Abstract
Stephen King’s novel The Long Walk, written under the pseudonym of Richard
Bachman, offers a vision of sport in a near-future society, where death-sports serve as a major
spectacle. This was designed as a critique of trends and problems in sport in the 1960s and 1970s,
with over-commercialization and increased violence. Some of this has been mitigated by recent rule
changes in the world of sport, but King’s writing prefigured the rise of reality television, where
people are practically willing to risk it all for personal gain.