Despite some enormous differences in pay among professional athletes, most aspects of daily life remain surprisingly constant across sports and income levels. "Living Out of Bounds" provides answers to persistent questions about what it's really like to be an athlete, and discusses the filtered image of the athlete that emerges through books and other media. Overman mines a wide array of sports biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, and diaries to construct a representative picture of the athlete's life from the rise of American sport in the late 19th century to the present day. In so doing, he reveals the person behind the sports celebrity, as he or she exists on a daily basis. Individual chapters cover such topics as college athletics, the pressure of celebrity, the difficulty of balancing sports and everyday life, sex and gender, race in sports, the obsession with the body, and the difficulties associated with retiring.