The world still has heroes, but something has changed in terms of the type of people that society celebrates and rewards.

Heroes and heroines have existed throughout human history.

As an iconic figure of the celebrity world, David Beckham was recently considered as becoming a Jordan (Cashmore 2002, 141).

As a basketball player, Michael Jordan was nicknamed “Air Jordan,” and off the court he soared by forging a new role for celebrity athletes in a globalizing world.

Although sports celebrities in the first half of the 1900s reaped some benefits from stardom, they were secondary actors in sports spectacles.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the print media helped create an industry of leisure out of “spectacles.”

Today the aging stadium stands empty, and its future is in doubt.

By 1974 the Astrodome was America’s third-mostpopular manmade tourist attraction, drawing 7.5 million visitors a year. . .

The very nature of the Astrodome as an entertainment complex allowed for the incorporation of some notable images of the early space age.

While players had to adjust to climate-controlled baseball on an artificial field. . .

Designers considered a number of dome styles, including Fuller’s geodesic dome and an air-pressuresupported dome with a cloth or film covering.

The Harris County Board of Park Commissioners in Houston issued contracts to architects for the preliminary planning for a new stadium in 1958.

Locations of the Summer Asian Games

One legacy of the 2002 Asian Games in Busan, South Korea, was that for the first time a team from North Korea had participated in a games in South Korea.

Bangkok, Thailand, held the Asian Games in 1998, the fourth time since 1966 that the games were held in Thailand’s capital.

The 1994 games in Hiroshima, Japan, were controversial again for the Chinese, with eleven Chinese athletes suspended for performance-enhancing drugs.

One month after Iraq invaded Kuwait in August of 1990, the Asian Games opened in Beijing, China.

Security was increased for the 1986 Asian Games in Seoul, South Korea.

In 1982 in New Delhi, police arrested more than seven hundred people three days before the games opened, fearful that Akali Sikh activists might try to disrupt the games.

Bangkok,Thailand, once again stepped in to rescue the games in 1978 after Islamabad, Pakistan, pulled out as host.

In 1974 in Tehran, Iran, the Asian Games were especially controversial when the political issues of Taiwan and Israel again became hot topics.

South Korea had been selected to host the 1970 games but ongoing domestic problems forced the Koreans to decline.

The games of 1962 were awarded to Jakarta, Indonesia, by a narrow 22–20 vote of the Asian Games Federation and with pessimism that Indonesia’s complete lack of facilities and experience in organizing events of this kind would doom the games.

In Tokyo, Japan built for the 1958 Asian Games what was said to be one of the most modern and beautiful stadiums of its time in the world.

China declined to participate in the games of 1954, in Manila, Philippines, when the Taiwanese were invited to participate.

New Delhi’s National Stadium welcomed athletes from eleven nations in March of 1951 to the first Asian Games.

In recent decades, fans have talked about England’s cricket performance in a way akin to Americans talking about the Chicago Cubs or the Boston Red Sox.

Americans associate cricket with the English and a privileged, leisured way of life.