of how athletes have fought for inclusion and equality on and off the playing field, despite calls for them to “stick to sports.” There is a common cry in many public discussions that athletes should just “stick to sports,” that sports and politics are somehow sealed off from one another, even while team owners, directors, managers, and entire leagues insist on using patriotic displays such as the playing of the National Anthem in order to project a sense of unity. The truth, however, is that unity in sports and American society is far from the reality, and that athletes have as much a right as anyone to fight for a more inclusive world. In Don't Stick to Sports: The American Athlete’s Fight for Inclusion, Derek Charles Catsam carefully explores this disparity. He examines how, throughout sports history, minority athletes have had to fight every step of the way for their right to compete, and continue to fight for equity today. From African Americans and women to LGBTQ+ and religious minorities, Catsam shows how these athletes have taken a stand to address the underlying injustices in sports and society despite being told it’s not their place to do so. While it’s impossible for a single book to tell the entire history of exclusion in sports in the United States, Don’t Stick to Sports illustrates the ways in which both exclusion and the fight against that exclusion have helped to define a system that often claims to be based on meritocracy but has proven to be far from the truth.

As bottom-up history, Don't Stick to Sports is a brave and bold book that will change the reader's thinking about how they view American sports. From telling the history of the playing of the "Star-Spangled Banner" at sporting events, to detailing how today's LGBTQ athletes navigate a toxic sporting space, Derek Catsam gives a powerful history lesson on why studying sports can tell us a lot about ourselves as a nation.--Louis Moore, historian, speaker, and author of We Will Win the Day: The Civil Rights Movement, the Black Athlete, and the Quest for Equality, History deniers, be warned. Professor and notable sports historian Derek Catsam hits a homerun with Don't Stick to Sports, a collection of essays that highlight the unavoidable intersection between sports and politics in American culture. Catsam brilliantly draws the correlation between the 1918 global pandemic, domestic tensions, and the use of "The Star-Spangled Banner" to the 2020 global pandemic and subsequent debates on personal freedom and public health, and American athletes taking a knee during the National Anthem. Through the personal histories of some of the greatest names in NFL, NBA, and MLB, in boxing, track and field, tennis and more, Catsam challenges the idea that athletes should "stick to sports" and leave activism at the door even as sports has become a popular leverage for politicians to "rouse the ire of cultural warriors against imaginary foes." From Muhammad Ali to Brittney Griner, from Bill Russell to Mary Decker, from Jackie Robinson to Billie Jean King, Catsam reminds us just how intertwined sports, politics, civil rights, and the most basic freedoms truly are. You need this book in your personal library.--Alexandra Allred, member of the first-ever U.S. women's bobsled team, USOC Athlete of the Year, White House Champion of Change for Public Health nominee, and author of When Women Stood: The Untold History of Females Who Changed Sports and the World

Derek Catsam is professor of history and the Kathlyn Cosper Dunagan Professor in the Humanities at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin where he teaches courses on race, politics, and sports. His most recent books include Beyond the Pitch: The Spirit, Culture, and Politics of Brazil’s 2014 World Cup and Flashpoint: How a Little-Known Sporting Event Fueled America’s Anti-Apartheid Movement. Catsam has won awards, fellowships, and grants from a number of respected institutions and was named the 2016 Hugh Le May Fellow in the Humanities at Rhodes University. Catsam appeared in the Emmy award winning PBS “American Experience” documentary, Freedom Riders, and on C- Span’s Book TV.