Edge of Sports

Dave Zirin, The Nation’s sports editor, has been praised as the “conscience of American sportswriting” by The Washington Post. He is the author of eight books on the politics of sports, including Brazil’s Dance with the Devil: The World Cup, The Olympics, and Bad Sports. Zirin is a frequent guest on ESPN, MSNBC, and Democracy Now! and he also hosts The Nation’s Edge of Sports podcast. 

Don McPherson, an All-America quarterback at Syracuse University who went on to play professionally in the NFL and Canada, began his work on gender-based violence prevention in 1994 at Northeastern University's Center for the Study of Sport in Society. He has served on the boards of the Ms. Foundation for Women, the NCAA Sexual Assault Task Force, and the NCAA Board of Governors Commission to Combat Campus Sexual Violence. His educational programs and lectures have reached over one million people in more than three hundred colleges and communities throughout North America. In You Throw Like a Girl: The Blind Spot of Masculinity (Edge of Sports) former Syracuse University quarterback and NFL veteran Don McPherson examines how the narrow definition of masculinity adversely impacts women and creates many "blind spots" that hinder the healthy development of men. Dissecting the strict set of beliefs and behaviors that underpin our understanding of masculinity, he contends that we don't raise boys to be men, we raise them not to be women. Using examples from his own life, including his storied football career, McPherson passionately argues that viewing violence against women as a "women's issue" not just ignores men's culpability but conflates the toxicity of men's violence with being male. In You Throw Like a Girl, McPherson leads us beyond the blind spots and toward solutions, analyzing how we can engage men in a sustained dialogue, with a new set of terms that are aspirational and more accurately representative of the emotional wholeness of men.

Melissa Isaacson is an award-winning sportswriter, author, and public speaker. In more than thirty years on the job, she has covered every major US sports championship as well as the Olympics. She has written for numerous publications, including long tenures at such institutions as ESPN and the Chicago Tribune. She was the Tribune’s first woman columnist and beat writer on the Bulls and Bears, and she covered the Michael Jordan–led Bulls over their six NBA titles. She is currently on the faculty of Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. She is the author of State: A Team, a Triumph, a Transformation (Agate Midway). In 1975, freshman Melissa Isaacson entered Niles West High School in suburban Chicago with one goal: make a team, any team. For Missy, that turned out to be the basketball team. Title IX had passed just three years earlier, prohibiting gender discrimination in education programs or activities, including athletics. As a result, states like Illinois began implementing varsity competition—and state tournaments—for girls’ high school sports. With the intimate insights of the girl who lived it, the pacing of a born storyteller, and the painstaking reporting of a veteran sports journalist, Isaacson chronicles one high school team’s journey to the state championship. In doing so, Isaacson shows us how a group of "tomboys" found themselves and each other, and how basketball rescued them from their collective frustrations and troubled homes, and forever altered the course of their lives.

Ryan O'Callaghan played right tackle in the NFL for six seasons, with the New England Patriots and Kansas City Chiefs. In college, he played for the University of California Golden Bears. Co-author Cyd Zeigler is the cofounder and coeditor of Outsports.com, the world's most renowned publication dealing with LGBTQ issues in sports. In My Life on the Line: How the NFL Damn Near Killed Me, and Ended Up Saving My Life (Edge of Sports), Ryan O'Callaghan talks about his plan long term plan: play football and then, when his career was over, kill himself. Growing up in a politically conservative corner of California, the not-so-subtle messages he heard as a young man routinely equated being gay with disease and death. Letting people know was not an option. Better death with a secret than life as a gay man. Throughout his NFL career O'Callaghan’s secret sexuality and hidden drug use were in a collision course. Going from pot to NFL-sanctioned prescription painkillers quickly sent his life into a tailspin. Nearing the twilight of his career, Ryan faced the ultimate decision: end it all, or find out if his family and football friends could ever accept a gay man in their lives. NFL and NBC Sports analyst Peter King wrote that the publication of Life on the Line "[…] could be (and should be) a seminal moment for many athletes and other people in all walks of life. If an NFL player, cloistered in the manliness of his game, can come out of the closet and tell his story with such purpose, I hope that many others will follow his brave lead. This dramatic story […] might be a turning point for football."