To the Extreme: Alternative Sports, Inside and Out

Insider and outsider narratives on the essence of modern "extreme" sports.

An international array of authors, including some prominent extreme athletes like Jake Burton and Arlo Eisenberg, look at a variety of issues and concerns within the new action extreme sports that are gaining popularity throughout the world. For each sport, an interpretation is presented through two essays: one written by a scholar active in some aspect of research for the given activity, and another by a practitioner/athlete who writes "from the inside out." The juxtaposed essays confront questions about the essence of sport such as, What is sport?; How does it originate?; and What is its use, value, and function? This book offers a fascinating look at how twentieth- and twenty-first-century sport forms emerge, proliferate, and take hold in a sport-crazy world.

Robert E. Rinehart teaches Kinesiology at California State University at San Bernardino. He is the author of Players All: Performances in Contemporary Sport. Synthia Sydnor is Associate Professor of Kinesiology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.