Camp Fire Site

  Straight Shooter.    A Memoir of Second Chances and First Takes.     Stephen A. Smith. You may know Stephen A. Smith as the fast talking, hard driving, often bombastic debater, and national sports pundit on ESPN for both television and radio.    Now after three decades in the business it was time for Smith to tell his life story.     Stephan A. Smith has led an interesting life.    This is undoubtedly the biggest take away from reading Smith’s memoir:   Straight Shooter.    Among other topics, we learn about his upbringing in Queen’s New York, his close relationship to his mother and siblings, his estranged arrangement with his father, the development of his burgeoning career and ascension to national prominence at ESPN.   It is a collection of the good, the bad, sometimes ugly experiences of Stephen Smith but also the perseverance to overcome and succeed.    He reveals the triumphs ac...

  The Game is NOT A Game.     Robert Scoop Jackson. The Power, Protest and Politics of American Sports.   Robert “Scoop” Jackson claims that his book, The Game is NOT a Game, is not really about race but power.     He means the power of people that control or at least have a stake in the sports world.     Topics range from the need for more respect due to female athletes, the black athletes shrinking presence in baseball, as well as the ever growing clutches of analytical influences in sports.    Most of all, though, the thirteen chapters get the reader to think about the external and internal forces working against players within these sports especially with regard to and from the perspective of a person of color.   Of course it is a challenge to read through the pages and topics and not believe that race is still a central theme in this book.    Not that it would take away from the many salient p...