The Sports Immortals is the first serious and scholarly attempt to explain the psychology of hero-worship in sport. While others (most notably Michael Oriard) have studied the heroes and villains of sports literature, this book is the first study of the very similar creation of gods and demi-gods in the arenas of real games. After presenting as groundwork an overview of the classic theorists - seminal thinkers such as Jung, Rank, Frazer, Jessie Weston, and Ernest Becker - The Sports Immortals goes on to show how the sports public creates heroes and villains in precisely the same way the Greeks filled Olympus with archetypal deities. It shows why Babe Ruth was a hero and Joe Jackson a villain, despite the fact that the former admired and learned from the latter; it explains why John L. Sullivan and Jim Corbett, who were both "gods," were such different "gods." The historical scope of this study extends from that era - the era of Sullivan, in the late nineteenth century - to the present.