The Big Time: How the 1970s Transformed Sports in America

Every decade brings change, but as Michael MacCambridge chronicles in THE BIG TIME, no decade in American sports history featured such convulsive cultural shifts and completely transformed the sports landscape as the 1970s.

More than politicians, musicians or actors, the decade in America was defined by its most exemplary athletes. The sweeping changes in American life and culture were seen in the collective experience of Billie Jean King and Muhammad Ali, Henry Aaron and Julius Erving, Jack Nicklaus and Chris Evert, among others, who spent the decade redefining the role of athletes and athletics. The Seventies witnessed the emergence of spectator sports as an ever-expanding mainstream phenomenon, as well as dramatic changes in the way athletes were paid, portrayed, and packaged. It also witnessed a hard-won revolution, as women were involved in sports in unprecedented numbers, both as athletes and spectators. In telling the sweeping story of how American sports changed over the decade, a larger story emerges: of how America itself changed, experiencing a cable-wired, modernity of perpetual leisure and entertainment, in which sports played a newly central role.