As scheduling begins for spring quarter, with students frantically searching for good classes and good teachers, there is a fascinating class with a unique professor being offered for the first time this year.

The class is in the European history department and is called “Sport in the Modern World.” Professor Robert Edelman, a 30-year veteran at UCSD and one of the campus’ most interesting characters, teaches it.

Edelman is a perfect fit to run the class, with years of experience in sports journalism, sports history, scholarship and other areas. He is especially knowledgeable about Russian culture and society and, therefore, uses a lot of the time in his class to focus on Russian sports.

But he devotes time to other subjects as well. However, one thing Edelman wants to make clear is that the class is not a breeze, nor is it a sports stats contest.

“I think the problem is that a lot of people take the course thinking it’s going to be ‘SportsCenter’ or sports trivia or something that will be easy,” Edelman said. “The first thing we do is spend time on definitions of cultural theory and social theory.”

If cultural theory in sport does not sound interesting, do not take this class. Edelman will not ask students about how many home runs Mark McGwire hit in 1998, but he will ask the cultural effect a soccer match can have on the countries involved. In total, the class focuses only one week on so-called American sports, so soccer, which follows the American period, is the main topic.

“[The class] is not too much about America because I figure Americans will know their own sports well,” Edelman said. “Its basically the 19th and 20th centuries because that’s when the British developed modern sport and that’s where I start.”

From there, Edelman leads students on a journey through sports history, with stops along the way to investigate the social situations leading into and following major sporting developments.

“It’s a different course because it’s a topical course,” Edelman said. “There’s a kind of chronological basis, but it’s not through each decade like a typical survey course would be. That’s just because if you’re writing a textbook about the history of the world, you can’t really just go chronologically, you have to organize it topically as well, otherwise your history would say, ‘And then these five things happen’ … without describing the context.”

Edelman’s description of the history of sport does have a context, and goes into detail about it once class starts.

“In teaching [the class], what I’m trying to do is take all the things that you study in terms of categories that are important in history, like race, class, gender, ethnicity [and] sexual tendency, and, one, apply them to sport, and, two, see what sport can actually tell us about these categories,” he said. “It’s a good laboratory for looking at a lot of these things.”

Edelman’s perspective is one of the sports scholar, a profession that’s emerging as a legitimate field after years of disrespect.

“The topic was seen as academically marginal and not fully scholarly respectable for years and years,” he said. “If I had suggested 20 years ago to do a course in this, I wouldn’t have been allowed to do it. Now, I’m encouraged to do it and my colleagues think its grand and I’m happy to do it.”

Edelman never heard encouragement when he was researching sports history years ago. Instead, he faced years of setbacks and insults.

“If you’re a historian of sport, the historians don’t respect you because you’re dealing with this topic that’s about popular culture and — God forbid — you should study something that’s fun,” Edelman said. “And then sports people don’t trust you because they don’t understand why we ask questions like ‘Do you think this proves the Marxist critique of capitalist sport by the fact that you signed this contract?’”

Today, however, Edelman has earned the trust and respect of athletes and historians alike. His thorough research and in-depth analysis of such issues as the Olympics and Russian soccer have vaulted him to the forefront of his field.

According to Edelman, the Olympics can tell society a lot about sport and its social implications.

“The Olympics are basically a reaction to the rise of professional sport,” he said. “The word ‘amateur’ actually doesn’t exist in the sporting lexicon until after professional sport emerges. Basically, it’s an elite reaction to all these working people getting drunk and carrying on at soccer games and to the athletes becoming increasingly working class. And the way you keep the sport for social elites is you make it amateur, because you can’t make a living out of it and you are forced back to the coal mine.”

For those that think the course is all class analysis with no room for fun, think again. Edelman is planning activities relating to sports in order to keep students entertained.

“One of the things we’ll do this year, if there’s a big Champions League game, is we’ll go to Round Table and bring 50 people to watch the game,” Edelman said.

Whether it’s rowdy soccer mobs in the middle of Round Table or the dissection of soccer’s effects on Europe and the world, Edelman’s course could be the perfect fit for students looking for an interesting class outside of their regular field of study.