Author: Simon Black

Sports journalism is not immune from the year-end “listicle”, the clickbait content that dominates the Web every December. While I admit to being a sucker for these “best of” exercises, as a decade came to a close the stakes were high but the “Athletes of the 2010s” lists were so

Photo by Brook Ward By the time San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick decided to take a stand against oppression by taking a knee during the national anthem, it will have been clear to even the most casual sports fan that we are in the midst of an athletes’ revolt.

The Raptors are hot. Toronto’s professional basketball team sits atop the Eastern Conference and are arguably the NBA’s most exciting team to watch. But on-court swagger has been paired with slick re-branding, the centerpiece of which is the “We The North” campaign. The campaign’s lead commercial intersperses Raptors’ highlight-reel dunks

Janelle Joseph is a Banting Research Fellow at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology. Her research represents the first national interdisciplinary study to merge theories of youth studies, Afrocentricity, criminology, education, and physical cultural studies. Dr. Joseph’s research and teaching also include studies of transnationalism and sport, with a

Terry Eagleton has got it wrong. In his 2007 book The Meaning of Life, the literary theorist and doyen of the British Left proclaimed, “It is sport, not religion, which is now the opium of the people.” For Eagleton, the human desire for solidarity and physical immediacy are the raw