Kicking
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As a poet, public-facing scholar of sports politics, and former professional soccer player, having represented the United States on the men's U23 national soccer team, Jules Boykoff draws on his lifetime of athletic experience to reflect on the practice of kicking. With short vignettes blending the personal, the reflective, the historical, and the analytical, Kicking is uniquely positioned to reflect on the most popular sport in the world. From the act of kicking a soccer ball, Boykoff looks outward to his own family history, including his mother's struggle with polio, which fed her insistence on his athleticism; to broader trends like greenwashing and sportwashing; and to reflections on sport's toxic masculinity, the poetics of on-field revenge, and the power-politics of both the men's and women's World Cups. Kicking is a must-read for all those who love the beautiful game.
Jules Boykoff
Jules Boykoff is an academic, author, and former professional soccer player. He is the author of Activism and the Olympics, Celebration Capitalism and the Olympic Games, Landscapes of Dissent, Beyond Bullets: The Suppression of Dissent in the United States, among others. He has been called "one of the biggest names in international Olympic Games academia." His writing has appeared in the Guardian, the New York Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle, and he has been interviewed on the BBC and Democracy Now! He is a professor of Politics and Government at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon.
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