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Slapping Leather

Queer Cowfolx at the Gay Rodeo

By Elyssa Ford and Rebecca Scofield

Campy and competitive, gay rodeo offers a community of refuge that straddles the urban and rural. Since the mid-1970s, gay rodeos have provided space to both embrace and challenge the idealized masculinity associated with the...

Heartbreak City

Seattle Sports and the Unmet Promise of Urban Progress

By Shaun Scott

To cities, sports have never been just entertainment. Progressive urbanites across the United States have used athletics to address persistent problems in city life: the fights for racial justice, workers' rights, equality for women and...

Biking Uphill in the Rain

The Story of Seattle from behind the Handlebars

By Tom Fucoloro

Seattle was recently named the best bike city in the United States by Bicycling magazine. How did this notoriously hilly and rainy city become so inviting to bicyclists? And what challenges lie ahead for Puget...

Fear No Man

Don James, the '91 Huskies, and the Seven-Year Quest for a National Football Championship

By Mike Gastineau. Foreword by Nick Saban

In 1984 the University of Washington Huskies won every game but one, ranking second in national polls. For most coaches, such a season would be a career pinnacle. But for Don James second place motivated...

Outriders

Rodeo at the Fringes of the American West

By Rebecca Scofield

Rodeo is a dangerous and painful performance in which only the strongest and most skilled riders succeed. In the popular imagination, the western rodeo hero is often a stoic white man who embodies the toughness...

Counterpunch

The Cultural Battles over Heavyweight Prizefighting in the American West

By Meg Frisbee

Boxing was popular in the American West long before Las Vegas became its epicenter. However, not everyone in the region was a fan. Counterpunch examines how the sport’s meteoric rise in popularity in the West...

Bike Battles

A History of Sharing the American Road

By James Longhurst

Americans have been riding bikes for more than a century now. So why are most American cities still so ill-prepared to handle cyclists? James Longhurst, a historian and avid cyclist, tackles that question by tracing...

Playing While White

Privilege and Power on and off the Field

By David J. Leonard

Playing While White argues that whiteness matters in sports culture, both on and off the field. Offering critical analysis of athletic stars such as Johnny Manziel, Marshall Henderson, Jordan Spieth, Lance Armstrong, Josh Hamilton, as...

Trout Culture

How Fly Fishing Forever Changed the Rocky Mountain West

By Jen Corrinne Brown

From beer labels to literary classics like A River Runs Through It, trout fishing is a beloved feature of the iconography of the American West. But as Jen Brown demonstrates in Trout Culture: How Fly...

Ready All! George Yeoman Pocock and Crew Racing

By Gordon Newell. Foreword by Dick Erickson

In the 1920s, an upstart West Coast college began to challenge the Eastern universities in the ancient sport of crew racing. Sportswriters scoffed at the “crude western boats” and their crews. But for the next...

Becoming Big League

Seattle, the Pilots, and Stadium Politics

By Bill Mullins

Becoming Big League is the story of Seattle's relationship with major league baseball from the 1962 World's Fair to the completion of the Kingdome in 1976 and beyond. Bill Mullins focuses on the acquisition and...

Better than the Best

Black Athletes Speak, 1920-2007

By John C. Walter, Malina Iida

In these engaging and forthright interviews, thirteen African American athletes talk about how they endured through pain, loneliness, and rejection to become champions. In sports as diverse as football and fencing, wrestling and track and...

Their Day in the Sun

Women of the 1932 Olympics

By Doris Hinson Pieroth

The 1932 Olympic games took place in Los Angeles in the depths of the Great Depression; that they were held at all falls barely short of miraculous. The United States sent thirty-seven women to compete—seventeen...