Sport and criminal behavior

Abstract

It is almost always distressing to have to write a bad review of a book. The authors have put in considerable energy, time and, often, emotion into their work. No good-faith reviewer likes to critique other researchers’ efforts. Sadly, however, this volume is not deserving of a positive review. I will start with the good. The articles, in general, are clearly written and refreshingly free of the cholesterol-like jargon, which clutters up much of academic communication. If the aim was to provide a general, nonchallenging overview of the subject to American undergraduate students, then it has done an average to good job. There is some interesting writing. For example, in ‘‘Fraud in Non-profit Sport: A Case Study of the Sport Sun State Soccer Association’’, the authors, Michelman et al., have chosen to present their work as a narrative which, given their seemingly meticulous research, is a fresh and innovative approach. However, upon careful reading it is unclear if the case was simply a financial fraud that happened to involve a sports league rather than a matter that was inherent to a sports organization. Most chapters in the book show a similar absence of careful analysis. The best chapter is the final one by Lee and Lee, ‘‘Professional Wrestling: Pseudo Sport, Real Death’’ where, because the authors focus on one particular sport, there is considerably more insight than most of the other articles. However, there are several less than satisfactory elements. First, the book is very American-centric to the exclusion of the sport as a global phenomenon. The title of the book speaks to this odd singularity, ‘Sport’ in this case really means professional US sport, as if baseball, American Football and basketball were the sum total of all sport in the world. The volume should be titled American Sport and Criminal Behavior. This lack of awareness or acknowledgement of the rest of the world produces some breathtaking oddities. In a book on criminal behaviour in sport there is very little on Olympic sports or the International Olympic Committee, some of whose senior executives have been under criminal investigation, less than one page on the formation and workings of the World Anti-Doping Agency and absolutely no mention of the world’s biggest sport, soccer, and its governing body FIFA. If it is merely a mis-titled book about American sports how does it rate on those subjects? Much better, but there is still a distressing lack of analysis.