Glory Days
The Summer of 1984 and the 90 Days That Changed Sports and Culture Forever
HarperCollins · Print & ebook · June 21, 2022
A rollicking guided tour of one extraordinary summer, when some of the most pivotal and freakishly coincidental stories all collided and changed the way we think about modern sports The summer of 1984 was a watershed moment in the birth of modern sports when the nation watched Michael Jordan grow from college basketball player to professional athlete and star.
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- Who it’s for
- A lively tour of 1984, when star power, television, and money remade the sports landscape.
- Themes
- The rise of modern sports, Sports commercialization, 1980s sports and culture
- Genres
- Sports History, Sports, Olympics
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A rollicking guided tour of one extraordinary summer, when some of the most pivotal and freakishly coincidental stories all collided and changed the way we think about modern sports The summer of 1984 was a watershed moment in the birth of modern sports when the nation watched Michael Jordan grow from college basketball player to professional athlete and star. That summer also saw the debut of ESPN and the first modern, commercialized, profitable Olympics.
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Magic Johnson and Larry Bird’s rivalry raged, Martina Navratilova and John McEnroe reigned in tennis, and Hulk Hogan and Vince McMahon made pro wrestling a business, while Donald Trump pierced the national consciousness as a pro football team owner. It was an awakening in the sports world, a moment when sports began to morph into the market-savvy, sensationalized, moneyed, controversial, and wildly popular arena we know today. In the tradition of Bill Bryson’s One Summer: America, 1927, L. Jon Wertheim captures these ninety seminal days against the backdrop of the nostalgia-soaked 1980s, to show that this was the year we collectively traded in our ratty Converses for a pair of sleek, heavily branded, ingeniously marketed Nikes. This was the year that sports went big-time.
Sports in Motion
A lively tour of 1984, when star power, television, and money remade the sports landscape.
Come here for
- Jordan’s rise alongside ESPN’s debut and the first modern commercial Olympics
- Rivalries, wrestling, and business ambitions reshaping American sports
Expect
- Ninety days framed as a turning point in modern sports
- A wide-angle look at spectacle, branding, and big business
Where it sits
| Sports | 57% |
|---|---|
| Sports History | 54% |
| Olympics | 24% |
Percentages are BookFrontier’s reading of the book.
Publisher categories
- U.S. History
- 20th-Century America
- Sports
- Sports Writing
Show all 8 publisher categories
- Sports History
- Tennis
- Olympics
- Sports & Society
- Authors
- L. Jon Wertheim
- Publisher
- HarperCollins
- Published
- June 21, 2022
- Format
- Print & ebook
- Theme
- The rise of modern sports · Sports commercialization · 1980s sports and culture
- Reading lane
- U.S. History