In an increasingly secular, fragmented, and distracted culture, nothing at all provides Americans together that can compare with sports. On Sundays in Sept, more households worship at the altar from the NFL than at any church. This charm, which slashes across all demographic and ideological lines, makes sports perhaps the last unifying mass ritual of our era, with huge numbers of people all focused on the same thing at the same minute. That timeless, live quality makes sports activities very powerful, and incredibly profitable. And about The Power of Sports: Mass media and Spectacle in American Culture the media spectacle around them is getting larger, brighter, and noisier.

More importantly, sports are sold as an oasis of community to a nation deeply divided: They are escapist, apolitical, the only link that binds. Actually, exactly because they show up allegedly ‘above politics,’ sports activities are able to smuggle powerful messages about inequality, patriotism, labor, and competition to massive audiences. So that as the wider culture works through moving gender roles and masculine power, those anxieties will also be within the encounters of female sports journalists, sports athletes, and fans, and through the coverage of assault by and against male systems. Sports, rather than being the thing everyone can agree on, flawlessly encapsulate the roiling tensions of modern American life.