'This is an important book. It elevates sport sociology to levels heretofore rarely achieved, showing that this subdiscipline, still in its adolescence, is coming of age. Tackling issues as crucial as cultural resistance and hegemony, the author shows us how sport can be used to illustrate the tension between an industrial power and a developing nation....Destined to take its place as one of the best critical ethnographies of sport, we recommend Sugarball.'--Patricia A. Adler and Peter Adler, American Journal of Sociology