A CULTURAL HISTORY

OF SPORT
VOLUME 6

i
A Cultural History of Sport
General Editors: Wray Vamplew, John McClelland, and Mark Dyreson

Volume 1
A Cultural History of Sport in Antiquity
Edited by Paul Christesen and Charles Stocking

Volume 2
A Cultural History of Sport in the Medieval Age
Edited by Noel Fallows

Volume 3
A Cultural History of Sport in the Renaissance
Edited by Alessandro Arcangeli

Volume 4
A Cultural History of Sport in the Age of Enlightenment
Edited by Rebekka von Mallinckrodt

Volume 5
A Cultural History of Sport in the Age of Industry
Edited by Mike Huggins

Volume 6
A Cultural History of Sport in the Modern Age
Edited by Steven Riess

ii
 A CULTURAL HISTORY
OF SPORT

IN THE
MODERN AGE
Edited by Steven A. Riess

iii
 BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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iv
 CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS vii

SERIES PREFACE xiii

Introduction: One Hundred Years of Sport in Modern Society, 1920–2020 1

Steven A. Riess

1 The Purpose of Sport 37

William J. Morgan

2 Sporting Time and Sporting Space 57

Brian M. Ingrassia

3 Products, Training, and Technology 81

Jean Williams and Wray Vamplew

4 Rules and Order 105

Sheldon Anderson

5 Conflict and Accommodation 127

Matthew Taylor

6 Inclusion, Exclusion, and Segregation 149

Kevin B. Witherspoon

7 Minds, Bodies, and Identities 173

Mike Cronin

v
vi CONTENTS

8 Representation 191
Steven A. Riess

BIBLIOGRAPHY 221
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 251
INDEX 255
 ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION
0.1 Czechoslovakia Bohemia Praha Prague: Workers’ Olympics,
calisthenics of 5,000 members of the Prague section, June 25,
1921. They were a left-wing alternative to the sokols, drew
athletes from thirteen nations, and considered an unofficial
Workers’ Olympics. A. & E. Frankl bild. Published by Vossische
Zeitung 23/1921 Vintage property of Ullstein bild. Getty Images. 4
0.2 International Workers’ Olympics, Frankfurt am Main, 1925. The
first official Workers’ Olympics drew eleven nations who competed
under a red flag. Photographed by Willibald Krain. Courtesy
Wikimedia Commons. 5
0.3 In 1907, Australian swimmer Annette Kellerman was arrested
in Boston for wearing an indecent one-piece suit that showed
her neck, legs, and arms. She redesigned the suit, which became
“the Annette Kellerman,” which was soon used in the Olympics.
Bain News Service. George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of
Congress. Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.
LC-Dig-ggb-03569. 6
0.4 Three young women posing in swimsuits and wearing their
swimming competition medals (between 1910 and 1930). George
C. Bain Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
Division Washington, DC. LC-DIG-ppmsca-19489. 7
0.5 World Championship Women’s Bowling in New York, May 8,
1929. The Chicago team poses before facing the New York team.
Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone. Getty Images. 8

vii
viii ILLUSTRATIONS

0.6 Bing Miller of Philadelphia A’s being tagged out at home by

Muddy Ruel of Washington Senators, 1925. Washington Nationals
Baseball Club Collection. Library of Congress Prints and
Photographs Division Washington, DC. LC-USZ62-135437. 10
0.7 India national cricket team 1932. First Test match – England vs
All India. England captain Douglas Jardine steers a ball from All
India bowler Amir Singh past second slip during the inaugural first
Test match between England and All India, played at Lord’s cricket
ground in London, June 25, 1932. The non-striking batsman is
Eddie Paynter. England won the match by 158 runs. Photo by
Popperfoto. Getty Images. 14
0.8 Jesse Owens Winning Long Jump at Berlin Olympics, 1936. Jesse
Owens of the United States leaps to gold with a jump of 8.06
meters (26.44 feet), just 7.6 centimeters (3 inches) below his world
record. Photo by © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis.
Getty Images. 17
0.9 Pelé (Edson Arantes do Nascimento). World’s greatest football
player. The Brazilian played for Santos (1956–74) in Brazil and the
New York Cosmos (1975–7). Photo by Schirner /Ullstein picture.
Getty Images. 21

CHAPTER 2
2.1 Largest college football crowd in American history. On October
13, 1928, an estimated 120,000 fans at Soldier Field, Chicago saw
the University of Notre Dame defeat the Navy, 7–0. In the fourth
period on fourth and three, Johnny Neimiec tossed a pass to
Johnny Colrick for the game’s only touchdown. Photo by George
Rinhart/Corbis. Getty Images. 59
2.2 Diagram of Proposed Dodger Stadium in Chavez Ravine, Los
Angeles, September 23, 1957. Photo by Los Angeles Examiner.
USC Libraries/Corbis. Getty Images. 64
2.3 Panoramic view of Eden Gardens Stadium in Kolkata, the oldest
cricket ground in India established in 1864. This is a 2008 match
in the Indian Premier League. Partha Bhaumik photographer.
Source: Flickr Garden of Eden. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons. 65
2.4 Nippon Budokan Hall in 2018, originally constructed for the 1964
Tokyo Olympics. It was later the site of a famous series of Beatles
concerts in 1966. Photo by Kakidai. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons. 66
2.5 The Houston Astrodome Scoreboard pictured during a June
7, 1969 game between the Astros and Cardinals. The Houston
Astrodome’s innovative scoreboard photographed on June 7, 1969
ILLUSTRATIONS ix

with 26,764 spectators. Photo by Bill Wilson. Courtesy Wikimedia

Commons. 67
2.6 Chicago Stadium prepared for a Chicago Blackhawks game
in 1930. The arena operated from 1929 to 1994, replaced by
the United Center in 1995, best remembered for its deafening
acoustics. Photo from The Sporting News Archives. Courtesy
Wikimedia Commons. 72

CHAPTER 3
3.1 Football Crowd circa 1925: Crowds pack the stands to watch the
football match. Photo by General Photographic Agency. Getty
Images. 82
3.2 Betty Cuthbert’s Running Spikes. Cuthbert was Australia’s “Golden
Girl,” who won three Olympic gold medals in the Melbourne Games
of 1956, and a fourth gold in 1964. Pool/Pool. Getty Images. 83
3.3 Riley, Buick, and Bugatti on the start line at a Surbiton Motor
Club race meeting, Brooklands, January 9, 1928. Brooklands was
a 2.75-mile (4.43-kilometer) motor-racing circuit built in 1907
near Weybridge, in Surrey, England. It was the first facility built
specifically for motor racing. Heritage Archives. Getty Images. 85
3.4 Crowd scene on the opening day of the 1952 Olympics. Helsinki
Stadium, Finland. Photo by Nat Farbman/The LIFE Picture
Collection. Getty Images. 91
3.5 Marco Pantani of Italy, rider for the Mercatone UnoScanavino
team cycling on the Courchevel–Morzine Stage 16 of the Tour
de France on July 18, 2000 at Courcheval, France. Photo: Doug
Pensinger. Hulton Archive. Getty Images. 93
3.6 Kenilworth Cigarette Advertisement, March 20, 1920 in the
Illustrated London News issue. The ad features a pair of golfers. A
woman offers a wager of twenty cigarettes to the male player that
he cannot make his shot. Photo by Mansell/Time & Life Picture/
The LIFE Picture Collection. Getty Images. 101

CHAPTER 4
4.1 The dominance of some players such as Minneapolis Lakers’ George
Mikan prompted rule changes. The NBA widened the three-second
lane because of Mikan’s unstoppable low-post scoring. Courtesy of
the Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, MN. 108
4.2 Harold “Red” Grange of the Chicago Bears, December 8, 1925.
The University of Illinois halfback (1923–5) was the greatest
x ILLUSTRATIONS

college football player of all time. He turned pro late in 1925 and
is wearing his Chicago Bears uniform. National Photo Company
Collection. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division,
Washington, DC. LC-DIG-npcc-15254. 111
4.3 Joyce Hill Westerman of the AAGPBL sliding into third base. A
catcher-first baseman, she played in the league between 1945 and
1952, batting .228. Courtesy A. Bartlett Giamatti Research Center,
National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. 116

CHAPTER 5
5.1 Crowd gives the Nazi salute during the 1936 Berlin Olympic
Games. Photo by Universal History Archives. Getty Images. 129
5.2 The Boxer. 1942 bronze sculpture by Richmond Barthé
(1901–89). Modeled after Cuban world featherweight
champion Kid Chocolate, renowned for his ballet-like
movement. Simeon B. Williams Fund. Courtesy of The Art
Institute of Chicago. 137
5.3 Heysel Stadium Riot, Brussels, Belgium, May 29, 1985. Juventus
vs Liverpool, European Cup Final. Liverpool fans threw rocks
from the decrepit stadium before the game at Juventus fans,
compelling them to flee. They ran into a wall that collapsed,
killing thirty-nine and injuring 600. The game was still played, and
Juventus won 1–0. English fans were subsequently banned for five
years from attending games in Europe. Photo by Liverpool Echo/
Mirrorpix. Getty Images. 143
5.4 Bleacher crowd at Ebbets Field in early 1950s comprised of a
broad cross-section of Brooklyn’s residents by gender, race, and
age. Courtesy Brooklyn Central Public Library. 144

CHAPTER 6
6.1 Jackie Robinson (1919–72) in his Brooklyn Dodgers uniform.
Robinson was the first African American in MLB in the twentieth
century. He overcame enormous racism, starred from 1947 to
1956, leading his team to six pennants and one World Series.
He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962. Courtesy
National Archives and Records Administration, Maryland. 150
6.2 Young people – go to the stadiums! 1947. A political poster by
Leonid Fyodorovich Golovanov, a highly acclaimed Russian
graphic artist. The USSR promoted competitive sport after the
Second World War for men and women to promote physical fitness
ILLUSTRATIONS xi

and national defense. Russia did not participate in the Olympics

from 1912 until 1952 when it was well prepared to compete.
Found in the collection of the Russian State Library, Moscow.
Hulton Archives. Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images.
Getty Images. 154
6.3 1930–1 Homestead Grays. Experts rate this team as the best
African-American team ever. Standing: Cumberland Posey*, Bill
Evans, Jap Washington, Red Reed, Smokey Joe Williams*, Josh
Gibson*, George “Tubby” Scales, Oscar Charleston*, Charlie
Walker, Jr. Kneeling: Chippy Britt, Lefty Williams, Jud Wilson*,
Vic Harris, Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe. Photo by Wright &
Riley. Harrison Studio/Heritage Auctions. Courtesy of Wikimedia
Commons. 155
6.4 The Harlem Globetrotters representing the United States
Information Agency in 1958 in Vienna, as the American
government sought to promote better diplomatic relations
overseas. The team previously drew a record 75,000 spectators to
a game on August 22, 1951 at Berlin’s Olympic Stadium. Courtesy
National Archives and Record Administration. 160
6.5 Pvt. Joe Louis says – “We’re going to do our part, and we’ll win
because we’re on God’s side.” Louis was not only a symbol of
American heroism, but served his country during the Second
World War, fighting ninety-six exhibition matches before more
than two million troops, and donating over $100,000 to Navy
and Army war relief from his two title bouts in 1942. Courtesy
National Archives and Record Administration. 163
6.6 Wilma Rudolph at the first USA vs USSR track and field meet,
July 1961. Rudolph crosses the finish line just ahead of Tatiana
Shohalkanova in Lenin Stadium, Moscow, to help the US women’s
400-meter relay team win in a world record time of 44.3 seconds.
National Archives and Records Administration. 166
6.7 Jack Klugman, Bobby Riggs, and Billie Jean King in an episode
of the television series The Odd Couple, October 30, 1973. ABC
Television. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons. 170

CHAPTER 8
8.1 Time magazine cover “Horse Feathers.” – 1932 Paramount film
with the Marx Brothers. The title was a 1920s colloquialism for
“nonsense.” The satire focuses on a game between two colleges
that employed imaginative schemes to recruit professional talent
and evade the prevailing amateur code. This photograph reflects
xii ILLUSTRATIONS

how the brother scored the game-winning touchdown. Pictorial

Press. Alamy Stock Photo. 201
8.2 American tennis player Helen Wills Moody (1905–98). She was
the best women’s player in the world in 1927–33, 1935, and
1938, winning thirty-one Grand Slam tournament titles. She was
a worldwide celebrity, admired for her beauty and graceful play.
Photo by Agence de press Meurisse. Bibliothèque nationale de
France. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons. 211
8.3 Centennial of Baseball, 1839–1939, by U.S. Post Office. The U.S.
government published a stamp to honor the anniversary of Abner
Doubleday’s supposed inventing of baseball in Cooperstown,
NY in 1839. Hi-res scanning of postage stamp by Gwillhickers.
Courtesy Wikimedia Commons. 212
8.4 Woman relay runner at the Moscow Spartakiada, 1928. Postcard
commemorating the Russian All-Union Spartakiade. Color
lithograph on off-white wove postcard. Artist Gustav G. Klutsis
(1895–1938). Private collection. Photo by Fine Art Images/
Heritage Images. Getty Images. 213
8.5 Cover of Spartakiada RSI magazine, 1928. Female discus thrower.
Artist Gustav Klutsis. State Art Museum of Republic Latvia, Riga.
Hulton Archive. Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images. Getty
Images. 214
8.6 Dempsey vs Firpo, 1924. Oil on canvass by George Bellows
(1882–1925). Purchased with funds from Gertrude Vanderbilt
Whitney’s Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Champion Jack Dempsey fought Argentinean Angel Firpo on
September 23, 1923 at the Polo Grounds. Firpo was knocked
down seven times in the first round, Dempsey twice, and the
second time was knocked out of the ring. It took him 14 seconds
to return to the ring. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. 215
8.7 Fanny Blankers-Koen (1954). Dutch heroine who won four gold
medals in track at the 1948 London Olympics. Blijdorp District,
Rotterdam, Netherlands. Sculpture by Han Rehm. Photograph by
Door Wikifrits. Courtesy of wikimedia commons. 217
8.8 The Olympic Black Power Statue at San José State University
honoring Tommie Smith and John Carlos was completed in 2005
by “Rigo 23.” The sculpture purposefully omitted second-place
medalist, Australian Peter Norman, a supporter of the Olympic
Project for Human Rights, as per his request to ensure attention
was focused on Smith and Carlos. Photo by Lawrence Fan.
Courtesy of Lawrence Fan. 218
 SERIES PREFACE

A Cultural History of Sport is a six-volume series reviewing the evolution of

both the internal practices of sport from remote Antiquity to the present and
the ways and degrees to which sport has reflected—and been integrated into—
contemporary cultural criteria. All of the volumes are constructed in the same
pattern, with an initial chapter outlining the purposes of sport during the time
frame to which the volume is devoted. Seven chapters, each written by a
specialist of the period, then deal in turn with time and space, equipment and
technology, rules and order, conflict and accommodation, inclusion and
segregation, athletes and identities, and representation. The reader therefore
has the choice between synchronic and diachronic approaches, between
concentrating on the diverse facets of sport in a single historical period, and
exploring one or more of those facets as they evolved over time and became
concretized in the practices and relations of the twenty-first century.

The six volumes cover the topic as follows:

Volume 1: A Cultural History of Sport in Antiquity (600 BCE –500 CE )
Volume 2: A Cultural History of Sport in the Middle Ages (500–1450)
Volume 3: A Cultural History of Sport in the Early Modern Period
(1450–1650)
Volume 4: A Cultural History of Sport in the Age of Enlightenment
(1650–1800)
Volume 5: A Cultural History of Sport in the Age of Industry (1800–1920)
Volume 6: A Cultural History of Sport in the Modern Age (1920–present)

General Editors:
Wray Vamplew, Emeritus Professor of Sports History, University of Stirling,
UK, and Global Professorial Fellow, University of Edinburgh, UK
John McClelland, Professor Emeritus of French Literature and Sport History,
University of Toronto, Canada.
Mark Dyreson, Professor of Kinesiology, Affiliate Professor of History, and
Director of Research and Educational Programs for the Center for the Study
of Sports and Society, Pennsylvania State University, USA

xiii
xiv
 Introduction:
One Hundred Years of
Sport in Modern Society,
1920–2020
STEVEN A. RIESS

The basic elements of sports were already well established by 1920, but major
changes have occurred since then. Notable developments include increased
professionalization and commercialization, the democratization of sport by
class, race, and gender, and the heightened role of nationalism, ideology, and
diplomacy in a globalized sporting world.
The British and Americans, who created most modern sports—the former,
cricket, soccer, and track and field, and the latter, baseball, basketball, volleyball,
and football—controlled subsequent growth, dominated competition, and
exported their sporting cultures abroad to promote in their formal and informal
empires cultural hegemony among subject people, economic exploitation, and
diplomatic interests. One unanticipated result, however, was that players and
workers used sports as a way to oppose colonial control and create space for
sports to promote their own identity (Oonwumechili and Akindes 2014: 7).
The British were particularly prominent in introducing their sports overseas,
and also exporting their cherished conception of the amateur—a gentleman
who played sport solely for pleasure. At home the British were particularly
loyal to their traditional pastimes, encouraging of gambling sports, and also

1
2 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

supportive of professionalized working-class soccer (Van Bottenburg 2001:

209, 212–13).
The American sporting culture owed a great deal to the British, from whom
they got such major sports as pugilism and thoroughbred racing, and values like
amateurism, honor, and muscular Christianity. The American sporting experience
would differ in significant ways from the British by being far more democratic
and much more supportive of commercialization and professionalization. The
American sporting culture was also influenced by the hunting and fishing skills
of Native Americans and their sport of lacrosse, and the immigrant German and
Scandinavian traditions of physical culture.

THE SPORTING WORLD, 1920–45

Male Participatory Sport
Opportunities to participate in sport in this era were heavily influenced by
economic factors. The United States was spared from the ravages of war, and
its post-First World War economy thrived, producing the world’s highest
standard of living. Europe’s economy, by contrast, was in great distress because
of its 41 million casualties, incredible property destruction, the decline in
international trade, huge national debts, dismal farm conditions, and inflation.
This preceded the coming of the Great Depression, when sporting options
declined substantially all over the world.
Other factors influenced sporting culture than economics, notably cultural
diffusion, local traditions, climate, and physical geography. Soccer, exported by
British businessmen, military personnel, and government workers, became
globally popular, and cricket became well established throughout the empire.
American businessmen and missionaries, abetted by returning foreign students,
particularly promoted baseball in Latin America, the Caribbean basin, and
East Asia.
Cold temperatures shaped the popularity of ice hockey in Canada and skiing
in Scandinavia and Alpine Europe, while a warm climate and access to the Pacific
Ocean in Hawaii facilitated swimming, boating, and surfing. Traditional sports
often survived like buzkashi in Afghanistan, and various versions of martial arts
around the globe, supporting the maintenance of indigenous cultures.
Wealthy sportsmen around the world in the 1920s enjoyed numerous
sporting options as members of prestigious and restrictive sports organizations,
including cricket, horse racing, polo, skiing, golf, and yacht clubs. Their
manifest function was entertainment, but also important were such latent
functions as demonstrating manliness, sociability, and for business purposes.
Upper- and middle-class Europeans, Americans, and Canadians, who enjoyed
short working hours and earned ample incomes, belonged to more democratic
INTRODUCTION 3

sports clubs of lesser stature and prestige, for similar purposes. White-collar
central Europeans particularly enjoyed gymnastics, hiking, and track clubs.
Sons of North American and British upper- and middle-class families played
arduous team sports at secondary schools and colleges (Birley 1995; Davies
2017; Holt 1989).
Working-class Anglo-American inner-city lads continued to enjoy self-
directed sport on city streets, playgrounds, and parks, but also benefited from
adult supervised sport at settlement houses and neighborhood schools that
were purportedly uplifting (building character, morality, and manliness), while
promoting health and acculturation. Slum youth were particularly drawn to
boxing at settlement houses and boxing gyms where they learned to defend
themselves and friends from rival ethnic groups, a skill that occasionally led to
a prize fighting career (Riess 1989: 151–68).
American working-class youth loved to play baseball, if they had the space,
while the working class elsewhere preferred soccer. However, team sports became
less viable once young men grew up, got married, and had to support a family,
and also because their strenuous daily labor often left them too tired for vigorous
sport. They also found suitable options at readily accessible taverns where they
could drink and play billiards, bowl, or throw darts, or they could bowl at
neighborhood bowling alleys. These inexpensive sports were not physically
taxing, and were a means to demonstrate prowess. Taverns and billiard halls
drew rough crowds and a lot of gambling, while bowling lanes had a higher
status, and offered opportunities to meet members of the opposite sex. Bowling
among urbanites was often an adjunct to street corner life. Chicago in the 1930s
had about 500,000 male and female bowlers in 900 leagues (Riess 1989: 73–81).
Inner-city Anglo-American men also raced pigeons, while their rural brothers
enjoyed outdoor sports like hunting and fishing (Holt 1989: 186–7, 190–2).
Blue-collar Germans were more into physical culture than other Europeans,
particularly the 1.75 million turners, whose festivals featured non-competitive
mass rhythmic exercises (Van Bottenburg 2001: 69–76, 112). Next came soccer
with over 1 million registered players by 1932 (Murray 1996: 45). However,
critics disliked its English origins, competitive character, and the promotion of
the wrong kinds of heroes (Goldblatt 2006: 617).
Post-war working-class sporting opportunities were substantially enhanced
through welfare capitalism, initiated by the late nineteenth century by British,
German, French, and American industrialists to counter labor unrest. By the
1920s, hundreds of American manufacturers sponsored sports programs
that included such participatory sports as baseball, basketball, bowling, golf,
softball, and tennis. Many firms also sponsored teams in baseball, basketball,
football, and track that vied against other companies. Chicago alone had forty-
six semipro industrial baseball teams in 1918. Players got time off to practice
and earned $10–$20 for Sunday games, plus side bets. Certain Midwestern
4 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

companies sponsored football squads like the Decatur Staley Starch Company,
which became the Chicago Bears. Certain unions, like the International Ladies
Garment Workers Union, countered management with their own sports
programs (Riess 1989: 82–6).
European leftists employed sports to challenge existing bourgeois sporting
culture to enhance their appeal, promoting a theory of physical activity that
advocated men’s and women’s physical fitness as a base for a workers’ culture and
the upcoming class struggle. Their ideology emphasized mass participation under
socialist values that stressed friendship, cooperation, and mutual support rather
than capitalist values that stressed elite athletic competitiveness, economic profit,
individualism, nationalism, and record breaking (Krüger and Riordan 1996).
The Socialist Workers Sport International (SWSI) , founded in 1920,
consisted of six national federations, peaking in 1931 with about 1.9 million
men and women in twenty nations, primarily Germany. SWSI staged Workers’
Olympiads at six-year intervals from 1925 to 1937, starting with winter and
summer games in Germany. The summer games in Frankfurt were highlighted

FIGURE 0.1: Czechoslovakia Bohemia Praha Prague: Workers’ Olympics, calisthenics

of 5,000 members of the Prague section, June 25, 1921. They were a left-wing
alternative to the sokols, drew athletes from thirteen nations, and considered an
unofficial Workers’ Olympics. A. & E. Frankl bild. Published by Vossische Zeitung
23/1921 Vintage property of Ullstein bild. Getty Images.
INTRODUCTION 5

FIGURE 0.2: International Workers’ Olympics, Frankfurt am Main, 1925. The first
official Workers’ Olympics drew eleven nations who competed under a red flag.
Photographed by Willibald Krain. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

by mass rhythmic exercises. The 1931 meets were in Austria where Vienna’s
summer games drew 80,000 athletes and 250,000 spectators (Krüger and
Riordan 1996: vii, 31).
The Russian Revolution and the ensuing civil war turned asunder much of
Russian society and culture. The government in 1921 founded the Red Sport
International (RSI) to promote physical culture to develop a healthy and
disciplined Soviet body, support national defense, and operate its own
international sporting network. The RSI emphasized mass gymnastics, but in
time supported competitive sporting games, most notably at the 1928 Moscow
Spartakiad (Krüger and Riordan 1996). The regime also established multisport
clubs, notably Dinamo Moscow (NKVD) in 1923 and TsDka (Red Army) in
1928, both preceded in 1922 by the union-organized Spartak Moscow. The
principal team sport was soccer, although there was no national league until
1936. The sports movement was retarded by Stalin’s purges of thousands of
sportsmen and women, physical educators, physicians, and five ministers of
sport (Goldblatt: 313–14).
6 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

Workers’ sporting options with the coming of the Great Depression lessened.
Unemployment in 1932 was over 22 percent in the UK, 43.7 percent in Germany
(Clavin 2000: 112), and 25 percent in the USA in 1933. Private sports clubs,
schools, and clubs had to cut back on operations to stay operational. Many
corporations reduced or cancelled sports programs during the Great Depression.
President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal stepped in to provide public sporting
facilities, doubling the number of public sponsored recreational programs from
1933 to 1935, mainly through the Civil Works Administration, set up to create
jobs for the unemployed. Then in 1935 the Works Progress Administration was
organized (renamed Works Projects Administration in 1939). The WPA from
1935 to 1941 spent about $1 billion to construct 5,898 new athletic fields and
playgrounds and 770 swimming pools (Riess 1989: 142–3, 148).

Women’s Participatory Sport

Women’s sporting opportunities in Western nations increased significantly
during the Roaring Twenties when they had greater social and sexual freedom

FIGURE 0.3: In 1907, Australian swimmer Annette Kellerman was arrested in Boston
for wearing an indecent one-piece suit that showed her neck, legs, and arms. She
redesigned the suit, which became “the Annette Kellerman,” which was soon used in
the Olympics. Bain News Service. George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of
Congress. Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC. LC-Dig-ggb-03569.
INTRODUCTION 7

FIGURE 0.4: Three young women posing in swimsuits and wearing their swimming
competition medals (between 1910 and 1930). George C. Bain Collection, Library of
Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, DC. LC-DIG-ppmsca-19489.

than ever before. Changes in fashion were more conducive to athletics since
instead of wearing garments from the neck to the ankle, women were wearing
shorter and looser skirts, and lightweight and looser blouses. However, their
options were still severely limited to sports considered gender appropriate,
which meant feminine and not very rigorous. Opinion-makers considered sport
a male sphere that taught manly values, harmed women’s health, and made
them unappealing marital partners; however, social scientists and the press
countered with scientific research about the positive physical impact of sport
upon women. Middle- and upper-class wives and daughters joined sports clubs
that sponsored sports like figure skating, golf, and tennis. Champions at those
sports included, respectively, Sonja Henie, Suzanne Lenglen, and Edith
Cummings, all from well-to-do families. Henie (Norway) and Lenglen (France)
were national heroes, along with American swimmer Gertrude Ederle and
tennis player Helen Wills (Skillen 2013: 229–30, 233–4, 236; Birley 1995:
203–13).
Prominent American female physical educators in the 1920s believed their
students should suppress their competitive instincts and focus instead on
cooperative play and companionship through intercollegiate “play days,”
8 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

thereby avoiding competition and other negative aspects of male sports.

However, the dominant view was quite different at Historically Black Colleges
and Universities (HBCUs), where educators and fellow students supported
women’s intercollegiate basketball and track and field, as long as coeds
maintained their femininity (Liberti 1999; Grundy 2001: 169–70).
The 20 percent of inter-war American working-class women who worked
outside the home could gain status, recognition, and self-esteem through sports,
especially if they worked for companies that sponsored athletics through their
welfare capitalism programs. Factory girls at the Western Electric (WE) plant in
suburban Chicago had wonderful facilities, including a 10-acre (4-hectare)
athletic field for its 28,000-member athletic association, purportedly the world’s
largest. Their employees organized a comprehensive lunch-hour program that
included baseball, basketball, bowling, cycling, golf, gymnastics, swimming,
tennis, and track and field. In 1930 the WE sponsored a women’s track meet
that attracted more than 10,000 spectators (Riess 1989: 86; Cahn 1994).
A 1930s survey in Chicago found that bowling was by far the most popular
women’s sport (35 percent). The Women’s International Bowling Congress,

FIGURE 0.5: World Championship Women’s Bowling in New York, May 8, 1929.
The Chicago team poses before facing the New York team. Photo by Keystone-France/
Gamma-Keystone. Getty Images.
INTRODUCTION 9

founded back in 1916, staged national tournaments, and by 1937 offered

$95,000 in prize money. After the war, middle-class women comprised 40
percent of suburban bowlers. The next most popular sports in the 1930s were
softball (11 percent) and tennis (10 percent). The Chicago American sponsored
a huge softball tournament in 1933 that included a women’s division. The
Amateur Softball Association, founded one year later, had 2 million members,
including a large number of women (Betts 1974: 278–9).
Women’s sport in Europe got a significant boost in 1921 when Alice Milliat
challenged the negative view of rigorous sport for women, founding La
Fédération sportive féminine internationale (Leigh and Bonin, 1977). A number
of Central European women were prominent athletes, including Jewish
women, who dominated table tennis, and gained fame in swimming and track
and field. The middle-class Berlin Sports Club was 25 percent Jewish, and
included Lilli Henoch, a world record holder in the 1920s in the discus, shot
put, and 4 x 100-meter relay. However, Jewish working-class women were
more likely to join Zionist sports clubs like Hakoah Vienna that supported
fencing, swimming, team handball, and tennis, promoting muscular Judaism, a
Jewish identity, and fitness for future motherhood (Pfiester and Niewirth 1999:
287–325; Bowman 2011).

SPECTATOR SPORT
The US Scene
Spectator sports were enormously popular in 1920s America when wages
were up and working hours down, formerly illegal sports were legitimized, and
there were countless sports heroes. The prime spectator sport was Major
League Baseball (MLB), well covered by the press, broadcast by radio, and
accessible by mass transit, with an annual average attendance of 9.3 million.
The season lasted 154 games, tickets cost as little as $0.25, with the pennant
race a prelude to the World Series. Fans watched in modern and spacious
fire-resistant ballparks, including New York’s Yankee Stadium, built in 1923
with over 60,000 seats. The national pastime started the 1920s under the
shadow of the Black Sox Scandal of 1919, but the indicted players were
acquitted. The sport’s stature was further restored by the performance and
charisma of star performers, primarily Babe Ruth of the Yankees, who hit a
career record 714 home runs, and earned a record $80,000 in 1930 ($1,153,328
in 2018). The Yankees won fifteen pennants and five World Championships in
the 1920s and 1930s.
Ruth was the preeminent of many sports idols of the 1920s, an icon of
prowess and consumption, despite personal flaws unreported by the press.
Sports icons like aviator Charles Lindbergh and “Red” Grange of football
10 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

FIGURE 0.6: Bing Miller of Philadelphia A’s being tagged out at home by Muddy Ruel
of Washington Senators, 1925. Washington Nationals Baseball Club Collection.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, DC. LC-
USZ62-135437.

seemed to encapsulate the values, beliefs, and behavior that promoted national
character, just as the national pastime represented some of the myths, symbols,
and legends needed to bind the nation together (Riess 1989: 7, 22–30).
In 1929 the typical player made between $5,000 and $7,000, and the average
team made $83,484 ($1,203,556 in 2018). Players were mostly native-born
urban white Americans, but immigrants were underrepresented. There were a
handful of Cubans and Native Americans who seemed to prove the sport’s
democratic recruitment policies, but African Americans were barred by a
common understanding. Fans felt their presence would lower the status of the
national pastime, and white players were afraid skilled blacks would take their
jobs. In 1920 Andrew “Rube” Foster organized the Negro National League
to encourage black capitalism, provide jobs for black players and ancillary
personnel, and promote black pride.
MLB attendance peaked in 1930 with a record attendance of 10.1 million,
and profits of $1,965,007 ($122,813 per team). However, the sport soon
struggled with the Depression, and attendance in 1933 was down to 6.1 million.
Teams lost money in the early 1930s, and cut salaries by 25 percent. MLB tried
to recover by introducing night baseball, an annual all-star game, and permitting
teams to sell local radio broadcast rights (Riess 2008: 102–11). Baseball was
back in the black by 1935.
INTRODUCTION 11

The other leading professional sports in the 1920s were thoroughbred racing
and boxing, both formerly banned nearly everywhere, the former due to
wagering, the latter because of its violence and ties to organized crime.
Thoroughbred racing had a long-standing tradition on the continent, but prize
fighting was rare outside the Anglo-American world. Several state legislatures in
the 1920s legalized these sports to reward war veterans for their service, to gain
ethnic votes, and to secure needed revenue.
The turf boom declined sharply in 1931 because of the Depression. Yet two
years later, ten states legalized on-track gambling to help raise revenue. By 1936
growing public interest produced record gates, purses, receipts, and state
revenue, yet most betting was still with illegal off-track bookmakers offering
convenience and credit. Seabiscuit, the leading stallion who lost his first
seventeen races, ended up earning a record $437,730, becoming a national
symbol for how average people might overcome bad times by working hard
(Riess 2014: 29–54).
New York in 1920 legalized boxing under the aegis of a state boxing
commission. Major matches staged at Madison Square Garden and Yankee
Stadium drew huge crowds, including elegantly dressed, wealthy men and
women. The most famous bout was the 1927 “Long Count” heavyweight
championship between Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney at Chicago’s Soldier
Field, drawing over 100,000 spectators and a $2.6-million gate.
Pugilists were mainly poor inner-city Irish, Jewish, Italian, and African
American seeking fame and fortune in a brutal occupation heavily controlled by
the underworld (Riess 1989: 109–16). Blacks fought for titles in all divisions
except the heavyweight where the color line was redrawn in 1915 after Jack
Johnson lost his title. Then, in 1937, Joe Louis, carefully molded to be a non-
threatening person, won the title from Jim Braddock, making him a big race
hero. Louis became a national hero one year later, knocking out in round one
former champion German Max Schmeling, considered a representative of
Nazism.
The United States had several other professional spectatorial events in the
interwar era, ranging from six-day indoor bicycle racing and the Indianapolis
500 car race to team sports like the National Hockey League (NHL, founded
1917). The NHL started as a totally Canadian operation that began adding
American teams in 1924 that for years lacked stability.
Pro basketball was a minor regional sport, centered on the eastern American
Basketball League (1925–31, 1933–55) which had only white teams. The top
black teams were the touring New York Renaissance, founded in 1923, and the
Harlem Globetrotters, established in Chicago in 1926. They captured the
World Professional Basketball Tournament in 1939 and 1940, respectively.
The American Professional Football Association, founded in 1920, and
renamed in 1922 the National Football League (NFL), also started as a
12 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

minor regional venture. The NFL had many small-town teams, drew
negligible crowds, paid modest wages, and received minimal press coverage. Its
low status was reflected by the presence of an all-Native-American team, the
Oorang Indians (1922–3), and the employment of African Americans through
1933. During the Depression, the NFL made some important innovations,
including a championship game in 1933 and a player draft in 1936 (Crepeau
2014).
Amateur high-school basketball and football were more popular than the
professional version, promoting a strong sense of local community and
tradition, especially in small towns like Martinsville (Indiana) whose high-
school gym seated 5,200, more than the town’s population. The biggest team
sports crowd ever was 120,000 for the 1937 Chicago city football championship
at Soldier Field.
Intercollegiate football enjoyed a popularity boom in the 1920s, reflected by
new stadiums that seated over 60,000. Such edifices, along with high-quality
teams, enhanced school spirit and state pride, promoted institutional stature and
the state’s progressive character, and satisfied local demands for entertainment.
National attendance reached 27 million in 1927, but dropped by 25 percent
between 1929 and 1933 (Watterson 2000: 177). College football downsized in
the Depression, but administrators cancelled few programs, claiming it instilled
such American values as perseverance, competitiveness, and democracy (Austin
2016). Urban boosters in warm-climate locations responded to the downturn
by initiating post-season “bowl” games to promote tourism and economic
development.

Spectator Sport in Europe

Spectator sports were less prominent overseas. English crowds enjoyed amateur
sporting events like the Oxford and Cambridge rowing and track meets, the
Wimbledon tennis championships, and the Henley regatta, but cricket was still
the national game, while football was the game of industrial workers and Rugby
Union of the middle class. Cricket was extremely slow paced, especially
multiday test matches, and did not draw big crowds, but fans loved the game,
the rituals, and how it “provided a shared vocabulary of ‘fairness’ and embodied
a set of principles for the decent organization of public life.” The sport produced
the first knighted working-class athlete, Jack Hobbs, a hero and a gentleman
(Holt 1989: 267–8).
The British masses were fans of thoroughbred, greyhound, and motorcycle
racing, and like the Irish and French were heavily into gambling sports. On-
track betting was legal since 1906, as was off-track betting on a credit/cash basis.
The Racecourse Betting Act of 1928 created a state-controlled bookmaker
presence at racetracks employing pari-mutuels, and in 1933 the Royal
INTRODUCTION 13

Commission on Lotteries and Betting concluded that gambling did not create
serious social or economic problems, and supported licensing horse-race
gambling (Donoughe 2000; Hudson 2014; Huggins 2007a: 291–2; Huggins
and Williams 2006: 184–5). Racing historian Mike Huggins argues that “racing
both symbolized and reflected the undemocratic nature of British society” and
postulates their acceptance of “its inequality and snobbery may have helped [the
working class] acquiesce in society’s wider inequalities” (Huggins 2003: 206–7;
Gambling Commission 2018). By 1939, off-track gambling had about 8 million
customers betting around £500 million a year. There are currently around 1,000
legal betting shops in London alone (Donoughue 2000; Gambling Commission
2018; Hudson 2014; Huggins 2003: 206–7, 213, 291–2; Panja 2018).
Dog racing was an evening sport first commercialized in the USA, but widely
banned because of the gambling and connections to organized crime. By 1927,
5.5 million Britons attended dog races and sixty-two companies took bets on
dogs. A decade later, there were 220 tracks attended by 38 million (Birley 1995:
293; Huggins 2007: 98–120).
Professional football was a big working-class spectator sport in the UK,
promoting a sense of community among fans. Holt argues they saw soccer as “an
area of free expression and cultural independence” and an outlet for competition
unavailable at work. The Football League’s ninety-two clubs operated as a low-
risk, low-reward business, with little interest in increasing press coverage, adding
evening or Sunday games, or encouraging gambling. Owners paid very low
wages and exercised enormous power over players through the transfer system.
Some 6 million people bet on soccer pools in the 1930s (Goldblatt 2014: 183–4;
Murray 1996: 82–3, 109–10, 159, 165, 169–70).
Central Europe in the 1920s became a center for professional soccer, though
Germany did not have pro soccer until 1932. Vienna’s vigorous sporting culture
was heavily influenced by its strong working-class identity and left-wing politics.
The Wiener Fußball-Verband organized the first pro league outside of Britain in
1924, won by the Zionist Hakoah sports club (Murray 1996: 45; Goldblatt
2014: 176, 193, 200).
Interwar soccer was played at a very high level in South America, reflected
by Uruguay’s gold medals at the Paris and Amsterdam Olympics, and the first
World Cup in 1930. One year later Argentina became the first South American
nation to have pro soccer, followed by Uruguay and Brazil. Crowd control was
a severe problem, leading soccer pitches to have moats and barbed wire-lined
fields (Murray 1996: 46–50).
Italy became a dominant soccer force in the 1930s when Mussolini became
the first dictator to use soccer to manipulate and distract the masses, promote
nationalism, and impress other nations. Il Duce’s support of La Liga contributed
to consecutive World Cup victories in 1934 and 1938 (Goldblatt 2014: 273–4;
Murray 1996: 47, 56–67, 121, 124).
14 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

BRITISH SPORT AND IMPERIALISM

The British were highly successful in employing sports to maintain cultural, if
not political, ties with their empire and former colonies, institutionalized by the
British Empire Games (later the Commonwealth Games) in 1930. India became
so adept at the British sport of field hockey that they won three straight Olympic
gold medals (1928–36), and its cricket team competed against England in a test
match in 1932, giving the colonials a chance to evaluate themselves against the
mother country. Cricket was equally important in the Caribbean where top
players at elite secondary schools became local heroes and English gentlemen.
Athletes like author C. L. R. James were strong believers in the game’s ethic.
However, local cricket clubs were divided by skin tone and education.
Consequently cricket had different political meanings for white officials,
brown-skinned clerks, and black dockworkers (Holt 1989: 202–12, 218–23;
Bateman 2009, 122, 157–95).

FIGURE 0.7: India national cricket team 1932. First Test match – England vs All
India. England captain Douglas Jardine steers a ball from All India bowler Amir Singh
past second slip during the inaugural first Test match between England and All India,
played at Lord’s cricket ground in London, June 25, 1932. The non-striking batsman
is Eddie Paynter. England won the match by 158 runs. Photo by Popperfoto. Getty
Images.
INTRODUCTION 15

Modern cricket began to dramatically change in 1962 when county cricket

clubs began playing a one-day version of the game. The first international one-
day match was played in 1971, and in 1975 the Cricket World Cup was
established. British citizens of West Indian and South Asian descent today often
support teams from their parental homeland on tour in the UK as a protest
against prejudice and an affirmation of their self-identification. Sociologists
argue that sport today is still one of the main means through which notions of
“Britishness” are constructed, contested, and resisted (Fletcher 2014: 293).
Britain’s sporting relationship was different with its former white colonies,
enabling Australia, Canada, and New Zealand to reconcile nationalism and
British culture. Hockey-mad Canada, with a large francophone population, did
not follow English sports, but preferred Scottish curling, First Nation’s lacrosse,
and American baseball, while vigorously respecting the English amateur code.
Australia and New Zealand were heavily involved in cricket, rugby, and track
and field, and competition between metropole and periphery was so fierce that
British teams sometimes bolstered a touring team with “ringers,” including an
Indian in the 1932 cricket tour of Australia. Two years later the British relied
on the new bodyline bowling tactic to intimidate Australian batsmen, leading to
political repercussions, though the English aesthetic remained dominant
(Bateman: 145–56). Afrikaners in the Union of South Africa regularly played in
the Commonwealth Games through 1958, but did not identify with British
values. They preferred the more manly game of rugby to cricket to assert their
ethnic pride and independence (Holt 1989: 212–15, 221, 224–36).

THE OLYMPIC GAMES

The preeminent worldwide sporting event was the quadrennial Olympic
Games, significant not only for the competition, but also for its symbolic value
and impact on international relations. In 1920 the Games resumed in Antwerp,
Belgium after an eight-year hiatus, with twenty-eight countries, many of whom
struggled to send a team. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) banned
the losing Central Powers (Germany, Austria, Turkey, Hungary, and Bulgaria)
and the radical USSR. The IOC introduced the five-ringed Olympic flag and
the releasing of doves to represent peace. The USA won 95 medals, well ahead
of second-placed Sweden (64), a major athletic power that was neutral in the
Great War. American women competed for the first time since 1900 and
captured all three women’s swimming events in world record time.
Four years later, France hosted the first Winter Olympics in Chamonix, as
well as the Summer Games in Paris. The Winter Games were modest festivals,
staged in out-of-the-way winter resorts frequented by the social elite. The Paris
Games cost FF10 million ($6,801,067 in 2018), but, despite very good
attendance, expenditures ran about 45 percent more than receipts. The USA
16 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

took 99 medals and France 38, while Finland, taking 37, and led by national
hero Paavo Nurmi, dominated the distance races (Zarnowski 1992: 21).
The 1928 Summer Games in Amsterdam cost $1.2 million and nearly broke
even. The USA dominated, with 56 medals, followed by Germany’s 31 in its first
appearance since 1912. The press incorrectly reported that all runners in the
women’s 800 meters were totally exhausted or did not finish, “confirming”
negative attitudes about women in sports. The event was discontinued until 1960.
The 1932 Olympic Games were held in the USA at Lake Placid, site of the
country’s best winter sports facilities, and Los Angeles, whose boosters had
previously constructed the Coliseum to secure the Olympics to promote
property values, tourism, and the city’s international stature. The world
economy limited participation to 1,408 athletes, half the number of the
Amsterdam Games, with 42 percent from North America. Men were housed in
the first Olympic village, while 127 women stayed at an upscale hotel. The USA
easily triumphed with 103 medals, far ahead of Italy’s 36. American Babe
Didrikson starred, though limited by IOC rules for women to three events,
winning the javelin (Olympic record), 80-meter hurdles (new world record, or
NWR), and tied for first in the high jump (NWR), losing in a jump-off for
leaping head first. The Games were a huge financial success, ending up with a
$1 million profit (Olympic Century X 1996: 21–3, 28, 168).
Germany was selected as the site of the 1936 Winter and Summer Games
prior to the rise of Adolf Hitler. On April 1, 1933, shortly after Hitler became
Chancellor, the government imposed a boycott of Jewish businesses, and a
week later fired all Jewish civil servants. The Nazi oppression continued for
two years, and on September 15, 1935, the Nuremberg Laws took away the
Jews’ citizenship and civil rights. Calls went out to boycott the games because
of Nazi anti-Semitism, racism, anti-Catholicism, and oppression of socialists
and labor unions, but no nation boycotted the Games. Forty-three percent of
Americans, led by organized labor and leading journalists, favored a boycott,
but the Amateur Athletic Union narrowly voted to send a team (58 to 55.5)
(Large 2007: 69–109).
The Nazis had not originally supported the Olympic Movement, but decided
to spend $30 million to show the world how Germany had risen from the
shadows of the First World War. The German Olympic Committee tried to
ameliorate widespread negative publicity by inviting foreign Olympic officials
to visit Germany to examine prevailing social conditions and by placing two
Olympic medalists with Jewish fathers on their squad.
German planners invented two rituals to tie the Third Reich to Ancient
Greece: the Mt. Olympus torch lighting, and a relay carrying the torch to Berlin
for the cauldron-lighting ceremony. The Summer Games were attended by a
record 3 million people, and provided a grand venue for Nazi propaganda.
German athletes performed exceptionally well, capturing 89 medals to 56 for
INTRODUCTION 17

FIGURE 0.8: Jesse Owens Winning Long Jump at Berlin Olympics, 1936. Jesse
Owens of the United States leaps to gold with a jump of 8.06 meters (26.44 feet), just
7.6 centimeters (3 inches) below his world record. Photo by © Hulton-Deutsch
Collection/CORBIS/Corbis. Getty Images.

the USA. Hungary, fascist Italy, and Japan came in third, fourth, and eighth,
respectively. However, the spectacle’s star was African-American Jesse Owens,
who won four gold medals in track and field, a huge symbolic statement against
Nazi racism.

SPORT DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR

World sport was first strongly affected by the impending conflict in 1938 when
Japan dropped its commitment to host the 1940 Games because of the Sino-
Japanese War. The site was shifted to Helsinki, but canceled after the Russian
invasion in late 1939 (Collins 2007: 161–3). The Nazis employed sports at
concentration and POW camps primarily to entertain their guards. There were
football matches between guards and captives, and boxing matches were staged
at the death camps between prisoners who could be killed if they lost (Gomet
2016: 1099–115; Simpson 2016: 65–88). Thirty former Jewish Olympians
died during the Holocaust.
18 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

The war curtailed sport on the home front. The Football Association (FA)
immediately cancelled its season because of a national ban on the assemblage of
large crowds (Woodlock 2017), and in May 1940 the government closed
around ninety racetracks to conserve gasoline and rubber, though the classic
races were still staged to provide some normality to the home front. A few
tracks were employed for military purposes, like Bath, converted into an RAF
landing site, Nottingham into military camps, and Ascot into a prison for
POWs (Saville 2009).
The White House kept baseball operating to keep up public spirit though the
quality of play dropped sharply with many players in the military. Attendance
in 1943 was down nearly 25 percent from 1941. Chicago Cubs owner Philip K.
Wrigley was so worried that MLB might close that he organized the professional
All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) in 1943. The
players were far more skilled than fans anticipated, but public interest waned
after the war with the return of veteran major leaguers, along with a renewed
opposition to women in non-traditional women’s roles.
American racing was hindered by the rationing of rubber, gas, and steel, and
the closure of certain tracks for wartime needs. Nonetheless, the sport was
extremely popular among people starving for entertainment, setting yearly
national records during the war for purses, gates, and mutual handles. In
January 1945 the Office of War Mobilization closed all tracks as a defense
measure, but they were back in business following VE Day (Devereux 1980:
311–3; Robertson 1964).

SPORT SINCE THE SECOND WORLD WAR

Post-war sport was heavily shaped by diplomatic, political, and cultural
developments. The coming of the Cold War had a very strong influence on
international sport because it was employed as a soft form of diplomacy to
demonstrate the relative superiority of American or Russian social, economic,
and political systems. Other notable developments included the demise of
amateurism, sport’s globalization, the fight against racism, women’s increased
participation, and the impact of performance enhancement drugs.

OLYMPIC DIPLOMACY
The 1948 Winter Games at St. Moritz, Switzerland was the first Olympics
in twelve years, followed by the $32 million London “Austerity Games.”
Germany and Japan were not invited and the USSR felt unprepared and stayed
away. Fanny Blankers-Koen, a 30-year-old Dutch mother captured the
100-meter and 200-meter sprints, the 80-meter high hurdles, and the 4 x
100-meter team relay. She was later voted the female athlete of the century by
INTRODUCTION 19

the International Association of Athletics Federations (Beck 2012b: 28–42;

Bijkert 2004).
The USSR rejoined the Olympic Movement in 1952 in Helsinki. American
and Russian athletes were under strong pressure to prove their nation’s
superiority. Russian athletes were ostensibly amateurs, supported by college
scholarships like many Americans, or by sinecures in the military or secret
police, and further incentivized by cash prizes. The USA won 76 medals, while
the Russians did superbly with 71. The People’s Republic of China participated
for the first time, but left after the IOC recognized the Republic of China
(Taiwan).
Russians dominated the 1956 Winter Olympics with 16 medals at the Italian
ski resort of Cortina d’Ampezzo, and captured 98 medals at the Summer
Games. However, Melbourne was a diplomatic disaster following the Red
Army’s suppression of the Hungarian Revolution. Russian athletes were booed
by spectators, fighting occurred in the Olympic Village, and Hungary won a
bloody semifinal water polo game over Russia 4–0 (Reinhart 1996: 120–39).
Two years later, annual track meets were initiated between the USA and
USSR (1958–1985) to promote cultural exchanges. The Russians dominated,
winning fifteen of nineteen meets. US men outscored Russian men at thirteen
meets, but Russian women outpointed the Americans eighteen times. This
convinced many American sporting groups to seriously promote women’s
athletics (Turrini 2001: 427–71; Turrini 2010).
The 1960 Rome Games was widely televised to Europe and broadcast on
“live” delay elsewhere. Russia outclassed the USA by 103 medals to 71, but the
Games’ heroine was Wilma Rudolph, of Tennessee State University, an
historically black college, who won the 100-meter and 200-meter sprints, and
the 4 x 100-meter relay.
In 1964 the Tokyo Summer Games, the first in Asia, signified Japan’s
redevelopment since the war. Civil rights leaders in the Republic of South Africa
(RSA) initiated a boycott of its Olympic team to pressure the sports-minded
government to halt apartheid. Newly independent sub-Saharan states convinced
the IOC to bar the RSA.
1968 was a major year of worldwide social protests and the Vietnam War.
Harry Edwards’s Olympic Project for Human Rights called for an Olympic
boycott to banish the RSA and Rhodesia from the Olympics, and fire President
Avery Brundage of the IOC, but it fizzled out. Days before the Mexico City
Games, a major protest in the Tlatelolco neighborhood of Mexico City called
for greater civil and democratic rights and social revolution, resulting in over
300 deaths.
The 1968 Games are best remembered for the African-American protest
against American racism, most notably by 200-meter medalists Tommie Smith
and John Carlos. They bowed their heads on the medal stand when the
20 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

National Anthem was played, representing their belief that its theme of freedom
did not apply to black Americans. The IOC responded by expelling them
from the Olympics (Bass 2002: 81–184). The US team won the medal count
over Russia (107 to 91) for the first time since 1952. African runners swept
the five longest distance races, foreshadowing future dominance in distance
running.
West Germany promoted the 1972 Munich Olympics as “the Games of Joy,”
demonstrating national rehabilitation and its newly respected world stature.
The USSR captured 99 medals, the USA 94, and the GDR 66, a huge result for
a nation of 17 million. Mark Spitz won seven gold medals in swimming, all
NWRs. However, the Games are mostly remembered for Black September, a
Palestinian terrorist group, who killed eleven Israelis, generating fears of future
terrorism at major sporting events.
Amateurism was then on its last stand, as equipment manufacturers were
widely known to be paying athletes for endorsements. In 1978, the IOC
recognized “state amateurism,” enabling athletes to receive appearance money,
consulting fees, and payments for TV ads when filtered through their national
sports organization (Llewellyn and Gleaves 2016: 147–8, 152–3, 156, 164;
Bertling 2007: 53). Eight years later, the IOC permitted international sports
federations to allow professionals to compete in the Olympics. This culminated
with the “Dream Team” in Barcelona in 1992.
The 1976 Summer Games in Montreal was a financial disaster, costing
$1.5 billion. The USSR won 125 medals to 94 for the USA, and 90 for the
GDR, whose suspiciously muscle-bound women captured eleven of thirteen
swimming events. Taiwan was banned from Montreal, leading four years later
to the return of the People’s Republic of China to the Olympics for the first
time since 1952.
In 1980 the Winter Games were back at Lake Placid. One of the most
shocking results in international sport occurred in the semifinals when a ragtag
American hockey squad won a 4–3 victory against the USSR, winner of every
Olympic tournament except for the similarly stunning American upset in 1960.
International intrigue returned to the Summer Olympics when American
president Jimmy Carter called for a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games after
Russia invaded Afghanistan. Russia retaliated by refusing to go to Los Angeles
for the 1984 Summer Games. Los Angeles was the sole bidder that year because
potential rivals were worried off by fears of terrorism, Montreal’s financial
disaster, and the limited expectations for long-term benefits. The IOC revised
its constitution to allow private corporate sponsorship, enabling businessman
Peter Ueberroth of the Olympic Organizing Committee (LAOOC) to finance
the games through a $225-million TV deal with ABC, minimum $4 million
commercial sponsorships, and ticket sales. The LAOOC produced a $222.7
million profit.
INTRODUCTION 21

Russia returned for the Seoul Games in 1988, winning 132 medals, followed
by the GDR with 102, embarrassing the USA with 94. However, four years
later, following the breakup of the USSR and the impending end of South
African apartheid, the Olympics would lose its geopolitical significance. The
new big Olympic issue was the escalating costs of the mega event, which reached
$44 billion for the Summer Games in Beijing (2008) and $51 billion for the
Winter Games at Sochi (2014). This was directly connected to the widespread
corruption among officials who voted on Olympic sites, and the growing
opposition of countries to even bid on the Games.

SOCCER IN THE POSTWAR ERA

Soccer is the world’s most popular team sport reflected by the participation of
211 nations in the 2018 World Cup qualifications. England was the most
prominent soccer power after the Second World War, but did not compete in
the World Cup until 1950 when it lost 1–0 to the United States, the greatest
upset in soccer history. Uruguay won the title by upsetting Brazil 2–1 before
173,850 at Rio’s Maracana Stadium. In 1955 the Union Européenne de Football

FIGURE 0.9: Pelé (Edson Arantes do Nascimento). World’s greatest football player.
The Brazilian played for Santos (1956–74) in Brazil and the New York Cosmos
(1975–7). Photo by Schirner /Ullstein picture. Getty Images.
22 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

Association (UEFA) staged the first European club championship (renamed the
European Cup in 1992) (Goldblatt 2006: 287–304).
South American teams dominated the World Cup from 1950 to 2002, winning
eight of fourteen. Pelé, the world’s greatest player, scored 1,282 goals in 1,364
career games, and led Brazil to three World Cup championships (1958, 1962, and
1970). He had great flair and charisma, epitomizing the Brazilian style of
“beautiful soccer,” combining art, dance, drama, and spectacle (Goldblatt 2006:
375–81).
The English Football League (EFL) only became big time in the mid-1960s.
Owners had opposed TV coverage, Sunday matches, and gambling, although
soccer pools employed 100,000 people. Coaches preferred brawn to skill and
operated as dictators over modestly-paid athletes (Murray 1996: 109–10, 115,
118; Goldblatt 2006: 402, 406).
In 1966 England captured the World Cup, and thirteen years later EFL teams
won eight straight European Cups, emphasizing competitiveness, energy, and
pace. The Spanish Liga then was known for technique and ball control, Italy’s
Serie A stressed defense, and Germany’s Bundesliga encouraged movement,
efficiency, and team play (Goldblatt 2006: 560; Subramanian 2015).
European revenues mainly came from attendance until the late 1960s since
their governments resisted commercialized TV, and owners believed that free
TV would cost them business. Once the move to TV began, teams earned more
money, and big pay raises followed. Teams became increasingly owned by rich
men willing to spend to promote their primary business or for ego gratification
(Murray 1996: 155, 157; Goldblatt 2006: 402–3).
In 1992, twenty-two English teams left the EFL and formed the new English
Premier League (EPL) which in 2016–17 had £4.5 billion in total revenue, the
most of any soccer association. It is the world’s most-watched sports league,
broadcasting in 212 countries, and generating £8.45 billion in world TV rights.
However, the Bundesliga, which still has standing room, draws the largest
crowds, 44,646 per game in 2017–18. Manchester United made £581m in
2016–17 (Germany 2018; Keegan 2017; Onwumechili and Akindes 2014: 7–8;
“Premier League Soars” 2018; Sunday Times 2013). Real Madrid was the third
most valuable sports franchise in 2019 ($4.24 billion). The next most valuable
soccer squads were Barcelona ($4 billion), Manchester United ($3.8 billion),
Bayern Munich ($3 billion), and Manchester City ($2.69 billion). The highest
paid team in all sports in 2019 was Barcelona (£10.5m), followed by Real Madrid
(£8.9m) and Juventus (nearly £8.1m). The next seven highest were all from the
NBA. By revenue the top teams in 2020 were Real Madrid ($796 million),
Manchester United ($795 million), and Barcelona ($724 million) (“Global Sports
Salaries, 2019” 2019; “Forbes’ list of the most valuable football clubs” 2020).
Big profits since the 1980s enabled European teams to buy up the world’s
best players, like Argentine superstar Diego Maradona who transferred to
INTRODUCTION 23

Barcelona in 1982 for a then record £5 million. By 2002 there were over 600
Latin Americans in Europe’s top leagues. A newer source of talent are second-
generation immigrants reared in low-income housing projects like those
surrounding Paris (les banlieues), who comprised much of France’s World Cup
champion squad. Les bleus were once a highly homogeneous white eleven, but
are currently heavily staffed by players of color (Murray 1996: 161; Goldblatt
2006: 778; Badenhausen 2018; Dawson 2018).
Professional soccer has had its share of problems, most notably hooliganism,
which mainly began in England in the 1950s and 1960s, and subsequently
spread throughout Europe (Dunning et al. 1988; Stott and Pearson 2007).
Hooligans were mainly poorly educated, unskilled, racist, and sexist young
white men, who berated and attacked rival fans before, during, and after
matches. Most soccer riots were attributed to hooliganism (Cronin 2017;
Dunning et al. 1988; Holt 1989: 329–42; Murray 1996: 125–6, 163–6).
Soccer also suffers from mismanagement and corruption by the Fédération
Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), which runs international soccer,
including the men’s World Cup, viewed on TV in 2018 by 900 million people.
Former presidents João Havelange (1974–98) and Sepp Blatter (1998–2015)
were very corrupt and poor managers. Blatter facilitated Russia securing the
2018 event, on which it spent $11.6 billion, and enabled Qatar to get the 2022
games, despite its insignificant soccer history, disregard of human rights, and
likely climatic problems (Murray 1996: 130–1, 144, 146; Zimbalist 2015: 3–4,
145–6, 148–51).
The US women’s team has been a dominant force in world play, winning
three World Cups (1991, 1999, 2015) and four Olympic championships (1996,
2004–12). The 1991 World Cup game against China drew 90,185, a record
for a woman’s sporting event. The 2015 World Cup match against Japan drew
23 million American televiewers, earning a higher rating than the NBA or
NHL championships. However, this popularity has not transferred well to
pro soccer.

SPECTATOR SPORT IN THE USA

Commercialized sport boomed in the USA after the Second World War, a time
when fans had money to spend on sporting contests they had often missed during
the war. The exception was thoroughbred racing which had thrived for much of
the war. Beginning in the late 1940s, flat racing annually achieved the largest
attendance of any sport for over thirty years. Fans enjoyed outstanding tracks,
superb jockeys, and great horses, including three Triple Crown winners between
1973 and 1978. Attendance peaked at 74.7 million in 1980. The huge interest
led to renewed interest in urban harness racing that had languished for decades.
New York promoters initiated in 1940 evening racing at Long Island’s Roosevelt
24 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

Raceway to appeal to a working-class audience. However, the sport’s expansion

was not feasible until after the war when entrepreneurs in other cities, especially
Chicago, established their own politically connected tracks and racing clubs
which became huge successes (Riess 1989: 190–1; Riess 2014: 40–2).
Thoroughbred racing was not surpassed by MLB as the leading spectator
sport until 1984. Crowds declined because of the huge takeouts by state
governments, competition from illegal bookmakers, harness racing, state
lotteries and state sponsored off-track betting, the rise of legalized sports
betting in Las Vegas in the 1970s, and the emergence of riverfront casinos
(Riess 2014: 42–7).
While horse racing is currently struggling in the USA, it remains successful in
Great Britain where it is the second most popular spectator sport, in Japan which
stages about 21,000 races annually, and especially in the oil-rich United Arab
Emirates, where in 1996 the $10 million Dubai World Cup was initiated, offering
the biggest purse in the world. It was only surpassed in 2016 by Gulfstream Park’s
$12 million Pegasus World Cup, increased a year later to $16 million (Riess 2014:
43–4; “The Pegasus World Cup Invitational Returns” 2017).
Prize fighting did not get a lot of attention during the war when healthy
young men were away fighting, but fan interest grew afterwards. The sport was
one of early TV’s biggest attractions, with network bouts on as often as six days
a week, featuring stars like heavyweight champion Joe Louis and welterweight
champion (1946–51) Sugar Ray Robinson, 128–1–2 in his first eleven years.
However, too much TV coverage ended up saturating the market. The sport
was also hurt by fighters absorbing too much brutality, and the underworld
influence in the sport, depicted in movies, by Sports Illustrated’s investigations,
and the 1960 Senate inquiry into boxing corruption (Riess 1988: 29–52).
Worldwide interest in pugilism revived with the rise of Muhammad Ali.
Cassius Clay stunned the sports world in 1964 by upsetting heavyweight
champion Sonny Liston, and announcing his new name and membership in
the militant anti-white Nation of Islam. Ali was perceived as a threat to white
Americans, especially after refusing induction into the Army in 1966 as a
conscientious objector, which led to losing his license and championship.
However, he became a popular hero to African Americans and American youth
by standing up for his principles. He returned to the ring in 1970, and one year
later the Supreme Court overturned his conviction for draft dodging. Ali
regained the championship from George Foreman in 1974 in the “Rumble in
the Jungle” in Kinshasa, Zaire.
Boxing’s popularity dropped significantly after Ali’s retirement. The sport
lacked prominent heavyweights, was beset by weak regulation, and had a poor
image due to shady promoters like Don King. Furthermore boxing was so
violent that around 120 American fighters died from boxing blows between
1945 and 2005 (Abreu 2011: 95–113).
INTRODUCTION 25

Major League Baseball

MLB did superbly after the war as attendance doubled from 1944 to 1948
reaching 20,938,388, the most ever until 1962. The minor leagues also boomed,
setting a record in 1949 with fifty-nine leagues, and a record 39.6 million
spectators, that lasted for fifty years. Television coverage became widespread by
1947, increasing fan interest, but also enabling them to stay home and watch
ballgames or other free TV shows. This led to baseball attendance at all levels
declining in the early 1950s. By 1970 there were just twenty minor leagues
drawing 10 million spectators. (Jay 2004: 18; Official Site of Minor League
Baseball 2018; Kronheim 2011: 1–62).
MLB integrated in 1947 when the Brooklyn Dodgers signed African
American Jackie Robinson despite the opposition of other owners, white fans,
and many ballplayers. Dodgers president Branch Rickey selected Robinson
because of his extraordinary athleticism, military service, attendance at a white
university, and upcoming marriage. Critics worried that integration would hurt
profits and the status of the game, open up rosters to more African Americans.
and promote integration in the broader society. Robinson persevered despite
enormous prejudice, and led the Dodgers to the 1947 pennant.
MLB did not integrate speedily, and it was not until 1959 that the last team,
the Boston Red Sox, integrated. MLB had several African-American stars by
then, including Hank Aaron, Roy Campanella, and Willie Mays, but people of
color were still underrepresented. The proportion of African-American major
leaguers rose to 10.1 percent in 1962, peaked in 1981 at 18.7 percent, but was
down to 8.4 percent in 2018, reflecting inadequate inner-city youth programs,
and the African-American focus on the NBA and the NFL. However, the Latino
presence rose from 5 percent in 1955 to 29.8 percent in 2017 (Armour and
Levitt 2017).
MLB salaries in the 1950s averaged around $5,000 a year due to the glut of
talent, its exemption from anti-trust legislation, and a weak union. In 1966
labor economist Marvin Miller became director of the Major League Baseball
Players Association, and negotiated salaries for 1967 that averaged $19,000.
Then in 1975 arbitrators awarded free agency to pitchers Andy Messersmith
and Jim McNally, which led to a big escalation in salaries, reaching $144,000
in 1980, $1.9 million in 2000, and $4.52 million in 2018 (Grundy and Rader
2015: 210).
MLB teams began to relocate in 1953 when the Boston Braves moved
west to Milwaukee, the first franchise shift since 1903. One year later, the
St. Louis Browns migrated to Baltimore and, in 1955, the Philadelphia
Athletics to Kansas City. These moves were motivated by decaying ballparks,
promised publicly owned ballparks, and white flight to suburbia and the
sunbelt, leaving behind declining inner-city neighborhoods with large black
populations.
26 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

The biggest move came in 1958 when the financially successful Dodgers and
Giants relocated from New York to Los Angeles and San Francisco, respectively,
made viable through air travel. The Dodgers started off playing in the Coliseum,
but in 1962 moved to publicly owned land where the team built the $23 million
Dodger Stadium, the first privately financed park since 1923. Thereafter all
new major league parks were publicly subsidized until 2000, when the Giants
built A&T Park. These developments led to league expansion in 1961, and
there are currently thirty franchises. Annual MLB attendance rose from 16.2
million in the 1950s to 80.9 million in the 2000s, but declined to 73.5 million
in the 2010s (“1950–1959 Baseball Attendance” n.d.).
The average MLB team in 2017 was worth $1.54 billion, led by the Yankees,
who play in the new $1.5 billion Yankee Stadium, at $3.7 billion. The average
ball club’s value was far below the $2.4 billion for the NFL, but higher than
$1.355 billion for the NBA and $517 million for the NHL, and just slightly
above the $1.458 billion for the world’s top twenty soccer teams (“Average
Player Salary in Major League Baseball . . .” 2018; Badenhausen 2019; “Business
of Baseball” 2018; Ozanian 2017; Ozanian et al. 2019).

The National Hockey League and the National Basketball Association

The NHL was a six-team league from 1942 until 1967 when it first expanded
to what is now a thirty-one-team league with seven Canadian franchises and
twenty-four in the USA. European players first entered the NHL in 1965, and
currently comprise 27.2 percent of the rosters, compared to 27.4 percent
Americans, and 45.3 percent Canadians (“Active NHL Players Totals by
Nationality – Career Stats” 2018).
In 1946, the Basketball Association of America (BAA) was organized with
eleven big-city teams, ten of which were owned by arenas seeking to fill empty
dates. The BAA merged in 1949 with the regional National Basketball League,
whose teams were located in small and mid-sized Midwestern cities, to form
the seventeen-team NBA. The NBA struggled at first, and was down to eight
teams in 1954, dropping nearly all the smaller-city teams, but currently has
thirty-two teams. The Boston Celtics is its most successful franchise, winning
seventeen NBA championships.
The average NBA player in 1967 made $20,000, which rose to $170,000 in
1980 because of free agency and competition from the American Basketball
Association (founded in 1967), which merged with the NBA in 1976. The
average salary in 2019 was $6.67 million (“2017–18 NBA Player Contracts”
2018; Grundy and Rader 2015: 354; “2019–20 NBA Player Contracts 2020”;
Williams 2019).
The NBA did not integrate until 1950, and maintained an unofficial quota
system until the 1960s. Black players introduced a different style of play that
was faster, played above the rim, and more creative. Since 1990, about 75
INTRODUCTION 27

percent of NBA players have been black, and they have been more successful
achieving management roles than in any other sport. By 2017 there had been
seventy-one black coaches, including nine that year (“History of Black NBA
Coaches” 2017), and the Charlotte Bobcats have had black ownership since
2004–5.
NBA globalization has risen markedly since 1990 when there were just
twelve Europeans in the NBA, reaching seventy-four in 2017, far surpassing
the forty-three white American players. The record for foreign-born players
was set in 2016–17 at 113. By 2004, the NBA was televised in 205 countries,
and currently 20 percent of NBA merchandise is sold overseas. Its biggest face
overseas is still Michael Jordan, whose Nike line sold $500 million in the past
five years (Badenhausen 2018; “New Record Number of 74 Europeans in the
NBA” 2017; NBA.comStaff 2020).

The National Football League

The NFL struggled during the Second World War, but by 1946 was on the edge
of financial success. This led to the rise of the rival All America Football
Conference (AAFC), an integrated league with franchises in Los Angeles and
San Francisco, innovations which the NFL copied. Four years later, three
AAFC teams joined the NFL, making it a thirteen-team league.
Early TV coverage produced mixed results, but would soon be the key to the
NFL’s future. The turning point came with the 1958 championship game at
Yankee Stadium, won by the Baltimore Colts 23–17 in overtime against the
New York Giants, viewed by 30 million people. Commissioner Pete Roselle
thereafter convinced owners to support the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961
that legalized the pooling of national TV revenue.
The NFL’s growing popularity led to the creation of the American Football
League (AFL) in 1960, which struggled at first, drawing just 41 percent of
the NFL’s 40,000 average crowds. The AFL’s big moment came in 1964 when
it signed a five-year $36 million contract with NBC, enabling it to enter a
high-priced bidding war for rookies with the NFL. The leagues merged two
years later, the season culminating with an inter-league championship game,
retroactively known as Super Bowl I. In 1967, the average player made $25,000,
higher than MLB or the NBA, but future gains were more modest due to their
short careers and a weak Players Association. Average salaries rose to $79,000
in 1980, $352,000 in 1990, and $2.1 million in 2017. Jobs in the thirty-two-
team league are very dangerous and a study of 111 recently deceased players
found 99 had Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (“Here’s what the average
NFL player makes in a season” 2019; Rader 2009: 354; Renzulli and Connley
2019; Sifferlin 2017; Woodruff, 2018).
The NFL reintegrated slowly, beginning in 1946. The Washington Redskins
were the last team to integrate in 1962. Black players soon composed about 30
28 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

percent of rosters, but were usually “stacked” into positions that required
athleticism, but little decision-making. This changed by the mid-1980s when
blacks regularly played quarterback and middle linebacker. The NFL has been
about 70-percent black over the last decade (Reid and McManus 2018; Ross
1999).
Football in the 1970s supplanted baseball as the national pastime. The
greater popularity came from rule changes promoting a fast-paced passing
offense, an ideology more in line with dominant social values, and especially
excellent TV coverage. Annual team TV revenues more than doubled from $6
million in 1977 to $14.2 million in 1982. By 2018, league revenue was over
$16 billion, with $8.78 going to the team, and 48 percent to the players. The
average team had an operating profit of $91 million, and the league had twenty-
seven of the fifty most valuable sports franchises in the world. Half of the
revenue came from TV ($244 million per team), and the rest from admission
fees, concessions, parking, and stadium naming rights. One year later the Dallas
Cowboys were up to $5.5 billion, and the average team was worth $2.86
billion. The most expensive stadiums in the world were MetLife Stadium in
East Rutherford, NJ, and Mercedes Benz Stadium in Atlanta, which each cost
$1.6 billion (Badenhausen 2017, 2019; Colangelo 2019; Kaplan 1917; “NFL
Evaluations 2918; “Sports Money” 2018; Ozanian et al. 2019).

Other Professional Sports

Auto racing, golf, and tennis are prominent worldwide professional sports.
European racing is mainly grand-prix racing over closed public roads. The
British manufactured thirty-seven winning vehicles from 1950 to 2018, though
Ferrari cars won the most (fifteen), while British drivers captured the most wins
(eighteen) (“F-1 Formula Champions” 2018).
The Indianapolis 500, with open-wheel and open-cockpit automobiles,
draws as many as 300,000 fans, making it the biggest single spectatorial sporting
event in the world, with a winning prize of $2.5 million. However, North
American racing is dominated by NASCAR (National Association for Stock
Car Racing), founded by Bill France, Sr. in 1948. It sanctions over 100 racetracks
employing stock cars (ordinary vehicles modified for racing). The sport
represented an invented tradition that became part of white southern memory,
reminiscent of the 1930s when many drivers delivered untaxed liquor by
outrunning revenuers. Ironically, most drivers are no longer southerners, 40
percent of spectators are women, and the big increase in fandom is outside the
South (Davis 2009; Hugenberg and Hugenberg 2008).
Postwar professional golf was dominated by Americans Ben Hogan, who
won nine majors, and Sam Snead who won seven. Public interest boomed in the
1960s due to TV, the charisma of Arnold Palmer, who won seven majors
INTRODUCTION 29

between 1958 and 1964, altering golf’s country-club image to a people’s game,
and Jack Nicklaus, who won nineteen major titles. Tiger Woods reigned over
golf from the late 1990s to 2013, winning fourteen majors, and was PGA
Player of the Year eleven times. He became the first athlete to earn over $1
billion, and his multiracial background helped make the game appear more
accessible.
Pro golf today is highly globalized. Swedish star Annika Sörenstam dominated
the women’s tour with ninety international championships, $22 million
earnings, and Player of the Year eight times between 1995 and 2005. She was
followed by Lorena Ochoa of Mexico, #1 in the world (2007–2010). In 2018,
eight of the top ten women players in the world were Asian (Badenhausen
2009; “Career Money” 2016; “Official Money” 2018).
Amateurism dominated tennis until 1968 when open tennis was initiated at
the British Hard Court Championships. There were a number of professional
tours at this time, but the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) founded in
1972 eventually won out, and since 1990 has organized the worldwide men’s
tour. The main women’s pro competition was originally the Virginia Slims Tour
(VST) established in 1970 by leading female players, notably Billie Jean King,
irate that women were getting as little as 8.5 percent of men’s earnings in the
same tournament. The VST was supplanted in 1973 by the Women’s Tennis
Association, the year when the US Open offered men and women equal prizes.
The dominant women pros were Billie Jean King, Martina Navratilova,
Steffi Graf, and Serena Williams. Ms. Williams won thirty-nine Grand Slam
events, and was selected “Sportsperson of the Year” in 2015 by Sports Illustrated.
One year later she earned $27 million from purses and endorsements (“#51
Serena Williams, Athlete Tennis” 2017). The most successful men’s pro was
Roger Federer of Switzerland, who won twenty Grand Slam tournaments, and
was top player in the world for 237 weeks straight.

BIG-TIME AMERICAN INTERCOLLEGIATE SPORT

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) is a huge operation with
a budget of $1.1 billion in 2017, supervising twenty-one sports for women and
nineteen for men in three divisions. The NCAA was a weak organization prior
to the Second World War, with authority limited to settling playing and
eligibility rules, and protecting amateurism (NCAA Surpasses $1B in Annual
Revenue” 2017). It did not even run the most prestigious post-season basketball
competition, the National Invitational Tournament in Madison Square Garden,
established in 1938, one year before the NCAA’s national championship.
The NCAA encountered two major crises in 1951 when there was widespread
cheating at the United States Military Academy, then a football powerhouse,
that led to the expelling of thirty-seven football players, and a nationwide plot
30 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

to fix basketball games that involved thirty-two players at seven schools who
were paid off by gamblers to keep the score close, but not necessarily lose.
Former math teacher and professional gambler Charles K. McNeil invented the
“point spread,” which in the 1940s became a successful method to encourage
wagering on mismatches by predicting the anticipated point differential (Boyle
1986). A second major basketball betting scandal occurred in 1961, leading to
the indictment of forty-nine players from twenty-seven colleges.
Integration was a big long-term issue for the NCAA. African-American
athletes were excluded from virtually all predominantly white southern
universities until the late 1960s and black athletes were underrepresented in
northern colleges. Major southern institutions would not even play teams with
black players. The first steps toward southern integration occurred in the mid-
1950s at lower-prestige state institutions like North Texas State whose student
body had already integrated (Marcello 1987).
Hostility to integration was especially fierce in the prestigious Southeastern
Conference (SEC), abetted by racist state governors like George Wallace of
Alabama. In 1967 the University of Kentucky became the first SEC football
team to integrate, pushed by a coach who badly wanted to win. He recruited
ideal candidates who were star athletes, academically well prepared, and not
considered potential troublemakers. The last major institutions to integrate
their football elevens were Louisiana State and Mississippi in 1972 (Henderson
1997; Martin 2010).
The NCAA’s power today comes from its control over lucrative football and
basketball telecasts. Intercollegiate football boomed in the 1960s when annual
attendance reached 30 million, and then rose to 40 million in the 1970s,
accompanied by big increases in TV revenues. In 1984 the NCAA lost its monopoly
control when the courts ruled individual teams and leagues could arrange their own
deals. The SEC alone generated $375 million in TV sports revenue in 2016. CBS
currently pays $1.1 billion a year to telecast “March Madness,” the source of
90 percent of NCAA revenue (Garcia 2018; Smith and Ourand 2016).

SPORT AND GENDER

Sport remains a primarily male sphere, a socially constructed masculinity-
building institution in a patriarchal society, an important male bonding ritual
that serves as a shared topic of mutual interest among males to help socialize
boys and young men. Organized youth sports help participants strengthen their
gender identity by displaying their strength, aggression, competitiveness, speed,
bravery, and heroism (Fine 1987). However, since the 1970s, physical culture
has increasingly become an activity appropriate for all genders, an important
activity for acculturating girls and young women, giving them a sense of identity
and community through organized play, sports clubs, and school sports.
INTRODUCTION 31

The push for female physicality took an important forward step in the 1950s
through the rise of an American fitness movement that emerged following
research that found that nearly 60 percent of American children failed at least
one physical test compared to 9 percent in Europe. Newly elected president
John F. Kennedy, in 1960, became a strong proponent of fitness for health and
for Cold War purposes, criticizing the sedentary male American lifestyle
(Kennedy 1960). The fitness movement was especially appealing to housewives
worried about their own health and appearance, who became the main market
for TV exercise gurus Debbie Drake and Jack LaLanne.
The fitness movement promoted jogging in the late 1960s. Running clubs
sprang up to promote fun runs, mental health, and socializing, along with
private health clubs with professional trainers, classes in activities like
aerobic dance, and such amenities as restaurants with juice bars. Jogging’s
popularity created a boom in fancy running gear that enriched manufacturers
like Nike (worth nearly $30 billion in 2017). Huge numbers of men and
women participated in such long-distance races as the New York Marathon,
which by 2000 drew over 50,000 competitors (McKenzie 2013: 106, 109–42;
Martin 2011).
Traditional constraints on women’s athletics weakened in the mid-1960s
with the rise of the women’s rights movement that demanded equal rights with
men; the counterculture, which questioned traditional ideas and beliefs about
physical activity; the sexual revolution of the 1960s–70s, which challenged
traditional gender behavior; and the aforementioned dismal performance of
Americans against Russian women. Leading politicians, sports leaders, and
the national media urged high schools and colleges to prepare athletic
women for sport’s Cold War. One outcome was the formation in 1971 of the
Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women to promote non-scholarship
intercollegiate women’s competition and national championships. Tennis star
and role model Billie Jean King, an advocate for women’s sports and equal pay,
won in 1973 the winner-take-all $100,000 “Battle of the Sexes” against 55-year-
old hustler and former tennis champion Bobby Riggs.
The most important development was the revolutionary Title IX of the
Educational Amendments Act of 1972 that outlawed sexual discrimination by
school districts and colleges receiving federal aid, leading to a huge increase in
female participation in competitive sports. The proportion of girls playing
interscholastic sports rose from 3.7 percent in 1972 to 40 percent in 2012 and
women in varsity college sports sharply increased from under 30,000 in 1972
to 212,000 in 2012 (Lee and Dusenbery 2012). A long-term impact of Title IX
was that in 2012 and 2016 American women won more Olympic medals than
their male teammates.
Another group defined by their sexuality whom conventional wisdom
considered non-participants were gay men, presumably because they were
32 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

effeminate and not “real men” (McKenzie 2013: 99–100). In the 1980s,
homosexual athletes slowly began “coming out.” Straight men were threatened
by their presence in the locker room, and a new reality that dramatically
challenged a traditional criterion of manliness. On the other hand, the
conventional wisdom about lesbians was that they were disproportionately
athletic, and thus “unwomanly.” Public concerns about lesbian athletes date
at least to the 1930s, when women’s softball became controversial because
of widespread suspicions that physically strong and masculine-looking
players were lesbians who enjoyed sport and used the playing field to make
social connections that threatened their straight teammates (Cahn 1994:
164–206).
Skilled LGBTQ long felt compelled to keep their sexual orientation secret,
concerned that publicizing their sexuality could threaten their athletic careers
and livelihoods. Bill Tilden, winner of six Wimbledon and fourteen US Open
championships remained “in the closet” while active, and multisport star Babe
Didrikson hid behind her sewing skills and marriage to a professional wrestler
(Hornblum 2018: 397–401; Cayleff 1996).
Gay athlete visibility was boosted the 1980s by the Gay Rights Movement,
the Gay Games, first held in San Francisco in 1982 with 1,350 athletes, and
being “outed,” as happened to Billie Jean King in 1981. Today proud lesbian
women are prominent in several sports, especially tennis, basketball, softball,
track and field, soccer, speed skating, and track. However, there are still overtly
few homosexual athletes. They are most prominent in sports that stress elegance
and style, like figure skating and diving, most notably Greg Louganis, winner of
four Olympic gold medals (1984–8).
Sports leaders today have a difficult time resolving how to resolve certain
sexual identity matters like the gender identity of particular female athletes and
how to deal with transgendered athletes. The latter issue surprisingly dates to
1936 when two very prominent European track stars altered their identification
from female to male following surgery (“Change of Sex” 1936). Afterwards
President Avery Brundage of the American Olympic Committee called for
examinations of women Olympians. A couple of years later, Dora Ratjen, who
came in fourth in the high jump at the Berlin Olympics, was discovered to have
been a boy raised as a girl.
In the 1960s many observers questioned the gender of the Press sisters,
Russian athletes who won a combined five track-and-field gold medals, and
they retired once gender verification was introduced. The Olympics in 1968
introduced chromosome testing, but it was banned as inconclusive in 1999,
replaced by testosterone testing. In 2018 the International Association of
Athletics Federation (IAAF) limited the test to races of 400 meters to one mile
(Guilford 2012; Berg 2009; Garza 2018).
INTRODUCTION 33

THE UNDERSIDE OF SPORT

American Sports Betting
While legalized sports betting flourished in the United Kingdom, legalized
sports betting in the United States was limited to on-track racing until
1970 when New York State instituted legal Off-Track Betting (OTB) at
government storefronts, which other states and Canada subsequently emulated.
However, in 2010, New York’s OTB closed, having failed to adequately raise
revenue and eliminate illegal gambling, while simultaneously on-track profits
declined.
Nevada was the only state with legalized sports betting (1931) before OTB,
but it was a minor operation. In 1954 the federal government enacted a 10
percent tax on sports wagers, making it increasingly difficult for the state’s legal
bookies to operate. However, in 1974, Congress lowered the tax to 2 percent.
The Nevada Gaming Control Board thereafter approved sports wagering inside
casinos. Sports gambling significantly picked up, and after the tax was further
dropped to 0.25 percent in 1983, every major Nevada hotel had sports betting.
The latest innovation in sports gambling came in the 1990s when it was
introduced to the Internet in the Caribbean, Mexico, England, and Australia
(Davies 2017: 397).
By 2000 Nevada handled over $3 billion in sports wagers, and $4.2 billion
in 2015, mainly on the Super Bowl and March Madness (Schwartz 2006: 351–
68 ). However, illegal gambling still thrived. The American Gaming Association
estimated that in 2017 $150 billion was illegally wagered on sports (American
Gaming 2017). One year later, the courts ruled that the Bradley Act of 1992,
which banned sports betting everywhere except Nevada and three other states
with sports lotteries, was unconstitutional. This ruling is expected to dramatically
increase state-supervised legal sports gambling.

Betting in the UK
Gambling in the United Kingdom has been a flourishing enterprise, abetted by
the 1960 legalizing of off-track betting. The main sources of sports betting are
soccer, horse racing, and dog racing. The government owned the on-track
betting business until sold to Betfred in 2011, which sold to the UK Tote Group,
which services sixty race courses, high-street betting shops, and the Internet.
London alone has over 1,000 betting shops. The online sports betting market
in the 2010s was worth about £650 million, serving 2.1 million customers.
Thirty-five percent of gambling is currently on sports, led by football (46.7
percent) and horse racing (27.3 percent) (Hudson 2014; “New Ownership
Heralds New Era for the Tote” 2019; “What are the most popular sports to bet
on in the UK?” 2020).
34 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

The Abuse of Athletes

Drugs were employed by trainers in the nineteenth century to speed up racehorses
(strychnine), let them run without pain (morphine), or stifle them (tranquilizers).
Human cyclists, distance runners, and swimmers have used performance
enhancing drugs (PEDs) like strychnine, caffeine, and cocaine for well over a
hundred years. In 1928 the International Amateur Athletic Federation banned
performance-enhancing drugs, but without requiring testing (Gleaves 2012, 30,
33; Rosen 2008: 3–17).
By the 1950s, scientists had moved on from studying the influence of
testosterone on athletic performance to synthetic anabolic steroids. Steroids were
soon used to enhance performance by football players, weightlifters, and
competitors in field events, leading to new world records. PED use became an
Olympic issue in 1960 after Danish cyclist Knud Jensen died during a 100-kilometer
race after using vasodilators to enhance blood circulation. However, the IOC left
drug-usage control to each sport’s own international federation.
The GDR and the USSR in the 1960s spent millions on scientific research
and training programs, anticipating impressive results for little risk. Many of
their athletes were unaware of being manipulated, though young women
developed substantial muscularity, deepened voices, and facial hair, and
damaged their reproductive organs. In 1990, after the collapse of the GDR,
uncovered Stasi records provided evidence of the misdeeds (Dennis and Grix
2012; Hunt 2011).
The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), in 1999, under the aegis of the
United Nations, various national governments, and leading private sports
organizations drew up anti-doping rules to help the IOC enforce doping
regulations, but proved ineffective. Thirty percent of athletes at the 2011 IAAF
world championships admitted to taking PEDs, yet almost none had tested
positively (“More than 30 Percent of Athletes” 2017).
A major 2015 WADA report found widespread doping was so rampant in
Russia that the IOC banned 111 athletes for the 2016 Summer Olympics and
Paralympics, and barred the Russian Olympic Committee from the 2018 Winter
Olympics. Since 1968, Russians have been stripped of 46 Olympic medals, 32
percent of the 143 medals stripped for drug usage ( “List of Stripped Olympic
Medals” 2018).
PED usage was rampant among pro football players by the 1970s, when
around 75 percent of linemen and linebackers were regular users. MLB’s drug
situation was nearly as pervasive, and became well known because of the home-
run barrage of the late 1990s, accompanied by Barry Bonds’s and Sammy Sosa’s
physical transformation. Mark McGwire hit a record 70 home runs in 1998,
but later admitted to taking androstenedione, an androgen then permitted by
MLB that increases testosterone production. Bonds’s home-run production
skyrocketed at age 37 as he stroked 209 in four seasons, including a record 73
INTRODUCTION 35

in 2001. Four years later MLB introduced a new drug policy calling for year-
round, unannounced testing, with suspensions as long as one year. As of 2018,
sixty-four Major Leaguers had received suspensions for drug use (Davies 2017:
409–19; “List of Major League Baseball Players Suspended for Performance-
Enhancing Drugs” 2018).
The past few years has seen shocking revelations of coaches and physicians
physically abusing athletes, particularly children and young women. Assistant
Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky was sent down for rape and child
sexual abuse, former speaker of the US House of Representatives Dennis
Hastart was found guilty of abusing teenage wrestlers when a high-school
coach, and Dr. Lawrence Nassar of Michigan State University and the USA
Gymnastics team was convicted of molesting more than 150 girls and women.

CONCLUSION
By 2020 the US was still at the apex of world sport, but Great Britain was no
longer a major player, long supplanted by the Soviet Union/Russia as the prime
US rival. However, since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia and its
many former minions has faltered a bit as the major foil of American sporting
hegemony, particularly in the Olympics. Since 2008, China has emerged as the
central rival of the USA in overall medal counts, perhaps a portent of the future
beyond 2020.
Sport is a major recreational and commercial activity around the world,
exemplified by the 206 nations participating in the 2016 Rio Olympics, more
than the number of states in the United Nations. Sport was no longer an
exclusively male sphere, but an area of substantial activity for women in the
Western world, providing a means of displaying prowess, now considered
appropriate to their gender. The once highly-respected status of the amateur
athlete has virtually disappeared outside the Anglo-American world, and is
increasingly seen as antiquated in big-time intercollegiate sport. The leading
male and female athletes in major sports like football are international
celebrities, although for the most part, just the men still make the big money.
36
 CHAPTER ONE

The Purpose of Sport

WILLIAM J. MORGAN

To say some object or activity has a purpose might seem to be a simple,

uncomplicated matter. For instance, suppose I’m cleaning out my garage and
find a hammer I had misplaced some time ago behind a stack of old magazines.
The very moment I spy it I know, without having to think about it, that any
time I need, say, to put up another shelf in my garage or my upstairs office, I can
use my hammer to do so. That is because the purpose of a hammer is to build
and construct things like shelves. Indeed, it was made specifically to accomplish
such purposes, which is why it has the physical shape and properties it does.
That same hammer, however, might come in handy to achieve other purposes.
Suppose, for instance, while repotting some plants in my garage one day I am
attacked by an intruder who intends to do me harm, spotting the hammer
nearby I pick it up to ward off my would-be attacker. True, this time I had to
think first—and given the situation without a moment to spare—about using
the hammer for the purpose of protecting myself. But, again, my realization
that I could use my hammer for this very different purpose was as simple as it
was straightforward—the mere sight of it was all I needed to put it to this
protective use.
Can the same be said regarding the purpose of a complex, highly structured
social practice like sport? After all, sport, too, has an easily recognizable
purpose, which is roughly winning. And, of course, like the hammer, it, too,
was specifically created and crafted to serve this purpose. Furthermore, it can
also serve very different purposes, such as a providing a public gathering place
for members of a group to socialize, or to talk over a business proposal while
playing a round of golf. However, I want to claim that, in the case of sport,
determining what is its purpose is a much more complicated matter. It is

37
38 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

decidedly more complicated because unlike hammers, tools, and other sorts of
human projects and endeavors, what its purpose is can’t be directly read off of
the physically observable movements that players actually make within its
carefully demarcated athletic confines. The complicating factor here is that
sport is an institutional creation, and as such confers certain institutional
statuses on the physical actions that take place on the playing field. If one is
unfamiliar with these institutional statuses, then one won’t have the foggiest
idea that when they see, for instance, a person kicking a ball into a net that a
goal has just been scored, or a person wielding a small stick and using it to
propel a small ball into a small hole that a putt has just been sunk. In other
words, the bare physical actions of kicking a ball and striking a ball with a stick
will give the uninformed observer (one not acquainted with the institutions of
football or golf) nary a clue as to what is the point of either of these actions.
Unlike hammers and other such artifacts, then, determining what the goal of
sport is can’t be read directly off of the bodily actions that take place there or
the physical properties of the various objects that are used in athletic contests.
Since my aim in this chapter is to shed light on the purpose(s) of sport, I will
begin by offering an account of its complex institutional character. Next, I will
argue that sport answers to three different kinds of rationales. The first is what
I call its internal purpose, which derives from its intrinsic structural composition
and makeup. The second I call its external purpose, which depends upon but
has no intrinsic connection to sport itself, to its internal constitutive features.
The third I call its hybrid internal purpose, which has to do with the particular
historical and social contexts in which it is played and observed, and, more
particularly, with the way the larger conventions and mores of the communities
and societies that populate these historical and social contexts inform its overall
goal and practice.

DOES SPORT HAVE A PURPOSE? AN OBJECTION

But before we begin our inquiry into the purpose of sport, we first need to get
out of the way an obvious, if seemingly far-fetched, objection that sport, in fact,
doesn’t have a discernible purpose. What seems so counterintuitive about this
objection is that sport, like most social practices, is nothing if not a goal-
oriented, purpose-driven activity. Nonetheless, the claim that it is unlike most
other human endeavors in lacking such an evident purpose has been made by
no less an august figure than the former, now deceased, United States Supreme
Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Scalia argued such in a dissenting opinion
regarding a case brought by a professional golfer whose congenital leg disability
prevented him from walking a golf course, and who sued under the American
with Disabilities Act for the right to use a cart contrary to the rules of the
Professional Golf Association (PGA). The Supreme Court found in his favor
THE PURPOSE OF SPORT 39

arguing that walking is not an essential skill of golf. Scalia’s dissent reasoned
that “To say something is ‘essential’ is ordinarily to say that it is necessary to the
achievement of a certain object” (Sandel 2007: 43). By “object” here he clearly,
if clumsily, meant the achievement of the goal or purpose of golf. To Scalia’s
way of thinking, however, the problem with the golfer’s case is that “it is the
very nature of a game to have no object [goal] except amusement (that is what
distinguishes games from productive activities),” therefore, “it is quite
impossible to say that any of a game’s arbitrary rules is ‘essential’ ” (43). Scalia
thus concluded that because the aim of sport is only to provide its participants,
and presumably spectators, some vague, amorphous semblance of a pleasurable
experience, no critical assessment can be made as to whether any of its arbitrary
game rules sanctioned by the PGA is more or less essential to producing such
an indeterminate outcome.
Scalia’s mistake here is drawing the wrong inference from his perfectly
plausible premise that the rules of sport are arbitrary in the sense that they
easily could have been configured differently had a gamewright or athletic
community so intended; which, by the way, does indeed distinguish them, as
Scalia remarked, from the instrumental rules of productive activities like, say,
coal mining, in which the rules for extracting coal are determined by the hardly
malleable constraints of nature itself. The wrong inferential move he makes
here is that once the heretofore arbitrary rules are settled upon, formally drawn
up, they are no longer arbitrary in the least nor is the purpose for which they
were devised unclear or vague. After all, it is not as if the presiding rules of golf
give players the option to follow them or not depending upon their subjective
whims. Further, it is not as if the presiding rules of golf leave us in doubt as to
what is the point of golf (to shoot the fewest number of strokes in playing the
requisite rounds of golf). Rightly understood then, there is nothing arbitrary
about the rules of sport or vague about what they require to satisfy its “certain
object.” To suggest otherwise, as Scalia would have us believe, is to fatally
conflate what is at bottom a strictly rule-governed pursuit of athletic perfection
for a bacchanalian pleasure fest in which anything goes so long as it titillates
those who play and watch golf. Scalia’s contention, therefore, that golf in
particular and sport in general have no (specifiable) purpose to speak of, save
indeterminate pleasure-seeking, has no persuasive force I can see, and so need
not deter us from inquiring how best to account for its purpose.

THE INSTITUTIONAL CHARACTER OF SPORT

Before I examine the particular purposes sport answers to, let me flesh out my
opening claim that providing a satisfactory account of what is sport is
complicated by recognizing that the physical actions that take place there are
only intelligible if we grasp the institutional status that lies behind them. In
40 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

order to get a handle on their institutional status, I consider Searle’s important

theory of how natural objects, actions, and the facts about them (in our specific
case, physical/bodily actions), acquire an institutional standing that gives them
a purpose and significance that belies their naturalness and their brute
physicality.
Searle was inspired by a long-time puzzle, namely that there are objective
facts about the world in which we live that are only facts by human agreement,
and only exist because we believe they exist. He had in mind such things as a
piece of paper that is a $5 bill, that people are citizens of different countries, or
that the New York Giants won the 1991 Super Bowl (Searle 1995: 1). Objective
facts of this kind are unlike objective facts of a different order such as there is
snow and ice at the summit of Mt. Everest or that hydrogen atoms have one
electron (2). The difference is that the latter so-called facts do not depend on
human agreement, which is why Searle dubbed them “brute” facts. However,
the former so-called facts depend on human agreement, which is why he dubbed
them “institutional” facts. They are institutional facts because they require
“human institutions” for their very existence, because they are the sorts of
things that are made, not found. Searle developed his theory to explain how
such institutional facts are possible, and how they get to be what they are.
The utility of Searle’s theory for sport is that it provides a persuasive account
of how brute physical actions such as running, throwing, and the like become
institutional actions such as stealing second base and pitching, how they become
core features of an athletic institution like baseball and thereby take on a
meaning, significance, and purpose that they would otherwise lack. For Searle
the answer to such questions can be found in the deceptively simple formula,
“X counts as Y in context C” (28), which he calls a constitutive rule and
identifies as the basic building block of all institutional phenomena. In the
specific case of sport, the X term in Searle’s formula designates the actual
physical actions upon which the institutional status is imposed (42). For
example, in (American) football the X term picks out the physical action of a
person crossing a line etched on the ground or some artificial surface clutching
an elongated spheroid. The Y term denotes the institutional status affixed to the
physical action. In football again, the Y term confers the institutional status of
a touchdown on the physical action of a person breaking the plane of a line
carrying an elongated spheroid (43). In acquiring this new social status as a
touchdown, the actual bodily movements involved in a person crossing a line
gain a significance, meaning, and point that go beyond the movements
themselves. The phrase “counts as” for Searle refers to the process by which
such brute physical actions acquire such a socially accepted and recognized
status. Sticking with our example of football, “counts as” marks the transition
from the brute, physical act of running across a line, to the institutional act of
scoring a touchdown, from institutionally unencumbered physical actions that
THE PURPOSE OF SPORT 41

might serve any number of institutionally unencumbered ends, to particular

institutional actions that serve a particular institutional end. Further, this
conferral of an institutional status, of counting the physical action of a person
crossing a line as a touchdown, is and must be accepted and recognized by the
members of the relevant larger community. It is that collective agreement and
recognition alone that ensures the physical action of crossing a line counts, in
fact, as a touchdown.
On Searle’s institutional story, therefore, social practices like sport can have
the goals they had in the past, or have now, or will have in the future, or have
now and forever more, if and only if the members of the relevant communities
collectively agree and recognize they do. For in order to institutionalize sport,
to anoint certain physical actions and ends as sporting actions and ends, there
must be agreement all around by the relevant members of that institution that
running across a designated line is indeed a touchdown. There can be no such
social institutions in the absence of such a consensus. So the physical action
involved in the scoring of a touchdown only counts as such, and only counts as
an objective fact, under a specific description authorized and accepted by
members of that community. This also explains why language is indispensable
to the identification of the institutional goal of sport, and, of course, any other
institutional goal. For physically (empirically) speaking there is no difference
between the X and Y terms, between breaking the plane of a line and scoring a
touchdown. Rather, the only difference between them is the imposition of a
social status on the X term, “and this new status needs markers, because,
empirically speaking, there isn’t anything else there” (69; author’s emphasis).

THE INTERNAL PURPOSE OF SPORT

Whatever the purpose of sport may be said to be, it should be clear by now that
accounting for its institutional status is something we can ignore only at our
peril. That said, it is now time to examine the three purposes of sport. The first
of these is what I previously called the “internal” purpose of sport, meaning the
purpose that is prescribed by and is derivable from the intrinsic, structural
properties of sport itself as a game of physical skill. Every sport is structurally
designed to bring about a particular outcome, or better, a specific achievable
state of affairs, which calls for the exercise of special physical skills. In his
brilliant analysis of games and sport, Bernard Suits calls this designated specific
state of affairs the pre-lusory goal of sport (Suits 2018: 34). In addition to this
goal, Suits argues, sport is further defined by what he calls a lusory goal, which
is simply the aim of winning, of bringing about a state of affairs that counts as
winning because it was achieved by following the relevant rules (34).
The pre-lusory goal of sport picks out the specific achievable state of affairs
that it was structurally designed to generate. So understood, the goal of a foot
42 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

race is to cross the finish line first, of hockey to propel a puck into a net, of golf
to put a small ball into a small cup, etc. Each of these goals spells out just what
those who play these and other sports are seeking to accomplish by the physical
actions and strategic decisions they execute. What makes them the particular
goals they are is that any physical actions and the like, which are undertaken in
their name, are supposed to lead to these specific states of affairs.
But isn’t the goal of crossing the finish line first, it may plausibly be asked,
the same as winning a foot race? The answer, Suits tells us, is no, because the
pre-lusory goal of a foot race, the specific state of affairs of crossing the finish
line ahead of other competitors, does not include, and provides no specification
of, the rule-governed means by which it is supposed to be achieved. The same
goes, of course, for the pre-lusory goal of any sport. In a foot race, therefore,
crossing the finish line first is not the same as winning if it was accomplished by,
say, cutting across the infield of the track. Similarly, in hockey if the puck ends
up in the net by a player’s hand rather than stick, or in golf if a player kicks the
ball out of the rough to make par, the achievement of these different states of
affair does not become synonymous with winning. So the fact that the pre-
lusory goal of sport is a simple, disjunctive, freestanding goal that encompasses
no other feature of sport (rules or means), rather than a compound, conjunctive
one that encompasses both rules and means, is what distinguishes a pre-lusory
goal from a lusory goal (winning).
With this distinction in mind, I now turn my attention to this second, lusory
goal of sport. As noted, Suits defined the lusory goal of sport as winning. What
this lusory goal adds to the equation is a specification of the rule-governed
means by which it is to be attained. This is what makes it a compound goal
rather than a simple one like its pre-lusory counterpart. So the lusory goal of a
foot race is to cross the finish line first by, among other things, running around
rather than across the track, of hockey by putting the puck in the net by, among
other things, using a stick rather than one’s hand, of (American) football by
breaking the plane of the goal line by, among other things, running with the ball
or catching a ball.
Each and everyone one of these lusory goals, of course, conforms to Searle’s
constitutive rule formula, “X counts as Y in context C.” The X term refers to
the physical actions designated by the pre-lusory goals of sport (crossing the
finish line first, putting a ball into a cup, breaking the plane of a line drawn on
the ground). The Y term concerns the imposition on the physical actions
specified in these pre-lusory goals of the institutional ludic status of winning in
each sport. And the “counts as” is the process by which the institutional status
of winning (lusory goal) is conferred on each pre-lusory goal of sport.
But when accounting for the specific institutional statuses and purposes of
select social practices like sport, we must be careful not to run together Searle’s
general, all-purpose, institutional constitutive rule formula of “X counts as Y in
THE PURPOSE OF SPORT 43

context C,” with the particular, practice-specific, constitutive rule(s) of sport.

For every object or activity procures its institutional credentials by conforming
to Searle’s general constitutive rule formula in its own distinctive way by virtue
of constitutive rules that are internal and particular to each. For instance, the
physical bits of paper that comprise the X term of money “count as” money
(the Y term), as the official currency of a given society, only when they are
processed and issued in accordance with the constitutive rule(s) that governs
such in that society. Similarly, the various vocalizations, documents, and actions
that comprise the X term of marriage, “count as” marriage (the Y term), as an
official marriage ceremony in a given society, only when they are performed in
accordance with the particular constitutive rule(s) that governs such in that
society. Sport, of course, is no different in this regard, since the physical actions
that comprise its X term “count as” sport (the Y term), as an institutionally
recognizable sport in a given society, only when they are carried out in
accordance with the particular constitutive rule(s) that governs such in that
society.
The point not to be missed, then, is that the constitutive rule(s) by which
money, marriage, or sport acquire their institutional status and purpose—that
is, satisfy Searle’s general constitutive rule formula of “X counts as Y in context
C”—are specific and relative to each institutional object and practice. What
particular institutional work the latter rules do, therefore, is confined to the
particular object or practice that they govern. So, in the case of money, the
money-specific constitutive rules that effect its transformation from physical
bits of paper to money, to an official medium of exchange for all sorts of
economic transactions in our society, are the mandates issued by the Treasury
department that govern, among other things, their issuance and their official
approval as currency, to wit, the phrase that the department requires be
inscribed on each bill: “This note is legal tender for all debts public and private.”
In the case of marriage, the marriage-specific constitutive rules that effect its
transformation from vocalizations, documents, and actions to a full-fledged
marriage ceremony, are the requirements set by the relevant civil/state agency
regarding, among other things, who is eligible to be joined in matrimony and
who is authorized to officiate at and conduct such a ceremony.
Sport, of course, gets its institutional walking papers in the same twofold
way by meeting Searle’s constitutive rule formula according to its very own
practice-specific constitutive rules. However, the particular, distinctive way its
constitutive rules effect the transformation from its pre-institutional, pre-lusory
goal of accomplishing some specific state of affairs to its institutional, lusory
goal of winning is by limiting the allowable means to accomplish the former.
For example, in foot races crossing the finish line first (pre-lusory goal) counts
as winning (lusory goal) only if it is accomplished by following its constitutive
rules that forbid, among other things, cutting across the infield. What goes for
44 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

the constitutive rules of foot races, of course, goes for the constitutive rules of
all sports, since their distinctive function, Suits tell us, is to put obstacles in the
path leading to a pre-lusory goal by prohibiting more efficient in favor of less
efficient means (Suits 2018: 35–6). Just, then, as it is expedient to cut across the
infield in a foot race, or to propel a puck into the net by tying the goalie’s hands
behind his/her back in hockey, or to put a ball into a cup by using one’s hands
in golf, each and every one of these efficacious means is outlawed by the
respective constitutive rules of each sport. True to form then, the constitutive
rules specific to sport that outlaw the most effective means to accomplish its
different pre-lusory goals mark the distinctive way it meets Searle’s formula and
confers an institutional status on these goals.
All of which underscores once again why it is vital in accounting for the
institutional status and purpose of a social practice like sport that the internal
constitutive rules by which it satisfies Searle’s general constitutive rule formula,
“X counts as Y in context C,” not be confused for or conflated with that
formula. To be sure, failure to account for or give Searle’s formula its just due
is itself a mistake that would leave an important gap in our understanding of an
institutional phenomenon like sport. But the failure to keep these two kinds of
constitutive rules apart, to run them together, is, to my mind, the greater failure,
since it all but renders institutional fare like sport inexplicable. In particular, it
obscures the fact that one can’t win (lusory goal) an athletic competition by
breaking one or more of its constitutive rules, by what amounts to, according
to Suits, cheating. Suits calls this irreconcilable tension between winning and
breaking its constitutive rules (cheating) the “logical incompatibility thesis”
(35). The basic idea behind it is easy enough to grasp because it rests on the
already-discussed point that what distinguishes lusory from pre-lusory goals is
that the former, unlike the latter, include a rule-based specification of the
precise way in which it is to be achieved. So, for example, in golf what counts
as winning is not just getting a ball into the requisite number of cups (typically
nine or eighteen cups), but to do so by the fewest number of strokes. Hence, the
moment a golfer resorts to trying to get a ball into a cup by using one’s hands
and/or feet one can be confident that whatever this player is doing he/she is
certainly not playing golf. One way, therefore, to render golf or any other sport
as a paradoxical enterprise is to confuse Searle’s open-ended conception of
constitutive rules for Suits’s carefully delimited conception of the constitutive
rules of sport.
Before I conclude my discussion of the internal purposes of sport, however,
there is yet another conflation of rules that we should be wary of and that I
would be remiss in not mentioning. This conflation concerns the running
together of the constitutive rules of other non-athletic practices/institutions
with the distinctive constitutive rules that govern athletic practices. What is
worrisome about this conflation is not only, as before, that it puts in doubt the
THE PURPOSE OF SPORT 45

intelligibility of sport, but further conceals what is so special and extraordinary

about athletic endeavor that, no doubt, has a lot to do with the great allure and
prominence it has enjoyed, and still enjoys, in so many cultures worldwide. I
am referring here to the distinctive non-instrumental relation of means to ends
required by sport’s constitutive rules, to the fact that these rules make it harder
rather than easier to achieve their goals. This non-instrumental relation of
means to ends appears to be peculiar to sport/practices and institutions, because
most, if not all, other important social practices/institutions insist upon an
instrumental relation between their means and ends. That is, what is
characteristic of the constitutive rules of non-athletic institutional practices is
that they require that their means make it easier rather than more difficult to
carry out their different functions and purposes, and that their means are the
most efficient available to accomplish what they were designed to do. When we
conflate the difference between the constitutive rules of non-athletic and
athletic institutions, we end up mistakenly putting sport into the same
instrumental box of other institutions, and, as a consequence, trying to explain,
once again, the unexplainable fact that in sport we quite deliberately put
obstacles in the path of athletic goals. What is more, when we confuse the
constitutive rules of sport for those of other non-athletic institutions, we also
conceal the fact that sport was never designed nor intended to be an instrumental
pursuit, to answer to the same ordinary and everyday needs as, for instance, the
institutions of money or marriage or government do. On the contrary, it was
fashioned and intended to be something separate from our ordinary, everyday
concerns and routines, something that answers to our quest for extraordinary
challenges that capture our fancy precisely because we humans have never been
content just to survive but to flourish by exercising all of our human capacities
in as many different ways as we can imagine. The failure to recognize sport’s
relative autonomy is, therefore, to miss massively the point of sport itself.

THE EXTERNAL PURPOSE(S) OF SPORT

I now turn to the second kind of purpose that figures in sport, the so-called
external purpose of sport. By the external purpose of sport I mean all those
various goals and ends that it has been put to use to facilitate but that have no
intrinsic connection to sport itself. That is, the external purposes of sport, and
we must insist on the plural “purposes” here given the vast array of ends and
goals, which it has been used over the course of its historical development to
promote, are not ends or goals that can be derived from or read off of its
internal structural properties. So while, for instance, the constitutive rules of
sport were created with its lusory goal in mind, they were not created with
other non-athletic goals in mind, which is why the actions they license were not
intended or expected to bring about these extra-game goals. That sport has,
46 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

nonetheless, proved useful in achieving such external ends suggests that

different people for different reasons have intentionally recruited it to play this
instrumental role for contingent historical factors that have nothing directly to
do with sport itself.
Because the external purposes for which sport has been enlisted to serve
are so numerous both in kind and number, this part of its teleological
portfolio is unwieldy to say the least, and thus difficult to get a handle on.
Attempting, then, to give a satisfactory account of each and every one of
them, let alone keep track of them all, is beyond the purview of my chapter.
But I can at least provide a sampling of several different categories into which
these non-athletic purposes fall and a rough, abbreviated sketch of how they
have been so used.
The external goals sport has been used to further include religious, military,
economic, gambling, nationalistic, and social and political causes and programs.
Such a list, while not exhaustive, does illustrate the extent to which sport has
been appropriated to serve an astonishing number of non-athletic ends and
goals.
The specific ways sport has been used in these different ways is itself too large
and varied than to cite, in brief, a few instances. To begin on the religious front,
it is worth noting the use of sport by the Fellowship of Christian Athletes to
proselytize the non-Christian religious and irreligious among us. Similarly, the
military interest in sport has been almost a constant in its historical evolution.
Here we can point to the obvious physicality of sport to account for the military
role it has prominently played, particularly in the past, as well as its supposed
inculcation of virtues such as courage and loyalty that allegedly prompted the
Duke of Wellington to quip that the Battle of Waterloo, which led to the decisive
defeat of Napoleon’s forces, was won on the playing fields of Eton.1 The
economic utility of modern sport as a means for making a living and for turning
a profit is a dominant feature of the current athletic scene. The same goes for the
recruitment of sport to achieve social goals, whether it be the persistent efforts
of the upper class to tame what they perceived to be the uncivil appetites of the
working class or those of progressive reformers at the turn of the twentieth
century to redress the savage social inequalities of the Gilded Age. Placing
wagers on sport has also been a significant part of modern sport, in which the
gambling establishment’s self-interest in “fair betting” happily coincided with
the amateur interest in fair play (Vamplew 2007: 857). Sport has, in addition,
been a friend of nationalistic causes in the modern world, in which being
admitted as a member nation of the Olympic family is a powerful symbol that
one’s country has, so to speak, arrived. Sport, alas, is no stranger to atavistic,
ethnic upsurges of nationalist fervor, a prominent example of which was the
breakup of Yugoslavia that was foreshadowed in a football game between the
Red Star Belgrade and Dinamo Zagreb clubs, in which before the first whistle
THE PURPOSE OF SPORT 47

rioting broke out at the stadium in Zagreb. As one commentator of the time put
it, “Yugoslavia stopped existing when the Dinamo-Red Star riot took place. If
we can’t play football anymore and be in the same terraces anymore, it was
impossible to live together anymore” (quoted in Sanatora et al. 2018: 9). Finally,
for my survey purposes, the repeated use of sport to advance political programs
is a further and well-documented part of the history of modern sport, as
evidenced by Coubertin’s revival of the ancient Olympic Games to promote the
cause of international understanding and world peace.
This all too cursory sketch of the wide array of non-athletic goals and ends
attributed to sport shows that these external purposes, and the agendas to
which they were wed, have no intrinsic connection to sport itself, to its
constitutive rules or internal lusory features. Nonetheless, there is and must be
something about sport that lends itself to such mind-boggling appropriation.
There are very few social practices that would come anywhere close to matching
the prodigious record of sport on this instrumental scale. So, even though sport
was not made or created to play this specific role as a means to accomplish these
non-athletic ends, its internal structural properties were apparently well suited
to play it.
What it is about sport that lends it to such widespread use would require a
paper in its own right. But I think it is safe to say that it undoubtedly has
something important to do with its relative autonomy from the rest of our lives,
from the fact that its extra-ordinary, non-instrumental logic of action mandates
that obstacles be placed in the path of its internal, pre-lusory goals to make
their achievement as difficult and as challenging as possible. This logic of action
makes sport not only the challenging affair that it is but the distinctive
undertaking that it just as assuredly is, since in everyday life placing obstacles in
the path of our practical ends is a decidedly irrational thing to do. Hence, the
reason why so many people the world over are fascinated with and attracted to
sport is because it gives them something to look forward to that takes them
beyond their daily struggle to eke out a living. This not only explains why they
flock en masse to watch sports, but also explains why they are easy marks for
ideologues of all stripes that seek to further their own agendas through sport.
I might be accused at this point of trying to have my cake and eat it for
claiming, on the one hand, that the external purposes of sport have nothing
importantly to do with its internal purpose, and so with its internal structural
constitution and makeup, while, on the other, I have also maintained that its
prodigious instrumental record as a means to realize these external purposes
must somehow have something to do with its inner logic and constitution. In
short, it seems very much like I’m trying to have it both ways.
I will show that I am not trying to have it both ways by taking a second look
at how sport has been used to realize certain external ends. I will concentrate
specifically on how sport has been appropriated for a distinctively political
48 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

purpose and feature Coubertin’s revival of the ancient Olympic Games as my

paradigmatic example.
The notion that sport might have a contribution to make to political life
hardly originated with Coubertin. Indeed, perhaps its most important and
famous modern exponent was Rousseau, who in his essay “Letter to M.
D’Alembert on the Theater,” first published in 1758, extolled the public and
political virtues of festivals conducted “in the open air” (Rousseau 1960: 125).
The sort of public festivals he had in mind prominently included the “games of
the ancient Greeks.” The importance of these athletic festivals was because, “It
does not suffice that the people have bread and live their lives in their stations.
They must live in them pleasantly, in order that they fulfill their duties better . . .
[and] that public order be established.” As Rousseau saw it then, “The disposition
of the state is only good and solid when, each feeling in his place, the private
forces are united and co-operate for the public good” (126). It is with this very
political objective in mind that Rousseau exhorted the citizens of Geneva, his
home in exile, to institute “prizes for gymnastics, wrestling, running, discus, and
the various bodily exercises” (127). Moreover, he added, “Why should we not
animate our boatmen by contests on the lake? Could there be an entertainment
in the world more brilliant than seeing . . . hundreds of boats eloquently
equipped, starting together at the given signal to go and capture a flag planted
at the finish, then serving as a cortege for the victor returning in triumph to
receive his well-earned prize?” (127). Rousseau concluded his encomium to the
political virtues of sport by urging that such public festivals not be banished
from republics, for “It is in republics [like Geneva] that they were born, it is in
their bosom that they are seen to flourish with a truly festive air” (126).
We can clearly see here in Rousseau’s vivid verbiage the political vision that
inspired Coubertin roughly a century and four decades later to propose a
modern Olympic Games devoted to international peace. He differed from
Rousseau, of course, only in the political goals he harbored. Whereas Rousseau
worried that people couldn’t be counted on to meet the political obligations
necessary for there to be a well-ordered state by bread alone, Coubertin worried
people couldn’t be counted on to act in the mutually respectable, pacific ways
necessary for there to be peace among nations by bread alone. Like Rousseau
before him, he, too, saw the need to draw people out of the narrow social
circles in which they trafficked in the course of their everyday lives while
engaged in mostly ho-hum, routine instrumental pursuits dedicated to practical
ends. In order to enlarge their social circles, therefore, Coubertin surmised that
reviving the ancient Greek Olympic Games was just the sort of festive, exciting,
public tonic needed to lure people out of their occupational cocoons. By giving
them something out of the ordinary to rally around, he thus hoped that they
might, in Rousseau’s own words, “form among themselves sweet bonds of
pleasure and joy” (125) that would advance the cause of world peace.
THE PURPOSE OF SPORT 49

However, it is what Coubertin realized that Rousseau didn’t in enlisting

sport to advance his political agenda that brings me back to trying to have it
both ways here. For while Coubertin was equally impressed as Rousseau was in
the power of sport to bring people from all walks of life and homelands together
in ever larger numbers, he was under no illusion that there was anything about
sport itself, about its logic of action or other internal features, that is political
in the least. As a consequence, he was very clear that sport would have to be
carefully harnessed to deliver the political payoff he sought. Left to its own
devices, sport is more than capable of—indeed, is designed precisely for—
delivering on its own internal lusory goals, and winning the loyalty of those
who play and watch it to its own lusory agenda. If these lusory goals and
agendas were left unchecked, he recognized, the Games would quickly turn
into just another athletic competition, though one, ominously in this regard,
played out on a global stage, in which the only thing that mattered would be
who won and who lost, rather than how well all the athletes from the many
participating nations got on with and were able to learn from one another. It
was for this very reason that Coubertin and his epigones tried mightily to
prevent the athletic competitions themselves from overshadowing the larger
political point of the Games by, among other things, adding opening and closing
ceremonies heavy on pacific symbolism, forbidding the publication of point
tables, and requiring athletes at the 1924 Paris Olympics to live together in
cabins near the Stade Olympique de Colombes so that they would be in constant
interaction with one another. In other words, what Coubertin foresaw and
tried to preempt was exactly the point of my discussion of the external purposes
of sport: that any at-bottom apolitical activity like sport, one created and
fashioned to serve a distinctly lusory purpose and agenda, could, nevertheless,
be exploited for a distinctly political (pacific) purpose only so long as it was
sufficiently larded with political checks, rituals, and tropes to contain the
apparent infectious enthusiasm for all things athletic.2

THE HYBRID INTERNAL PURPOSE(S) OF SPORT

To this point, I have argued for a distinction between the internal purpose(s)
and external purpose(s) of sport on the basis of their different relation to the
intrinsic ludic features of sport. I thus claimed the internal purpose(s) of sport
qualifies as such because it is derived from its intrinsic structural properties, and
that the external purpose(s) of sport qualifies as such because it is dependent on
these same intrinsic structural properties to do its instrumental work, but is not
grounded in them. This distinction, I think, is sound as far as it goes, but does
not go nearly far enough on the internal purpose side of the ledger. That is
because what sport is for is always more than what its strict formal ludic
properties, its constitutive rules and the like, reveal about it. This something
50 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

more has to do with the social and historical contexts in which sport takes
place—that is, with the social conventions and mores of the societies and
cultures in which it is played and watched—that define its basic orientation and
character at a particular time and place. Thus, while the constitutive rules
and formal ludic properties of sport do indeed grant it relative autonomy from
the rest of society and the typical instrumental activities pursued and practical
goals entertained there, they do so, it pays to reiterate and underscore, only
relatively. For, despite its vaunted relative autonomy, sport does not exist in a
social and historical vacuum. What is the purpose of sport, therefore, is always
in part of a piece with what is going on in larger society, of the various social
notions and conceptions circulating at the time of what makes for a worthwhile,
valuable way to live one’s life. What differentiates these social conventions and
mores that sport partakes of from the other external social ends that it serves as
a mere means to procure is that they become integral features of sport itself, of
the internal purpose(s) and lusory agenda(s) it sets for itself in different social
and historical circumstances.
I want to consider now the third, socially appointed internal purpose of
sport, what I call its hybrid internal purpose. To illustrate just what kind of
internal purpose I have in mind here, I focus on the early period of the modern
Olympic Games, spanning roughly from the 1906 Athens Games to the 1924
Paris Games, which Mark Dyreson, among others, has expertly analyzed in his
important book, Making the American Team: Sport, Culture, and the Olympic
Experience (1998). This particular historical period of the Olympic Games is
important for my purposes because it midwifed not just one social conception
of athletic enterprise but two, whose respective adherents on both sides of the
Atlantic (mainly England and the United States) vied with one another to make
its favored conception the dominant notion of Olympic sport.
The two rival historical conceptions of the point and purpose of sport at
issue during this time were the gentleman-amateur take on sport championed
by England and most of the other Western member nations and the professional
take on sport championed mainly by the Americans. These opposing notions of
sport have, of course, survived to the present, although in a form that would be
scarcely recognizable to their original proponents. This latter point should not
go unremarked because the conflict between these two parties on how to do
sport was not, as it is often portrayed today, simply a dispute over whether
athletes should be paid for their athletic exploits.
In its earliest iteration, the gentleman-amateur side of this athletic divide was
little more than a one-sided power play by the upper class to exclude the
working class from its athletic ranks by denying amateur status to any one who
worked for wages. Later iterations of this athletic ideal, however, turned it into
a broader (though, to be sure, hardly democratic), more inclusive social
conception of sport as evidenced by its less restrictive definition of an amateur,
THE PURPOSE OF SPORT 51

which denied amateur status only to those who received, directly or indirectly,
material benefit from engaging in sport (Guttmann 1994: 12).3 This was made
possible by the emergence of a growing and more affluent middle class that
welcomed amateur sport with open arms.4
The leading ideal behind the amateur conception of the purpose of sport was
that it should be pursued primarily for the love of the game itself rather than for
any instrumental benefits that might be obtained by taking it up. This, of course,
was the source of its contempt for those who deigned to play sport for monetary
purposes. But that contempt extended to anyone who played sport for any
ulterior motive other than the sheer joy of the athletic struggle itself. In addition,
it was the reason why amateurs of the day considered it undignified to try too
hard to win. As they saw it, sport was not the sort of enterprise that called for
or warranted wholehearted effort. Rather, how one acquitted oneself on the
playing field by, among other things, being generous to one’s opponents and
gallant in defeat, was far more important than winning. As one proponent at the
time put it, “Play like a gentleman, which means like a sportsman, for the word
sportsman . . . does not refer to the quality of play but to the quality of conduct
in play.” What is more, this amateur aversion to ungentlemanly, unbridled
athletic striving accounted for, among other things, their adherents’ opposition
to what would surely today be regarded as acceptable strategies in team sports
like boxing out opponents in relay foot races and cycling, giving their side a
competitive edge; hiring professional coaches to hone their athletic technique;
taking competitive advantage of vulnerable opponents who, for instance, ran
their scull aground in a boat race or dropped their racket in a tennis match; and
exploiting the rules to their advantage. Indeed, to the gentleman-amateur way
of thinking these tactics amounted to little more than business trickery that
ought to have no place in athletic affairs (Whitney 1908a: 766).
The social conventions and mores of the gentleman-amateur conception of
sport ran up against an altogether different ascendant professional conception of
sport embraced by their competitive rivals across the pond, whom they faced in
repeated Olympiads. For the mainly American adherents of professional sport,
the point and purpose of sport was to demonstrate athletic superiority and win,
not generosity of spirit or gallantry. This sea change in the notion of sport’s
purpose was fueled by the precipitous rise in social importance of the professions
and professionalization in the United States, and by American progressive
reformers like Theodore Roosevelt, who advocated the virtues of a physically
strenuous life (Rader 2004: 128–31). These two convergent forces resulted in a
transvaluation of sport, in which both the idea that sport could and should be
viewed as a vocation rooted in the ideal of a career open to talent rather than an
avocation (though at this early stage there was considerable suspicion over
paying athletes) and that sport could and should be taken very seriously gradually
became the new norms of athletic practice. As a consequence, the central planks
52 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

of the amateur conception of sport no longer had any store for American
Olympic athletes, who made it clear to all their competitors from other nations
that winning was their unambiguous aim. Further, strategies such as boxing in
one’s opponents in team sports were no longer frowned upon but embraced, and
giving vulnerable opponents a sporting chance were spurned. After all, athletic
misfortunes like running one’s scull aground were, as the Americans seldom
missed an opportunity to point out, self-inflicted ones, athletic lapses, which no
one who truly grasps the seriousness of competitive sport would dream of trying
to remedy (neutralize) by honorable means.5 The same went for hiring
professional coaches and trainers, something which athletes of a professional
cast of mind trying their mightiest to be the very best at their chosen sport
naturally regarded as the perfectly rational and right thing to do.
This dispute between amateur and professional proponents of Olympic sport
reared its head in different and interesting ways from this early period into the
later decades of the twentieth century. In the 1930s, a formal definition of
amateurism was included in the Olympic Charter, but it was narrowly conceived
in financial terms forbidding pay for play and compensation for lost salary. But
opposition to financial incentives to engage in sport was not the only concern of
those of the amateur persuasion. Beginning in the 1950s, the International
Olympic Committee (IOC), concerned that the Cold War “was pushing athletes’
training regimes to unthinkable levels of professional-like commitment,”
introduced rules prohibiting excessive training that set limits on the number of
hours per day and per week athletes were permitted to train (Ritchie 2018: 268).
These rules, not surprisingly, were to no avail, since by this time the
professionalization of sport had proceeded too far to be deterred by a few ill-
timed rule changes. But in relatively short order the IOC trained its sights on
what they considered to be yet another unfortunate consequence of the
professionalization of sport, namely the use of drugs such as amphetamines and
anabolic steroids to enhance athletic performance. In fact, as early as 1938, Avery
Brundage, an American member of the IOC who was later to become its president
from 1952 to 1972, came out strongly against the use of such drugs, arguing that
it violated the amateur stricture against trying too hard to win. In 1946,
Brundage’s admonition against doping was included in the Olympic Charter
(267). It wasn’t until 1967, however, that the IOC issued a formal ban against
doping. Ironically, by the time the IOC instituted drug testing in the Olympic
Games in the mid-1970s, the amateur ideal that fueled its anti-doping sentiments
was on the verge of collapse. Bowing to outside pressures to allow athletes to be
financially compensated for their athletic performances, from both public and
private coffers, the IOC changed its Charter “Rule 26,” which “effectively
ushered in today’s era of fully professionalized Olympic athletes” (270).
With the elimination of this anti-monetary provision of the amateur ideal,
the Olympic movement put all of its effort to uphold the legitimacy of sport
THE PURPOSE OF SPORT 53

behind its anti-doping stance, which it claimed was necessary to protect and
preserve what it now called “the spirit of sport.” Despite this alteration in its
official lexicon, the IOC’s new push to rid the world of sport from the scourge
of doping had as much to do with enforcing that part of the amateur ideal that
cautioned athletes not to take sport too seriously as Brundage’s original
opposition to drugs did. This concerted effort to keep drugs not only out of the
Olympic Games but out of elite sport altogether, I think it is fair to say, is the
central issue that preoccupies those like the IOC who worry about the fate of
sport today. That it rests on a fragile if not contradictory thread should also not
go unnoticed; for, as Ritchie pithily puts it, “The battle is over the necessity to
produce the best and most lucrative performances possible while still preserving
the image of sport’s purity” (271).
What we have in these two dueling conceptions of sport, then, are two
paradigmatic examples of how the internal purpose of sport is importantly
shaped by larger forces in society, by the prevailing zeitgeist of the era in which
it is played and watched. The specific part these socially-rooted purposes played
in sport in these two instances is the same normative one they play in any
particular historical era, in which conventional standards and norms drawn
from the larger society regarding how we should comport ourselves in pursuing
our life goals are incorporated into sport. Such norms guide us in how we
should comport ourselves in pursuing our athletic goals. As we saw in the case
of the gentleman-amateur conception of sport, the norms of the quasi-
aristocratic way of life that defined much of the contemporary English and
Western European society, when incorporated into sport, as is their wont,
mandated that athletes should try to win but not too hard or strategically or by
seeking professional expertise and the like. But in the case of the professional
conception of sport, the norms of the professional ideal and of progressive
social forces that defined American society from the late nineteenth century
onward, once incorporated into sport, again as is their wont, mandated that
athletes should use all means necessary to win, availing themselves of whatever
strategies, technical measures, and expertise necessary to ensure their athletic
success—the one exception being, of course, drug-assisted performance.
What I have been calling these hybrid internal purposes of sport add to the
formal structure of sport is a normative layer that importantly tells us which
conventional ways of accomplishing our athletic objectives are better than
others. That is to say, while the pre-lusory goal of sport specifies what state
of affairs we are trying to bring about, and the lusory goal stipulates what
specific rules must be followed in trying to win, the internal hybrid goal of
sport lays down what social, conventional norms we are obliged to honor to
achieve genuine athletic success—for example, how doggedly should we try
to win as well as what kinds of skills, strategic or otherwise, we should rely on
in this quest.
54 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

That these imported conventional goals of sport rightfully belong in the

same internal teleological category as its pre-lusory and lusory goals do is, to
reiterate, what distinguishes them from the external, extra-athletic ends sport is
periodically called on as a means to help realize. That explains why Olympic
athletes who prize winning over international goodwill can and are justly
criticized for missing the overarching political significance of the Games,
whereas amateur-gentleman or professional athletes who violate the
conventional norms of their respective athletic communities can and are justly
criticized for missing the (normative) point of sport itself. The contrast in the
two kinds of failures (political in the former case, athletic in the latter)
underscore the contrast between failing to honor the external (extra-athletic)
ends of sport, which, no matter how lofty and praiseworthy, remain, as it were,
extrinsic appendages of sport, and failing to honor the internal governing
conventional norms of sport, which, despite the different social and ethical
shapes they may take, retain, however parochial, their intrinsic ludic standing.
It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the blistering criticism each side
of this divide directed to the other was viewed by both camps as an intramural
athletic matter rather than an extramural political one. For what the British
Olympic contingent and press found fault with the American athletes for was
not their political tone-deafness but that they proved to be “better athletes than
sportsmen,” and what the American Olympic contingent and press found fault
with the English athletes for was not their political tone-deafness but their
athletic nonchalance, their lackluster athletic effort, which they blamed for the
poor showing of English athletes in the premier track-and-field events (Dyreson
1998: 163).

CONCLUSION
I have argued that the question of the purpose(s) of sport can be answered in
three basic ways. In the first, the answer is to achieve a specific state of affairs
(pre-lusory goal) in a manner that accords with its fundamental rules (lusory
goal). In the second, it is as a means to achieve a whole range of external ends
(economic, political, religious, etc.), none of which has any intrinsic connection
to sport. In the third, the answer is to accomplish a specific state of affairs not
only in accordance with its rules but also in a particular normative way that
comports with the mores and conventional expectations of the relevant athletic
community. The first and third answers are rightly called internal purposes, but
for different reasons. Whereas the first, pre-lusory and lusory goals of sport
qualify as such given their grounding in its basic ludic features, specifically its
constitutive rules, the third, hybrid internal purpose of sport qualifies as such
given its grounding in the conventional norms that govern sport at particular
times and places. Even though these conventional goals leave intact the formal
THE PURPOSE OF SPORT 55

ludic scaffolding of sport, to include, of course, its strange, inverted game logic,
they add an important normative dimension to sport without which we would
be at a loss in assessing what counts as a “good game,” in a distinctively ethical
sense. That is, the changing conventional goals of sport are responsible for
putting up ethical guardrails as to how its pre-lusory and lusory goals should be
pursued. If it is objected that this normative contribution to sport is insufficient
to warrant the attention and space I have devoted to it, just ask our amateur and
professional athletic predecessors why they got so worked up over their
conventional–normative differences, or in our contemporary, bitterly-divided
athletic community, why those of us who so passionately think natural talent is
an indispensable mark of athletic achievement get so riled up by those who
think performance-enhancing drugs, along with protein shakes, technological
advances in athletic equipment, and the like, are just a further, perfectly
acceptable way to achieve athletic perfection.6

NOTES
1. Though this claim has been so often repeated it has become famous, it turns out to
be apocryphal. Guttmann, in his fine history of the Olympic Games, corrected the
record (1994: 9).
2. That Coubertin and his followers have largely failed to rein in the sporting side of his
grand political vision—that winning has mostly trumped Coubertin’s founding
political ambitions for the Games—is not because of a lack of foresight or trying on
his or their parts, but perhaps a testament to the stunning appeal of sport itself to
both participants and spectators. Indeed, in a recent television interview, Lindsey
Vonn, the US downhill gold medalist in the 2010 Winter Olympic Games, when
asked how she dealt with the pressure of vying for Olympic gold, revealed she
skipped out of the opening ceremony and opted for private accommodations over
the Olympic village during the competition. In other words, she took the athletic part
of the Games very seriously indeed, but not its overarching political purpose. I think
it is safe to say that today she is the rule rather than the exception. Of course, the
pacific internationalism Coubertin sought to imbue the Olympics with was
compromised from the outset by petty political disputes among member nations, not
to mention of late by the incredible commercialization of the Games, which led one
critic of the 1984 Los Angeles Games to criticize its glitzy, showbiz opening ceremony
as “the world according to Disney” (Guttmann 1994: 161)
3. Though a much-improved, more democratic rendering of amateurism, it was for all
that, as Guttmann noted, “illogical.” Why? Guttmann’s answer: if an athlete were
paid to play, say baseball, why should s/he be declared ineligible to play a different
sport (12).
4. Holt points out that it was mainly because the middle class took to amateur sport that
it spread beyond the elite public (private) schools of England, the institutional
seedbed of amateur sport, and eventually to the nation and the international realm in
the Olympic Games (2006: 366).
5. In this regard, the British press were entirely right to suppose that Americans
confronted with such self-inflicted athletic lapses by their opponents would regard
56 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

giving them an opportunity to redeem themselves as an act of “sheer stupidity”

(Whitney 1908b: 248).
6. I want to thank Steve Riess and Wray Vamplew for their very helpful suggestions that
improved my chapter contribution. I’m also indebted to Steve Riess for his excellent
editing of my essay.
 CHAPTER TWO

Sporting Time and

Sporting Space
BRIAN M. INGRASSIA

Time and space have undergone dramatic changes in the modern era. In an era
of industrialization and even postindustrial economic growth, new
communications and transportation technologies have connected people in far-
flung and formerly disconnected geographical regions, thus facilitating the
virtual shrinking of space. Meanwhile, technological and industrial innovations
have enabled greater numbers of people to congregate, often in climate-
controlled spaces, thus enhancing the ability of athletic clubs or franchises to
commodify time. In this way, athletic events once considered amateur pastimes
have become profit-making ventures. While individuals may have once
dedicated time to work, rest, worship, or otherwise passed time, people in the
modern era have greater opportunities to spend their time—and to spend
money doing so. Sport has been a key element of these larger social and cultural
transformations. Since roughly 1920, sport has come to occupy increasingly
prominent and profitable spaces—both physical and temporal—within modern
societies. Sport, indeed, has changed modern society, in many cases dominating
its spatial realities.
In particular, stadiums and arenas have become an integral part of the
urban or suburban fabric as sport has grown in importance within modern
calendars and economies. Innovative construction technologies have facilitated
construction of larger, more complex, and more profitable sporting spaces that
often resemble those built in other places around the world. Meanwhile, radio,
television, and the Internet allow spectators to watch or listen from far-off

57
58 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

locations, thus fostering sporting economies of scale and the simultaneous

experiencing of athletic events. Venue design has even shifted, in some cases, so
live events can compete with electronic media transmissions. With the rise in
spectatorship and economic impact, athletic competitions occupy recurring
places on the calendar, in some cases becoming virtual, or even actual, holidays.
Global competitions provide a shared experience for the world’s population,
and they also reflect (whether intentionally or not) nationalistic competition.
Meanwhile, rules or other sporting parameters have been tailored for modern
attention spans and schedules.
This chapter explores the various ways sport insinuated itself into modern
time and space after 1920. It focuses particularly on sporting venues, which
may best be understood in reference to premodern antecedents. Robert
Trumpbour (2007) considers stadiums “new cathedrals,” ostensibly secular
spaces with semisacred significance that loom over both modern cities and
modern psyches. Some scholars have even called stadiums “modern coliseums,”
in reference to ancient Rome’s primary site for contests that entertained
residents of the urban metropole and reinforced imperial power. Today,
stadiums fill a similar role. Modern stadiums help “order human experience
and actions,” thus “shaping people’s senses of themselves” (Lisle 2017: 8).

THE GOLDEN AGE OF SPORT STADIUMS

In the 1920s the modern world emerged from the ashes of the First World War,
a vast technological conflict that affected millions of people around the globe.
Modern sporting culture thrived in this postwar era, a time that some call the
“Golden Age of Sport.” Although the first steel-reinforced, concrete stadiums
were built earlier, such structures proliferated in the 1920s, often providing
gathering spaces for tens of thousands of paying spectators. Sport was
increasingly commodified. In the United States, major arenas included campus
stadiums for intercollegiate football, including war-memorial structures like
those at the Universities of California or Illinois. Usually equipped with parking
lots, such stadiums drew on increased automobile usage and paved roads to
build extensive fan bases. They demonstrated American university campuses’
attempts to take greater spatial control over sport; yet it was also increasingly
clear that many universities were effectively allowing “big-time” athletics to
become a permanent part of institutional missions and academic calendars
(Ingrassia 2012).
Meanwhile, some cities began to construct huge municipal stadiums that
served as public gathering spaces for team sports, prizefights, or various non-
sporting events. Wembley Stadium was hastily built of reinforced concrete in
1922–3 for a London international exposition intended to demonstrate Britain’s
global might. It accommodated over 120,000 spectators for association football
SPORTING TIME AND SPORTING SPACE 59

FIGURE 2.1: Largest college football crowd in American history. On October 13,
1928, an estimated 120,000 fans at Soldier Field, Chicago saw the University of Notre
Dame defeat the Navy, 7–0. In the fourth period on fourth and three, Johnny Neimiec
tossed a pass to Johnny Colrick for the game’s only touchdown. Photo by George
Rinhart/Corbis. Getty Images.

(soccer) matches, motorcycle races, and other spectacles (Barclay and Powell
2007). In America, cities including Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia
built gigantic stadiums; these cities were motivated by interurban competition
or the desire to host national or global events. Chicago, for instance, hoped to
outdo other municipalities by constructing the world’s biggest public sporting
space, a war-memorial stadium called Soldier Field (Cremin 2013; Ford 2009).
Los Angeles’s Coliseum, initially a somewhat smaller structure (seating around
75,000), was later expanded and hosted both the 1932 and 1984 Olympics.
Such facilities, though, were sometimes so big that, paradoxically, they seemed
to defeat their own purpose. According to one observer, Philadelphia Municipal
Stadium’s design was massive and obtuse enough to inhibit spectatorship
(Kuklick 1991).
Stadiums exposed sport to the multitude, and radio aided this process by
simultaneously bringing the sounds of sport into millions of homes and building
bigger fan bases over larger geographical areas. Television did something similar
by the 1950s (Smith 2001; Oriard 2001). And, like automobiles, electronic
media drew more spectators into the stands and helped create world-renowned
sports celebrities. For example, New York Yankees slugger Babe Ruth traveled
around the globe for exhibition games, including some in Japan. Ruth’s presence
was so large that his home field, Yankee Stadium, which opened in 1923 and
60 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

seated over 60,000, was dubbed the “House that Ruth Built.” This state-of-the-
art baseball palace was “the first true baseball stadium – a structure intended to
accommodate massive crowds and make a progressive and confident statement
about baseball’s future” (Sullivan 2008: 1–2). Not until the late 1900s would
spectators desire a return to cozier, pre-1920s parks.
Many postwar sports venues, including stadiums in Italy, Germany, and
England, were designed to promote physical culture and develop national
strength through physical fitness (Bolz 2012). This way, sport contributed to
the nationalistic movements preceding the Second World War. In the years
leading up to the 1924 Olympics, for example, Paris considered building a
100,000-seat stadium that might show how the nation had recovered from the
Great War, while also inspiring youth athletics. Although this massive structure
was never built, it showed how important such edifices would be throughout
the twentieth century (Lewis 2017). Elsewhere, Japan built Meiji Jingu Stadium
on sacred ground in Tokyo in 1926, and the stadium soon hosted a baseball
tournament featuring teams from cities around the Japanese Empire (Morris
2011). Although such facilities were meant to bolster national power and
authority, they increasingly emulated standard models drawn from other
nations. Near Kobe, the Japanese constructed Kōshien Stadium, a modern,
reinforced-concrete stadium—then Asia’s largest sports venue, seating 60,000—
that was based on New York’s 1911 Polo Grounds (Guthrie-Shimizu 2012).
Euro-American sports often spread to colonial territories, too. In 1921, for
instance, a member of the Philippine Amateur Athletic Association wrote that
Manila should have a structure like the massive football stadium recently built
at Ohio State University in America (Ingrassia 2012). This desire reflected the
spatial redesign of the Philippines, when urban planners created American-style
sporting spaces with tennis courts, polo fields, and golf greens (McKenna 2017).
By the 1920s these and other Western-style sports, especially basketball—one
of a number of late-1800s games that used a time clock to regulate length of
play—had gained popularity among Filipinos, whose taste for American-style
sport was fostered in gymnasiums of the Young Men’s Christian Association
(YMCA) or the US military (Gems 2006; Antolihao 2015). Cricket, meanwhile,
was popular throughout the British Empire. Postcolonial theorist C. L. R. James
wrote about how cricket fields such as the one where he played in the Trinidad
of the 1910s and 1920s were sites for instilling colonial authority and English-
style discipline. There, a “motley crew” of white, black, Chinese, and Indian
children “learned to obey the umpire’s decision without question, however
irrational it was” (James 1963 [2013]: 25).
Disciplined and standardized sporting cultures often represented dramatic
social shifts. With the rise of industry and scientific management in the late-
1800s came rationalized games, including American “gridiron” football, which
originated from rugby and utilized precise measurements of time and space. It
SPORTING TIME AND SPORTING SPACE 61

may not be a coincidence that gridiron football’s primary inventor, Walter

Camp, spent much of his career working at a major clock company (Tamte
2018). By the 1920s professional football grew in popularity, via the NFL. In an
era of increasing secularization, more Americans embraced this spectacle for
Sunday afternoon entertainment. Yet professional football was often relegated
to tenancy in established venues, especially MLB stadiums. Following the
pattern of college football, played during the autumn academic term, professional
teams played in late autumn and early winter, when baseball teams were idle. Yet
even then, football teams often struggled to fill large venues, especially in frigid
weather (Coenen 2005). Only after the 1960s, with the NFL’s growing
popularity (due largely to television), would cities build stadiums—including
climate-controlled structures—specifically intended for the gridiron game.
Of course, sporting spaces and times were not equally accessible to all. For
instance, baseball teams in America’s Negro Leagues frequently rented major-
or minor-league stadiums at times when the main tenants were absent. In a few
cases, though, black businessmen owned and operated their own parks. In
Pittsburgh, Greenlee Field (built 1932) was one of the region’s finest ball
grounds, and it even hosted football games between HBCUs. Such facilities
became an important part of the black community as well as the underground
economy in which some black businessmen operated (Lanctot 2004; Ruck
1987). The sporting calendar was often segregated, too. Before the 1960s, for
example, African-American high schools often played games on Wednesday or
Thursday evenings (Hurd 2017), rather than the Friday nights more typical for
white interscholastic teams.

SPORTING SPACE IN AN ERA OF NATIONALISM

AND GLOBAL CONFLICT
International competitions became an integral part of sporting calendars in the
1920s and 1930s, when the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup gained global
appeal. The first modern Olympics in 1896, modeled on those in ancient
Greece, took place at a refurbished ancient stadium in Athens. Two decades
later, the 1912 Stockholm games were the first held in a stadium built specifically
for the Olympics. Later, the first World Cup was held in Uruguay in 1930, with
the host nation defeating Argentina before 100,000 spectators at Montevideo’s
huge Estadio Centenario (Keys 2006). Big stadiums sometimes served as venues
for multiple global competitions. The 1938 World Cup in France, for example,
included matches at the suburban Paris venue that had also hosted the 1924
Olympics—the same games where the idea of the Olympic village debuted
(Barney et al. 2004).
The 1932 Olympics were a defining moment for the reconceptualization of
sporting space. Los Angeles, a booming port city and home of the Hollywood
62 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

film industry, went all out, expanding the Coliseum to seat over 100,000. The
Olympic village, a “miniature city,” housed 1,000 male athletes, organized by
nationality; female athletes, though, had to stay at a nearby hotel. The village
represented growing connections between sport and modern life, as well as the
athletic gender divisions perpetuated through most of the twentieth century.
Meanwhile, telephones, telegraph, and teletype machines disseminated coverage
of the games throughout the world (Keys 2006: 107). Sporting space grew even
bigger and more nationalistic at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. When a preliminary
design for the 100,000-seat stadium was not grand enough for Adolf Hitler, the
Nazi leader ordered architects to redesign it (Keys 2006). The stadium, while
massive, took up just a fraction of the Reichssportfeld, a “vast complex of arenas,
playing and practice fields, schools, offices, parking lots, and subway stations”
(Mandell [1971] 1987: 125). It was a virtual city within a city. The games
transformed Berlin into a media hub, with facilities to broadcast events via
radio, film, photography, and the incipient medium of television to hundreds of
millions around the world (Keys 2006). Hitler anticipated that after Nazi
conquest of Europe, the Olympics would be held perpetually at a 400,000-seat
stadium in Nuremberg (Mandell [1971] 1987). These grandiose plans, obviously,
were thwarted by the Second World War.
Other nations built lavish spaces for athletic competition during the 1930s
economic depression, setting the foundation for the vast expansion and
homogenization of sporting space that followed the Second World War. In
Chile, for example, sport became a way to project a self-consciously modern
national identity, through venues such as the massive Estadio Nacional, built in
Santiago in 1938 (Nadel 2014); this structure gained infamy in later years when
it served as a detention space for political prisoners during the 1973 Chilean
coup. Throughout the 1930s, moreover, stadium construction provided jobs
for many workers. In the United States, a federal work-relief agency called the
Works Progress Administration built thousands of high-school athletic facilities
and gymnasiums throughout the nation (Pruter 2013). In France and Italy, large
stadiums hosted political rallies during the interwar years (Lewis 2017).
For many who faced joblessness or underemployment during the Great
Depression, sport became an affordable distraction. But cities and sports teams
often had to innovate to compete for consumers’ limited cash. American cities in
warm-weather climates – including Miami, Dallas, and El Paso – emulated
southern California’s annual Rose Bowl game by hosting New Year’s Day “bowl”
games between top collegiate football teams, thus attracting tourists from colder
regions (Watterson 2000). Initially, some of these holiday contests were contested
in existing structures, including campus stadiums, but eventually some cities
built arenas specifically for the big holiday games, such as Miami’s Orange Bowl,
where the line between commercialism and amateurism continued to blur. Other
innovative strategies emerged in the 1930s. To attract working-class fans to night
SPORTING TIME AND SPORTING SPACE 63

games, some minor-league or Negro-League baseball clubs added lights to

ballparks or invested in portable lighting systems. This innovation also helped
teams and spectators avoid summer daytime heat. Experiments with illuminated
sports dated back to the 1880s, but such efforts reached MLB in 1935 when the
National League’s Cincinnati Reds, a small-market team whose attendance
numbers were flagging, installed high-intensity electric lights at modest Crosley
Field, significantly boosting attendance and revenues (White 1996). Outdoor
sports were no longer limited to daytime hours. The last holdout against night
games in US professional sport was MLB’s Chicago Cubs, who finally installed
lights at legendary Wrigley Field in 1988, despite protests by nearby residents
who did not want evenings disrupted by floodlights or raucous fans (Mount and
Davidson 1984).

RISE OF POSTWAR SPORTS VENUES

The Second World War interrupted the regular, four-year cycle of global
sporting competition—namely the Olympics and World Cup—that had
developed after 1896. Neither of these major, four-year competitions took
place between 1940 and 1946. And in at least one case a major sporting event,
the 1942 Rose Bowl, was relocated to an area less likely to be attacked.
Cancellations were selective, though, with some events continuing and others
not. Sport boomed again after the war, though, and so did stadium-building. In
Mexico, Estadio Jalisco opened in Guadalajara in 1960, accommodating over
60,000; this venue, along with other large stadiums, effectively served as
symbols of Mexican modernity (Nadel 2014). Urban sporting space changed
dramatically after the war, partly due to cities’ rebuilding around automobile
infrastructure. In the United States, federally funded highways and low-interest
home loans led to metropolitan sprawl, especially in the quickly growing “Sun
Belt” regions. Many sports franchises moved from older city centers to suburbs,
to which spectators could more easily drive by car. In other cases, “ballparks or
arenas were expected to become focal points for downtown redevelopment or
suburban development” (Riess 1989: 250–1).
The prototype for suburban sport venues may have been early-1900s
automotive racetracks, which provided a potent example of how modern
technologies could virtually eliminate strictures of geographical space. Road
races were popular on both sides of the Atlantic, but they were not conducive to
charging admission or controlling spectators. Enclosed tracks like the Indianapolis
Motor Speedway—built in 1909 on farmland beyond the city’s edge, and based
on the model of Brooklands in England—enabled commodification of auto
sport. Indianapolis hosted its first annual 500-mile race in 1911 (Foster 2000),
and other cities built similar tracks. Many spectators drove, often from great
distances, to watch drivers risk life and limb at speeds around 80 miles per hour.
64 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

FIGURE 2.2: Diagram of Proposed Dodger Stadium in Chavez Ravine, Los Angeles,
September 23, 1957. Photo by Los Angeles Examiner. USC Libraries/Corbis. Getty
Images.

Such tracks even served as proving grounds for innovative automotive

technologies. The so-called “Brickyard” in Indiana fell into disrepair during the
Second World War, a time of strict tire and fuel rationing, but afterward the 2.5-
mile oval changed ownership and continued as a prime venue for racing. Seating
over 200,000, Indianapolis’s legendary speedway ranked among the world’s
largest sporting venues by the twenty-first century.
With society’s rising dependence upon cars, sports franchises saw the
advantages of building stadiums on urban fringes, where commodified sport
was more easily sold to motorists. While older, pre-1920s ballparks provided
intimate spaces for spectators, they were often wedged into neighborhoods
barely accessible to automobiles. In some cases, paid spectatorship declined
precipitously as city residents, including many war veterans, moved to suburbs.
Sometimes teams followed. In 1953, MLB’s Boston Braves set a precedent by
moving to a county-financed stadium in Milwaukee surrounded by highways
and parking lots, some of which spawned Milwaukee’s legendary tailgating
culture. Other teams emulated the Braves by moving to suburban stadiums in
new cities. Most famously, the Brooklyn Dodgers relocated to quickly growing
SPORTING TIME AND SPORTING SPACE 65

FIGURE 2.3: Panoramic view of Eden Gardens Stadium in Kolkata, the oldest cricket
ground in India established in 1864. This is a 2008 match in the Indian Premier
League. Partha Bhaumik photographer. Source: Flickr Garden of Eden. Courtesy
Wikimedia Commons.

Los Angeles after it became clear that a new, state-of-the-art domed stadium
could not be built in Brooklyn. Dodger Stadium (opened 1962) was a self-
consciously modern facility with massive expanses of parking spaces. Although
privately financed, its public cost was significant: Los Angeles evicted over a
thousand Mexican-American families from their homes in Chavez Ravine, an
area once slated for public housing development (Lisle 2017). This action
represented the ways postwar urban planners often prioritized professional
sports over residents.
Spaces for global sporting contests also grew during the postwar period,
especially in the southern hemisphere. Brazil hosted the 1950 World Cup, the
first after the Second World War. National leaders hoped Rio de Janeiro’s
massive Maracanã Stadium would highlight Brazil’s modernity. Still unfinished
in July 1950, the stadium nevertheless hosted nearly 200,000 spectators for the
finals (Nadel 2014). Later that decade, as Australia prepared for the 1956
Melbourne Olympics—the first held outside Europe or North America—
factions debated where to construct a stadium. They compromised on expanding
the century-old Melbourne Cricket Ground, which now seated 120,000 and
clearly emulated Wembley Stadium’s simple, tiered design. The only structure
built anew for the Melbourne Games was the ultramodern natatorium, the first
fully indoor Olympic swimming facility (Goldblatt 2016). Weather increasingly
became a negligible factor as sport moved indoors.
In at least one case a city virtually redesigned itself around Olympic venues.
Tokyo hosted the games in 1964, at a time when Japan was undergoing dramatic
postwar growth. A part of the city that once housed US soldiers became a site
for the Olympic Village, stadium, and natatorium. Tokyo’s “cleansed and
modernized urban space” seemed to have become a “site to accommodate the
bodily performances of a proud nation” (Igarashi 2000: 145–6). New roads
connected venues, outlining the massive, modern city (Goldblatt 2016). For
66 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

FIGURE 2.4: Nippon Budokan Hall in 2018, originally constructed for the 1964
Tokyo Olympics. It was later the site of a famous series of Beatles concerts in 1966.
Photo by Kakidai. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

many Japanese, Nippon Budokan, the octagonal, steel-reinforced-concrete

martial-arts hall built to resemble an ancient temple, “strengthened the
association of past with present, tradition with modernity” (McClain 2002:
564). This modern shift became especially apparent when globally popular
musical acts, especially the Beatles, performed at Budokan in the years following
the Olympics.
The 1964 Tokyo Olympics were the first games globally broadcast via
satellite, and the Olympics continued to grow in scope and ambition in this era
of televised sport. In 1968, Mexico City staged a lengthy Olympics Cultural
Festival and invested in grandiose infrastructure, including massive highways to
athletic venues (Goldblatt 2016). Such development proceeded despite rampant
poverty throughout Mexico (Witherspoon 2008). Misplaced extravagance
became a recurring theme for global sports. The 1976 Olympics placed
Montreal in serious debt, and the city’s spectacular facilities remained unfinished
by the time of the opening ceremony. Stade Olympique’s innovative retractable
roof, which never functioned properly, was not even finished until the following
decade. Meanwhile, television grew increasingly important for simultaneously
disseminating the games for a global audience. By the 1970s, it seemed that
“everyone on earth with access to a television set ha[d] a front row seat” (Barney
SPORTING TIME AND SPORTING SPACE 67

et al. 2004: 121). In 1984, Los Angeles combined corporate sponsorship with
reuse of established venues to profit from the Olympics, adding better
“telecommunication infrastructure” and new “cultural facilities.” This was an
anomaly, though, as most future Olympic hosts did not yield so great a windfall
from the games (Dyreson and Llewellyn 2008: 2003–4).

IMPACT OF MODERN MEDIA AND CONSUMERISM

As early as the 1950s, television was changing the sporting landscape. In the
United States, professional football got a huge boost from the 1958 NFL
championship game, which 45 million people viewed on television—a number
that dwarfed the 65,000 watching from Yankee Stadium’s grandstands. Football,
with its stop-and-start action typically played in cold weather, benefited from
television’s camera angles and commercial breaks. Viewed on screens in
suburban living rooms, football thrived, setting a precedent for the consumption
of sport in private, rather than public, spaces. Media sometimes provided
spectators with a cheaper, or more comfortable, experience. By 1967, due in
large part to the impact of television, the NFL and the upstart AFL began
playing an annual championship game, dubbed the Super Bowl, usually

FIGURE 2.5: The Houston Astrodome Scoreboard pictured during a June 7, 1969
game between the Astros and Cardinals with 26,764 spectators. Photo by Bill Wilson.
Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
68 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

contested at a major stadium in a temperate region. The spectacle only grew

larger after the leagues merged in 1970, with hundreds of millions eventually
tuning in. “Super Sunday” became a real holiday with parties and celebrations,
even in nations that usually ignored gridiron football. The Super Bowl
represented sports’ late-1900s brand of commodification, with most sports
profits realized from media contracts and viewership (Crepeau 2014).
By the 1960s stadium builders designed spaces explicitly to compete with
television. In Houston, MLB’s expansion-franchise Houston Colt .45s (later the
Astros) initially played at basic Colt Stadium, but in 1965 they moved into the
elaborate Harris County Domed Stadium. This space-age marvel, soon renamed
the Astrodome, sheltered spectators from hot, humid weather. Sited near
highways and surrounded by parking lots, it was supposedly the world’s “most
accessible stadium.” In climate-controlled space, patrons sat “in plush-type opera
seats, protected overhead by a permanent translucent roof covered with 4,596
plastic skylights, and in a temperature of 72 degrees controlled by a $4,500,000
air-conditioning system.” Weather was no longer a meaningful factor in the
outcome—or viewing—of sports (Houston Sports Association 1968: n.p.). In
such stadiums, action on the field was made legible via big scoreboards. The
Astrodome was almost like a giant living room. Everything was carefully
engineered, including the grass, which eventually died and was replaced by an
artificial playing surface (called Astroturf, or simply “the carpet”) after transparent
roof panels were painted over to minimize solar glare. Watching a game at the
Astrodome was like watching from home, yet presumably better, with luxury
boxes and restaurants. Although the dome might be seen as a mid-century
populuxe facility, providing luxury to the masses, it actually fostered hierarchy.
Wealthier visitors could purchase a more lavish experience, which set a precedent:
nearly all subsequent stadiums had boxes or suites for well-heeled fans (Lisle
2017; Trumpbour and Womack 2016).
The spatial divide between elite and common spectators grew throughout the
later twentieth century, even in long-established sports such as horse racing.
Although the legendary Kentucky Derby had witnessed “social stratification”
since the late-1800s, “the disparity between the infield and the grandstand”
become even more apparent in the 1970s. The infield, from which it was difficult
even to see the race, had typically been a space for a diverse crowd of “gamblers,
minorities, women, drunks, and thieves.” By the countercultural era, even with
slightly higher admission prices, the infield was becoming a place for nudity, sex,
and drugs—activities standing in stark contrast to the conservative mores of
wealthier spectators in the grandstands (Nicholson 2012: 149–52). Eventually,
though, the disorderly infield gained its own cachet and became just another
place for well-off spectators to enjoy race day.
Perhaps as a reaction against formalized mid-century sports, new leisure
activities based in less formal spaces emerged after the 1960s, including running
SPORTING TIME AND SPORTING SPACE 69

(“jogging”) and hiking. Runners created distinctive communities and subcultures

on urban thoroughfares, while hikers sought “personal authenticity” on rugged,
rural trails. Ultimately, though, many such individuals appeared to occupy a
privileged position based in consumerism (Haberman 2017; Berg 2015: 3).
Well-off runners articulated collective identity as people engaged in sport—not
as individuals just moving from place to place—by purchasing and wearing gear
made specifically for athletic activity (McKenzie 2013). Meanwhile, innovative
clothing or personal items for women, such as the “jogbra” (later the sports
bra), allowed female athletes to play more frequently or in more public venues
(Schultz 2014), thus expanding the range of sporting spaces available to women.
Women’s sports, both professional and amateur, expanded greatly after the
1960s. Once relegated to crumbling gymnasiums or undesirable times, the
prominence of women in sports increased due to legislation as well as the agency
of feminist activists. In 1967, Kathrine Switzer was the first woman to run,
unofficially, the Boston Marathon, resisting attempted removal from the race;
women first ran the marathon officially in 1972. In 1973 tennis star Billie Jean
King famously defeated former Wimbledon champion Bobby Riggs in a
notorious match dubbed the “Battle of the Sexes.” While tens of thousands
watched in the Astrodome, tens of millions more viewed on television as King
efficiently dispatched the aging, self-avowedly chauvinistic Riggs. King later said
the prime-time match booted tennis “out of the country clubs forever and into
the world of real sports, where everybody could see it” (Ware 2011: 2). After
1972, furthermore, a US civil rights law commonly known as Title IX established
“the understanding that girls and boys in schools have the same rights to athletic
facilities and programs, coaches and instructors, uniforms and transportation”
(Gorn and Goldstein [1993] 2004: 205). Although women’s sports still typically
garnered fewer spectators and lower pay than men’s, things were changing. By
the 1980s, some women’s intercollegiate sports teams played in the same arenas
as men’s teams (Suggs 2005). In golf, which remained a largely white, male
activity, space was sometimes still sex-segregated well into the twenty-first
century. Augusta National Golf Club, for instance, only admitted its first female
members in 2012 (Crouse 2012).
As cities grew dependent upon automobiles, sport and recreation were
increasingly linked to transportation infrastructure and urban renewal. Cities
and professional sports franchises sometimes worked together to replace
working-class (especially many non-white) neighborhoods with huge,
multipurpose sporting venues such as St. Louis’s 1965 Busch Stadium or
Philadelphia’s 1971 Veterans Stadium. Efficiency was the watchword for these
circular, non-distinct facilities that seated large crowds for televised baseball or
football—and which tended to look and feel the same, regardless of the city
(Trumpbour 2007). Indoor venues changed, too. New York demolished the
magnificent 1910 Penn Station to make room for the new Madison Square
70 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

Garden, which accommodated basketball, hockey, and other indoor events,

atop an efficient new rail station, when it opened in 1968. In New Orleans, the
Superdome provided climate-controlled seating for over 70,000 when it debuted
in 1975—complete with a new type of artificial turf. Such structures have even
served as municipal shelters, such as when Hurricane Katrina survivors sought
refuge in the Superdome and Astrodome in 2005.

HIDDEN COSTS OF MODERN STADIUMS

The cost of major sports arenas exploded over time, especially as team owners
grew adept at pitting municipalities against each other, using the threat or
promise of moving as leverage (Trumpbour 2007). In March 1984, NFL’s
Baltimore Colts suddenly relocated to a new indoor facility in Indianapolis
called the Hoosier Dome, completed in 1982 at a cost of $78 million. Other
teams followed this example. In 1996, the Cleveland Browns left Municipal
Stadium—a cavernous lakefront facility built in 1931 that may have been the
first publicly owned and operated stadium utilized primarily by a commercial
enterprise—and moved to Baltimore to occupy a new, publicly financed stadium
costing over $200 million (DeMause and Cagan [2002] 2008). Increasingly, the
financial burden of constructing and maintaining athletic venues has been
shouldered by the public, while team owners retain profits. French taxpayers,
for instance, contributed almost half the FF 2.67 billion construction cost for
the 80,000-seat Stade de France in the 1990s, although most profits went to
private operators (Lewis 2017). In 1971, after Dallas refused to build a new
stadium for NFL’s Dallas Cowboys, the team moved to the $25 million Texas
Stadium, financed and maintained by suburban Irving (Crepeau 2014). Texas
Stadium—with a partial roof covering most spectators—had a capacity
significantly smaller than the Cowboys’ previous home, the Cotton Bowl, which
allowed the team to charge higher season-ticket prices and rent out luxury
boxes to wealthy tenants. Such features effectively separated elite spectators
from working-class fans (McComb 2008).
Cities have invested deeply in stadiums or arenas to bolster economic
development, urban growth, and civic prestige. Typically, though, many have
not understood the true financial impact of subsidizing world-class sports
facilities with public–private partnerships, the public costs of which have
increased significantly over time. Cincinnati, for example, overestimated
projected sales-tax revenue, and therefore had to reduce municipal services
after replacing multipurpose Riverfront Stadium (built 1970) with two new
single-sport stadiums for the MLB Reds and NFL Bengals. Both Houston and
Orlando saw bond ratings decline circa 2010, when reduced consumer demand
(after the Great Recession of 2007–9) inhibited the cities’ ability to adequately
service sports-facility debt. As demand for big-time sports has risen, moreover,
SPORTING TIME AND SPORTING SPACE 71

professional leagues have limited or even thwarted expansion into new markets.
Teams’ ability essentially to hold cities hostage in return for new facilities has
only increased over time (Long 2013).
As teams pursue newer, more spectacular athletic facilities, the life span of
these venues has shortened dramatically. Even when older stadiums are structurally
sound, cities claim obsolescence to spur new construction (DeMause and Cagan
[2002] 2008). MLB’s Texas Rangers, for instance, currently occupy a ballpark in
the Dallas suburb of Arlington completed in 1994 at a cost of $191 million—yet
the team is slated to move in 2020 to a new, retractable-roof facility costing up to
$1 billion (Solomon 2016). In metropolitan Atlanta, a city known for its sprawling
footprint, MLB’s Braves continued their peripatetic franchise history in 2017 by
moving from a stadium, built for the 1996 Olympics, near the central business
district, to one in the suburbs, 11 miles from downtown (Sandomir 2013b). This
move bucked a recent trend of downtown parks. Since 1960, only five MLB
teams had moved further from the city center, while thirteen had moved closer to
downtown. In fact, the Braves are the only MLB team since 1973 to move more
than a mile further from the city center (Fischer-Baum 2013).
Modern construction technologies enable global construction firms like
Populous to design state-of-the-art stadiums or arenas intended to attract and
impress paying spectators. Some facilities, including Munich’s Allianz Arena
(completed in 2005 and utilized as a venue for Germany’s 2006 World Cup) or
Johannesburg’s Soccer City (redesigned for the 2010 South Africa World Cup),
are visually stunning technological marvels (Wimmer 2016). Yet by the 1990s, at
least some sports fans began to view older, eccentric parks like Chicago’s Wrigley
Field or Boston’s Fenway Park as ideal venues, while seeing multipurpose
structures like the Astrodome, with its fixed roof and artificial turf, as
undistinguished relics of mid-century efficiency. Many clubs thus turned to new
designs that added old-fashioned touches to otherwise ultramodern structures.
So-called “retro” baseball stadiums like Baltimore’s 1992 Camden Yards, though,
were paradoxical. Although clearly modern structures in terms of construction,
they try to appeal to local taste or history. Wedged into urban neighborhoods,
these intimate venues seemingly rejected modernity by evoking older parks with
asymmetrical fields and exposed brick or steel elements. Yet this new generation
of parks might actually be seen as simulacrums, or stadium signifiers exhibiting a
postmodern pastiche of effects fulfilling spectators’ desire for vague nostalgia
(Rosensweig 2005). Such ballparks often combined retro features with modern
amenities, including expensive luxury boxes and dining options. Even the
bleachers, once cheap seats thronged by working-class spectators, became
exclusive. Retro ballparks might be considered “urbanoid” spaces: “carefully
planned and sheltered” places “that seemingly bristled with urban energy and
unpredictability” but actually “provided risk-averse, middle-class suburbanites”
with a carefully engineered sporting spectacle (Lisle 2017: 256–7).
72 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

FIGURE 2.6: Chicago Stadium prepared for a Chicago Blackhawks game in 1930.
The arena operated from 1929 to 1994, replaced by the United Center in 1995, best
remembered for its deafening acoustics. Photo from The Sporting News Archives.
Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

The rise of advanced construction techniques also led to larger indoor spaces
for hockey and basketball, both of which expanded and professionalized in the
twentieth century. Basketball, originally invented by James Naismith in 1891 to
keep physical education students occupied in winter, became a significant
intercollegiate and interscholastic sport before expanding into professional
leagues, including the NBA, after the Second World War. In the 1940s, NBA
teams often played in municipal arenas seating anywhere from 4,000 to 22,000
spectators (Surdam 2012). But professional basketball’s profile, like that of the
NFL, grew after the 1970s. By the 1990s, many franchises occupied large, state-
of-the-art arenas, often located in downtown business districts, seating 18,000
to 21,000, including Chicago’s United Center (1994) and Boston’s Fleet Center
(1995, now TD Garden), both of which also hosted NHL teams. United Center
replaced cavernous 1929 Chicago Stadium, remembered as much for its
deafening acoustics as for its long record of hosting games (Sell 1994). Large
arenas, though, are not unique to the United States. Štark Center (completed
2004) in Belgrade, Serbia, seats over 18,000. The cavernous arena, named for a
food company, has hosted basketball, volleyball, and table tennis championships,
as well as Eurovision song contests. The Philippine Arena (2014) in Ciudad de
Victoria is the world’s largest indoor arena, accommodating over 50,000 for
basketball tournaments and other cultural events.
SPORTING TIME AND SPORTING SPACE 73

Engineering was an important part of the stadium-building equation by the

early 2000s, facilitating construction of spaces that allowed athletes and spectators
to avoid inconveniences of the natural environment. Cities with harsh climates
built retractable-roof venues, an advance that blurred the lines between indoor
and outdoor sporting space. Such facilities are expensive. To maintain fields
under a roof can be even costlier “than creating and operating a [permanently]
covered structure” (Wimmer 2016: 16). Meanwhile, technology allowed some
professional sports to expand to places where they otherwise could not be played.
In North America, the NHL expanded to warm-weather cities—including Los
Angeles, Miami, and Nashville—which could not reasonably host franchises
without climate-controlled arenas. Meanwhile, artificial snow allowed the Winter
Olympics to take place at times determined years in advance, regardless of actual
weather conditions or the looming threat of global climate change. During the
1988 Calgary Games, in fact, some observers wondered whether the Winter
Olympics could be held anywhere, even in warm-weather regions (Atkin 1988).
In some places where the climate is unsuitable for winter sports—including
Dubai, United Arab Emirates—architects have designed and built climate-
controlled, indoor ski slopes (Wimmer 2016).
In other cases, entire towns in unique climates have been built around sport
and tourism. Aspen, Colorado, an old mining town, refocused its identity on
skiing after the Second World War. Nearby, postwar developers built the new
resort town of Vail at a formerly nameless mountain with no significant
resources—just lots of snow for skiing. When it opened in 1962, Vail was an elite
resort community with motels, restaurants, and boutiques for wealthy visitors
(Philpott 2013). Like the retro ballparks it preceded, Vail was a simulacrum,
combining the natural landscape of Colorado’s High Country with features of
Bavaria or the Swiss Alps. Vail’s design resulted in “a landscape with such strong,
European references that it might have made skiers wonder exactly where they
were” (Coleman 2004: 147). Yet again, technology spurred the homogenization
of sporting space and the elision of geographical distinctions.
Media and transportation innovations have helped create global audiences
for sport, sometimes with implications for social change. In 1973, black
American tennis star Arthur Ashe controversially participated in the South
African Open, held in a nation racked by apartheid. Ashe visited Johannesburg’s
segregated neighborhoods, where he saw how apartheid inhibited aspiring
black athletes who did not benefit from the same facilities as whites (Hall 2014).
The following year, American promoter Don King arranged a championship
bout between undefeated heavyweight George Foreman and legendary boxer
Muhammad Ali in what may have seemed the unlikeliest of places: the Central
African nation of Zaire. The famous match, billed as the “Rumble in the Jungle,”
took place at Kinshasa’s Stade du 20 Mai, where 60,000 saw Ali knock Foreman
out in eight rounds. The bout’s odd timing, though, smacked of colonialism: to
74 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

reach prime-time television viewers in North America, it was staged at 4 a.m.

(Eig 2017). While some of Africa’s major cities have spectacular arenas for
football (soccer), many of the continent’s people play or watch the sport on
more modest, or even rustic, fields (Hoeffgen 2010).
Modern communications and transportations infrastructure have also allowed
sports leagues to expand beyond national boundaries, shrinking the space
between athletic competitions as well as between fans. In North America, MLB
expanded to the Canadian cities of Montreal in 1969 and Toronto in 1977; since
the 1990s the league has considered locating franchises in Guadalajara, Mexico
City, Monterrey, or Vancouver (Zimniuch 2013). In the early 2000s, EPL
association football gained popularity worldwide, with network coverage even
reaching the United States, where soccer did not have a significant presence until
the late 1900s (Sandomir 2013a). In one unique case a sport facility (not the
franchise) crossed a national boundary. Houston’s Colt Stadium, no longer
needed after the Astrodome opened, languished until 1971, when it was
dismantled and moved to Coahuila, Mexico, where it hosted a Mexican League
team for over a decade. In 1982 the stands were relocated again, this time to
Tampico. Along the way the stadium earned the nickname “El Mecano” (“the
erector set”). After it was finally abandoned, old Colt Stadium was sold for scrap,
part of a market for used stands or affordable, second-hand Jumbotron
scoreboard screens (Millman 2000). As sports facilities became standardized
throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, they also became—
like sporting events themselves—commodities traded in the global marketplace.
Poorly designed or managed facilities have been sites of tragedy. A British
football venue witnessed perhaps the biggest sporting tragedy in modern history
when ninety-six fans died and hundreds others were injured in a “crush” at
Hillsborough Stadium in suburban Sheffield, England, on April 15, 1989.
Victims died of asphyxiation or were trampled as fans streaming into the gates
pressed up against a fence in one of the pens. Although initially officials blamed
the tragedy on drunkenness and “hooliganism”—then a concern for Britain’s
conservative Thatcherite government—later investigators attributed the crush
to improper crowd control within an aging venue that had been altered without
careful attention to crowd safety. The stadium, originally constructed in 1899,
was modified for England’s 1966 World Cup. Over time, “piecemeal” alterations
at the stadium resulted in a “mixture of old and new barriers, bits removed and
bits added.” This polyglot facility, when combined with police expectations of
rowdy fan behavior, resulted in terrible tragedy (Scraton [1999] 2016: 51).
After Hillsborough, the United Kingdom required seating for all fans at football
games (Wimmer 2016). Extreme crowd-control measures for soccer are not
uncommon, especially in areas that sometimes see gang activity and spectator
deaths. In Argentina, for instance, some fields are surrounded by moats and
concrete walls, or even policed by armed officers with dogs (Marx 1991).
SPORTING TIME AND SPORTING SPACE 75

SPORTING TIME IN THE GLOBALIZING

TWENTIETH CENTURY
Some sporting times, like venues, have become iconic. As the NFL grew more
successful in late-twentieth-century America, it expanded from its traditional
temporal home on Sunday afternoons, a time originally chosen because it did not
compete with college football games on Saturdays. Starting in 1966, well after
artificial lighting became common at most professional sporting venues, the NFL
scheduled games on Monday evenings to attract more television spectators. By
1970, Monday Night Football was a cultural juggernaut, a prime-time show that
“altered domestic relations, leisure habits, and workplace gossip” (Oriard 2007:
25–7). Indeed, college and pro football has expanded to nearly every day of the
week, largely to garner greater media audiences and revenues. Meanwhile,
American high-school football is still usually played on Friday nights, with games
taking on nearly religious significance in some communities, such as isolated
Odessa, Texas (Bissinger [1990] 2000). Since 1982, when oil prices spiked,
Odessa’s teams have played at a 19,000-seat stadium. Such excesses are not
unheard of throughout Texas, where the biggest scholastic football stadiums cost
millions of dollars.
Sports are seasonal, too. Baseball is primarily a summer game that starts with
spring training and ends with the World Series (the so-called “Fall Classic”), a
cherished autumn rite. Gridiron football is played in autumn, when collegiate
and high-school academic years start back up. Ice hockey, for obvious reasons,
is associated with winter, although the rise of climate-controlled arenas has
made seasonal limitations less absolute. The global sport of association football
(soccer) is less uniform. Although America’s Major League Soccer (MLS) season
roughly corresponds to that of MLB, European leagues like the EPL typically
play from late summer to spring, sometimes contesting matches during
snowstorms. The Confederation of African Football (CAF) Champions League,
meanwhile, typically plays from February to November. Traditionally, basketball
is a winter game, played indoors between football and baseball seasons, yet the
NBA finals have expanded into the early summer, providing more opportunities
for ticket sales and television revenue. Although late-1800s educators protested
college football games played on the late-autumn Thanksgiving holiday, the
NFL currently holds games, especially those featuring the Detroit Lions, on
Thanksgiving, a tradition that dates back to the Great Depression and Detroit’s
use of radio to promote its struggling franchise. The NBA, meanwhile, has
increased its number of Christmas Day games.
In American college basketball, spring is a time for championships, and it is a
time that has been exploited for media revenue throughout the late 1900s and
early 2000s. In 1938, the National Invitational Tournament (NIT) brought the
best college teams to New York, but by the early 1950s a gambling scandal made
76 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

the metropolis unappealing for a supposedly amateur tournament. A competing

National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) tournament, founded 1939,
became the premier contest by the 1970s, holding early-round games at campus
arenas and final rounds in urban arenas or domed stadiums. After 1974, the
NCAA tournament grew into a culturally and commercially important annual
event called March Madness (Walker and Roberts 2016). After the NIT sued,
claiming the NCAA had created a monopoly over postseason competition, the
NCAA simply bought out the NIT—and thus effectively took control of a
significant segment of the intercollegiate athletic calendar (Carlson 2017).
The rising importance of spectatorship and television in an era of shortened
attention spans and media competition has even inspired rules changes. For
instance, the NBA added a 24-second shot clock in 1954 as a way to speed up the
game and drive up scores, an innovation that some credited with preserving the
league, or at least augmenting its popularity (Surdam 2012). Intercollegiate
basketball postponed adoption of a shot clock for decades, but finally yielded in the
1980s. Meanwhile, in 2014, MLB, which faced serious competition from NFL
and other sports, began experimenting with new rules—initially implemented in
off-season or minor leagues—to shorten games, which to some twenty-first-century
spectators seemed unbearably long. MLB also schedules fewer doubleheader
matches than previously. These innovations, some of which have been implemented
in minor-league play, included a 20-second pitch clock and limited time for pitching
changes (Rohan 2014; ESPN 2015; Axisa 2017). It remains to be seen, though, if
such changes will increase attendance—or if the shortfall in spectatorship has
something to do with rising ticket prices. Leagues have also considered finding new
ways to end tied games, so as to please impatient spectators and fit into television
schedules. Such changes echoed the 1960s origins of limited-overs cricket. These
shorter cricket matches could be finished in several hours, rather than several days,
which appealed to younger people or those with less spare time for sport. In recent
years, the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) has considered tweaking rules
to limit lengthy matches. In many sports, moreover, play is frequently stalled to
accommodate commercial advertisements aimed at television viewers. This is not
usually the case in soccer, though, where matches are typically broadcast without
interruptions.

REIMAGINING SPORTING SPACE IN

THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
By the early twenty-first century, as big money infused both professional and
(ostensibly) amateur sports, a few cities renovated old facilities to add modern
amenities. In 2003, Chicago built an entirely new, ultramodern stadium bowl
within Soldier Field’s original 1920s shell. This essentially new facility for NFL’s
Chicago Bears cost over $600 million, including $432 million of public subsidies.
SPORTING TIME AND SPORTING SPACE 77

The structure’s transformation was so dramatic that it lost designation as a

national historic site (Cremin 2013; Ford 2009). Meanwhile, new owners added
less extreme, yet significant, augmentations to other heritage fields, such as
Boston’s Fenway Park or Chicago’s Wrigley Field. In some cases, cities even
replaced iconic structures with new ones designed to mimic originals. London’s
New Wembley Stadium, costing £798 million, opened in 2007. The new
structure, unlike the old national stadium built in the 1920s, was architecturally
ambitious, with a distinctive tubular steel arch taller than the older stadium’s
twin towers. Like a modern airport, the stadium “funnel[ed] huge numbers of
people through wide concourses and up escalators to multiple destinations.”
New Wembley accommodated 90,000, with over 10,000 seats dedicated to
“premium packages, hospitality experiences, corporate entertainment,” and
other expensive experiences tailored to wealthy spectators (Goldblatt 2014:
259–60; Barclay and Powell 2007). Two years later, new Yankee Stadium,
ostensibly a precise replica of the original 1920s structure, opened; the old
stadium was then demolished. Like the “retro” ballparks of the 1990s, these new
structures are stadium signifiers designed to maximize profits through the selling
of sport and modern amenities within spaces evoking nostalgia or collective
memory.
As the price of professional sporting spaces increased phenomenally, sports
stadiums and arenas continued to be sites for class stratification. This process
has only been exacerbated by the rising costs of sporting space in a globalizing
athletic marketplace. Teams positioned themselves as global brands and
occupied expensive real estate, typically at public cost. In the 1990s, the new
ownership group of MLB’s Seattle Mariners, led by Japan-based video-game
giant Nintendo, convinced Seattle to build a retractable-roof stadium. In 1999
Safeco Field replaced the crumbling multipurpose 1976 Kingdome—which
itself was built despite protests by local Asian-American residents who preferred
construction of affordable housing. By the early 2000s, fans could watch
international sensation Ichiro Suzuki while consuming a so-called Ichiroll: a
pricy, sushi-style item that was neither an authentic Asian-American dish nor
traditional ballpark fare, but which signified sport’s globalized commodification
(Gilbert 2013).
For many cities, the price of sport in a globalized era continued to rise. After
1984, many cities hoped the quadrennial Olympics would bring fame and
fortune. But unlike Los Angeles, which utilized existing venues like Pauley
Pavilion (built 1965) or the 1930s Coliseum, hosting the Olympics usually
involved building a raft of expensive structures. And though some facilities may
be subject to adaptive reuse, others become costly ruins. The latter has especially
been the case in Athens, which incurred massive debt to fund the 2004 Olympics,
yet saw venues crumbling and abandoned within just a few years (Bloor 2014).
Facilities built for the 2008 Beijing Olympics and 2014 Brazil World Cup,
78 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

likewise, appear to have little long-term potential for profitable sustained usage
(Wimmer 2016). The perceived economic and social damage of global sport has
even resulted in various NOlympics movements. In Los Angeles, site of the
2028 Games, opponents predicted that when the city hosts the Olympics again,
residents may witness “the forfeiture of [their] city to the interests of contractors,
developers, media corporations and the special interests who designed the bid”
(Democratic Socialists of America 2018).
Despite such legitimate concerns, new global sporting events have arisen and
gained popularity. The World Baseball Classic (WBC), first staged in 2006,
pitted national teams against each other for global championship. The
permeability of national boundaries within nationalistic competitions were
once again apparent, as many players had to decide for which country they
would play: one where they or a parent were born, or one where they currently
lived or worked as professional athletes. So far, all WBC games have been held
in East Asia or the Americas, with all championship-round games held in MLB
stadiums in California. Global telecommunications technology has allowed
spectators around the world to watch the games.
In the early twenty-first century, electronic media such as television and the
Internet continued to disseminate sports beyond the field of play. Fandom
spread far beyond a team’s hometown, with clubs for European soccer teams
based in cities throughout Africa or America. Talk-radio shows fostered
community for sports fans, while networks like ESPN televised sport around
the clock. Even as sporting spaces grew more elaborate and expensive, it was
unclear whether the games were really for the people in the stands, or for those
watching and listening from afar. Speaking of the gigantic new football stadium
in Arlington, Texas, completed in 2009 at a cost of $1.3 billion—and later
renamed AT&T Stadium, as part of the early-twenty-first century trend of
corporate naming rights—the Dallas Cowboys’ owner conceded the power of
sporting media: “Only a small percent of our fans will ever be here.” Instead,
they would experience games at the stadium “vicariously,” via media (Crepeau
2014: 177). Yet widespread sports coverage has had the seemingly
counterintuitive effect of driving up ticket prices, as many spectators hope to
see teams in person, not just on a screen. The Internet, meanwhile, has fueled
so-called “fantasy sports,” which allow fans to serve, effectively, as managers of
their own, handpicked (or computer-picked) teams (Walker 2006).

CONCLUSION
One scholar writes that “the spread of modern sport has disseminated a sense of
homogeneous empty time around the globe, and participation in international
sports contests has linked people all over the world to a uniform clock and
calendar” (Keys 2006: 90). This observation certainly seems to hold true for the
SPORTING TIME AND SPORTING SPACE 79

post-1920 period. The overarching themes of sporting space and sporting time
in the modern era include the commodification of sports teams as global brands;
the construction of homogenous and often publicly financed stadiums or arenas;
the decreasing impact of climate on enclosed sporting facilities; the simultaneous
consumption of sporting events by way of new media technologies; and the
ritualization of sporting seasons or championship games into virtual or actual
holidays. These transformations have left an indelible stamp on modern societies.
This stamp may have, in many cases, manifested itself as a public spirit of
municipal or national community, but it has also proven to be detrimental to
peoples or communities whose sporting times and spaces have been dramatically—
and perhaps irrevocably—altered by globalization and commercialization.
80
 CHAPTER THREE

Products, Training,
and Technology
JEAN WILLIAMS and WRAY VAMPLEW

INTRODUCTION
Sports products can be divided into three major categories. First, spectator
products, which are sold either at the sites of events or mediated electronically and
made globally available by satellite technology. Secondly, player products which
may include games, equipment and costume, instruction and assistance, facilities,
clubs, and training. Thirdly, associated products which are goods and services
which have been allied with sport in some way, but which are not really necessary
to the playing or watching of sport, though they can heighten the enjoyment
(Vamplew 2018). These might include a varied range of products which stand
alone, but are integral to experiential enjoyment, such as music, food and drink,
social media, mainstream media, merchandise, and different spectator experiences
(including VIP boxes and special areas with enhanced hospitality) and so forth. As
will be shown below, technology had a significant role in developments within all
these categories All sports products can be affected also by cultural values through
the beliefs, attitudes, and emotions of both producers and consumers. While
income, wealth, and prices clearly have a major role in the marketing of sport, as
with any other visitor attraction experience, culture also influences the taste
demand. Tastes can vary across individuals who maybe like to experience “value
for money” or a “grand day out” and are also affected by class, gender, and
nationality. Tastes can also be influenced by opinion-makers including entrepreneurs
and commercial advertisers, or dictated by law, as the “safe standing” movement
in Britain at association football grounds indicates. This chapter, though far from
comprehensive, explores some of these cultural issues in an introductory overview.
81
82 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

SPECTATOR PRODUCTS
Increased leisure time and greater disposable incomes meant that people
increasingly watched those sportspersons who were more proficient than
themselves. Spectatorship also grew as the media industries allowed enthusiasts
to access sport in an increasing variety of ways. The media and sport have a
symbiotic relationship historically, as the regular scheduling of sport enabled it
to become a staple news item, widely available to a readership who perhaps
could not attend in the stadium itself. As an illustration, London has hosted the
Olympics three times: the 1908 Games were the first to be filmed; those of
1948 were part-televised; and in 2012 many people accessed the events at their
leisure using social media and the Internet.

The Cultural Significance of Mega Events

One of the most significant drivers of both sporting products and specialist
training was the creation of large, ambulatory, regularly staged international
tournaments with attendant visitor attractions, mediated reach, high costs, and
the attendant infrastructure projects necessary to stage sport on such a scale

FIGURE 3.1: Football Crowd circa 1925: Crowds pack the stands to watch the
football match. Photo by General Photographic Agency. Getty Images.
PRODUCTS, TRAINING, AND TECHNOLOGY 83

FIGURE 3.2: Betty Cuthbert’s Running Spikes. Cuthbert was Australia’s “Golden
Girl,” who won three Olympic gold medals in the Melbourne Games of 1956, and a
fourth gold in 1964. Pool/Pool. Getty Images.

(Müller 2015: 627). These mega sporting events have cultural meaning in that
they have captured the public imagination (Roche 2000: 101).
The Olympic Games as a mega sport product have cultural significance in
several senses. First, in line with de Coubertin’s aim to create an Olympic
environment in which artists and athletes could be mutually inspired, the IOC
emphasizes that a host city must organize and promote a cultural program
alongside the sporting events. Not until Stockholm in 1912 was an arts
competition actually organized but, from then until London in 1948, such
contests were organized in parallel to the sporting competitions, and gold, silver,
and bronze medals were awarded to the successful participants. In 1950 it was
decided that from the Melbourne Games in 1956 the presence of arts in the
Olympics would take the form of concurrent cultural exhibitions and festivals
instead of competitions. Yet the Olympic audiences did not seem particularly
interested in the arts program so, instead of staging the festivals at the time of the
games, the cultural lead-in to the Barcelona Olympics of 1992 was a four-year
Cultural Olympiad, a format that has been followed by subsequent host cities,
allowing them to project their international image for a longer period of time
than in the past (Garcia 2008). Second, the opening and closing ceremonies have
been used to exhibit aspects of the culture and cultural history of the country in
which the Games have taken place. The Sydney opening ceremony in 2000, for
84 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

instance, featured a parade of the iconic Victa lawnmowers which had cut grass
in the Australian suburbs for over half a century, and also a tribute to the Country
Women’s Association, an institution for the rural Australian matriarchy. Third,
Olympic memorabilia not only provide memories when bought as souvenirs but
have become collectors’ items as aspects of cultural heritage (Budd 2012: 106–
12). The Olympics have enabled the host country to display a sense of self-
identity on a world stage, and also project that self-image to its domestic audience
thereby using culture through a sporting lens for both domestic political and
international relations purposes.
Soccer World Cups share mega-event status with the Olympics but vary in
that they are hosted by a nation (or even nations as in 2002 when Japan and
South Korea shared the event) rather than individual cities and deal with only
one sport. England may have invented soccer and given it to the world, but other
countries put their own cultural imprimatur on the game. The World Cup, first
played for in Uruguay in 1930 and avoided by England for reasons of sporting
politics, enabled those cultures to be displayed beyond national boundaries. It
allowed teams to demonstrate their distinctive playing styles and, as international
travel became more accessible, fans their devotion to a nation as represented by
its football team, and indeed by the related ephemera which includes posters,
artifacts, and, since 1966, the mascot for each tournament (Williams 2018: 215).
The first World Cup poster, for instance, created by Guillermo Laborde, had
inflections of Uruguay’s Planismo movement, with levels of opposing planes in
the design. This interpreted global trends in art and design, contextualized by
Uruguay’s increasingly confident industrial economy and commercial awareness.
Again, unlike the Olympics which emphasized its heritage with ancient Greece,
the World Cup’s nationalist cultural appeal is that of Roman gladiatorial combat
since the format is not a medal table but (with the exception of Brazil in 1950,
which took a different approach) a knockout competition (Hughson 2017: 381).
In January 1967 American football team the Green Bay Packers played
Kansas City Chiefs in the first World Championship Game, an annual fixture
that soon became referred to as the Super Bowl. It is an American institution,
the largest shared experience in the nation’s cultural life. More Americans
watch this sporting event—one of the highest-rated television shows in the
world—than vote in elections or attend religious services: indeed those who
express no interest in the contest could be accused of un-American activity. By
the mid-1970s it had attained mega-event status and Super Bowl Sunday was
increasingly regarded as a national holiday. It is now “the most influential and
lucrative entertainment behemoth in the national landscape,” though, unlike
the football World Cup which celebrates the world game, the Super Bowl
remains a parochial spectacle. But what a spectacle! It leads Americans to gather
together to participate in shared rituals including overt displays of nationalism.
It is also a celebration (both in the profligate partying and the television
PRODUCTS, TRAINING, AND TECHNOLOGY 85

FIGURE 3.3: Riley, Buick, and Bugatti on the start line at a Surbiton Motor Club race
meeting, Brooklands, January 9, 1928. Brooklands was a 2.75-mile (4.43-kilometer)
motor-racing circuit built in 1907 near Weybridge, in Surrey, England. It was the first
facility built specifically for motor racing. Heritage Archives. Getty Images.

advertising) of conspicuous consumption, “a public demonstration of the

American ability to buy things” (Hopsicker and Dyreson 2017: 2–3).
Unlike the Super Bowl, which is played in one stadium on one Sunday each
year, the Tour de France cycle race takes up three weeks of the French summer
as it wends its way around the nation and, on occasions, beyond its borders. It
began in 1903 as a specifically commercial venture designed to increase the
circulation of L’Auto, a French sports paper, but it served to help the French
come to terms with modernity, technology, and the mass media. For the French,
it is more than a bicycle race; indeed it is more than the several contests it
embraces of the yellow jersey for the overall winner, polka dot for king of the
mountains, green for the sprinter with most points, and white for the best
young rider. The media presents the Tour as an exploration of France’s cultural
heritage but every year the Tour gives the French a familiar and very public site
for them “to project their understanding of the past, assessments of the present,
and aspirations for the future” (Thompson 2007: 4). Over time the Tour has
acquired symbolic significance in France, become a guardian of French cultural
memory, helping create a national identity and promoting iconic heroic figures
of the men who manage the hard climbs and perilous descents of the Alps and
86 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

Pyrenees to reach Paris, always the finish of the final stage. Every year millions
of spectators line the roads to become a part, albeit fleetingly, of a national
cultural activity, to cheer their favorites and to admire the endurance of the
riders (Dauncey and Hare 2003).
No contemporary envisaged that, when they started, these events would
reach mega status. The early Olympics were not even stand-alone affairs but
were accompaniments of international expositions (from which they borrowed
the idea of a dizzying scale of spectacle and a kaleidoscopic range of activities)
and the first World Cup had but thirteen entrants and needed no qualifying
competitions. Yet for varying reasons, cultural and otherwise, they have
increasingly gripped the public imagination and ultimately, aided by the reach
of television, they achieved quadrennial international cultural significance. The
Tour de France and the Super Bowl have achieved similar recognition, though
more on a national and annual basis.

Some Cultural Implications of Spectator Team Sports

Cultural economic attitudes have influenced the development of sports leagues
and conference structures with some fundamental differences between those in
the United States and those in Europe. First, there is the matter of club
ownership. Using football as an example, British clubs have tended to follow
the American model of private ownership, but elsewhere in Europe there are
significant differences. The German Bundesliga has a rule that all clubs must be
controlled by their members who have to hold 50 percent plus one of the
shares. Spain, too, has a tradition of fan-run organizations even for mega clubs
like Barcelona and Real Madrid. Here clubs are set up as non-profit institutions
with ordinary fans as members who vote in a president with finance coming
mainly in the form of long-term bank loans which seem to be continually rolled
over because of the cultural significance of the clubs (Vamplew 2017). One
recent standout feature of British football club ownership has been its transfer
to foreigners. Over 60 percent of EPL clubs have a majority foreign ownership,
a movement that has tied in with the British government’s acceptance, if not
encouragement, of inward investment in the economy generally, and has been
aided by British clubs, unlike many continental ones, being companies rather
than associations. Yet this does not appear to have weakened the non-profit
motivation that traditionally came with British owners who were civic boosters
rather than profit-seeking entrepreneurs, though perhaps it is now kudos for
the owners themselves than for their city.
It is generally argued that those who bought into clubs in America were
looking to make money while those in Europe were more concerned with
winning cups and championships, what economists refer to as utility
maximization in contrast to the profit-maximizing behavior of American
PRODUCTS, TRAINING, AND TECHNOLOGY 87

owners. The literature on North American sports has tended to de-emphasize

utility-maximization on the grounds that there is no evidence that owners have
received less than a market return on their investment and generally make
capital gains when they dispose of a franchise. Even poorly-performing teams
can make profits and few US teams make losses in any season. In contrast few
professional teams in Europe make consistent profits and rely on benefactors
(wealthy individuals or supporters groups) to keep them afloat (Szymanski
2012: 5).
This has had implications for league structures. American leagues are closed
ones with no promotion or relegation. Franchises tend to be allocated centrally
by the league, each with territorial restraints, and are widely dispersed
geographically: it is rare to find more than one team in the same metropolitan
area. This offers local monopoly status and protects club revenue. However,
franchises can migrate, especially when city authorities offer subsidies, and new
franchises can be awarded, though this is with financial compensation to the
incumbents at a price agreeable to them. Clubs often own or host teams in
minor leagues to which players can be sent; in effect promotion and demotion
applies to players rather than the clubs. Leagues intervene in the labor market
for their sport with player drafts, roster limits, salary caps, and restrictions on
player trading. In the product markets closed leagues often opt for gate-revenue
sharing, some joint merchandising, and the collective sale of broadcasting
rights. The idea underlying this behavior is to equalize playing abilities between
clubs, and thus promote equality of competition with an uncertainty of outcome
which most sports economists argue will maximize attendances and viewing
figures. Although some of these appear in Europe where leagues tend to be
open, ability on the field means that it is possible to rise up the pyramid and also
to fall down. Hence there is more of a meritocracy than in the United States.
Leagues are bigger and some cities have several teams—at one time the EPL
had six teams from London—and local derbies are a key feature. Revenue
sharing is less common, player drafts and roster limits are relatively unknown,
and player transfers for cash is the norm, whereas it is more usual in America
for players to be traded in exchange for other players.
Elite sports teams have long purported to be representatives of their locality:
indeed even in the age of manufactured nicknames they still carry a city’s
nomenclature. Emphasizing their links with local communities is one reason
why leading sports clubs have corporate responsibility strategies by which they
make donations in money and kind to neighborhood charitable ventures and
support similar initiatives at a national and local level. These are an accentuation
of traditional charitable functions which sports clubs and sportspersons have
undertaken throughout the modern age and before (Vamplew 2016). Clearly
being part of the community was important to clubs when ticket sales dominated
revenue sources, but for British owners a raison d’être anyway was to put their
88 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

city on the map by promoting a successful team. In contrast, this latter role in
the United States has increasingly been played by the public authorities who
have offered subsidies, especially stadium facilities, to owners to retain or lure
a major team to their city. Since 1960 nearly all of the venues for professional
sport built in the United States have been publicly funded (Davies: 285). As this
implies, American owners have not been averse to selling or transferring their
franchise to a city many miles away, indeed even across the whole continent as
when Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team shifted to California in 1958. Yet baseball
still traffics in the fiction that corporate franchises can really represent
communities, and the spectator market has been conditioned to accept that
local identity is at the heart of the cultural meaning of the sport within the
United States.
Nor are players really representative of the communities where they ply
their trade. With a major exception of the “Lisbon Lions,” the Glasgow Celtic
European Football Champions of 1967, in which all the team hailed from
within 10 miles of the ground, players in the modern age did not generally
emanate from the neighborhoods where their teams are located. English soccer
literature often recalls how in the immediate post-Second World War decades
the players of EFL clubs often caught the same buses to home matches as the
fans. However, although the players may have lived locally, they were not
always local in origin and perhaps never have been. Indeed in the early years of
the EFL, which, unlike cricket, had no birth qualification, Scottish players
often migrated south to play in English football. Moreover there was a transfer
system for the buying and selling of players to other teams before 1914. What
has changed in recent years with the creation of the EPL is that the bulk of the
players are no longer even British. In the starting line-ups for the first round of
EPL fixtures in 1992 just eleven players came from outside the United Kingdom
or Ireland. This has changed dramatically and teams now resemble a league of
nations with foreigners making up over 60 percent of the aggregate registered
EPL players. North American team sports weakened their community
representation—if it had ever existed without small franchises—with the
coming of the draft in American football (1935), basketball (1947), ice hockey
(1963), and baseball (1965), as well as the development of the farm system in
baseball by which players were stacked away in minor league teams across the
county to prevent their signing by rivals.

Cultural Exceptionalism
Australian Rules football is specific to that country. Although it resembles an
amalgam of all other codes of football, it actually owes nothing to any of them.
It began in 1858 as a means of keeping Melbourne cricketers fit during the winter
and became organized into a state-based league competition in 1877, predating
PRODUCTS, TRAINING, AND TECHNOLOGY 89

all other football leagues. In 1990 the competition became the Australian Football
League, confirming that it was now a nationwide competition, though state
leagues continued to function. It has several distinctive features, some of them
reflecting Australian cultural heritage, particularly the concept of everyone
getting a “fair go” and the larrikin anti-authority attitude. At state level it has
been organized around electorate districts within the major cities. Unlike many
football codes there are no knockout cup competitions with the top of the league
at the end of the season being declared “minor” champion before an elaborate
playoff system to determine the “major” champion. On the field it has a unique
closed-fist method of passing the ball and features spectacular high marks where
a player often clambers on an opponent’s shoulders to catch the ball. Points are
awarded for near misses at goal, and not only is there no offside but players
cannot be sent off for foul play, though any reported offenders are ineligible for
the end-of-season award as “best and fairest” player (Hess et al. 2008).
American college sport is a unique phenomenon in which athletics has
become the cuckoo in the nest undermining the academic mission of many
institutions. It began as a player sport product but became a major cultural
spectator sport, popularized through the local press (Oriard 1994). Universities
and colleges of further and higher education worldwide are dedicated to
teaching, learning, and research, but in the United States, uniquely, they also
host a $16 billion-a-year sports enterprise which has become part of the mass
entertainment industry. Annual athletic budgets of several institutions top $100
million and most institutions spend more on sport than they receive directly
from it. Their reward is glory, publicity, enhanced branding, political support in
the state legislature, student and parent interest, and alumni donations. College
sports, at least in those sports that have major professional leagues, have in
effect become minor leagues used for draft purposes. This stems from some
sports, football and basketball in particular, having no minor-league system in
which aspiring professionals could learn their trade. Recruitment has been
geared to the college draft and colleges are the only place where adequate
coaching can be found. Increasingly student athletes in these sports are regarded
by the universities, by the sports departments, and by the students themselves
as being a distinct body on campus, separate physically and culturally from
other undergraduates (Chudacoff 2015).
American college sport is a striking case of what Vamplew (2018) has termed
“commercial amateurism,” in which unpaid athletes perform in front of paying
spectators, bringing revenue to promoters, clubs, and organizations. This
concept covers situations like Queens Park, a Scottish amateur football club,
which in the immediate post-First World War decade owned the largest football
stadium in the world. Another example is Australian track and field in the
1920s. Neilsen (2014) shows how those who administered antipodean amateur
sport were drawn into running it as a business and replicated the practices
90 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

adopted by entrepreneurs pushing professional sport. They sought to popularize

their sport by creating a network of clubs and promoting competition between
them, as well as bringing overseas stars to Australia, neither of which fell within
the classic British view of amateur sport under whose policies they were
supposed to be operating. The general decline of amateurism at the elite level
during the modern age—Rugby Union was the last major international sport to
begin to pay its players overtly in the mid-1990s—has left American colleges in
a unique position.

PLAYER PRODUCTS
Player products focus on sports participants as consumers and how they have
been supplied with equipment to play with, costumes to wear, places in which
to perform, and training to improve their playing skills.

Equipment and Costume

The main functions of sports equipment and costume are to enable and improve
performance as well as to offer protection to and identification of the wearer.
Some basic equipment is necessary for a sport to take place but it is developments
in design that have helped make participants faster, higher, and stronger. Just
compare some items at the beginning of the modern age with their later
equivalents: the stiff bamboo versus the flexible carbon fiber vaulting pole;
wooden golf clubs versus the composite graphite and titanium versions; and the
contrasting streamlining of cars in the inaugural Italian Mille Miglia of 1927 with
their Formula One counterparts. Some equipment was not even comprehended
in the 1920s. Athletes with physical disabilities could rarely be sportspersons, but
now cyborg technology allows some to challenge able-bodied competitors.
Costume is omnipresent in any representation of sport, be it the
acknowledgment of ability in cycling’s maillot jaune (“yellow jersey”), the
identifying colored silks worn by jockeys, or the protective helmets of American
footballers. One fear is that the latter, rather than protecting the wearer, has led
to their use as an offensive weapon and even more injuries. As technology has
improved the design and materials of sports costume, such as the all-in-one
swimsuits, it has to be questioned whether, in the search for marginal gains,
costume has actually become equipment. As Williams (2015) has argued, the
collaboration between Adi Dassler of Adidas sports shoes and Sepp Herberger
in 1954 enabled the German team to screw in longer studs (or cleats) to counter
muddy conditions at halftime in the World Cup final to turn a 2–0 deficit to
Hungary into a 3–2 win, and created a major moment of postwar national
pride. Bates and Warner (2011) have noted the dichotomy in costume between
elite and recreational athletes in water sports and skiing, where the former have
PRODUCTS, TRAINING, AND TECHNOLOGY 91

FIGURE 3.4: Crowd scene on the opening day of the 1952 Olympics. Helsinki
Stadium, Finland. Photo by Nat Farbman/The LIFE Picture Collection. Getty Images.

opted for high-tech, skintight bodysuits, not generally seen in the pool or on
the slopes. Perhaps the main achievement of costume—or rather costume
change, as skirts became shorter and shorts became acceptable—has been to
allow women to participate more fully in sport. Yet a major development has
been unseen. Phillips and Phillips (1993) argue that new materials, such as
nylon and rayon, led to lighter underwear for women, and the development of
tampons increasingly liberated women to enjoy and participate in sport.
Team sports demanded uniformity in costume design, but in other sports and
in sporting recreation individuality could flourish. There have been fashions
within sport: the tartan trews of American golfers visiting St. Andrews in the
1990s; the ultrashort shorts of English footballers in the 1970s and 1980s; and
air shoes and the like among basketballers. However, these are subject to the
regulatory rules of event organizers and even governing bodies. Cultural
conservatism among tennis administrators meant that shorts were not acceptable
until the 1930s, and even today skirts are the preferred option for female
92 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

players. Moreover, while other tournament organizers have relented, Wimbledon

still enforce the diktat that suitable tennis attire should be almost entirely white.

Training, Instruction, and Assistance

Instruction and assistance came as goods (manuals, rule books, and performance-
enabling and -enhancing substances) and services (coaching, teaching, and
scientific advice). In the 1920s professional golfers were advertising themselves
as “teachers” and “instructors” to readers of the Golfers Handbook. Today
personal trainers abound and instruction can be received electronically. At the
elite level coaching was systemized and revolutionized during the modern age
with scientific method applied to achieve even marginal advantage. Victorian
sports administrators often regarded coaching as akin to cheating in gaining a
unfair, unnatural advantage, though they accepted that sometimes it was a
necessary evil, as in eights rowing where unison and style were considered vital.
Any such coaching, however, was generally only acceptable if it came from their
social peers (Day 2012). This gradually changed, and by the 1920s trainers such
as Sam Mussabini helped his charges such as Olympic gold medalists Albert Hill
and Harold Abrahams with their training regime, diet, and relaxation. By the
middle of the twentieth century, advice had become segmented and specialized
with dieticians, strength and conditioning coaches, physical therapists and
physiologists, and it was increasingly possible to earn a living as an expert in one
specific aspect of physical athletic preparation.
Sports science was pioneered in Germany before 1920, and during the
modern age its provision became formalized in most western and northern
European nations. Its widespread adoption in the communist bloc has been
attributed to a desire for more medals in international competitions, but this
seems no less true of the Western world, though here there may also have been
a commercial imperative. Sports science researchers focus on the key areas of
physiology, nutrition, biomechanics, coaching, and medical support. However,
there is a disconnect between sports science and sport for the masses. Although
there have been some spin-offs for the ordinary athlete, particularly in
rehabilitation, the focus of sports medicine everywhere, like sports science, has
been the elite sportsperson and how to enhance their performance (Vamplew
1989: 68). So much so that one researcher has noted that at the beginning of the
modern age most elite athletes were normal, healthy citizens but over time they
have become potentially unhealthy physiological freaks (Heggie 2011: 194).
In many sports the workplace is simultaneously a site of medical expertise
and extraordinary medical neglect (Howe 2004). Promoters and managers
frequently demand that participants play through pain, using drugs to enable
them to perform despite the long-term damage to their bodies. Avoidable heat-
related deaths have been a constant feature in American football as players and
coaches alike de-emphasize the dangers of playing and training in such
PRODUCTS, TRAINING, AND TECHNOLOGY 93

FIGURE 3.5: Marco Pantani of Italy, rider for the Mercatone UnoScanavino team
cycling on the Courchevel–Morzine Stage 16 of the Tour de France on July 18, 2000
at Courcheval, France. Photo: Doug Pensinger. Hulton Archive. Getty Images.

conditions. The culture of elite sport is to pressurize performers to minimize or

suppress pain and injury (Schultz, Kenney, and Linden 2014).
Scientific knowledge and technology have helped athletes break records by
improving not just their bodies but also the environment in which they perform.
Modern swimming pools for international events have wave-reducing lane
ropes to absorb the splash from nearby swimmers, and running track surfaces
have slip-resistant lanes that return energy to the legs rather than drain it like
the old, uneven cinder ones did. Indeed one estimate is that Jesse Owens,
winning Olympian in the 1936 100–meter sprint, who had a best time of 10.2
seconds, would have been only a stride behind Usain Bolt’s 2013 World
Championship winning time of 9.77 seconds had he had the benefit of modern
track, shoe, and starting block technology (Brennan 2018).

Public and Private Provision of Facilities

Bolz (2012) has shown that the interwar years in Europe were characterized by
massive construction of publicly funded, local participatory sports venues based
on an imperative to improve public health. Germany led the way, taking
94 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

advantage of the prohibition on military education imposed in the Versailles

peace treaty to adapt army training facilities for public use. Much was achieved
in the Weimar Republic and the Nazis continued the policy of facilities for the
masses rather than large venues for spectators. Italy, too, had politicized fascist
physical education policies, and even in Britain, where there was a reluctance
for state intervention in the sporting area, national governments saw a need for
improved public health, though the onus for provision was left to local
authorities. Yet the legacy of tradition still influenced the interwar decision-
making. Whereas in 1922 Germany had an estimated 1,360 swimming pools
and Britain 700, Italy had never been a national state and even in 1933 possessed
but five pools. Similarly, gymnastics in Britain had never attained the level of
popularity of the activity in Europe and gymnasiums scarcely featured in sports
construction planning. In the United States, as part of its New Deal building
program, the government invested in public parks and sports facilities and, at
the level of an individual sport, Moss (2013) has shown that in the 1920s the
private golf club enjoyed a boom, fueled by the ease of consumer loans which
were used to pay for fees and subscriptions, but, following the stock market
collapse later in that decade, American golfers, even from the middle classes,
moved steadily to the use of public courses.

Participatory Sports Clubs

Sports clubs began to enable people with a common sporting purpose to come
together. They provided a basis for agreeing common rules and regulations,
created a framework for competitive interaction, and secured a location for
participation. Clubs also encouraged sociability and conviviality, described by
Holt (1992: 347) as being “at the heart of sport.” For the elite, tennis, skiing,
golf, and motor sport were essentially clubbable opportunities for the sexes to
mix, as well as providing chances for social interaction and to display status,
wealth, and taste. Motoring down to overseas venues like Deauville, where the
horse racing drew in tennis champion John Borota and aristocrats such as Lady
Mountbatten and the Aga Khan, merged sport and leisure activities, new
fashions, transport, and people-watching (“Dressing for the Autumn” Vogue
1930: 49). As in previous periods, clubs in the modern age tended not to cross
the social divide and reinforced cultural barriers with bonding social capital
between like-minded individuals rather than establishing bridging social capital
across class, racial, and ethnic groupings. Kay’s (2013: 1661) study of private
golf, tennis, and bowls clubs in twentieth-century Britain found evidence “of
people like us hanging around together and repelling outsiders,” and in interwar
America white Protestants created private golf clubs to keep out Catholics and
Jews, while immigrant German Jews built their own courses but excluded Jews
from eastern Europe (Moss 2013).
PRODUCTS, TRAINING, AND TECHNOLOGY 95

Workplace Sport
One special area of sports provision that became significant for some time in
the modern age was that of workplace sport. It became a major way in which
young adults, both male and female, were introduced to post-school sport in
the interwar years, decades which one researcher claims was a “golden age” for
work-based sport (Heller 2008: 607). Taking Britain as an example, works-
based teams, leagues, and cup competitions expanded throughout Britain for
both men and women in this period. There was a significant development of
interbusiness sporting rivalry with the establishment of competitions and events
solely for company teams. By 1939 over a quarter of football clubs and nearly
a fifth of cricket clubs in some northern towns had a workplace origin (Williams
1996: 124–5). The Industrial Welfare Society suggested that in the 1930s at
least 25 percent of workers were members of company sports clubs (Kay 2013:
1662). Employers saw this provision as an addition to company welfare schemes
that could create loyalty to their firms and undermine the growth of trade
unionism, while workers felt the quality of the provision was better and often
cheaper than available elsewhere (Vamplew 2017).
The first decade following the Second World War was one of nationalization
which saw state ownership of major industrial sectors such as the coal mines,
railways, and iron- and steelworks, all of which were committed to welfare
policies which included sport. Countervailing forces, however, included the
lessening of a need for sport to be part of a broader welfare package with the
development of the Welfare State. Phillips (2004: 112) suggests that personnel
policies may have replaced (or encompassed) old-style welfarism. Moreover, a
decade or so after the war, workers had become more affluent which raised the
prospect of alternative leisure activities. Continued postwar affluence in the
1960s meant that workers could choose leisure activities away from the
immediate workplace. Coupled with structural change within the economy as
steel, coal, and engineering fell on difficult times, both supply of and demand
for workplace sport reduced. The Lawn Tennis Association handbook for 1956
indicates that there were at least seventy-five affiliated working men’s clubs and
miner’s welfare tennis groups throughout the north of England, but thirty years
later, with large-scale colliery closures and alternative leisure options, there
were only seven (Kay 2012: 2542). Margaret Thatcher’s unsocial Britain
lessened any chances of a revival of workplace sport, which still exists but on a
much smaller scale than in its heyday.
Across the world, Australia exhibited a similar pattern of boom and decline
in workplace sport. Such provision there was dominated by Australian Rules
football, which was so popular that it occasionally morphed into a spectator
product. After a study of the phenomenon in the state of Victoria, Burke (2008)
concludes that, in the interwar period, workplace football was a significant
96 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

cultural leisure activity for the people of Melbourne and its suburbs and regional
centers. However, from a peacetime pinnacle at the close of the 1930s after the
Second World War a gradual but sustained decline began, and by the end of the
century workplace football was virtually extinct, a relic of a bygone era. In
Russia in the 1920s the influence of the Prolerkultrists led to labor exercises in
factory yards and farm meadows with men and women swinging hammers or
scythes, simulating work movements in time to music. The Soviet system also
involved the sponsorship of sports clubs (labeled Dinamo) by the security and
armed forces and, later, via trade unions such as those for white-collar workers
(Spartak), railway workers (Locomotiv), and car workers (Torpedo) (Riordan
2010: 545–7).

ASSOCIATED PRODUCTS
People have always been encouraged to consume other goods when consuming
sport. Indeed the sport product is a complementary one to others such as the
travel product, the alcohol product, the food product, and the gambling product.
As Stewart and Jones (2010) indicate, fans also purchase merchandise which has
become increasingly significant, especially as global supporters, who may never
attend a game in person, seek to identify with a team. Merchandising has been
a way that clubs further capture the utility of their fans. Replica shirts have been
joined by products with only a tenuous connection to football—own-label
wines, fragrances, and children’s toys—as merchandise sales have soared to rival
revenue from gate receipts. By 2007/8 the average EPL club made about £20
million from such commercial activity (Szymanski 2010: xiv–xv).
There is fashion within sport but also fashion emanating from sport. Whereas
sports clothing is for participants, sportswear, though often inspired by sports
clothes, is for anyone. Today modern sportswear can be as much about
leisurewear style as practical advantage in the arena: football shirts can send
signals about a player’s biometrics to the coaching staff, but they also serve as
replica products in a cross-generational market that can be worn on non-match
days (Stride 2015). This cross-fertilisation began in the 1930s when for some
consumers sportswear was becoming leisurewear. In both North America and
in Europe, the staple look of sports fashions were mix-and match-separates,
often in toning colors, or contrasting bright mixes of wool blend or cotton,
such as featured by Brenner Sports Limited (“Motoring on the Continent”
Vogue 1935: 14).
These designs incorporated sports shirts and jumpers for men and women,
to be worn for urban leisure as well as for active pursuits, and gradually a
coordinated look of smart casual separates in easy wash materials became
promoted as an “assemblage” or “ensemble.” Worldwide, this became an
international and cosmopolitan way of dressing, elegant and androgynous, with
PRODUCTS, TRAINING, AND TECHNOLOGY 97

tennis and basketball shoes predating trainers as the leading leisure footwear.
Clemente (2007) has shown how, in the span of half a century, sportswear in
south Florida evolved from the idiosyncratic daywear of elite northerners on
vacation in Palm Beach to a major textile industry producing the very clothing
that it was instrumental in popularizing.
Catering franchises have remained important contributors to stadium revenue.
Wimbledon tennis fortnight is the largest sporting catering operation in Europe;
in 2015 it employed 1,800 staff to prepare and serve meals and drinks. The
following quantities of food and drink were served: 350,000 cups of tea and
coffee, 150,000 bottles of water, 207,000 meals, 235,000 glasses of Pimm’s,
190,000 sandwiches, 150,000 bath buns, scones, pasties, and doughnuts,
130,000 lunches, 100,000 pints of draught beer and lager, 60,000 sausage
baguettes, 40,000 chargrilled meals, 32,000 portions of fish and chips, 30,000
liters of milk, 8,000 bottles of champagne, 125,500 ice creams, 6,000 stone-
baked pizzas, and, of course, 142,000 portions of English strawberries
(Wimbledon.com, 20 February 2016).
Sport heritage has become a minor industry as the sector has mobilized
nostalgia as a commercial but also an educational proposition. Museums and
Sports Halls of Fame are the most important conduits of this, and the second
half of the modern age has seen a significant increase in their number worldwide
(Phillips 2012: 249). They invoke a sense of the past by emphasizing the
material culture of sport. Stadium tours, too, have persuaded sports fans
literally to pay homage to their heroes. These tours, like museum visits, always
end via the ubiquitous shop where sports-related merchandise can be purchased
as part of the commodification of sporting memory.
Gambling is another associated sports product. Sport and gambling can
work well together; having a bet can add to the excitement of the event, and
the unpredictability of sport can create a lively betting market. Yet sport has
been much more important to gambling as a vehicle for betting than gambling
has been to sport as a source of revenue. Many governing bodies of sport were
reluctant to associate themselves with gambling because of justified fears of
ensuing corruption, but additionally, as much gambling was illegal, its revenue
streams could not be easily tapped anyway. A few sports in countries where
totalizators were legalized at race courses and dog tracks were able to raise
money to plow back into the sport, but the primary beneficiary was government
at state and national level. This disparity in revenue sharing was emphasized
when off-course betting became legalized (Riess 2011; Vamplew 2006).
During the modern age a revolution in communications technology
transformed the way in which sport was presented and experienced. There is no
doubt that the mega events previously discussed would not have become so
gigantic without the drawing power of television. Boxing was the first sport to
be widely televised (in the 1940s), the action in the limited-size ring being easy
98 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

for the static cameras to cover. In the early years of the modern age physical
attendance at the venue was essential to elite club revenues, but more recently
income from broadcasting rights has become the dominant item in their accounts.
The money from television contracts now appears to be the driving force in
many sports. This leads to the danger of the sports industry becoming too reliant
on one source of revenue. Currently competition between broadcasters is
keeping income high for sports organizations, but it can go wrong. When Irish
broadcaster Setanta’s contract with the Scottish Football League collapsed in
2009, several clubs were placed in financial jeopardy. Moreover the media tail
may now be wagging the sporting dog. Sport has compromised itself by changing
its playing and organization rules to suit broadcasting companies, such as the
introduction of the tiebreak in tennis (and later other sports) to enable schedules
to be met, and also allowing the television stations increasingly to determine the
starting times for events. Media companies now own sports clubs and teams, as
with Sky Broadcasting’s professional road-cycling team, and they also sponsor
events, again as with Sky who began funding the British Masters Golf
Championship in 2015.

ENTREPRENEURIAL MOTIVATIONS
One expert on sports entrepreneurship noted that “while the profit motive has
nudged sport in certain directions, one cannot say that it has dominated or even
controlled the industry’s structure” (Hardy 1986: 20). He sensed that “profit-
seeking and risk-taking—normally central dimensions of entrepreneurship—
have not always been so pivotal in an industry whose production process has
often been subsidised by state and philanthropic agencies.” More recently
Vamplew (2018) has argued for the introduction of the sports social entrepreneur
who seeks social returns rather than (or as well as) operating surpluses into any
discussion of promoter motivation and suggested, more generally, that sports
entrepreneurs should be considered as those persons who act as change agents
in the supply of sports products, who attempt to increase the output of the
industry, improve the consumer experience, or raise interest in sports products
by such means as developing new markets and creating new products. Much
sports provision in the command economies of the communist world was for
political, non-profit reasons, either to promote fitness and military preparedness,
or, as was also a motive in the Western world, to bring prestige to the nation
(and its politicians) via the reflected glory of gold medals won by their nation’s
athletes. It was suggested above that there was a cultural difference in the
motivation of American and European owners of sports clubs with regard to
profit orientation. This is not to infer that Europeans were uninterested in
making profits but to suggest that such earnings were not taken for personal
consumption or distributed as shareholder dividends. Instead they were spent
PRODUCTS, TRAINING, AND TECHNOLOGY 99

to improve the quality of the team to help the club win trophies. Others who
definitely sought profits like conventional businesses (which is what they were)
included the producers of sports costume and equipment, the purveyors of
food and drink at sports venues, and the proprietors of newspapers and
broadcasting companies who spread information about the events taking place
there. There were some who also sought profits from sport but indirectly. Many
local authorities in Britain constructed swimming pools, golf courses, and
bowling greens to help attract the tourist pound to their locality, and employers
who set up works teams felt such welfare provision promoted loyalty to the
firm and reduced labor turnover.

DARK PRODUCTS
Not everything marketed in the sports world of the modern age matched the
wholesome image promulgated by those adherents of sport as a force for good.
Clearly some sports products, be they spectator, player, or associated ones, can
be labeled dark products as their sale or use undermines the integrity of sport.
Spectator product providers were supplying several markets simultaneously.
Some spectators wanted to see a demonstration of skill, others an entertaining
spectacle; and yet others demanded the excitement and drama of a close contest.
Economists argue that it is this latter unpredictability of sport with an uncertain
result that is its key selling point. The problem for promoters is that this very
unpredictability means that quality or excitement cannot be guaranteed. For
some profit-seeking entrepreneurs the integrity of sport had to be sacrificed on
the altar of spectacle to ensure an audience: for them the value of “normal”
sport was not enough. The prime example was the development of professional
wrestling, which by the 1920s was becoming choreographed with predetermined
results. One wrestling impresario of the time, Charles Cochran (1915: 11),
claimed in his autobiography that “the public did not want straight wrestling –
they wanted a ‘show.’ ” The major supplier of professional wrestling today is
World Wrestling Entertainment which began as Capitol Wrestling Corporation
in 1952 and now hosts over 300 live events each year as well as telecasting to
some 150 countries. Although the bouts are scripted and follow a story line,
they have found a ready market among sports fans who prefer the spectacle to
true competition.
The elephant in the room when discussing sports science is performance-
enhancing drugs. There is a fine line—exploited by medical exemptions—
between performance-enabling and performance-enhancing drugs, one deemed
appropriate for bringing athletes to the starting line but the other banned for
giving them an unfair advantage. As Dimeo and Moller (2018: 81) show, over
300 substances which appear in general medications are now prohibited by
IOC and WADA rules, although they are legal for personal consumption. In
100 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

the search for international championship medals, some countries, notably in

the communist bloc, have sanctioned the systematic use of performance-
enhancing drugs, but Western athletes have also had their use of such drugs
condoned by their respective sports bodies (Dimeo, Hunt, and Horbury 2011).
Another form of dark product has been the sports costume and equipment
produced by the exploitation of workers, including children, in the
underdeveloped world. In the early 1990s much of the world’s output of
footballs stemmed from young boys and girls handsewing together panels of
leather or synthetic materials. A football could sell for $65 (£50); the 6-year-
old Pakistani child who stitched it together got paid the equivalent of 15 cents
(10 pence), a classic example of corporate capitalism exploiting market forces
to its advantage. Although child labor is illegal in India and Pakistan, few seem
to care that it is infringed to produce sports equipment: not the national or
state governments who simply accept the situation; not the multinational
corporations who subcontract the production of their wares to middlemen in
those nations; not even the Save the Children charity who argued that stitching
footballs was not as bad as other trades; and certainly not the consumers who
continued to buy footballs by the million (Navid et al. 2011).
Sport has never been totally pure: cheating one’s opponents, using
performance-enhancing substances, and player and spectator violence all have
a long history. Whether the use of dark products intensified in the modern age
is a matter of hypothesis rather than calculation but there are several indicators
that this has occurred. First, the use of performance-enhancing drugs, state
sponsored in the Eastern bloc and tolerated for stars in the West, has become a
recognized major threat to the integrity of track and field, road cycling, and
power sports such as weightlifting. Indeed a feature of these sports (and others)
is a race, between pharmacologists who invent performance-enhancing drugs
and those who detect them. Secondly, crowd behavior, particularly in soccer,
became a major problem in Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. Although not the
root cause, the association with alcohol often acted as a trigger mechanism or
an aggravating factor (Collins and Vamplew 2002: 80–7). Thirdly, historians
have shown that in America the criminal underworld infiltrated boxing in the
interwar decades and college basketball in the immediate post-1945 years (Riess
1988; Figone 1989). Additionally economists, using large data sets, have alleged
widespread match fixing in several sports including sumo, horse racing, college
football and basketball, and tennis (Vamplew 2018). A recent report solicited
by the European Commission noted that “scandals have multiplied in recent
years and encompass all disciplines, all levels of sport and a wide number of
countries” (Boniface 2012: 15). Indeed Hill (2016: 231–2), an investigative
journalist (but one with a doctorate in sociology), believes that “the war against
match-fixers is being lost,” predominately because of the globalization of the
sports gambling market.
PRODUCTS, TRAINING, AND TECHNOLOGY 101

FIGURE 3.6: Kenilworth Cigarette Advertisement, March 20, 1920 in the Illustrated
London News issue. The ad features a pair of golfers. A woman offers a wager of
twenty cigarettes to the male player that he cannot make his shot. Photo by Mansell/
Time & Life Picture/The LIFE Picture Collection. Getty Images.
102 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

GLOBALIZATION
Perhaps betting on sport has become globalized, but what of sport itself? National
cultures produced and popularized different sports in different areas of the world.
Tomlinson and Young (2011) identify four clusters of sport development within
Europe alone: not just the British, but also German, Soviet, and Scandinavian
versions. The British one was characterized by an absence of state intervention, a
reliance on private organizations, and a domination by an anti-commercial ethos
through the ideology of amateurism. The German cluster originated in nineteenth-
century militarized forms of physical culture and was marked by an emphasis on
the collective, the individual body in harmony with the body politic, and a non-
competitive ethos. Scandinavia had a variant on the German with an equal focus
on improving national spirit and defense in the nineteenth century, but placed
greater emphasis on individual movement, bodily harmony, and aesthetics.
Additionally, its notion of idrott proposed a recreational outdoor physical
development in harmony with nature. In the Soviet/eastern European cluster,
which emerged in the twentieth century, sport was an extension of the state
apparatus both in spheres of mass display and the cultivation of elite athletes. In
America, British sports immigrated with the colonists and prizefighting and horse
racing vied for precedence as early spectator sports. Yet the sport that emerged as
America’s national one in the nineteenth century was baseball, which had British
origins but no popularity in its homeland. The later developments of American
football and basketball were clearly innovations from within the United States.
It is often argued that these models of sports development have now been
undermined by globalization, but really soccer is still the only one truly global
sport. The World Cup, inaugurated in Uruguay in 1930, was the first single-
sport global team event, but it was unique also for being the first global
competition to allow professionals to participate. Moreover Taylor (2006)
asserts that it began the expansion of the international market for football
talent which cemented soccer as the world game. As befits the “world game,”
the supply lines for balls has become multinational. Footballs that once required
stitching in local cobblers’ workshops became sourced from South and East
Asia where labor was plentiful and cheap. In turn mechanized production in
China has undercut the low productivity of the handsewers of Pakistan and
Thailand (Navdi et al. 2011: 338–40). Yet this is more an international division
of labor based on comparative advantage than true globalization.
Globalization is often conflated, especially by those on the political left, as
Americanization. Yet sport has not become McDonaldized even with the global
reach of American televised sport. Although basketball has featured in the
Olympics since 1936, baseball has appeared only intermittently and American
football not at all, suggesting that some major American team sports have not
transferred sufficiently across the world to justify inclusion in one of the truly
global sports festivals. Backed by the NFL as a means of developing young players
PRODUCTS, TRAINING, AND TECHNOLOGY 103

by giving them more game experience, the World League of American Football
operated in Europe between 1991 and 2007. It was formed to serve as a spring
league, with seven of the ten teams actually based in North America. That format
lasted two seasons before, after a one-season hiatus, it was re-established in 1995
with six teams, all in Europe. In 1998 it was rebranded as NFL Europe until 2007
when it became NFL Europa, in deference to the dominant spelling in Dutch and
German. There was a lack of stability in the franchises and ultimately five of the
six teams were based in Germany. While attendances held up, this lost them
television contracts outside Germany, and in June 2007, one week after the World
Bowl XV, the league was disbanded. Reportedly it had been losing about $30
million a season. It had become an expensive exercise in amassing exemption for
NFL summer training camps (Starcevic: 2007).
In sport America has exhibited exceptionalism, if not isolationism, with the
one real world sport, soccer, only being accepted as a mainstream sport relatively
late in the United States. However, perhaps globalization should be considered
more subtly than simply the domination of a type of sport. As members of the
major superpower emerging from the First World War, Americans thought they
could use sport to spread American culture and ideology throughout the world,
similar to what Britain had done in the previous century. However, Dyreson
(2003) argues that the spread of modern sport encouraged nationalism rather
than globalization. Maybe globalization can be seen in attitudes toward the
promotion of sport but the American pursuit of profit has not been fully
replicated around the world with investment in sport for national and individual
kudos still often occurring.

CONCLUSION
During the modern age sport experienced commercial widening, commercial
deepening, product modification, and product transformation, often influenced
by cultural developments in wider society. Commercial widening occurs when
more revenue is obtained from traditional gate-revenue sources, such as the
playing of more games (with the expansion of Victorian Football League to
encompass Australian Rules teams from all the other states) or the creation of
extra stadium capacity when there is excess demand for the event being sold
(commonplace everywhere in growing sports). In effect it is a business strategy of
“more of the same.” Commercial deepening, however, involves the development
of new revenue sources such as sponsorship, merchandising, signage, and media
rights, which is the modern age sports business writ large. Product modification
involves changing the original sporting competition so as to attract larger
audiences, either for one event or over a season. Such changes include the
establishment of new competitions within the sport (in British soccer, League cups
were added to the more established League championships and Association cup
104 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

competitions), the introduction of playoffs for promotion from one division to

another (again introduced into the English and Scottish Football Leagues), or
perhaps playing at different times of the week (the establishment of Monday Night
Football for the American media) or even different times of the year (elite Rugby
League in England has switched from being a winter code to a summer one). Such
developments add more events to the sporting calendar but do not change the
essence of the traditional game. Product transformation, on the other hand, can
drastically change the nature of a sport and the way in which it is played. One
feature that has affected several sports is that the referee’s decision is no longer
sacrosanct. Technological developments enabling slow-motion replays have forced
governing bodies to acknowledge that in-play rulings can be challenged.
All these changes can be seen within Australian cricket, which began the
modern age with test matches scheduled against the traditional all-white teams
of England and South Africa and an internal Sheffield Shield competition
between the three most populous states of New South Wales, Victoria, and
South Australia. Commercial widening saw new international opponents
including India, Pakistan, and the West Indies, all non-white in their composition,
and the spread of the Shield tournament to the rest of the continent. Commercial
deepening began with the Australian Cricket Board signing contracts with
national radio and later television broadcasters, at the time non-commercial
organisations, but the sport gained even more revenue when media magnate
Kerry Packer set up a rival competition, World Series Cricket, in the late 1970s
as the resultant rapprochement allowed a commercial broadcaster to gain the
rights to televise all Australia’s games. Even more of an income generator was
the product modification of limited-overs (usually fifty for each side) cricket in
which a result could be obtained in a day unlike the four or five days of traditional
matches. Ultimately this led to product transformation and by the end of the
modern age the most popular form of the game in Australia was the Big Bash, in
which sides representing the capital cities, ostensibly the state teams with
imported guest stars, played each other, often under lights, in matches limited
to twenty overs batting for each side, thus fitting in with the zeitgeist of recent
times, that of instant gratification, fast food, and fast communication.
Sports products are not just an economic phenomenon but are influenced by,
and have implications for, cultural aspects of life. During the modern age cultural
shifts helped influence change in the format and character of many sports. Who in
1920 would have believed that one day the United States would win the Women’s
World Soccer Championship, or indeed that such a tournament would ever exist
(Williams 2013)? What cricket fan would have envisaged switching on an electronic
device to watch one-day games in India and Afghanistan, or that the headquarters
of that game would now be in Dubai? Who would have imagined that the Olympic
Games would have been hosted in Rio de Janeiro and would have featured golf,
synchronized swimming, mountain biking, taekwondo, and the triathlon?
 CHAPTER FOUR

Rules and Order

SHELDON ANDERSON

Political power in Europe and the United States at the turn of the century rested
with wealthy white men, who decided who would be allowed to play organized
sports, why the games were played, and how they were played. Sports were
seen as a way to maintain class structures, gender and ethnic divisions, and even
international order. In addition to adhering to the rules of a game, sports were
to teach proper bourgeois values of honesty, politeness, hard work, and
masculinity. Sport was a civil religion to inculcate values that assured the elites’
hold on political and economic power.
These leaders led the masses into the carnage of the First World War. Before the
war the powerful had managed to maintain their lofty position, but at the end of
the war the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman Empires had
collapsed, and the Bolsheviks were running Russia. After the sacrifices they had
made in the war, the lower and middle classes, women, and disenfranchised
minorities everywhere were demanding a greater piece of the political and
economic pie. The Second World War accelerated these changes.
The civilizing mission promoted by the upper classes, as reflected in sport,
came under scrutiny as well. The informal rules of sport dictated those eligible
to play, norms for behavior on and off the field, and the values sports were
supposed to champion. These rules have been contested to this day.
A recurrent theme of the past century of sport is that as much as they try,
sport authorities, like political figures, have faced continued challenges to their
laws and values. In fact, sports have often been the catalyst for changes to
political structures and societal norms. In this way, just as there has been a
gradual increase in the number of liberal democracies in the last century,

105
106 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

organized sports have also become more inclusive across national, ethnic, and
gender lines; this is an inspirational story.

THE CONSTITUTIVE RULES OF SPORTS

In the last half of the nineteenth century, the Anglo-American powers devised
many of the games that dominate the global sports scene today. The British Isles
birthed such games as soccer football, rugby, cricket, and golf, and had
standardized most Olympic events. The Americans gave the world baseball,
basketball, volleyball, and American football.
The regularization of sports paralleled the rationalization and modernization
of Western political and economic systems with their improved transportation
and communication that facilitated mobility and urbanization. Western sport’s
rules also became standardized, enabling players from different locations to
compete together. Sports record-keeping became increasingly exact to
determine who ran or swam the fastest, threw the farthest, or jumped the
highest. These are what Wray Vamplew terms the “constitutive,” or formal,
rules of sports (Vamplew 2007: 843).
The basic rules of the world’s most popular games were established by the
early twentieth century. Sports rules, of course, are in constant flux. Changes
are made for greater fairness, to insure player safety, correct an obvious flaw in
the game, or enhance fan interest. Players with extraordinary talents or those
who consistently bend the formal and informal rules can also prompt sports
authorities to make basic changes.
Soccer traditionalists have been loath to tweak the rules of “the beautiful
game.” In a sport where scores are rare, the referee is in a position to dramatically
change the outcome, especially if he whistles a foul on the defense in the penalty
area (often incorrectly) and awards a penalty kick. In a rule that was determined
over a century and a half ago, the penalty kick comes from 11 meters from the
goal against a stationary goalie. At higher levels, a goal results in over four of
five tries.
In the early 1860s, the headmaster of Uppingham School helped devise the
offside rule by which a player in front of the ball is “out of play.” The Harrow
Rules declared that the “[player] is said to be behind,” and Eton College had it
that “a player is considered to be ‘sneaking’ ” if behind the defense (Rous and
Ford 1974: 16). Could this have derived from the wild and wooly games pitting
village against village, where a villager could not infiltrate the other side, as if
he were a spy in war? In American football, the object of the receiver is to get
behind the defense. Soccer’s offside rule was changed in 1925, when FIFA
directed that only two (not three) players had to stand between possessor of
ball, but it is still a tough call for a linesman. Often goals are scored by players
in advantageous, albeit offside, positions.
RULES AND ORDER 107

Baseball is the hallowed American game, and like soccer has been slow to
make rule changes. Baseball loyalists have romanticized the game for its
timelessness, symmetry, and precision. Nonetheless, when baseball had a
scoring problem in the late 1960s, MLB lowered the height of the pitching
mound, giving the batter a better chance. In 1973, the American League further
boosted the offenses by instituting a “designated hitter” to bat for the pitcher.
Pitchers still hit in the National League, making baseball one of the only major
sports in the world that has different rules for its two constituent leagues.
Baseball purists laud the lack of a game clock, but long games (made even
longer with instant-replay reviews) have made MLB bosses contemplate a time
limit between pitches. This is heresy to traditionalists. The same issue confronted
the other “timeless” game—cricket—which in 1971 began to play a “one-day
international,” which in turn made the game more accessible to the working
masses. A five-day Test is still a time-honored tradition, but an unrealistic length
to play on a regular basis.
Baseball was one of the last American games to adopt instant replay. It is now
a staple of MLB, much to the consternation of old-timers who, like FIFA, did
not want to change their “grand old game.” Houston Astros manager A. J.
Hinch lamented the use of replay to find minute ways to call a player out on a
tag play: “In some ways, it feels like you’re getting a speeding ticket for going
60 in a 55. By the letter of the law, that’s how it’s played, and until they change
the rule, we’re obviously going to play that way” (Witz 2015).
Instant replay has taken out the humanity and soul out of the game, a victory
of science over art. For the most part gone are the entertaining rhubarbs
between manager and umpire, the endless debates about a blown call, and the
sour fruit that has inspired so many great moments in baseball lore, such as Don
Denkinger’s missed call at first base in the sixth game of the 1985 World Series,
a key play in the Kansas City Royals’ victory over the St. Louis Cardinals, tying
the series. The Royals went on to win the championship in the seventh and
deciding game. Now the final call is farmed out to a faceless video center in a
far-off city.
FIFA was also slow to introduce the use of technology. Before the advent of
instant replay, one of the most infamous soccer goals that should not have
counted was England’s third goal against West Germany in 1966, helping the
“masters of the game” to win their one and only World Cup. Diego Maradona’s
illegal “Hand of God” goal against England in 1986 sparked more controversy
about introducing replay. FIFA did not act until there were several embarrassing
botched calls in the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. Referees in one game
disallowed an English goal against Germany that would have tied the score at
2–2. Germany went on to win 4–1. In another game, an obvious offside led to
a 1–0 Argentine lead against Mexico and an eventual 2–1 win. Now FIFA uses
goal and sideline cameras to confirm or overturn the referee’s call.
108 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

Protecting player safety has produced the most sensible rule changes. For
example, after nearly twenty deaths in American football in 1905, the forward
pass was instituted to open up that game. In 1920, after Cleveland shortstop
Ray Chapman died from a purported spitball that hit him in the head, and for
sanitary reasons, MLB banned the pitch. Baseball is a dangerous game, especially
when runners bear down on catchers or defenseless middle infielders as they try
to catch the ball, or when hurlers throw a pitch (“beanball”) at batters at speeds
of up to 100 miles per hour. Baseball has legislated against these practices;
pitchers who throw at the batter’s head are warned, and in some cases thrown
out of the game. Runners are no longer allowed to crash into a middle infielder
on a double play, or run into the catcher at home plate.
Football today is facing a real dilemma in protecting players’ heads from
concussions and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), which has led to
highly publicized cases of dementia, and even suicide. More and more parents
are prohibiting their children from playing the game. There is also evidence

FIGURE 4.1: The dominance of some players such as Minneapolis Lakers’ George
Mikan prompted rule changes. The NBA widened the three-second lane because of
Mikan’s unstoppable low-post scoring. Courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society,
St. Paul, MN.
RULES AND ORDER 109

that heading a soccer ball at an early age can cause brain damage, and that
concussions in sport have become a serious problem. On the other hand, many
Americans are utterly disdainful of soccer players who writhe around in pain,
only to jump up and run around an instant later.
Some great centers like George Mikan of the 1950s Minneapolis Lakers
influenced games through their physical dominance, while others have prompted
rule changes because their tactics were dangerous. The small lane between the
basket and the free throw line was widened because Mikan could post up a
couple of feet from the basket, making his hook shot virtually unstoppable. The
NCAA’s ban on dunking from 1967 to 1976 was in large part a way to neutralize
the dominance of UCLA’s center Lew Alcindor (renamed in 1971 Kareem
Abdul-Jabbar), who stood 7 feet 2 inches. The rule actually helped him in the
long run as he had to develop more finesse around the rim.
In the 1970s, Oakland Raider defensive back Jack Tatum regularly blindsided
receivers to dislodge the ball. Tatum’s tactic was banned after he hit Buffalo Bill
receiver Daryll Stingley and left him. Bench-clearing brawls were a frequent
occurrence in the NBA before Laker Kermit Washington nearly killed Houston
Rocket Rudy Tomjanovich with one punch. The most memorable “closeline”
foul in NBA history was Boston Celtic Kevin McHale’s wipeout of the Lakers
Kurt Rambis in the 1984 NBA finals. Players are now tossed from the game for
fighting, flagrant fouls, or even from leaving the bench to try to break up a fracas.

AMATEURISM
“Auxiliary rules,” according to Vamplew, “specify and control eligibility, and
regulatory rules place restraints on behavior independent of the sport itself”
(Vamplew 2007: 843). Agreement on the basic rules of games has been easier
to arrive at than coming to a consensus on player eligibility or how athletes are
to play on the field, and behave off it. The authorities who governed cricket,
Rugby Union, the NCAA, and the IOC in the early twentieth century were
predominantly upper-class white men dedicated to the idea of amateurism.
They were convinced that the combination of money and sport in any fashion
would undermine the recreative camaraderie and purely competitive purpose
of sports.
The definition of amateurism, other than prohibiting the direct payment for
play, differed from sport to sport, country to country, and region to region. For
the past century and a half sporting authorities around the world fought a
losing battle to keep their sports clear of professionals. Coubertin himself was
aware of the impossibility of imposing one Olympic standard on the British
Amateur Athletic Association (AAA), the US Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), or
the French Fédération Française d’Athlétisme (FFA) (Llewellyn and Gleaves
2014: 96–7, 109).
110 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

The well-to-do easily preached their version of amateurism. They had the
leisure time and space to play games without needing any financial incentive.
The English “lawn games” of croquet, tennis, golf, and cricket were genteel
affairs played on manicured greens in exclusive clubs, without the shouts and
jeers of the riffraff.
The upper classes had more difficulty restricting participation in soccer and
rugby, games that could be played on any field and with minimal equipment—a
ball and a goal. Victorians included these games in public-school curriculums in
an attempt to inculcate English upper-class lads with sportsmanship, fairness,
and physical rigor. Soccer was not considered manly enough, so the rough and
tumble game of rugby became a measure of a young student’s courage—“a
hooligan’s game played by gentlemen,” as the old adage had it.
The amateur ideal had difficulty surviving in urban, industrial Britain. Since
the introduction of universal education in the last quarter of the nineteenth
century, working-class boys began playing soccer and rugby in schools and
reading about their local teams in the newspapers. Club managers paid players
who could not afford to take time off from work to play soccer under the table.
In 1883 the professionalized Blackburn Olympics beat the Old Etonians in the
FA final, ushering in era of northern club dominance over upper- and middle-
class southern clubs. Until the outbreak of the First World War, Tottenham
Hotspur, whose players were mostly paid northerners, was the only southern
team to win the FA Cup. In the case of rugby, the “Great Schism” of 1895
revolved mostly around southern rugby union teams who rejected the payment
of players which was permitted by the new rugby league.
Soccer and rugby league have long resolved the issue of professionals and
amateurs, but England’s most class-conscious game—cricket—maintained an
outmoded notion of amateurism. England’s most famous cricket player, W. G.
Grace, was one of the first to question “shamateurism,” taking, in 1873–4,
Ł1,500 to tour Australia (Tomlinson 2015). Nearly a century later, in 1963,
English cricket authorities finally bowed to reality, ending the distinction
between professionals and amateurs—“players” and “gentlemen.” From then
on they were all merely cricketers (Hopkins and Gibson 2012).
The IOC and the NCAA are the other major sports organizations that have
tried to exclude professionals. Throughout the Cold War the IOC kept up the
sham that Olympic athletes were unpaid amateurs. Longtime American Olympic
Committee (AOC) and then IOC president Avery Brundage doggedly adhered
to Coubertin’s original vision of an amateur Olympics, and turned a blind eye
to Soviet bloc subsidies of athletes. As long as Soviet bloc athletes had a job,
were in college or in the military (and rarely showed up), the IOC deemed
them amateurs. College athletes in the United States received scholarships to
play sports. Western athletes also took payments under the table to endorse
athletic gear or to compete in a sporting event. Finally, in 1992, the IOC
RULES AND ORDER 111

succumbed to reality and allowed professionals into the Games, nearly a century
after the first modern Olympics. Vamplew sees this as a positive development:
“Eligibility generally is now more to do with ability than social position” (2007:
852—3).
The highly profitable NCAA is currently the last bastion of amateurism. The
organization is fighting an ultimately unwinnable battle against cash payments
to college athletes who make NCAA officials, athletic directors, and coaches
billions of dollars. The NCAA Division-1 compliance book alone runs some
400 pages.
For over a century the NCAA has maintained the farce that its athletes receive
no cash payments. In 1929, the Carnegie Foundation surveyed 112 colleges and
universities, and found that only twenty-eight were running “ethical” sports
programs. The study concluded that “apparently the ethical bearing of
intercollegiate football contents and their scholastic aspects ‘were of secondary
importance to the winning of victories and financial success’” (Rader 2009: 192).

FIGURE 4.2: Harold “Red” Grange of the Chicago Bears, December 8, 1925. The
University of Illinois halfback (1923–5) was the greatest college football player of all
time. He turned pro late in 1925 and is wearing his Chicago Bears uniform. National
Photo Company Collection. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division,
Washington, DC. LC-DIG-npcc-15254.
112 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

The University of Illinois featured the great Red Grange from 1923 to 1925, but
amateurists were outraged when he turned professional after his senior season,
before finishing the academic year. The University of Chicago, once a major
football power, could not compete in this milieu, and in 1939, choosing to focus
on its academic mission, gave up football. Given that the University of Chicago
is one of the top universities in the world today, it is apparent that football was
not essential to its core mission to educate students. The university resumed
intercollegiate football in non-scholarship Division 3 in 1969.
Universities often subverted the system by giving players bogus jobs, much
like Soviet bloc athletes. The University of Minnesota, a powerhouse football
team before and after the Second World War, was adept at this deception.
Gopher great Bud Grant, future coach of the NFL’s Minnesota Vikings,
“worked” for a firm in Minneapolis, and showed up once a month to pick up
his paycheck (Hartman 1997: 55).
The NCAA has become a huge moneymaking machine, so much so that its
“amateur” sports programs are rife with scandal, corruption, and inequities. In
2014, six SEC baseball coaches (a non-revenue sport) were making more than
$1 million (Tracey 2014). As of 2018, fourteen D-1 basketball coaches were
making more than $3 million (USA Today 2018). Players receive scholarships
to attend school, pay for books, and have food at a training table. But many
come from impoverished families with no disposable income and went hungry
when the training table was closed, and had no money to fly home for a family
emergency or other sundry needs. In 2009, former UCLA basketballer Ed
O’Bannon filed a class-action lawsuit against the NCAA for using the images of
players—his among them—without compensation. He lost. In the mid-2010s,
Northwestern University quarterback Kain Colter tried to unionize Division-1
college football players so they could get a share of the billions of dollars
made on Division-1 football. The NCAA fought him and he lost the lawsuit
(Bonesteel 2015).
In the most recent string of a long line of embarrassing transgressions of
NCAA rules, the University of North Carolina was exposed for giving athletes
grades without them ever doing any work. The NCAA got the university off
without sanction because other non-athlete students had access to these bogus
courses. University of Louisville coach Rick Pitino’s basketball program
provided prostitutes for prospective players and payments to bring them to the
school. Despite his claim of innocence, Louisville fired him in 2017. The NCAA
vacated some of Louisville’s previous wins, but gave the school a light penalty
of four years’ probation.
In the end, even Coubertin knew that the idea of amateurism was untenable:
“I can admit it,” he wrote in his memoirs. “The [amateur] question never really
bothered me. It had served as a screen to convene the Congress designed to
revive the Olympic Games. Realizing the importance attached to it in sporting
RULES AND ORDER 113

circles, I always showed the necessary enthusiasm, but it was enthusiasm

without real conviction” (Llewellyn and Gleaves 2014: 101).
The cultural character of a nation, region, or city—often imagined—
influences the playing styles that managers, coaches, and players are expected
to follow. To play in a contrary manner is often seen as subversive, even if the
established approach is not always victorious. In the past it took courageous
individuals to contradict the forces that dictated a specific way of playing.
Today, with the professionalization and globalization of sport, these cultural
differences are being watered down.
The British, the founders of modern sport, approached competition based on
the tenets of amateurism, which was challenged by the upstart sportsmen across
the Atlantic. The British were supposedly disdainful of scientific training
methods and the way the Americans brought a “business-like” attitude toward
amateur sports. As Matthew Llewellyn and John Gleaves argue, “Striving,
training, and specialization—hallmarks of the professional—were strongly
abhorred as crude, impure, and tainted” (2014: 99, 103). Before the 1928
Amsterdam Games, the head of the US Olympic Committee, Douglas MacArthur,
enunciated the overly contentious American sporting ethic, which ran afoul of
the old British sporting traditions of gentlemanly sportsmanship: “We represent
the greatest nation in the world. We have not come so far to lose gracefully, but
rather to win, and win decisively” (Large 2007: 47).
English universities cultivated a tradition that it was enough for sportsmen
to give it the “old college try.” One historian observed that “to be perceived as
overtly trying for a goal is an English taboo.” Robert Falcon Scott, who died in
his failed quest to lead the first expedition to the South Pole, once said that
“gentlemen don’t practice” (Alexander 1999: 43). Ernest Shackleton had failed
in his attempt to reach the South Pole several years earlier, but his crew had
dragged along several cases of whisky to lighten their spirits along the way
(McGrath 2011: 32–6).
Another British subject set out to conquer the four-minute mile. It seemed
right that breaking this record for the mile, a measurement created by England,
should happen there. In 1945, Sweden’s Gunder Hägg had set the record in the
mile at 4:01.4, a mark that stood for nine years. Medical student Roger
Bannister had trained assiduously to beat the four-minute mark, but the British
media and scholars situated Bannister firmly in the amateur sporting tradition.
It was an image that the runner himself cultivated. One noted track coach,
Brutus Hamilton, commented that “the lad is a real amateur. He runs only
because he loves to run. And he prepares himself well” (Bale 2006: 49).
Breaking the four-minute mile was no amateurish endeavor, however.
Bannister’s quest was representative of another enlightened British tradition—
the scientific method. Instead of merely running long distances, Bannister
decided to do interval training to improve his speed and stamina, figuring that
114 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

to break the four-minute mile he had to run every quarter mile in 60 seconds.
He also developed lighter track shoes. Bannister’s quest for the four-minute
mile would be a team effort. He enlisted Christopher Brasher and Christopher
Chataway as pacers for the first parts of the race. John Bale writes that “the
sanitized space of the running track, devoid of serious competitors and manned
only by assistants, replicated the laboratory. The four-minute mile was an
experiment, a model to be empirically tested” (Bale 2004: 119–24). With the
help of the two “rabbits,” in 1954 Bannister ran a 3:59.4. Lord Brabazon
gushed that Bannister was “an example to the world of our ideal sportsman.”
But years later some observers criticized Bannister for undermining the true
spirit of sport in a race that was not really a true amateur competition (Bale
2006: 49, 51–2).

ALLOWING WOMEN ON THE FIELD

For much of the twentieth century sport was the bailiwick of men. In the view of
the bourgeois paragons of organized sport, the female ideal was the domesticated
wife who raised children and kept the house; she was unsuited to physical
exercise. Working-class women worked themselves to the bone, of course, but
that manual labor was anathema to the upper classes, who had reached their
social level to avoid sweating, straining, and struggling. A Rubenesque, pasty-
white form was desired. Although racing horses was the purview of the upper
crust, even women riding astride (as opposed to sidesaddle), according to some
prudes, caused “an unnatural consolidation of the lower part of the body,
ensuring a frightful impediment to future functions” (Hargreaves 2013: 135).
Bicycling was an “indolent and indecent practice which would even transport
girls to prostitution” (Odendaal 2012: 116). Strenuous exercise, they argued,
would jeopardize a woman’s ability to bear children and breastfeed.
Women of leisure were allowed to play sedentary lawn games of croquet,
badminton, and tennis, albeit in full dresses. Cricketers frowned on women
playing that game because it entailed hard throwing, batting, running, and
catching. Grace derided the “Original English Ladies Cricketers” league. “They
might be original and English,” he scoffed, “but they are neither cricketers nor
ladies.” The formation of England’s Women’s Cricket Association in 1926 was
the first international cricket organization (Odendaal 2012: 116).
Coubertin’s Olympic vision was decidedly upper class and male. “The
Olympic Games,” he declared, “must be reserved for men.” Coubertin did not
care if women exercised in private, but the prospect of women running and
jumping around in shorts in full public view was anathema to the conservative
Frenchman. As the saying went, “a horse sweats, a man perspires, but a lady only
glows.” When a few women’s events were included at the 1900 Paris Games,
Coubertin disgustedly complained that it was “the most unaesthetic sight human
RULES AND ORDER 115

eyes could contemplate” (Schweinbenz 2000: 135). He warned that if there

were women runners or soccer players in the Olympics “would such sports
practiced by women constitute an edifying sight before crowds assembled for an
Olympiad?” (Leigh and Bonin 1977: 73–4; Hargreaves 2007: 4).
It has been an ongoing struggle to allow women to compete on the same
level as men in the Olympics. No women competed at the first modern Games
in Athens in 1896. Women played in golf, tennis, and sailing at the 1900 and
1904 Olympics, archery was added in 1904, and swimming and diving in 1912.
Women’s track and field was not on the Olympic program until 1928. As one
journalist at the time wrote, women did not belong on the field of play but in
the water to swim (Pieroth 1996: 96, 101).
In the face of this resistance from the sclerotic aristocrats in the IOC, a
Frenchwoman started her own Olympic Games for women. In 1921, Alice
Milliat helped form the Fédération Sportive Féminine Internationale (FSFI) in
Paris. The FSFI held four women’s world competitions in the interwar period:
the Women’s Olympic Games in Paris in 1922 and Stockholm in 1926, and the
Women’s World Games in Prague in 1930 and London in 1934. The first Games
in Paris attracted athletes from five countries to compete in eleven different
disciplines.
The IAAF, which oversaw track and field, finally bent to Milliat’s constant
pressure. Women took part in track and field at the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics.
When several women fell in exhaustion after the 800-meter race, however, the
IOC wanted a return to the traditional gender order of things (Carpentier and
Lefevre 2006: 1121–2). IOC president Henri de Baillet-Latour made a motion
to ban women from all Olympic sports, but relented as long as men still ran the
Olympics.
In the interwar period, attitudes toward women doing sports changed at a
snail’s pace. Tennis stars Suzanne Lenglen and Helen Wills showed that women
could move around the court with speed and grace, and track-and-field
sensation Babe Didrikson plowed through male prejudices to do sports. Like
many sportswomen of the time, she was suspected of being a lesbian. Didrikson’s
acerbic competitive nature also broke gender convention. After Didrikson won
two gold medals at the 1932 Olympics, the famous sportswriter Paul Gallico
reported, “Everybody in Los Angeles was talking about the Babe. Was she all
boy? Or had she any feminine traits?” (Cayleff 1995: 92). Years later a physical
education teacher recalled that her mother was against her playing softball
because she did not want her daughter to “grow up to be like Babe Didrikson”
(Davies 2012: 112). Eventually Didrikson turned to golf, which was deemed a
more suitable sport for women.
Didrikson was the most famous athlete in the interwar period, but Stella
Walsh was arguably the greatest sportswoman of her time. Born in Poland but
raised from infancy in Cleveland, Ohio, Walsh won the 100-meter gold medal
116 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, and the silver medal in the same event in
Berlin in 1936. Walsh’s career spanned four decades; she ran sprints and middle
distances, threw the shot put and discus, played softball and basketball, set
numerous world records, and won over forty AAU track and field championships.
Walsh was murdered in a botched robbery in Cleveland in 1980, and the
mandatory autopsy revealed that she had a condition called intersex or gonadal
mosaicism (Anderson 2017).
During the Second World War women had new opportunities to enter the
workforce and to play sports, but they encountered numerous unwritten rules
for feminine behavior on the field. When many of MLB’s greatest stars went off
to war, such as Ted Williams, Hank Greenberg, and Joe DiMaggio, Chicago
Cubs owner Phillip Wrigley started the AAGPBL in 1943.
Playing mainly in Midwestern cities, the AAGPBL eventually had ten teams
and drew a million fans from 1943 to 1954. The AAGPBL consciously
feminized their players to sell a new brand of baseball, sending them to charm
school. The players wore skirts and makeup, and were carefully packaged as

FIGURE 4.3: Joyce Hill Westerman of the AAGPBL sliding into third base. A
catcher-first baseman, she played in the league between 1945 and 1952, batting .228.
Courtesy A. Bartlett Giamatti Research Center, National Baseball Hall of Fame and
Museum.
RULES AND ORDER 117

moral white girls supervised by chaperones. No “freaks or Amazons” needed

apply. However, as men returned from the war, women were again relegated to
traditional gender roles.
The big breakthrough in women’s sports was concurrent with the women’s
rights movement of the 1960s, the Soviet bloc’s theoretical promotion of equality
for women, and the need of the United States to compete with the Soviet women
in the Olympics. Western democracies began to accede to women’s demands for
equal pay, reproductive rights, and social and legal equality. The Equal Rights
Amendment failed, but in 1972 Congress passed Title IX legislation mandating
that publically financed educational institutions devote the same resources to
men’s and women’s sports, and proved to be a boon for American women’s sports.
One of the major promoters of women’s sports was tennis great Billie Jean
King, who in 1970 led a revolt against the United States Lawn Tennis
Association’s discriminatory pay policies, and formed a tennis tour sponsored
by Virginia Slims cigarettes. Three years later King defeated 55-year-old
huckster Bobby Riggs in a much-hyped exhibition, a symbolic milestone on the
way to women’s equality in sports.
Women fought hard to break into soccer, one of the bastions of male-dominated
sport. Many European countries banned organized women’s soccer from the First
World War to the 1970s on the grounds that it was unladylike and harmful to
women’s health. Soccer’s conservative ruling bodies discussed allowing women to
play on smaller fields and shorter games, and did not sanction the first women’s
World Cup until 1991 (Hofmann and Sinning 2006: 1653–6). No national team
promised equal pay for men and women until Norway in 2017, a sign that women
are gradually gaining a firm foothold in the soccer world.
Progress for African women’s rights has been slow, but running has changed
the cultural landscape for East African gender relations, defying an entrenched
male hierarchy to run. Ethiopian Derartu Tulu won the 10,000 meters at the
1992 Barcelona Olympics, becoming the first black African woman to win an
Olympic gold medal. Tegla Loroupe, one of Kenya’s first world-class women
marathoners, won the New York Marathon in 1995. Her father had four wives
and discouraged her from running, but Loroupe brought home prize money and
a new Mercedes-Benz, a powerful symbol of women’s power and self-sufficiency.
The emergence of women runners led some women to question the patriarchal
culture in the Rift Valley, and other Kenyans see women runners as a very visible
threat to undermine traditional gender roles. Loroupe later said, “I want to
show them that they don’t need to feel like useless people. They can use their
brains. Women are capable of helping their communities” (Noden 1998: 42).
Some conservative Muslim countries have stubbornly resisted the modern
movement toward equal rights for sportswomen. The founder of modern
Turkey, Kemal Ataturk, led the way in opening opportunities, which date to the
adoption of the Swiss Civil Code in 1926, replacing Islamic law and awarding
118 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

women civil rights, and women gaining the right to vote in 1934. Women began
to play tennis, fence, swim, row, and do track and field, using the same venues
as men. Turkey sent two women fencers to the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and in
2012 sent more women than men to the London Games (Pfister and
Hacisoftaoglu 2016: 1472, 1475, 1479). At the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics,
twenty-six teams had no women, yet twelve years later at Beijing only three
teams were all male, and afterwards, under pressure from the IOC, the Brunei,
Saudi Arabia, and Qatar teams sent women to the London Olympics.
Sports equipment companies saw a lucrative new market in women’s sports
and have contributed to the greater acceptance of women in sports. Nike
introduced ads such as “just do it,” and its 1995 commercial “if you let me play”
featured young girls telling the camera how much self-confidence and strength
they would have if they just had the opportunity. The “Gay Games” and
Paralympics have not only tweaked traditional Western notions of the prototypical
male athlete, but are an additional challenge to the human rights practices of
traditional patriarchal cultures and authoritarian regimes (Polley 2004: 10–30).
A recurrent problem for the rule-makers governing women’s sports has been
questions about gender. During the Cold War some in the West cast doubt on
the true sex of Russian women, particularly the muscular Press sisters. In the
1960s, international sports bodies began sex testing, but there has never been a
definitive way of determining sex. These tests cannot account for anomalies in
genital development, internal organs, chromosomes, or testosterone levels. In
1967, Ewa Kłobukowska, the Polish sprint champion, was stripped of her world
championship medals when she failed a chromosome test. The authorities were
embarrassed when she later birthed a son, highlighting the spectrum of primary
and secondary female characteristics.
Transsexual women have created a particularly tricky situation for sports
authorities, although the numbers of women who have competed after a sex
change are few. Protests greeted Renée Richards (Richard Raskind) when she
went on the women’s pro tennis tour in 1976, though Billie Jean King declared
that Richards had the right to compete (Pieper 2012: 682–4). Sports also has
no category for people who are born intersex. When some unfairly questioned
the sex of South African runner Caster Semenya after she won gold in the 800
meters at the 2016 Rio Olympics, Stella Walsh’s name again entered the
conversation.

OPENING GAMES TO NON-WHITES

Minorities and non-Western athletes also fought to be included in the world of
white men’s sports. Europeans were amenable to their colonial peoples playing
games as part of a “civilizing” mission, while the United States, South Africa,
and Australia, among other offshoots of European rule, originally banned non-
RULES AND ORDER 119

whites from playing with whites. Today it is unheard of for developed countries
to pose legal barriers to the participation of ethnic minorities in sport.
The British brought their sports culture to the empire as a benevolent way to
inculcate a sense of fair play, adherence to rules, health, and other progressive
tenets of “muscular Christianity.” The colonial elites were only too happy to
play cricket, soccer, rugby, and track and field, which provided entertainment,
a welcome distraction from toil, and an opportunity to beat the British at their
own games, which provided a modicum of sweet revenge.
Once African and Asian colonies gained independence in the decades after
the Second World War, the IOC recognized their right to participate in the
Olympics, though FIFA was slower to broaden participation in the quadrennial
World Cup. African frustration over lack of representation led to their boycott
of the qualifying rounds for the 1966 World Cup. FIFA responded by allotting
an automatic African qualifier for 1970. FIFA expanded the finals from sixteen
to twenty-four teams in 1982, and in 1998 to the current thirty-two teams.
The steady development of top African national teams forced FIFA to raise the
number of automatic berths to five, and in 2010 added South Africa since
the host nation is an automatic qualifier. There will be forty-eight teams at the
World Cup in 2026.
Sanctions against white South African athletes helped bring down apartheid.
Boycotts of South African sports teams began in earnest in the mid-1960s under
the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee (SANROC). Dennis Brutus
and other leaders believed they could influence domestic policies by limiting
the nation’s international sporting competitions, thereby harming its prestige in
one of its most popular cultural activities. The IOC prohibited apartheid South
Africa from participating in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, and again in 1968 in
Mexico City after thirty-two African teams promised to boycott. Two years
later, South Africa was expelled from the Olympics. However, rugby and cricket
were more important to the RSA than the Olympics. In 1976, after New
Zealand’s rugby team toured South Africa, over twenty African nations staged
a boycott of the Montreal Olympics. The boycott helped end apartheid in the
early 1990s, and the RSA returned to the Olympic Movement in 1992.

The American Scene

Until after the Second World War, organized sports in the United States had
strict, albeit unwritten rules against the participation of African Americans.
Professional baseball clubs had little incentive to integrate. Most teams were
located in the North, while most blacks lived in the South. Team owners did not
want to offend their players or white customers. In 1947, Jackie Robinson
became the first African-American player in MLB since Fleetwood Walker in
1884. The last baseball team to integrate was the Red Sox in 1959.
120 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

Jim Crow laws prohibited southern college teams playing against integrated
northern teams. Mississippi State University (MSU) won its first Southeast
Conference (SEC) basketball championship in 1959 and was ranked number
three in the country, but did not participate in the NCAA tournament. MSU
then declined two more invitations to play in the tournament in 1961 and
1962. However, in 1963, over the heated opposition of state lawmakers, the
school played, but lost to Loyola of Chicago, the eventual champion, 61–51 in
the second round. The Ramblers regularly played three or four African
Americans (Fitzpatrick 1998: 47).
The 1966 NCAA championship game was a groundbreaking moment in the
history of college basketball history, when the all-white Kentucky Wildcats,
coached by the conservative Adolph Rupp, faced an integrated team from Texas
El Paso, who started an all-black lineup. This was a big blow to white southerners
who resented the federal civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s that ended Jim
Crow in the South (Fitzpatrick 1998: 25, 34, 211, 220).
The integration of African-American players into sports did not end
discrimination. White managers and coaches still held stereotypes about the
limited mental capacity of African Americans, and refused to place them in
leadership positions like quarterback or middle linebacker, or even on the
offensive line. In 1968, Denver Bronco Marlin Briscoe became the first starting
NFL quarterback, but it was not until 1988 that a black quarterback, Doug
Williams of the Washington Redskins, won a Super Bowl. In 1976, blacks made
up about 50 percent of MLB outfielders and first basemen, but less than 10
percent of the more cerebral pitchers, catchers, and shortstops (Rader 2009:
327). African Americans were not hired as coaches or managers until Bill Russell
became the first black coach in the NBA in 1968, and, in 1975, Frank Robinson
became MLB’s first black manager.

TEACHING CULTURAL VALUES

Sport has always been associated with fun and games, but as modern industrial
societies developed in the nineteenth century in Europe, the United States,
and Japan, educators and sport organizers began to articulate the didactic
purpose of organized sports. Adhering to the formal rules of the game was
viewed as a way to inculcate dedication to the rule of civic law, and the informal
norms of play reflected the values of the middle and upper classes. Authorities
determined not only who could play, but how they played (Llewellyn and
Gleaves 2014: 98–9).
English educators in the mid nineteenth century included sport in the
curriculum in public schools to curb pupils’ unruly and violent antisocial
behavior, but also to build “a sound mind in a healthy body.” Harrow headmaster
the Reverend J. E. C. Welldon believed that sport distinguished civilized
RULES AND ORDER 121

England from other countries, and contributed to its global supremacy: “The
pluck, the perseverance, the good temper, the self-control, the discipline, the
co-operation, the esprit de corps, which merit success in cricket or football, are
the very qualities which win the day in peace or war” (Alegi 2010: 9).
Imperialists and missionaries used their games to “civilize” colonials. When
English cricket teams toured the British Empire, they were charged with playing
in a gentlemanly, sportsmanlike way. The IOC Creed echoed these values: “The
most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just
as the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. The
essential thing is not have conquered but to have fought well” (Toohey and Veal
2007: 64).
Baseball was unquestionably America’s pastime for much of the twentieth
century, and was inextricably linked to patriotism, and by association, the
quintessential hardworking and entrepreneurial American. Baseball’s rituals are a
sort of pledge of allegiance to the idea of the United States. Presidents have been
throwing out the Opening Day ball since 1910. During the First World War,
American League President Ban Johnson initiated the playing of the national
anthem before games, which subsequently became mandatory before high-school,
college, or professional sporting contests, a largely unique American custom.
The American Legion, a voluntary association of wartime veterans founded
in 1919, began sponsoring baseball teams in the 1920s to teach leadership and
patriotism. MLB’s credo, adopted by all levels of organized baseball, was to
build “manliness, character, and an ethic of success [instilling] the proper values
in America’s youth as well as educating immigrants to the American way of life”
(Elias 2010: 96–7).
Owners and league officials imposed rules of clean behavior on and off the
field. In 1921, MLB commissioner Kenesaw “Mountain” Landis banned eight
Chicago White Sox players for throwing the 1919 World Series, and threw out
seven more players for various crimes and indiscretions. One year later he
slapped a 39-game suspension on Babe Ruth for breaking a barnstorming rule
in the off-season. However, when it became apparent that baseball’s bottom
line would suffer without its biggest draws, the off-field shenanigans of such
stars as Ty Cobb and Frankie Frisch went unpunished (Krause 1997: 68–9). The
press was complicit in maintaining the ballplayers’ public image, enhanced by
publicizing their good deeds, like visiting sick kids in the hospital, while
overlooking heavy drinking and philandering.
Athletes were expected to conform to traditional moral behavior and present
a clean-cut appearance, which until the turbulent 1960s meant short locks and
no facial hair. Players with long hair and beards then represented a challenge
to authority and, in the early 1970s, Yankees owner George Steinbrenner
barred facial hair on his players. However, renegade Oakland A’s owner Charlie
Finley did not care about players’ grooming habits, and fielded a squad of
122 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

bearded, mustachioed, and long-haired All-Stars who won three World

Series Championships. Challenges were even greater in college sports and
professional basketball, where black athletes sported huge Afros and challenged
traditional styles of play with innovative styles of dribbling, passing, and
dunking.
Players in socially reserved tennis exhibited ungentlemanly behavior that
transcended normative conduct. In the 1970s, tennis “brats” included Romanian
Ilie Nastase and Americans John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors. McEnroe
berated umpires and linespeople with belittling comments that earned him stiff
penalties, including loss of points and even match forfeits.
Unruly fan behavior was historically rare at elite lawn games, which had the
most intricate informal rules, such as no shouting before balls were addressed.
This was not the case at team spectator sports where fans regularly yelled at
men at bat or basketball players shooting foul shots. Soccer has attracted the
most rabid and unruly partisans, especially England with its predictably rowdy
crowds. Scholars have studied long-standing club “firms,” who since the 1960s
consisted of like-minded white men who were facing increasing challenges to
their traditional roles in a rapidly changing ethnic, gender, regional, and class
culture. When the national team or club teams went abroad, the hooligans
came along to belittle and attack their rivals. When Liverpool fans attacked
Italian supporters of Juventus at a European Cup game in 1985 at Heysel,
Belgium, a retaining wall collapsed, causing thirty-nine deaths. English clubs
were banned from playing in Europe for five years. Crowd violence remains a
problem around the world, requiring barriers like moats at South American
fields, and police and fences in Europe.

Cheating
Sports authorities have tried in vain to eliminate blatant cheating from their
games. As long as big gambling is involved, mobsters and other shady characters
will try to fix the outcome of games, especially in individual sports. Boxing is
an eminently easy sport to fix, as only one participant has to be crooked. One
of the most famous fixes was the Jake LaMotta–Billy Fox fight of 1947. LaMotta
was a top middleweight contender who was promised a championship fight if
he took a dive against Fox, the ranking light heavyweight boxer. LaMotta got a
title bout twenty months later, and became middleweight champion.
Perhaps the most infamous case of cheating in running came in 1980, when
Rosie Ruiz took the subway part of the way in the New York marathon in order
to qualify for the Boston Marathon. She “won” the crown, not by running the
entire race, but by joining the marathon close to the finish line.
Conspiracies to throw team games are harder to orchestrate and harder to
keep under wraps. Nonetheless, gamblers have repeatedly tried to bribe players
RULES AND ORDER 123

and officials. Nearly every major European soccer league has been involved. In
the mid-1980s, French businessman Bernard Tapie took over Marseilles, leading
the team to a French and European championship. However, he had fixed
numerous games, and was drummed out of soccer. In the mid-2000s, German
referee Robert Hoyzer went to prison for taking payments to influence the
outcomes of lower-level Bundesliga games. Perhaps the biggest scandal in
European football history occurred in Italy where many top Italian teams
conspired to determine the outcome of games. Teams in European sports in
danger of relegation regularly approach teams in the middle of the standings—
for which a late-season game has no meaning—to throw the game.
Baseball has been relatively scandal-free since the Black Sox of 1919, but in
the 1980s Cincinnati Reds manager Pete Rose was tossed out of MLB for
betting on his own games. In the 1940s and early 1950s, college basketball
suffered from a series of betting scandals involving several institutions, including
the powerhouses of the University of Kentucky and City College of New York.
The mob was mixed up in the schemes, in which players were recruited to win
the game but less than the point spread. There were later point-shaving scandals
in 1961 and 1978–9, and Northwestern University, known for its academic
standards, was implicated after the 1994–5 campaign. Las Vegas had until
recently the only legal team sports betting parlors in the United States, but
proscribed betting on hometown University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Athletes have always tried to gain an advantage by bending and breaking the
rules, especially when prestige and big money are at stake. The question of
whether to game the system becomes a philosophical issue—that is, whether it
is morally right. What crosses the line between smart play and cheating? Some
coaches teach breaking the spirit of the rules, while others consider it the wrong
way to teach players, especially youngsters who are supposed to learn etiquette
and good citizenship through sports. Should a soccer coach teach the goalie to
jump early on penalty kicks? Hedge the 10-yard rule on free kicks? Tug the
opponent’s jersey on corner kicks? Flick the elbow of a basketball shooter, a
tactic virtually undetectable by a referee? Steal baseball signs?
One of the most memorable moments in baseball history was Bobby
Thomson’s walk-off home run to beat the Dodgers and win the 1951 National
League pennant. The Giants had gone on a tear late in the season, prompting
the Dodgers and other teams to accuse the Giants of stealing the catcher’s signs
to the pitcher, and then relaying them to the Giants hitters. More recently, in
2017, the Boston Red Sox admitted that they had used an Apple Watch to steal
the catcher’s signs, and, even more egregiously, a St. Louis Cardinal’s scouting
director was sent to prison for hacking into the Houston Astros’ database.
One of the most infamous examples of the fine line between cheating and
fair play was Argentine soccer star Diego Maradona’s hand goal against England
in the 1986 World Cup. The contest was already fraught with bad feelings that
124 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

included a violent 1966 World Cup match described “as not so much a football
match as an international incident,” along with the Falklands War in 1982.
Relations between the two countries were frozen. Maradona admitted that
“before the match with England, we all declared that football had nothing to do
with the Malvinas [Falklands] war. Lie! We did nothing but think about it,
fucking it was going to be just another game! . . . Sentimentally, I blamed each
of the English players for what had happened.” Maradona’s chicanery fit into
the English narrative of a devious Third World country that had tried to snatch
away the Falklands. Maradona said that the goal went in by the “hand of god,”
while England found it a moral outrage—on the contrary—the “hand of the
devil” (Britto, de Morais, and Barreto 2014: 672, 677, 680).
Sports are constantly innovating to stop players from breaking the spirit of the
rules. FIFA faced a serious case of cheating when Uruguay’s Luis Suarez used his
hand to stop a sure Ghanaian goal at the 2010 World Cup. Ghana botched the
penalty kick, prompting FIFA to contemplate simply awarding a goal for such
intentional cheating. At the 2014 World Cup, FIFA introduced the “vanishing
spray,” an aerosol line the referee used to keep opposing players from breaching
the 10-yard distance from the free kicker. After a 2008 playoff game, when New
York Ranger Sean Avery stood in front of New Jersey Devils goaltender Martin
Brodeur, waving his stick in front of his eyes, the NHL immediately enacted the
“Avery Rule,” making the practice an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty.
Doping has been the most ubiquitous form of cheating, and the most difficult
to detect. Athletes and their handlers have tried to stay one step ahead of the
testing procedures; no one knows how many cheaters have slipped through the
testing cracks. Cycling, the Olympics, and baseball have had numerous
embarrassing doping scandals. American Lance Armstrong, once considered
the greatest cyclist ever, was found to have doped his way to seven victories in
the Tour de France. He was banned from the sport in 2012. Olympic athletes
using coca, purified oxygen, amphetamines, and other performance-enhancing
substances goes back over a century. Early Olympic marathoners braced
themselves with strychnine. Canadian Ben Johnson became the world’s fastest
man at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, only to become the fastest man to have his
gold medal stripped for doping.
The IOC began drug testing at the 1968 Mexico City Games, and in
Montreal in 1976 athletes were first tested for steroids. Before the fall of the
Berlin Wall in 1989, systematic doping reached new heights in the GDR, which
sprang from an also-ran on the Olympic medal table to one of the best teams in
the world. In 1950, the regime established the German School for Physical
Education and Sport in Leipzig, which became a center of research on the
effective use of performance-enhancing drugs.
East German athletes, especially women, were subjected to excessive doping
protocols. East German women swimmers won no gold medals at the 1972
RULES AND ORDER 125

Munich Olympics, but one year later did superbly at the World Swimming
Championships in Belgrade because of a new doping regimen, capturing 14
medals. Then they amassed 18 medals (11 golds) at the Montreal Olympics in
1976. The GDR doped their way to second place on the overall medal board,
trailing only the Soviet Union. Eventually, about 2,000 elite East German
athletes were involved in its doping program (Dennis 2003: 138; Longman:
2002).
Unscrupulous Olympic teams have tried to stay one step ahead of the testing
methods, but the perpetrators have often been caught. The entire Russian team
was officially barred from the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang for
running a state doping program for its Olympic athletes, although individual
Russian athletes were allowed to compete.
Corruption at the highest levels of FIFA and the IOC has undermined their
efforts to clean up their sports. FIFA head Sepp Blatter and his minions took
huge sums to grant the World Cup to Russia in 2018 and to Qatar in 2022. The
dragnet is widening; in early 2018, US federal prosecutors subpoenaed
numerous FIFA and IOC officials to investigate bribes, payments, and other
perks they received from countries and cities bidding for the World Cup and
the Summer and Winter Olympics.

Violating Unwritten Rules

Players are not only pressured to conform to formal league and team rules, but
also follow their sport’s own set of unwritten rules. Baseball and cricket, the
sports with the biggest rulebooks, also have numerous proscriptions on player
behavior. The 1932–3 “Ashes” series with Australia is perhaps the most infamous
case of “not playing cricket”—or playing by the informal rules. In what was
later called the “Bodyline Series,” the English captain, Douglas Jardine, placed
fielders close to the batter on the legside and ordered his bowler, Harold
Larwood, to bowl directly at the batsman’s upper body. This was an offence to
the ostensibly refined customs of the gentlemen’s game.
Perhaps unbeknownst to cricket aficionados, Jardine’s lack of sportsmanship
was not extraordinary. For years, players have chided each other on the field,
something called “sledging.” Bowlers often derided the batsman. In the 1970s,
the Australian team initiated the practice to unsettle the batsman with constant
and untoward comments at the start of innings and between balls. In the next
two decades, the Australians took the practice to new heights—what team
captain Steve Waugh termed “mental disintegration.” The cricket world was
somewhat embarrassed when microphones were placed near the stump and
picked up these unpleasant exchanges, and there has been pressure to control
it. In 2017, the Australians talked about employing “smarter sledging,” with
some admitting that their trash talk had gone too far.
126 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

Disagreements can arise in baseball if players break the spirit of its unwritten
rules. For example, a player is not to cross the pitcher’s mound after making an
out, lest the batter disturb the pitcher’s carefully manicured landing spot.
Fielders are not to make phantom tags on runners, there is no stealing or
bunting if a team is far ahead in the game, and no bunting to break up a no-
hitter. And any player who flips his bat or takes too much time rounding the
bases is likely to have a pitch thrown at him in his next plate appearance.
Athletes were expected to speak well of their opponents, and win graciously.
However, Muhammad Ali, taking his cue from the braggadocio of the blonde
pompadoured professional wrestler Gorgeous George, broke these rules early
in his career. Ali belittled his opponent, called the round in which they would
fall, and crowed that he was “The Greatest.” Thereafter Ali’s antics have
become the norm, especially among African-American male athletes. Sports
officials have tried to legislate against showing off or too much celebration after
a great play (Fitzpatrick 1998: 239).

CONCLUSION
Since the advent of modern sport a century and a half ago, organized games
have been a progressive force in society. Allowances for women, minorities, and
developing countries to play sport has often preceded and accelerated legal
changes and customary practices. This chapter has outlined some of those
precedents, such as the integration of MLB in 1947, nearly two decades before
US civil rights legislation, the boycotts of South Africa that helped bring an end
to apartheid in 1990, and the integration of women into the Olympics on an
equal basis, while women still struggle around the world for civil rights. The
Paralympics are a model for societies who still marginalize the disabled. Indeed,
where people have run, jumped, and played games, the politicians have
followed. Sports have served the cause of justice, freedom, and human rights.
The argument can also be made that organized sports since the Second World
War have promoted international peace. During the Cold War, the Soviets
played by the rules of international sports organizations. The globalization of
sport has brought peoples together to watch their kinsmen and -women playing
in leagues around the world, whether it is Nigerians watching the EPL, Japanese
watching MLB, Russians watching the NHL, Serbs watching the NBA, or the
whole world watching the Olympics or the FIFA World Cup. The more
countries are invested in sport, the fewer conflicts between them. As this chapter
has shown, the rules of sport are in constant flux, but a direct correlation can
be made between greater participation of all sectors of society in sport and
peaceful relations between peoples.
 CHAPTER FIVE

Conflict and
Accommodation
MATTHEW TAYLOR

In September and October 1948, the British social research organization Mass-
Observation conducted a survey about attitudes to sport in individual and
national life. The results, summarized and to a large extent simplified in a file
report, were interpreted by the authors as supporting the popular self-image of
Britain as a sporting nation. A widespread interest in sport was detected across
the country, in all classes, and among both men and women. But beyond its
initial conclusions, the report highlighted the fault lines that had long existed in
attitudes to sport in Britain and elsewhere, complicating the idea of sport as a
site of collective identity and social unity. Specific questions on gambling,
Sunday play, professionalism, and the relationship between watching and
playing sport revealed the complexities in what people understood by “sport,”
and what they considered its purpose and its essence (Mass-Observation 1948).
One can conclude from the report that while sport continued to be an element
of British self-identity, the battle over how sport should be conducted and what
it ought to represent was as important as ever.
That much of the academic writing on the history of sport has taken
conflict—cultural, political, and economic—as its starting point should not be
surprising. Sport is unique as a leisure form in being organized primarily around
the competition between teams or individuals representing social or geographic
spaces, schools, colleges, workplaces, neighborhoods, towns, regions, and
nations. Opponents have in certain cases developed into rivals and enemies, the
“us” and “them” of sporting competition being informed by, and in turn feeding

127
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into, wider constructions of identity. Moreover, many of the earliest forays into
sports history and historical sports sociology have been influenced by concepts
such as hegemony and ideas of cultural conflict, control, and resistance
(Hargreaves 1986; Giulianotti 2005; Cronin 2014: 44–5). If scholarship has
moved on, with identity and representation emerging as dominant themes in
recent years, much of the historiography on sport within and across nations still
focuses, often implicitly, on conflict and contestation. Many social histories of
sport continue to envisage it “as a ‘contested’ landscape upon which ethnic,
racial, class, and community rivalries abound” (Howell 1995: 4). This chapter
will explore some of this work, approaching sport as a natural site of conflict,
opposition, and protest. Focusing on examples primarily but not exclusively
from the West—particularly North America and western Europe—this chapter
considers conflict and accommodation at a number of levels, moving from
interactions between nations to consider contacts within national, regional, and
local spaces. The first section examines sport and political protest nationally
and internationally, after which the narrative focuses on opposition to sport in
the context of religion, gambling, and violence. The third section considers
debates over the “true” or authentic meaning of sport, particularly in relation
to the divide between spectatorship and participation. This is followed by an
exploration of sport-based rivalries, with specific attention given to the
assumption that such clashes have been historically driven by animosity above
all else. Finally, the chapter briefly shifts focus to look at the possibilities sport
has offered historically for developing cooperative relationships between
groups, peoples, and nations.

POLITICS AND PROTEST

When in 2016 the San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick kneeled
during the playing of the American national anthem in a number of preseason
matches, it was recognized as the latest of a series of sports-based protests
against racial inequality in the United States dating back to the 1960s. Opinion
pieces situated the Kaepernick protest in the context of Muhammed Ali’s
refusal to enlist for the Vietnam War in 1967, and the black power salute of
athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos during the 1968 Mexico City Olympics;
the latter was directly referenced by a number of NFL players and other athletes
who held their fists high in the air when the US anthem was played. They also
connected Kaepernick’s action to more recent protests, such as those in 2014
spurred by the Black Lives Matter movement, involving NBA players such as
LeBron James, Kyrie Irving, Jarrett Jack, and Kevin Garnett, St. Louis Rams
footballers and college basketball player Ariyana Smith (Gajanan 2016). The
Kaepernick protest escalated in September 2017 when President Donald Trump
called on NFL players who failed to stand for the national anthem to be fined
CONFLICT AND ACCOMMODATION 129

or suspended, leading to scores of players kneeling, locking arms, or staying in

the locker room for the national anthem in a show of solidarity (Hoffman,
Mather, and Fortin 2017). While some regarded such protests as unpatriotic
and inconsistent with the privileges and responsibilities of a professional sports
star, others praised the courage of the protesters. The fact that Kaepernick’s
jersey sold more than any other in the NFL during his protest could be seen as
a mark of his popularity.
Regardless of the discussions about the appropriateness of the behavior of
Kaepernick and other athletes in such instances, his case can be regarded as an
example of those without political power using sport as a means of protesting
against dominant groups, interests, and practices (Levermore 2008). Symbolic
“gestures of protest” by athletes are just one of the many forms this has taken
(Thiel et al. 2016: 253). Opposition movements against political regimes have
also often focused on sporting events. This was evident, for instance, in response
to the Nazi government of the 1930s. Grassroots opposition to Nazi policies on
race manifested itself in a number of protests against sports fixtures with German
teams. In late 1935, for instance, a range of Jewish-British groups and
publications, anti-fascist pressure groups, and trade unions led by the Trades
Union Congress (TUC) campaigned against a friendly soccer fixture between

FIGURE 5.1: Crowd gives the Nazi salute during the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games.
Photo by Universal History Archives. Getty Images.
130 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

England and Germany due to take place at Tottenham Hotspur’s White Hart
Lane ground in north London. Concerns were exacerbated by the links between
the host club and the north London Jewish community and the alleged recent
death of a Polish-Jewish footballer at the hands of local Nazis in Upper Silesia.
The TUC argued that as the German team had become an effective representative
of the Nazi government, failure to act would be interpreted as a “gesture of
sympathy” to a regime condemned by most “democratic opinion.” The TUC
General Secretary Walter Citrine predicted “a grave disturbance of the peace” if
the match went ahead. Deputations to Home Secretary Sir John Simon failed to
convince him to intervene to stop the match and planned demonstrations against
the fixture never materialized (Spencer 1996: 6–14; Beck 1999: 187). Three
years later, shortly after the notorious Nazi salute given by the England team at
the prompting of the national association before a match against Germany in
Berlin, the players of Aston Villa defied football and embassy officials and
refused to salute. They chose a different mode of protest prior to a later game
in Stuttgart, allegedly saluting with two fingers rather than a straight hand
(Taylor and Ward 1995: 51–3; Beck: 6–7; Fox 2003: 148–9).
Opposition to the Nazi regime manifested itself most famously in aborted
attempts to boycott the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The movement was strongest in
the United States, where a coalition of influential opinion-makers formed a
“Committee of Fair Play in Sports,” and secured the support of politicians such as
the New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia, former New York governor Al Smith,
and Massachusetts governor James Curley. The American Federation of Labor, the
Jewish Labor Committee, and the Christian and Jewish press also came out in
support of a boycott, and the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), led by Jeremiah
Mahoney, was also sympathetic. The focus of the movement was the discrimination
against Jewish and black athletes, which was thought to violate Olympic
regulations. American observers in Germany, such as the diplomat George
Messersmith, also pointed out the danger that the Nazis would exploit the Games
to endorse their own political position domestically and internationally. His report
to the AAU in December 1935 was unequivocal about the discrimination inherent
in Nazi policy on sport, as in all areas of German life, and determined that a mass
boycott would constitute “one of the most serious blows which National Socialist
prestige could suffer” (Mayer 2004; Eisen 1984: 68–9). Ultimately, however, the
power and influence of the anti-boycotters prevailed, a decision which inevitably
impacted upon the success of similar movements in other countries. In France, for
instance, a number of influential administrators and journalists, such as Jules
Rimet of FIFA, L’Auto’s Jacques Goddet, and Paris-Soir’s Gaston Bénac, demanded
either relocation of the Games or a boycott (Murray 1992; Kessler 2011). But
here, as in other countries, mainstream political opinion tended to oppose any
suggestion of intervention. This was even more evident in nations like Britain
where voluntary traditions still dominated the organization of sport.
CONFLICT AND ACCOMMODATION 131

The anti-apartheid struggle was perhaps the most significant protest movement
that targeted sport and sporting events in the twentieth century. Opposition to
South Africa’s apartheid regime took many forms and spread across a number of
decades. Underpinning the protest and boycott campaigns of the 1960s, 1970s,
and 1980s was a large and increasingly influential popular movement. Direct
action became common alongside symbolic protest. The 1969–70 Springboks
rugby union tour to Great Britain, for instance, was plagued by orchestrated
demonstrations headed by anti-apartheid activist and future Labour Party
minister Peter Hain (Grundlingh 1996: 196). In 1970, opposition to the South
African cricket tour crystallized around a Stop the Seventy Tour (STST)
committee which received widespread support from student groups and
Christian organizations as well as Liberal, Socialist, and Communist factions.
Demonstrators raided cricket grounds, painting slogans on buildings and
damaging the turf with weed killer. Plans were made to blockade the South
African tourists at Heathrow airport. Gradually the demonstrators gained
broader public support, including from Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who
defended the protestor’s right “to demonstrate against the tour,” though he
remained critical of “disruptive protests” (Hain 2013: 236). Eventually the
pressure told and the English cricket authorities called off the tour. The wider
context was, of course, significant. In the same year, South Africa was expelled
from international athletics, cycling, gymnastics, swimming, and wrestling
competition, as well as Davis Cup tennis and the Olympic movement. But the
STST’s role was also crucial: it had been incredibly successful in achieving its
immediate aims and publicizing its cause. Threats of widespread boycotts of that
year’s Edinburgh Commonwealth Games by African, Asian, and Caribbean
nations if the cricket tour had gone ahead turned the locally-based campaign
into a major international diplomatic event.
Similar protests emerged as a common feature of South African rugby tours
to New Zealand through the 1970s and 1980s. A proposed Springboks tour of
New Zealand in 1973 was cancelled after a police report commissioned by the
government predicted as many as 10,000 demonstrators if the tour went ahead,
with the potential to provoke “the greatest eruption of violence the country has
ever known” (Nauright and Black 1996: 212). More significant still was the
1981 South African rugby tour, which was precipitated by, and in turn
reinforced, considerable divisions in New Zealand politics and society. The
protests predicted nearly a decade before now materialized, with demonstrations
accompanying every match and violence between protestors and police. At
Hamilton, the rugby stadium was occupied by anti-tour activists and the
scheduled match was cancelled. As well as impacting upon international
attitudes toward the apartheid regime, the events of 1981 shone a light on long-
standing gender and racial tensions in New Zealand society. A number of
commentators saw the protests in the context of a wider challenge to traditional
132 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

forms of masculine power, or as the focus for “counter-hegemonic struggle”

(Nauright and Black 1996). Given rugby’s popularity and status as a symbol of
nationhood in both South Africa and New Zealand, and the cultural significance
of the rugby rivalry between the two nations, it was not surprising that the
sport became a site for popular discontent and political protest (Nauright 1997;
MacLean 2000).
Toward the end of the twentieth century, sports mega events increasingly
became targets for human rights campaigners. The detention of thousands of
political prisoners in 1973 by General Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship
at the National Stadium in Santiago had led the Soviet Union to refuse to
compete in a World Cup playoff there. The following year, Chilean exiles and
sympathetic European left-wing groups protested with placards and slogans
during Chile’s World Cup finals match with East Germany (the GDR) and
invaded the pitch during the game against Australia in Berlin (Koller and Brändle
2015: 231). In Argentina four years later the focus was on the host nation’s
military junta under the control of Jorge Rafael Videla. Although some accounts
have downplayed the significance of opposition to the tournament—suggesting
that critical foreign voices were “limited to left-wing organisations and human
rights groups” (Koller and Brändle 2015: 235)—there is considerable evidence
of a widespread and organized campaign to convince national teams to boycott
the competition, FIFA to move it to another country, and, more generally, to
provoke public debate in different nations on links with the Argentine
dictatorship. Centered in Paris, where it was most prominent, with 200 local
committees, the anti-World Cup campaign was not, according to one scholar, a
small-scale extremist initiative but “a large protest movement with a transnational
dimension” (Rein 2014: 244). Although all of the fifteen qualifying nations
eventually chose to attend, and only two players—Dutch captain Wim van
Henegem and teammate Johan Cruyff—refused to take part for political
reasons, one could see the campaign as a significant “expression of transnational
solidarity” and a precedent for the more successful popular protests and boycott
campaigns that developed in relation to the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games
(Rein and Davidi 2009; Rein 2014).
Nonetheless, the international human rights movement was relatively
ineffectual in terms of its influence on major sporting bodies and events until
the 1990s. While it had campaigned in 1978, Amnesty International, the
world’s largest human rights organization, generally paid little attention to
sports events, even those such as the 1988 Summer Olympics in South Korea, a
nation with a poor human rights record. In 1993 the New York-based Human
Rights Watch (HRW) came out in opposition to Beijing’s bid to host the 2000
Olympics (Keys 2018). Focusing on generating publicity and column inches as
an indirect means of influencing the IOC, the HRW argued that China’s abject
human rights record should not be rewarded by granting it an Olympics. At a
CONFLICT AND ACCOMMODATION 133

time when the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre was still fresh in the public
mind, such a view drew considerable support across the American and European
media. Other political and international human rights groups actively opposed
Beijing’s candidature but none was as influential and effective as HRW: it was,
as one reporter noted, the “prime mover in the push” to block Beijing. The
HRW’s campaign proved successful, with Sydney narrowly defeating Beijing to
host the Games. The significance of the 1993 campaign was to broaden the
discussion concerning “the moral sphere” of sports events such as the Olympics
beyond a narrow focus on the treatment of athletes to a wider coverage of all
citizens of hosting and competing countries. The circumstances of the early
1990s would not be repeated a decade later when Beijing was granted the 2008
Games in the context of a more cautious approach from human rights groups,
some of whom now argued that the media attention attached to the Olympics
might lead to reforms. But the 1993 campaign helped to usher in a connection
between international sport and human rights that has only tightened since.
“Human rights advocacy groups,” as Barbara Keys has argued, “now pressure
international sports competitions to promote basic freedoms (of press, speech
and religion), judicial reform, and fair employment practices” in hosting
countries (2018: 438). Few arenas of public life, it could be argued, have
become as open in the early twentieth century to debates around human rights
as international sport.

RELIGION, GAMBLING, AND VIOLENCE

From the mid nineteenth century, organized sport had been promoted by
religious leaders across the Atlantic world and by Christian groups and
missionaries in Africa and Asia. The values and meanings initially associated
with team games as they developed in the English public schools and then in
educational establishments in formal and informal imperial settings were
heavily influenced by religious morality. Muscular Christianity was inscribed
with notions of manliness, teamwork, fair competition, and, perhaps most
important of all, fair play (Holt 1989; Mangan 1998). But both the meanings
and the game forms of Western sports were subject to varying degrees of
modification and domestication over time. Anthropologists have perhaps come
closest to capturing the complexities and contradictions in the process of sport’s
dissemination across nations and cultures. In India, for example, it has been
argued that while cricket’s formal properties worked in harmony with a number
of fundamental aspects of local society and culture, such as the caste system,
and particularly appealed to everyday understandings of Hinduism, rugby’s
emphasis on physical contact was problematic for the indigenous population
(Darbon 2008). In China, similarly, Western notions of “fair play,” promoted
through facilitating organizations such as the YMCA, were often resisted and
134 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

gradually replaced by powerful native discourses such as that built around the
idea of “face.” The notion of gaining or losing prestige, or face, at individual,
local, or national level was so culturally embedded that it became central to the
“moral content” of sport in China (Brownell 2000: 49–50).
Sport, among Protestants and Catholics in most countries, had by the 1920s
generally been acknowledged as an essential part of social life and a “useful
medium for the teaching of Christian values” (Willis and Wettan 1977: 205;
Baker 2007). The growth of church-based clubs demonstrated the value
attached to sport as a means of attracting potential converts and ensuring that
the church maintained a central role in local community life. In certain contexts,
the new media-constructed sports stars of the middle decades of the twentieth
century were represented and imagined as religious as well as national idols.
The Italian cyclist Gino Bartali, for example, winner of the Tour de France in
1938 and 1948 and the Giro d’Italia three times, was transformed by Catholic
propagandists and the Italian media into “God’s Cyclist,” a representative of
Christian ideals and virtues. Bartali was portrayed as a good Catholic man, and
his personal and sporting life was seen as perfectly in tune with essential
Catholic virtues such as chastity, stoicism, and charity. One incident during the
1938 Tour de France was frequently cited to illustrate his absence of aggression
and his fundamental spirituality. Bartali, with his teammates ready to attack a
Belgian rival who had attempted to knock him off his bike, apparently stepped
in with the words, “Leave him, God will punish him.” While in his early career,
Bartali’s Catholicism was offered as a counter to fascist machismo and
aggression, after the war he was presented as a symbol of Christian Democratic
conformity and morality in contrast to his younger rival Fausto Coppi,
mythologized as an icon of Communism, youth, and progress (Pivato 1996).
As this example demonstrates, by the twentieth century, Western religious
institutions generally attempted to harness rather than to ignore or condemn
sport. However, there were dissenters from this view, and certain sports and
sporting cultures continued to be the subject of religious ire. One point of
dispute that continued to be significant in Britain and North America was the
playing of sport on the Sabbath. Pressure groups such as the Lord’s Day Alliance
in Canada and the Lord’s Day Observance Society in Britain continued to seek
to protect laws that restricted entertainment and sport on Sundays, and to
convince sporting bodies to keep Sundays as a day of rest from recreation as
well as work. In spite of prominent examples of support for Sunday observance,
such as the sprinter and future Presbyterian missionary Eric Liddle’s withdrawal
from the Sunday heats of the 1924 Paris Olympics, there was considerable
evidence of growth in Sunday sport. “The tendency to use Sunday for sport is
decidedly on the increase,” one official of the Lord’s Day Alliance suggested in
the mid-1920s. He felt that this constituted “one of the most serious aspects of
modern civilized life, for it is a symptom of the decay of spiritual life” (Schrodt
CONFLICT AND ACCOMMODATION 135

1977: 27). In Britain, the claims of church groups and Sabbatarian organizations
were increasingly shouted down by labor organizations who argued that workers
should be permitted to play on their only free day. In 1934, the London County
Council, pressed by a coalition of the socialist British Workers Sports Federation,
trade unionists, and workers’ sports bodies, rescinded its bans on organized
Sunday cricket, football, and hockey, although restrictions on Sunday boxing
and all-in wrestling (purportedly on safety rather than religious grounds)
remained (Jones 1988: 151–4; Taylor 2009: 155).
After 1945, as the influence of the church declined further and new leisure
patterns emerged, the moral restrictions on Sunday sport gradually faded away. A
1948 Canadian survey revealed a widespread and increasing acceptance for
organized sport on Sundays; Mass-Observation reported the same year that 62
percent of the British population were in favor of Sunday games, with just 28
percent against (Schrodt 1977: 29; Mass-Observation 1948: 33). The Football
Association officially recognized Sunday football in 1960, and by the 1980s
professional matches on Sundays were not uncommon. When first-class cricket
matches were first permitted in 1967, the clergyman and former England cricketer
David Sheppard complained that this would “close off” the potential cricketing
career of “a man with a conscience” (Brailsford 1996; Brown 2006: 236). But
such protests were now less frequent and carried less authority than ever before.
Religious opposition also manifested itself as part of a much broader opposition
to gambling in sport in a number of countries. At the most extreme level,
organized betting and match-fixing threatened the integrity of sport in the eyes
of supporters and the wider public. In the United States the potentially corrupting
association of betting with sport was widely publicized at the very beginning of
the period in the aftermath of the “fixed” 1919 baseball World Series. Despite
being acquitted by a Chicago grand jury, the eight White Sox players involved
were banned for life in 1921 by baseball’s new commissioner Kenesaw Mountain
Landis. As Daniel Nathan argues, the so-called Black Sox scandal has reverberated
across the decades, fascinating and shocking in equal measures. When former
Cincinnati Reds player and manager Pete Rose was banned for life in 1989 after
allegations of betting on baseball, memories of the Black Sox framed much of the
public discussion; the fate of Rose and the Black Sox star player “shoeless” Joe
Jackson were connected by the media as “interchangeable tropes for the integrity
of American sport (and by implication American culture).” More than any other
incident in the history of the sport in the United States, the scandal has helped to
“map the moral space where baseball is argued” (Nathan 2008: 141–2).
Similar cases in the “national” sports of other countries have impacted upon
public trust in the short term but with less long-term effect on cultural memory.
In English soccer, for instance, allegations by The People newspaper in the 1960s
revealed the presence of a gambling ring orchestrated by former professional
Jimmy Gauld. Hundreds of players were suspected of being involved in this and
136 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

similar syndicates operating in different parts of the country. In 1965, the three
most prominent players involved—England internationals Peter Swan and Tony
Kay, and their Sheffield Wednesday teammate David Layne—were imprisoned
for four months and banned for life by the football authorities. Six years later the
rules changed to allow them to appeal their bans and Swan and Layne resumed
their careers, though they were by now veterans with only a few seasons left as
professionals (Inglis 1985). Journalist Arthur Hopcraft referred to the gambling
and bribery cases of the 1960s as “a jagged hole in the fabric” of football, but
they now barely register in popular histories of the game (Hopcraft 1968, 75).
In cricket, a series of betting controversies, culminating in match-fixing scandals
in the 1990s and 2000s involving leading players from South Africa, India,
Pakistan, and Australia and New Zealand seriously tarnished the reputation of
world cricket (Davies 2015; Philpott 2018). Yet the damage to the commercial
reputation of the game in the Indian subcontinent especially—where the Indian
Premier League has accumulated massive sums in advertising and corporate
spending since its establishment in 2008 (Mehta 2009; Nair 2011) —appeared
to have been negligible.
While betting had been crucial to the codification and commercialization of
sport in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it became increasingly ubiquitous
in the twentieth. In the UK, the rise of the football pools and greyhound racing
between the wars ensured that sports betting emerged as an essential part of
working-class life. By the 1930s, 10 million people across the nation were indulging
in a weekly flutter, and by 1950 the British football pools had become “the biggest
private-owned gambling concern in the world” (Clapson 1992: 162). In Australia,
where “a propensity to gamble” has been described as part of the national
character, gambling on sport became increasingly institutionalized through the
creation of government-sponsored betting outlets, such as the racecourse
totalizator, and the spread of organized illegal gambling networks. Most scholars
of sports gambling agree that most people who gambled did so moderately and
that it gradually came to be accepted in most societies as a legitimate recreational
activity (O’Hara 1992: 58; Davies and Abram 2001; Laybourn 2007).
This is not to deny the significance of anti-gambling groups who attempted
to lobby legislators to control betting on sport and publically denounced
gambling sports as morally unacceptable, as much as to point out their
marginality. Church groups and organizations such as the National Anti-
Gambling League (NAGL) in the UK continued to operate throughout this
period but their success was limited, even in relation to sports such as horse and
dog racing, for which betting was their raison d’être. Significant opposition
from Protestant churches and local politicians was rarely enough to dissuade
stadium owners from staging greyhound-racing meetings. In 1927 in south
London, the Crystal Palace trustees ignored a public petition of over 40,000
signatures and the NAGL’s legal claims that dog racing was “a serious menace
CONFLICT AND ACCOMMODATION 137

to the social and moral well-being of the nation” (Huggins and Williams 2006:
17–18). In Australia, groups such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union
(WCTU), which aligned itself to the anti-gambling lobby led by the Protestant
Church, were “visible and vocal,” but were an essentially upper-middle-class
organization that fell some way short of representing the ideals of all the
nation’s women. Indeed, the lingering social stigma associated with women’s
gambling did not prevent women from participating in sports betting in a
variety of ways, a fact that complicates historians’ construction of gambling as
a male preserve in many parts of the world (Jennings 1997: 5).

BOXING AND BLOOD SPORTS

Some sports were increasingly opposed during the twentieth century because of
their perceived violence. There was no consistent and uniform process at play
here, of course, as behavioral norms differed across nations and cultures. But
similar arguments were often utilized by those who called for restrictions on, or
the prohibition of, sports considered to be unnecessarily violent. The history of

FIGURE 5.2: The Boxer. 1942 bronze sculpture by Richmond Barthé (1901–89).
Modeled after Cuban world featherweight champion Kid Chocolate, renowned for his
ballet-like movement. Simeon B. Williams Fund. Courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago.
138 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

professional boxing, for instance, has been littered with campaigns by social
reformers and medical authorities to ban the sport. Boxing was not officially
legalized in New York until the Walker Law of 1920 and remained on the cusp
of both legal and moral acceptance in many parts of the world (Gems 2014: 36).
The rise of social democracy in Europe after the Second World War heralded a
new emphasis on welfarism and state involvement in many parts of everyday
life, including health. It was in those counties where the social democratic ethos
was strongest that the pressure to ban professional boxing was greatest: it was
prohibited in Iceland in 1957, in Sweden in 1969, and in Norway in 1982
(though the latter two bans were repealed in the twenty-first century). The anti-
boxing lobby that emerged in Britain from the 1950s was not untypical. The
most significant figure was Edith Summerskill, a Labour MP, feminist, and
qualified doctor. Her 1956 book The Ignoble Art chastised those who organized
and took pleasure in “the sight of one man beating another into insensibility”
(Summerskill 1956: 43). Summerskill’s failure to get bills prohibiting boxing
passed in Parliament in 1960 and 1962 was partly the result of limited public
and political support. The mixed views of the medical establishment did not
help (Carter 2011).
Periodic deaths in the boxing ring invariably led to renewed calls for the
sport to be banned. Against the views of its defenders that boxing has statistically
been the cause of far fewer deaths than other dangerous sporting activities,
such as motor racing, flying, or parachuting, critics have argued that only in
boxing is the aim to knock an opponent out—an objective that is inevitably
likely to lead to brain damage and other life-changing injuries. Below the
surface of the medical debate, however, discussions of boxing and other combat
sports have been conducted in philosophical and moral terms. The continued
popularity of boxing in so-called “civilized” societies has been regarded by
some commentators as a reason for serious collective self-reflection (Sugden
1996: 173–4). In 1962, American Catholic theologian Father Richard A.
McCormick deemed boxing to be fundamentally “immoral” in an invited article
in the pages of Sports Illustrated (Wyman 2016). In the wake of the death of
young Australian boxer Braydon Smith in 2015, one academic warned that
boxing and cage fighting tended to “desensitise us to the deliberate infliction of
harm” and “normalise aggressive behaviour in the minds of us all, especially the
young” (Sarre 2015).
As well as the young, women were often seen to be in need of protection
from the physical and moral dangers of boxing. The historical narrative of
women in masculine domains, such as boxing rings and gyms, has tended to
focus overwhelmingly on exclusion, and thus to underplay those who challenged
and redefined prevailing gender norms. There is considerable evidence, for
instance, that women were drawn to boxing as spectators, commentators, and
even participants from the 1920s onwards. In Weimar Germany, while some
CONFLICT AND ACCOMMODATION 139

commentators noted that boxing was not intended for the “delicate sensitivities”
of women, the sport became increasingly popular among women of all types,
appealing particularly to artists, writers, actresses, and others among Berlin’s
cultural elite. A number of films and novels featured women as symbols of
modernity, breaching the “masculine world” of boxing (Jensen 2002: 91, 93;
Gammel 2012). In the United States, actresses such as Clara Bow and Mae West
became known for their self-confidence, physicality, and independence in both
career and private life. Both were from working-class backgrounds in which
boxing was deeply embedded as an everyday form of self-defence as well as a
competitive sport. In different ways, they adopted boxing as a way of challenging
and complicating gender norms. One-off bouts were recorded in Nicaragua and
Mexico between the wars but it was not until the 1950s and 1960s that
pioneering female boxers, such as England’s Barbara Buttrick and the Americans
Phyllis Kugler and Jo Ann Hagen, and managers like Aileen Eaton, began to
make even the smallest impression on the sport’s dominant male culture. Far
from being repelled by the assumed unsophisticated physical violence of
boxing, there was evidence that some women were attracted to its visceral
excitement as well as its aesthetics (Boddy 2008: 218–35; Gems 2014: 225–8;
Smith 2014: 70–9).
Sports involving animals faced particular challenges as the animal welfare
movement grew in size and influence during the twentieth century (Kean 2000;
Davis 2016). However, attitudes to blood sports differed according to historical
circumstance and the cultural meanings attached to such practices in particular
settings. In parts of the new US Empire, as Janet M. Davis has shown, clashes
over cockfighting were about more than individual morality and the well-being
of the animals involved (Davis 2013). They were political struggles, in which
competing claims relating to nation building, citizenship, and self-determination
were articulated by supporters and opponents. In Puerto Rico, for example, the
US civil government imposed a ban on cockfighting in 1904. Officials promoted
the ban as a form of paternal protection and moral uplift for humans and
animals alike, believing that the cockfights encouraged drunkenness, violence,
and death across species. They also adopted the colonial language of civilization
and dependency to suggest that those who supported the practice were clearly
unfit to govern themselves. By contrast, indigenous enthusiasts deployed what
Davis has memorably called a form of “cockfight nationalism,” vigorously
defending the right to continue fighting as a means of preserving cultural
heritage and advancing claims to self-determination. Such arguments eventually
gained ground in all the US-controlled territories where the sport had been
banned. In Puerto Rico cockfighting was legalized again in 1933, despite
continued protests from American animal protectionists, missionaries, and
others who regarded the sport as fit for “a barbarous and cruel age,” not the
modern “humane and kindly era” (Davis 2013: 568).
140 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

The opposition to blood sports changed in nature and focus across the
twentieth century. In Britain, where traditions of aristocratic and elite support
for various types of hunting had developed over centuries, attempts to influence
political and public opinion proved to be slow and gradual. Animal welfare
groups such as the Humanitarian League and the League Against Cruel Sports
used a range of tactics to campaign against hunting up until the 1960s but with
limited success (Allen, Watkins, and Matless 2016). Though declining significantly,
the power of the landed interest remained resilient, and was buoyed by the
support of the new rich, who regarded fox hunting in particular as conferring
social prestige, and farmers, who had long advocated it for reasons of pest
control as well as sport. A government inquiry on cruelty to wild animals in
1951 concluded that as well as controlling animal numbers, field sports “may
also be considered useful in that they provide healthy recreation for a number of
people” (Tichelar 2011: 103). By the 1970s, however, wider social and economic
changes in the countryside and more critical attitudes to farming and food
production helped to bolster the range and impact of anti-hunting arguments.
The emergence of active campaigning groups such as the Hunt Saboteurs
Association (founded in 1962) and a general move from an animal welfare to an
animal rights agenda all contributed to the Royal Society for the Protection of
Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) publicly opposing fox hunting and the shooting of
birds for sport in 1976, a significant development for an organization which had
been dominated for much of its history by aristocratic and hunting interests
(Tichelar 2011). By the time of the election of the reformist Labour government
in 1997, fox hunting had become a high-profile and controversial political issue.
Increasingly viewed by the majority of the population as an anachronistic and
elitist pursuit, supporters defended it in emotional and psychological terms as a
flight from modernity and a nostalgic celebration of the English rural tradition
and landscape. In spite of opposition from the House of Lords and a newly-
formed Countryside Alliance, fox hunting was finally banned in the UK in 2004
(May 2013).
Debates focused on the competing claims of traditionalism and modernization
similarly circulated around Spanish bullfighting in the twentieth century.
While intellectual critics bemoaned the corrida as brutal, uncivilized, and
“incompatible with modernity,” the bullfight nonetheless developed from the
early twentieth century and through the era of General Franco’s rule as a
powerful representation of Spanish identity on an international stage (Andersen
2017: 12). While the portrayal of bullfighting as archaic and anti-modern has
been challenged by some scholars, who stress its pivotal role at the forefront of
a new era of mass entertainment and spectator sport, it was nonetheless subject
to a combination of opposing forces that combined to reduce its cultural
significance in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (Shubert 2001;
McFarland 2011). Animal rights arguments were one factor in play here but by
CONFLICT AND ACCOMMODATION 141

no means the most significant. In Spain, the Asociación Defensa Derechos

Animal (ADDA, founded in 1976) has actively campaigned with other national
and international activists for the prohibition of bullfighting (Brandes 2009:
790). In spite of Ernest Hemingway’s role in popularizing bullfighting as a
cultural spectacle, many American writers and tourists, as well as animal
protectionists, viewed the corrida as a symbol of “Spanish cruelty, decadence
and national decline” (Davis 2016: 23). Indeed the wider politics of ethno-
nationalism and Europeanization have been crucial in accelerating the sport’s
decline. In Catalonia, for instance, the bullfight is generally regarded as “a
Castilian rather than pan-Spanish custom,” an emblem of the oppressive
Spanish state. In 2012 the Catalan Parliament banned bullfighting, although the
decision was deemed unconstitutional by Spain’s highest court four years later.
For many socially progressive European-minded Spaniards, meanwhile, the
bullfight represented an anachronistic symbol of the nation’s uncivilized past,
ill-suited to its future as a modern European democracy (Marvin 1988; Brandes
2009: 786, 789).

PLAYING AND WATCHING

One of the key battlegrounds in twentieth-century sport was over differences
between participation and spectatorship. In the Soviet Union, Western sports
were initially officially rejected as bourgeois, and organized displays of physical
culture were preferred. In common with socialist critics in the West, Soviet
leaders and intellectuals stated their hostility toward “big-time, capitalist
professional sports,” believing that it “filled workers’ heads with useless
thoughts and diluted their interest in politics.” By the mid-1930s, however,
popular soccer and ice hockey championships had been established, and sports
spectacles, as Robert Edelman has shown, went on to become a “compelling
element of Soviet popular culture” (Edelman 1993: x). The relationship
between mass and elite sport was similarly complex and often contradictory
in other totalitarian states. In fascist Italy, the success of after-work leisure
and sport organizations—the Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro incorporated
20,000 local associations by 1937—and the emphasis on physical culture
and non-competitive gymnastics could be considered an uneasy fit with the
emphasis placed by the regime on the international success of heroic
sportsmen such as the heavyweight boxer Primo Carnera and the national
soccer team, World Cup winners in 1934 and 1938. Even if fascist propaganda
for the most part solved this contradiction by presenting its sports stars as
embodiments of the fascist “New Man,” “imbued, in body and spirit, with a
near-mythical devotion to the state,” the tensions between mass recreational
sport and elite competitive sport were never fully resolved (Gordon and London
2006: 45).
142 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

The absence of serious scholarly consideration of criticisms of organized

sport has been explored in an important article by academic G. K. Peatling.
Contemporary critics of sport have, according to Peatling, tended to be
dismissed by sports historians as reactionary, puritanical, and elitist, without
adequate reference to the particular social and cultural context of their writing.
Thus pre-First World War Liberal-Radical political commentators, such as
J. A. Hobson and Leonard Hobhouse, in their critiques of sport focused on the
links between the sports crowd and the popular enthusiasm for imperialism,
drawing out the anti-progressive tendencies of both. In criticizing sport, their
focus was not the world of amateur sport and “fair play” but the decline of the
“active interest of the participant” in favour of “the idle excitement of the
spectator” (Peatling 2005 362; Reid 2006 132–3). Peatling also draws a link
between these criticisms and the later writing of novelist and essayist George
Orwell in the 1940s. In this view, Orwell’s portrayal of international sporting
events that led to “orgies of hatred” needs to be understood in the context of
his wider writing about, and understanding of, nationalism. For Orwell, the
inherent competitiveness of nationalism in politics, economics, and warfare, as
well as in cultural matters such as sport, was an inevitable force for conflict and
division (Peatling 2005: 367; Beck 2012a: 80). As such, as with other critics of
sport, Orwell’s target was not sport in general but what he saw as the particularly
negative characteristics of the nationalistic sporting crowd.
Criticism of what might be called elite or top-level sport—often though not
always professional—was indeed, as one historian has noted of an earlier
period, “common and varied” (Bale 2014: 45). In interwar Britain, it took
many forms. Sports that were considered overly commercial and lacking in
sportsmanship were particularly criticized. Soccer was a frequent target, though
less so toward the end of the 1930s, and much less often in the postwar years.
In 1930, the Welsh rugby international Rowe Harding bemoaned professional
soccer as “sordid grasping after easy money,” and soccer crowds were regularly
accused in establishment newspapers of being too partisan and departing from
the normal standards of “English sportsmanship” (Huggins and Williams 2006:
18–19). Team games were often preferred to individual sports, like golf and
tennis, which were looked upon as too selfish and of less value in building
character. Underpinning many of these complaints was the feeling that sport at
the highest level was simply too serious. While cricket test matches were
important, the Daily Telegraph noted, in a 1926 editorial, it was ultimately
“only a game, and there are dangers in taking games too seriously.” An
overemphasis on competition potentially undermined the “moral authority” of
sportsmanship; according to one former England rugby union captain
interviewed in 1933, it could “kill spontaneity and cramp the joy of games” and
prevent the creation through sport of “active and suitable citizens” (Huggins
and Williams 2006: 20).
CONFLICT AND ACCOMMODATION 143

SPORTING RIVALS, SPORTING FRIENDS

At the heart of much of the conflict in modern sport has been the rivalry
between teams and individuals. Some scholars and writers have placed rivalries
at the center of their understanding of the cultural identity of sport. Simon
Kuper’s Football Against the Enemy, for instance, which explored the long-
standing interrelations between soccer and politics across the world, utilized
the rivalries between clubs and nations—Barcelona and Real Madrid, Glasgow
Celtic and Glasgow Rangers, the Netherlands and Germany—as a narrative
device (Kuper 1994). For sociologists Richard Giulianotti and Gary Armstrong,
rivalry and opposition were the key to understanding the symbolic meanings
attached to football (Armstrong and Giulianotti 2001). Cultural identities, it
has been argued, were established primarily through such rivalries, which
became “reinforced by local chauvinisms that are mapped in spatial terms”
(Giulianotti 1999: 10). In his detailed survey of symbolic identities in European
football, Christos Kassimeris has suggested that supporters’ dislike of rival clubs
naturally reinforces their membership of their own community; the “otherness”
of the enemy strengthening the sense of belonging and social cohesion crucial
to club allegiance (Kassimeris 2010).

FIGURE 5.3: Heysel Stadium Riot, Brussels, Belgium, May 29, 1985. Juventus vs
Liverpool, European Cup Final. Liverpool fans threw rocks from the decrepit stadium
before the game at Juventus fans, compelling them to flee. They ran into a wall that
collapsed, killing thirty-nine and injuring 600. The game was still played, and Juventus
won 1–0. English fans were subsequently banned for five years from attending games
in Europe. Photo by Liverpool Echo/Mirrorpix. Getty Images.
144 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

Because much of twentieth-century sport developed in an urban context,

towns and cities have been important sites for the incubation of rivalry and
conflict. The intracity rivalries that had been so important for the early promotion
of commercial sport remained fundamental in many sports and in most countries.
European and Latin American soccer, with their manifold “derby” matches, were
to some extent built on the dynamics of local antagonism. Rivalries may have
been less obviously important in US team sport, where geographical distance and
the relative absence of multiple franchises in one city might have been thought to
limit the potential for localized sport-based conflict. But controversies over the
location of sports teams have fueled rivalry between American cities, with a
“cutthroat competition among cities for teams” developing in certain periods,
such as the late 1950s and the 1980s (Euchner 1993: 6).
The most notable franchise shift occurred in 1958, when baseball’s Brooklyn
Dodgers moved to Los Angeles. The club was one of the best supported and
most profitable in the sport. But when its owner Walter O’Malley’s aim to
relocate the club from Ebbets Field to a more accessible neighborhood in

FIGURE 5.4: Bleacher crowd at Ebbets Field in early 1950s comprised of a broad
cross-section of Brooklyn’s residents by gender, race, and age. Courtesy Brooklyn
Central Public Library.
CONFLICT AND ACCOMMODATION 145

Brooklyn proved unsuccessful, he looked west instead. The decision had a

devastating effect on Brooklyn’s supporters and residents. Steven Riess has
suggested that the Dodgers were more “closely identified with its host city”
than any other US sports franchise, and that the club was “by a wide margin the
most important institution in the borough,” symbolizing “the character, culture,
and ethnic diversity of Brooklyn” on a wider national stage (Riess 1991: 236).
As the competition to keep and attract professional sports teams increased, so
municipal authorities were increasingly prepared to build expensive stadiums.
By 1988, only five out of twenty baseball and two out of twenty-eight football
stadiums were privately owned. Baseball parks and football fields had become
important in strategies to boost the image of cities to aid business development
and tourism as well as physical symbols of civic progress (Riess 1991: 239).
National sports cultures have also been animated by rivalries between
regional representatives. In Australia, for example, sport’s role in creating a
sense of nationhood around the period of Federation and beyond was crosscut
by regional parochialism, which itself built on long-standing antipathies within
individual states. Interstate rivalries have often been more persistent and
culturally significant than international contests. This has been particularly true
in relation to the less populated states, such as Queensland, Western Australia,
and Tasmania. The marginalization of Western Australia in the administration
of cricket, for instance, remained a point of dispute for decades. Accusations of
bias in selection policy meant that when Graham McKenzie became the first
Western Australian to represent the national team in 1961, he was seen as
carrying “the hopes and aspirations of his State” (Cashman 1995: 108).
Similarly, the long-standing complaints of Queenslanders at the drain of “their”
players to wealthier rugby league clubs in New South Wales was given a
competitive focus by the creation of the State of Origin match during the 1980s,
a clash that soon came to overshadow test matches in the public imagination.
Regional pride was also manifest in perceptions of the dominance of Melbourne
over Sydney as a national and international sporting hub, at least until the 2000
Olympics (Cashman and Hickie 1990). Richard Cashman has argued that
regional rivalries tended to replace intersuburban enmities toward the end of
the twentieth century as television and the increased mobility of supporters
worked to reconfigure the nature and scope of community identities and
loyalties (Cashman 1995: 110). This was equally true in European soccer,
especially in relation to clubs representing regions neglected by more powerful
political and economic neighbors, such as Napoli in southern Italy and Bastia in
Corsica (Koller and Brändle 2015: 151).
Much has been written about national sporting rivalries and the mapping of
political tensions onto specific sporting contests. Yet while there is no doubt
that major geopolitical events such as the Cold War and the Yugoslav wars of
the 1990s impacted significantly upon the sporting realm, increasing tensions
146 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

and enlivening existing nationalist conflicts, there is a danger of overplaying the

negative elements of sporting rivalries (Wagg and Andrews 2007; Mills 2018).
We should remember that in many contexts sporting rivalries are mutually
beneficial, enhancing public recognition of both parties and ensuring increases
in box office receipts. Likewise, we should not underestimate the potential of
mega events, particularly the most popular such as the Olympic Games and the
men’s soccer World Cup, for facilitating new contacts, friendships, and
understandings through sporting rivalry. In the latter case, for instance, there is
considerable evidence that what scholars have identified as “carnival” forms of
football spectating—based on colorful costumes, the wearing of national colors,
gregarious behavior, and, significantly, friendliness rather than hostility to rival
fans and hosts—spread from some South American and northern European fan
groups to become the norm during the 1990s and early twenty-first century
(Giulianotti 1999: 59–61). Studies of Korean fans at the 2002 World Cup and
various supporter experiences at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa have
highlighted the potential events such as this offer for celebrating national
identity without necessarily disparaging others (Whang 2006; Alegi and
Bolsmann 2013). The World Cup, in this sense, might increasingly be seen to
offer a space for “negotiating between us and them,” encouraging a “spirit of
diplomatic understanding,” and even at certain moments unifying supporters
across national divides (Guest 2013: 153, 157).

SPORT, UNITY, AND COOPERATION

It is a truism that sport can both unite and divide individuals, groups, societies,
and nations. This chapter, in common with most scholarly analyses, has mainly
focused on the divisions, conflicts, and controversies of modern sport. This
approach derives, in part, from an assumption that other agencies—governing
bodies, politicians, and sports journalists—tend to act as advocates of sport; to
paint it as an inherent force for good and to underplay or ignore its flaws and
contradictions. Yet there is a danger that by concentrating on what has been
called the “dark side” of sport (Cronin 2014: 98–9), we will miss instances
where it has either genuinely been perceived as a means of bringing together
diverse groups or where the evidence is nuanced, mixed, and contradictory;
where expressions of unity in certain situations and for some groups were
intermingled with discrimination and exclusion toward others.
Many transnational sporting contests, tours, and international competitions
were characterized by the camaraderie between organizers, competitors, and
observers. Complex networks developed from the 1920s onwards connecting
athletes, clubs, and journalists together as international competition became
increasingly common and increasingly valued. At a reception for athletes
competing at a British Empire–US athletics meeting in Chicago in August 1930,
CONFLICT AND ACCOMMODATION 147

Knute Rockne, football coach at Notre Dame, commented that “all of us dream
of international peace.” He went on:

Competitive sports not only satisfy the competitive instinct born in every
boy, but international games lead to better understanding between races.
When the youth of the world reaches for a spiked shoe instead of a grenade,
and for a football instead of a gun, the world is advancing towards peace.
—Gorman 2012: 165

Sentiments of this type were commonplace wherever athletes or sports teams

met in international competition, and many competitions were created to
specifically foster good relations between people across borders. We should not
underestimate the extent to which internationalist and universalist discourses
were prominent, for instance, in the promotion of international sports
tournaments. Competitions such as football’s post-1945 International Youth
Tournament were underpinned by a philosophy of international fraternity and
goodwill. One of its chief goals was “to bring together young people from
different countries, from conceptions, ideas and languages which are often
opposed” and to use sport to “create a basis for honest and sincere camaraderie”
(Marston 2016: 153, 146). Such statements could be dismissed as mere rhetoric,
but they were simply too prevalent and central to the stated aims of events of
this kind to ignore.
Since the turn of the twenty-first century, initiatives combining sports
development and humanitarian relief linked under the label Sport and
Development for Peace (SDP) have demonstrated the willingness to use sport
as a means of improving lives and opportunities in disadvantaged communities
across the world (Kidd 2008). Some of these have focused on sport as a panacea
for building bridges between deeply divided communities in places such as
Israel, Northern Ireland, and South Africa (Sugden 2008; Sugden and Tomlinson
2017). The idealism underpinning such programs has driven and influenced
activists and community leaders for much of the twentieth century. It also
demonstrates how conflict and accommodation have been closely related as key
elements of the history of sport since 1920.
148
 CHAPTER SIX

Inclusion, Exclusion,
and Segregation
KEVIN B. WITHERSPOON

“(Jackie Robinson) was a sit-inner before sit-ins. He was a freedom rider

before freedom rides.”
—Martin Luther King, Jr.

The day that Jackie Robinson first took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers,
April 15, 1947, ranks among the most important in American sports history. As
noted by celebrated filmmaker Ken Burns, producer of the 2016 documentary
Jackie Robinson, as well as his epic series Baseball (1994; 2010), Robinson’s
barrier-breaking act came long before other landmark moments of the Civil
Rights Movement, such as the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme
Court decision, Rosa Parks refusing to leave her seat on the bus in Montgomery,
Alabama in 1955, and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech
in Washington, DC (Burns 2016). In a real sense, Robinson—as a baseball
player—represented an opening wedge leading the nation toward desegregation.
At the same time, historian David Wiggins notes that “the most famous racial
advances in sport have typically followed rather than preceded major civil
rights legislation and social movements” (Wiggins 2016: 315). Even Robinson’s
groundbreaking moment falls on a continuum of change, following noteworthy
events that chipped away at racial barriers in the country, such as Marian
Anderson’s 1939 performance on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, A. Philip
Randolph’s 1941 March on Washington Movement, the desegregation of
wartime industries, and the 1944 publication of Gunnar Myrdal’s seminal The

149
150 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

FIGURE 6.1: Jackie Robinson (1919–72) in his Brooklyn Dodgers uniform. Robinson
was the first African American in MLB in the twentieth century. He overcame
enormous racism, starred from 1947 to 1956, leading his team to six pennants and
one World Series. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962. Courtesy
National Archives and Records Administration, Maryland.

American Dilemma, The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. While events
such as Robinson’s breaking the color barrier in MLB might tempt us to believe
that sport is always on the forward edge of social advancement, in fact sport has
just as often served as an agent of exclusion and segregation as one of inclusion
and equality. Scholar Daryl Adair explains that, “Sport can variously include or
exclude, and engage or marginalize, depending on a complex mix of values,
attitudes, and power structures. . . . Sport, in that sense, is neither inherently
virtuous nor heinous. . . . Depending on context, sport can either reinforce
prevailing orthodoxies or be part of reformist or radical agendas” (Adair 2011:
1). Robert Lipsyte put it this way, in his Introduction to Beyond a Boundary, the
classic work by C. L. R. James: “Sportswriters and academics have examined
sport as trap and safety valve and escape hatch, usually in the context of an
extraordinary hyper-event . . . or in the progress of an individual from ghetto
to glory, and sometimes back” (Lipsyte 1993: xi).
Across the globe over the last century, the elite and empowered classes have
dictated who may participate in sporting activities, and where, when, and how
they might play. Around the world, sport has primarily been a playground for
men rather than women, for the wealthy rather than the poor, and for the
INCLUSION, EXCLUSION, AND SEGREGATION 151

dominant race over minorities. As Lipsyte continued, “Lurking beyond the

boundaries of every game are the controlling interests, the forces of oppression,
the economics of the owners, the politics of the government, even the passions
of the fans” (xii). While barriers have indeed come down in recent decades, one
cannot overlook the fact that those barriers remained in place for many years,
to the pain and detriment of the millions who were marginalized in some way.
At the same time, for repressed groups, sport has provided pleasure,
amusement, and empowerment even in a segregated setting. Around the world,
women, blacks and other minorities, groups persecuted for their religion or
ethnicity, and colonized peoples have embraced sport to ease their suffering, to
move forward in society, and at times to compete against the empowered. Even
if their athletic endeavors went unwitnessed by anyone except themselves, such
experiences were significant, according to Wiggins, because they “served as . . .
symbol[s] of possibility, nurtured a sense of identity and self-worth, and both
challenged and reaffirmed long-standing dominant gender ideology and social
class standing” (Wiggins 2016: 315).
This essay will consider the place of inclusion, exclusion, and segregation in
modern sport. The most prominent factors considered in this study are race,
gender, and class, although limitations have been enforced for any number of
other reasons, including ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, age, and national
origin. To examine every instance of segregation—or every path-breaking
athlete—is far beyond the scope of this relatively brief study. Rather, what
follows is a summary of major global trends, with a number of case studies
introduced as examples.

EXCLUSION: SPORT AS AN AGENT

OF SEGREGATION
Almost universally, sport has served as a mechanism for the empowered to
demonstrate their superiority over the disempowered, and to limit their access
and avenues to possible empowerment. According to Wiggins, “Skin color,
nationality, citizenship, cultural differences, class, and a host of other factors
have, if not resulting in categorical exclusion, segregated individuals and groups,
denied them leadership positions, and influenced both their participation patterns
and media portrayal realized for their athletic accomplishments” (Wiggins 2014:
95). In the realm of sport, this has meant that professional sport, the highest
levels of amateur sport, and to some degree participatory sports have been
dominated by upper-class white men. In the decades prior to the Second World
War—before the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, before the
independence movement of African nations, and before the international
women’s movement achieved its most noteworthy gains—blacks and ethnic
minorities found access to mainstream sports limited if not completely barred,
152 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

and women competed in games and contests modified to eliminate heavy exertion
and physical contact, if they competed at all.
Victorian-era social conventions frowned upon robust physical activity for
women, as the sweat, contact, physical activity, and dirtiness associated with
sport were all considered unfeminine. The scientific community condemned
sport for women as well, concerned that heavy activity might damage their
reproductive organs, or exhaust the “physical capital” that was more appropriately
reserved for bearing children (Guttmann 1991). Combined with the powerful
tradition that women’s place in the family structure was at home, raising children
and housekeeping, these factors left women with few athletic options prior to
the 1920s. With few exceptions, women participated in light exercise such as
stretching, gymnastics, or walking, rather than more active sports. In the more
organized setting of college sports, women might engage in “play days” or
intramural games, rather than competitive contests. When they did compete in
sports such as tennis or basketball, they were encumbered by heavy clothing,
which limited freedom of movement, and the rules were modified so as to limit
physical exertion and contact. In basketball, for instance, the court was divided
into two or even three segments, with players required to stay within one
segment rather than running the full court. Other rules limited the amount of
dribbling, prohibited slapping or grabbing for the ball, and required frequent
passes (Schultz 2014: 74–6).
Women in the early twentieth century occasionally challenged these
limitations, without much lasting success. When a group of women in New
Zealand decided to start playing soccer and rugby in 1921, doctors and coaches
voiced numerous objections. One female doctor insisted, “Girls . . . should not
be allowed to play rugby football. It would mean nothing but harm and danger
to them” (Cox 2012: 449). Others argued that vigorous sports would do
damage to the women’s reproductive organs, that they were being selfish by
depriving their children of a proper upbringing, or that women simply could
not handle the rigors of a “man’s” game. Ultimately, officials decided, netball
(basketball) was a more suitable game for women (Cox 2012). As we shall see
in the following section, sportswomen resisted the limitations put upon them
by specialized rules and a watered-down competitive setting in ways both overt
and covert, creating for themselves a sporting realm to meet their desires.
For women in Islamic cultures, the barriers to participation were even more
imposing. According to scholar Gertrud Pfister, “For various reasons taking up
sport is scarcely reconcilable with women’s roles in many traditional societies,
especially Islamic cultures” (Pfister 2010: 2926). Islamic cultures generally place
low importance on sport, even for men, but for women in such societies, sport
is often anathema. For many in such regions, class and simply living conditions
become an obstacle to participation. According to Pfister, “Women’s chances of
participating and competing in elite sport depend to a large extent on their
INCLUSION, EXCLUSION, AND SEGREGATION 153

cultural and religious backgrounds” (2928). While a small percentage of Muslim

women come from supportive and affluent families, most live in poor and/or
war-torn conditions. For people who are living in poverty, or in constant states
of war, participation in sport is either not feasible or simply a low priority.
Finally, according to custom, many women marry at a young age and bear
children soon after. Thus, few women from Muslim countries participate in
sport, and only a handful have competed at the highest levels of international
sport. For those who do reach the highest levels, there are additional challenges.
Iranian women and others, for instance, must compete while wearing the hijab,
placing obvious limitations on their capacity to move, see, and react in an
athletic setting. As Pfister has aptly put it, “gymnastics cannot be done in a
hijab” (2931). Still, some women have had success in sports where the hijab is
not a crippling hindrance, such as shooting or archery; others have managed to
overcome it even in a more challenging setting, such as running track.
For women in Russia in the early twentieth century, and later those within the
Soviet sphere of influence, certain types of sport and physical activity were
encouraged, though they were still governed by prevailing local cultural and
gender norms. Unlike sports in western Europe and North America, which were
linked primarily with maternity, raising healthy children, and physical health and
attractiveness, under Soviet leadership sport was linked primarily with military
preparedness, worker productivity, and the avoidance of negative social influences,
including religion (Rowley 2006). Throughout the twentieth century, Russian
leadership felt perpetually at risk of war and/or invasion. From the conflicts with
Japan early in the century, to the horrors of the First World War and the 1917
October Revolution, through the international crisis of the 1930s and the Second
World War, Russians looking both to the east and to the west believed an attack
could come at any time. Preparing for absolute war meant that all citizens—men
and women alike—needed to be physically, mentally, and emotionally ready for
combat. Thus, sport in the Soviet sphere was an avenue for gender equality, and
Soviet women took to sports with enthusiasm equal to men. The emphasis on
military preparedness led women in these areas to participate in different sports
than women in the West, such as sharpshooting, parachuting, and aviation.
Because participation in athletics was governed and regulated by the state, and
men and women were considered equals, Soviet women may not have viewed
sport as an avenue for liberation and freedom of expression, as ultimately many
Western women did. While sports in the United States and Europe contributed to
a revolution in fashion, for instance, as female athletes literally threw off the
heavy, restrictive clothing of the Victorian era, Soviet women wore essentially the
same athletic (and military) uniforms as men. As noted by historian Alison Rowley,
women’s sport in the West became a vehicle for promoting physical attractiveness,
beauty, and sexual appeal, while Soviet women “took up sports because they were
model workers, patriots, and citizens” (2006: 1335).
154 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

FIGURE 6.2: Young people – go to the stadiums! 1947. A political poster by Leonid
Fyodorovich Golovanov, a highly acclaimed Russian graphic artist. The USSR
promoted competitive sport after the Second World War for men and women to
promote physical fitness and national defense. Russia did not participate in the
Olympics from 1912 until 1952 when it was well prepared to compete. Found in the
collection of the Russian State Library, Moscow. Hulton Archives. Photo by Fine Art
Images/Heritage Images. Getty Images.

As Allen Guttmann has shown through a study of Soviet-dominated nations

during the Cold War, practical concerns and the challenges of work and home
life still left women with fewer opportunities to participate in sport then men,
even if the local regimes paid lip service to gender equality. As Guttmann
explains, a heavy workload in the factory or on the farm, coupled with the
obstacles associated with bearing and raising children, left women with fewer
hours, on average, to engage in athletic activities than men in such nations as
the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and East Germany. In
communist eastern Europe “elite female athletes are prized as highly as elite
male athletes,” but at the grassroots level fewer women participate in sports
(1991: 175).
Racial and ethnic minorities, as well, were denied equal access to sport for
much of the twentieth century. In Jim Crow America, blacks struggled against
the pervasiveness of not only racial but also class bias. Blacks were rarely
admitted to mainstream universities, and if they attended college at all, it was
almost surely at underfinanced HBCUs. They were also not allowed entry into
INCLUSION, EXCLUSION, AND SEGREGATION 155

FIGURE 6.3: 1930–1 Homestead Grays. Experts rate this team as the best African-
American team ever. Standing: Cumberland Posey*, Bill Evans, Jap Washington, Red
Reed, Smokey Joe Williams*, Josh Gibson*, George “Tubby” Scales, Oscar Charleston*,
Charlie Walker, Jr. Kneeling: Chippy Britt, Lefty Williams, Jud Wilson*, Vic Harris, Ted
“Double Duty” Radcliffe. * (designates Baseball Hall of Famer). Photo by Wright &
Riley. Harrison Studio/Heritage Auctions. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

country clubs or nearly any other major athletic organizations such as the New
York Athletic Club. This meant that even those African Americans demonstrating
athletic promise had very limited opportunities to practice, compete, and
display that talent. Black athletes under this system often formed their own
teams and leagues which rarely could compete against the best all-white teams.
Finally, when black athletes did manage to earn spots on previously segregated
teams, other coaches and owners typically enforced a “gentleman’s agreement,”
whereby they would not allow their still-segregated teams to compete against
those that were integrated (Wiggins and Swanson 2016: xiii–xvi).
Through the first half of the twentieth century, segregation permeated all
sports in the United States, but perhaps none so prominently and severely as
professional baseball, which was not only the most-watched sport in the country
but had also become thoroughly entwined with American societal values and
cultural norms, as the “national pastime” (Pope 1997: 59–84). For many decades
prior to April 15, 1947, MLB was an all-white realm. Only three African
Americans played in the major leagues in the nineteenth century (William White
played one game in 1879 while passing as white, and the Walker brothers in
1884), and thereafter management enforced a color line, spurred on by star first
156 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

baseman and manager Adrian “Cap” Anson. This policy reflected the broader
societal limitations placed upon African Americans (Ribowsky 1995: 32). While
the color line in professional football was more fluid, no blacks played in the
NFL from 1934 to 1945. Many black players believed there was a gentleman’s
agreement among white owners not to employ them. White owners and
coaches, for their part, argued that they did not bring on black players for their
own safety; black players in the league prior to 1934 had been subjected to
harsh verbal and physical abuse, at times assaulted by the entire opposing team
(Smith 1988).
Racial segregation elsewhere was equally severe, or even worse. According
to historians Douglas Booth and John Nauright, in South Africa under apartheid,
“In the realm of sport and leisure, the state simply banned black people from
facilities” (Booth and Nauright 2014: 48). Unlike in the United States, however,
the isolation imposed on blacks in South Africa was so extreme that whites and
blacks rarely interacted with each other, meaning “that whites tucked blacks
out of sight and most whites lost all ‘feeling for human fellowship with blacks’ ”
(Booth and Nauright 2014: 50). Blacks had no avenue to professional or high-
level amateur sports, and played in isolation, often unknown to the international
sporting community. Only after decades of struggle for equality in South Africa,
coupled with an international boycott of South African sports, did apartheid,
along with segregation in sports, begin to crumble. Historians Robert Archer
and Antoine Bouillon argue that throughout its existence apartheid sport was
“the object of civic struggle in the name of social justice, involving not just
players, but the whole population” and “the full weight of state institutions”
(Booth and Nauright 2014: 42). Such internal resistance to apartheid sport was
eventually fortified by an international effort to force change in South Africa.
Beginning in the late 1960s, sparked in part by an international boycott against
South African participation in the Olympics, and the cancellation of several
tours by prominent opposing teams and players, South African officials began
the long, slow process of breaking down apartheid barriers in sport. Incremental
change led eventually to the full integration of the South African sporting
system, a process symbolized most poignantly by political-prisoner-turned-
president Nelson Mandela’s support for the national Springboks rugby team
during the 1995 Rugby World Cup which they ended up winning (Booth and
Nauright 2014: 56–60).

“SEPARATE GAMES”: SPORT AS AN

AVENUE OF RESISTANCE
Through the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, colonial officials
attempted to use sport as a mechanism of control. Indigenous sports were
suppressed or eliminated, and replaced with the sports of the oppressors. As
INCLUSION, EXCLUSION, AND SEGREGATION 157

scholars have demonstrated, however, such sports were frequently then used by
the oppressed as a means of resistance, especially in those cases in which the
colonized nation ultimately played against and defeated the teams of the
colonial power. Eric D. Anderson argues that while colonial sports were forced
onto the oppressed, there were several reasons for native cultures to accept and
eventually excel in such sports, including the sense of unity and pride that such
sports provided, and the opportunity to turn those sports against their
oppressors. Examples include cricket in India, Pakistan, and the West Indies;
rugby in New Zealand and Australia; baseball in Latin America; and American
football among Native American peoples (Anderson 2006: 249–50).
Social theorist and former Trinidadian cricket star C. L. R James authored
one of the most famous books about sport and culture ever published, Beyond a
Boundary, which describes how citizens of the West Indies adopted cricket, the
British game, and with it many of the social customs and behavioral expectations
of British rule. At the same time, James and his cricket-playing peers developed
a style and gamesmanship of their own, and eventually celebrated victories over
British teams as if winning their own war for independence (James 1993).
According to scholars Michael Arthur and Jennifer Scanlon, “Cricket emerged
in the West Indian context as a classic struggle between the oppressor and the
disenfranchised . . . [it] became a form of cultural indoctrination to cement
colonial power, further loyalty to Britain, and engender white supremacy.” At
the same time, they argue, “Alongside the colonial meaning makers stood the
disenfranchised colonials who ‘eventually claimed their right to cricket and re-
promoted it as a symbol of liberating, politicized mass culture’ ” (Arthur and
Scanlon 2005: 121). Malcolm MacLean observes a similar exchange between
oppressors and oppressed in his study of cricket in the West Indies. Maclean
writes, “. . . ‘natives’ and ‘newcomers’ adapt to and adopt each others’ ways in
a shared social, cultural, and physical space that is neither native nor newcomer,
they are not just meeting each other but changing each other” (MacLean 2014:
19). He concludes, “. . . we see sport as a tool of colonialist efforts to secure
both hegemony and dominance, and as a tool in the efforts of the colonized to
resist, to subvert, and to deny colonialist hegemony” (MacLean: 39). Thus,
cricket in the West Indies, originally intended by the British as a mechanism of
control, became not only a source of recreation and enjoyment for the West
Indian peoples, but also an avenue through which to assert their cultural and
even political independence.
Other parts of the world observed similar sporting relationships between the
colonial powers and colonized peoples. Historians Susan Baller and Scarlett
Cornelissen have studied sport in colonial Africa, and they draw similar
conclusions as Arthur, Scanlon, and Maclean. In Africa, they write, colonial
“administrators considered sport a means to create healthy and disciplined
subjects. . . . For colonial administrations, sport was a means of control. But
158 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

Africans made sport their own, adapting it according to their own needs. . . .
Sport can offer niches for people to create their own social worlds, away from
official control” (Baller and Cornelissen 2011: 2086).
Oppressed groups in other settings also created their own “social worlds”
through sport, employing it as a mechanism for resistance, empowerment, or
simply for pleasure and hope. There are innumerable examples to be drawn from
around the world over the last century—far too many to recount fully here—so I
will mention just a few that have drawn the attention of scholars. Historians have
noted that Japanese Americans, imprisoned in large numbers in internment camps
during the Second World War, exerted as much agency as possible despite harsh
conditions, serving a variety of roles in the camps, writing letters, and engaging in
artistic activities. In addition, they played sports, particularly the “American
game” of baseball. Historian Samuel Regalado, who has written extensively on
the experience of Japanese Americans in the camps, explains, “Before Pearl
Harbor, their world was entirely an internal one as exemplified through activities
such as athletic competition. In short, theirs was a segregated sport” (2009: 369).
After Pearl Harbor, the situation became much worse, as the great majority of
Japanese Americans was imprisoned in internment camps for the duration of the
war. Even in those camps, though, Japanese Americans played baseball, basketball,
football, volleyball, and softball, “so as to both satisfy their competitive appetites
and temper the trauma of evacuation” (370). As Regalado argues, “Sport helped
them endure their trauma and contributed to their sense of dignity” (139). Scholar
Ignacio Garcia notes a similar significance in the play of the all-Mexican basketball
team from Lanier High in San Antonio, Texas, which confronted racism and
anger from opposing coaches, players, fans, and parents as they competed against
all-white teams in the 1940s. Nonetheless, the team played, and played well. The
sports program at Lanier gave athletes a sense of dignity and purpose, while
allowing them to maintain their ethnic identity (Garcia 2013).
Sport has served as an outlet for the oppressed under even the harshest
imaginable conditions. Historian Kevin E. Simpson’s remarkable Soccer Under
the Swastika, Stories of Survival and Resistance during the Holocaust (2016)
reveals that even in the concentration camps during the period of most intense
Nazi brutality, Jews took some solace through sport, specifically soccer. He
writes, “For almost every concentration camp in the Nazi system, these hidden
stories of soccer as a pleasure pursuit, a means of survival, and a method of
resistance appear in victim testimonies” (Simpson 2016: xxviii). Yet Jewish
participation could also be a matter of life and death. Jewish pugilists entertained
camp guards just to stay alive, and the loser was often executed. Athletic fame
was no protection during the Holocaust when some thirty Jewish Olympians
were killed (Lebovic 2016).
Despite their exclusion, the elite levels of sport, women, minorities, and
other oppressed groups have always—in one degree or another—practiced
INCLUSION, EXCLUSION, AND SEGREGATION 159

sport as much as societal limitations would allow. At times, these activities have
included forming clandestine teams or leagues; adopting disguise or assumed
identities to participate in “mainstream” activities; or, most notably, playing
“separate games” apart from the segregated sports. Such participation served as
an important mechanism of empowerment for the marginalized groups, allowed
them to push back against the limitations put upon them, and prepare them for
inclusion into mainstream sports as those barriers ultimately came down.
For African Americans living in the Jim Crow era, the legal and social maxim
of “separate but equal” meant that blacks competing in the higher levels of sport
were compelled to play sports primarily on segregated college campuses—the
HBCUs—or in segregated leagues such as the Negro Leagues in baseball. While
the experiences of black athletes at the youth and high-school level were more
varied in the North, as they did sometimes compete on or against integrated
teams, such sportspersons also suffered the effects of racism. In early-twentieth-
century Chicago, for instance, those African Americans who had limited access
to public facilities, parks, and playgrounds encountered discrimination and
abuse from white competitors (Riess 2004: 77).
Even though all-minority teams rarely were presented with opportunities to
show their abilities against white opponents, playing and performing within
their own communities provided them an outlet of expression, such as by
playing baseball in the segregated Negro Leagues. The crown jewel of each
season was the annual all-star game, known as the East-West Classic, which at
its height drew crowds of more than 50,000. According to historian Rob Ruck,
“The East-West Classic showcased the verve and creative energies of the African
American community writ large that had germinated with little notice on the
other side of the color line” (Ruck 2016: 129). Such games became much bigger
than simply sporting events, becoming significant social gatherings. The East-
West Classic drew African-American fans from all over the country, who were
drawn not only to a game of baseball, but also a meeting of many of the most
respected and powerful citizens of their race. As Ruck also notes, African-
American fans selected the players in the East-West Classic by voting, a powerful
expression of voting rights in the era of Jim Crow when southern blacks were
denied access to the ballot box during political elections. Rank-and-file players
cherished the ability to play the game of baseball for a living, even in a segregated
setting. Historian Mark Ribowsky writes about Negro Leaguers: “Forces they
couldn’t understand could take away their rights, but no one could take away
their will. That was all they needed to play. And man, could they play”
(Ribowsky 1995: xix).
There were rare occasions that even while relegated to playing “separate
games,” minority clubs were allowed to play against all-white teams. Such
moments provided a glimpse of equality, and victories over the all-white teams
were treasured events. Among the first of these teams was the Renaissance Big
160 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

FIGURE 6.4: The Harlem Globetrotters representing the United States Information
Agency in 1958 in Vienna, as the American government sought to promote better
diplomatic relations overseas. The team previously drew a record 75,000 spectators to
a game on August 22, 1951 at Berlin’s Olympic Stadium. Courtesy National Archives
and Record Administration.

Five, also known as the Rens, a basketball team based in New York City which
toured the United States, taking on all comers during the Jim Crow era. They
often played against and defeated all-white teams, most notably in 1925, when
they defeated the Original Celtics, considered the finest team of the day. As
scholar Susan J. Rayl has noted, “In the midst of the Harlem Renaissance, [Bob]
Douglas’s young team represented the possibility of equality for African
Americans through their wins against white teams” (Rayl 2016: 21).
At times, marginalized athletes, as a way of competing against the top teams,
joined barnstorming teams that exploited stereotypical and often demeaning
depictions of that group, much in the same way that black actors at times
performed in blackface in minstrel shows and on the vaudeville circuit. Blacks
playing on the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team, or the Indianapolis
Clowns of the Negro Baseball Leagues, resorted to “clowning” to win over
audiences, strutting and gesturing in exaggerated fashion (Thomas 2012: 41–
74). Similarly, women playing for the All-American Red Heads basketball team
INCLUSION, EXCLUSION, AND SEGREGATION 161

in the 1930s and 1940s employed all manner of sexual innuendo to excite their
primarily male audiences (Molina 2016). Despite playing to stereotypes, these
athletes were extremely talented. The Rens and Globetrotters, for instance,
won the world professional basketball championship in 1939 and 1940,
respectively.
Women had limited sporting opportunities because of cultural norms, but
given the chance would turn to sport for fulfillment and empowerment. In turn-
of-the-century America, cohorts of girls and women played basketball, baseball,
and field hockey at all-women’s colleges, where, away from the prying eyes of
overprotective men, their sports often became quite vigorous and competitive
(Liberti 1999). On farms and in rural communities as well, daughters competed
with and against sons in many games and sports. There was a small cohort of
female baseball players. As historian Gai Ingham Berlage notes, “By the late
1800s, there were girls who had grown up playing baseball with their brothers,
and competitive women’s teams could be formed. By the 1890s, Bloomer Girls
teams had sprung up across the country and were regularly playing against
men’s teams” (2001: 239). While viewed by many as a vaudevillean-style
sideshow, women’s teams (at times peppered with a few men dressed in women’s
clothing) were often competitive against the men. Occasionally, women notched
eye-raising accomplishments against men, as when the pitcher Jackie Mitchell
struck out the mightiest hitters in the game—Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig—on
April 2, 1931. Underscoring the exceptional nature of such moments, though,
Mitchell was released from her contract immediately after the game. Many
skeptics believe the event was a sham, and afterwards women rarely competed
against men (242).
The high-water mark for women’s baseball came during the Second World War,
as many teams in the Major Leagues saw their rosters depleted due to the war. To
keep fans coming to the ballpark, major league owners turned to the novel idea of
creating a women’s professional baseball league, the AAGPBL, a development
brought to national attention by the 1992 film, A League of Their Own. While
again many considered the undertaking merely a publicity and moneymaking
stunt, the women competing in the league took it very seriously, and commentators
of the day lauded the women for their play as well as their femininity (243–5).
In other parts of the world as well, women challenged the traditional views of
gender that confined them to limited sporting roles. In Australia and New
Zealand, netball (basketball) became the most popular women’s sport. As
basketball historian Mandy Treagus notes, netball “embodied one of the key
attributes of the dominant mode of femininity of the time, restraint.” By tweaking
the rules of the game played by men, administrators of the sport imposed limits
on movement, scoring, contact, and dribbling. “The discipline and restraint
required of the netball player reflects the restraint required of feminine girls and
women through much of the twentieth century” (Treagus 2005: 102). And yet,
162 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

women who embraced the game frequently pushed the limits of the rules, and
whenever possible played a brand of basketball that involved much more jostling,
contact, and athletic play. In gender-segregated schools, and if no boys or men
were watching, women were allowed much more freedom to play as vigorously
as they wanted. Treagus concludes, “In adapting basketball into a game of their
own, the pioneers of women’s basketball were able to create an institution under
their own control, which they could modify not only to ensure that it fulfilled
their aims of encouraging women to participate in vigorous exercise, but also to
make it conform, at least in some degree, to the demands of middle-class
femininity” (Treagus: 95).
Around the world, women tested and at times bested the restraints imposed by
both male and female coaches and administrators early in the twentieth century.
Wholesale change and acceptance of women’s sport only came, though, in the
aftermath of the Second World War as the globe underwent massive changes on
many fronts. The rise and expansion of a worldwide feminist movement,
particularly in Europe and North America, provided the backdrop for women’s
increased participation in sport. Cold War politics, and particularly the growing
political influence of the Olympic Games, encouraged national teams to embrace
women’s sport. As medal counts—frequently utilized as measures of national
prestige and might—included both men’s and women’s events, those nations
embracing women’s sport most thoroughly were rewarded with medals.
Gradually, as girls around the world witnessed the accomplishments of women
such as Wilma Rudolph, Althea Gibson, Gertrude Ederle, or Olga Fikotová, the
number of female athletes grew dramatically (Bandy et al 2012: 667).

BARRIER-BREAKING ATHLETES AS
SYMBOLS OF CHANGE
In the age of segregation, outstanding individual performers who managed to
compete against members of the dominant race offered even more powerful
examples of the possibilities of what might be achieved by the underprivileged.
This was especially true in American boxing, in which two black athletes—Jack
Johnson and Joe Louis—attained the title of heavyweight champion long before
other sports accepted blacks. Their victories, in a sport that required men to
stand toe-to-toe until one pummeled the other into submission, were especially
powerful symbols of black empowerment. Jack Johnson, who reigned as
heavyweight champion from 1908 to 1915 after years of being ducked by top
white boxers, broke new ground, not only as the first black heavyweight
champion, but also as a physically dominating force, overpowering white men,
who had historically dominated every facet of American society. As such, he was
the ultimate symbol of empowerment for black Americans, representing all that
white Americans feared most. Yet Johnson was also a controversial figure. His
INCLUSION, EXCLUSION, AND SEGREGATION 163

FIGURE 6.5: Pvt. Joe Louis says – “We’re going to do our part, and we’ll win because
we’re on God’s side.” Louis was not only a symbol of American heroism, but served his
country during the Second World War, fighting ninety-six exhibition matches before
more than two million troops, and donating over $100,000 to Navy and Army war
relief from his two title bouts in 1942. Courtesy National Archives and Record
Administration.

penchant for fancy clothes, fast cars, and white women made him utterly
repugnant to whites, and left many blacks as well unable to fully embrace him.
Nonetheless, for blacks throughout the Americas, “With his epic story of success
in the face of discrimination, Johnson became a folk hero to men of color . . .,
inspiring them to take up the sport on their own terms” (Runstedtler 2012: 198).
Joe Louis, who came a generation later, was far more acceptable for both
blacks and whites alike. Early in his career, Louis was subject to much of the
same kind of racial sniping that had plagued Johnson throughout his life.
However, the rise of fascism abroad, along with a personality that many whites
perceived as less threatening than Johnson’s, allowed Louis to become a hero
for all Americans by the time his career concluded. Beginning with his victory
over Max Baer in 1935, Louis became a hero for his race, in the words of
Richard Wright, “the concentrated essence of black triumph over white”
164 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

(Runstedtler 2005: 48). As Theresa E. Runstedtler aptly describes it, “In some
respects, Louis could exert physical force and command white attention in a
way that escaped his black political and intellectual counterparts. Only in the
ring could a black man actually harm a white man without being arrested or
lynched” (70). Louis ultimately became a hero not only for black Americans, but
for those of African descent around the world, when he toppled the Italian giant
Primo Carnera—a personification of fascist supremacy—in 1935. Louis carried
his popularity even further in two of the most significant matches of that era, his
two bouts against the German champion Max Schmeling in 1936 and 1938, the
second of which was a stunning first-round knockout that cemented Louis as
an American icon (Baker 1988). As Runstedtler asserts, Louis’s rise as a symbol
of American patriotism in the 1930s was an important early step in the
desegregation of sport and even American society as a whole. “While political,
economic, and social equality remained elusive, the fantastic successes of African
American athletes with the racial integration of U.S. professional leagues in the
following decades meant that sports emerged as the ultimate, public stage for
this collective project in the assertion of black manhood” (Runstedtler 2005,
77; Wiggins 1988).
Along with Joe Louis, athletes such as Jesse Owens, who won four gold
medals at the so-called “Nazi Olympics” in Berlin in 1936, and the boxer Henry
Armstrong, who won world championships in three weight divisions in boxing,
attracted huge followings from black fans along with considerable support
from white fans as well (Spivey 1988: 284). Such athletes began to light the way
toward equality, not only in sports, but in society as well. Civil rights leader
Edwin Bancroft Henderson, writing in 1936, noted that black athletes “are
emulated by thousands of growing youth of all races, and above all, they gain
for themselves and the negro the respect of millions whose superiority feelings
have sprung solely from identity with the white race” (Wiggins 2016: 315).
In the decades after the Second World War, barriers in sports around the
world fell as pioneering athletes, one by one, became the first minority athletes
to compete on previously segregated teams. While Jackie Robinson taking the
field for the Brooklyn Dodgers is the most celebrated instance of breaking
barriers in sport, at some point every segregated team, in every sport and at
every level, accepted its first minority player. In most cases, the process was
difficult, in some cases unimaginably so. Fans, opposing players and coaches,
and even teammates often responded to the new players with skepticism, doubt,
and harsh words or actions. These athletes were usually isolated, as the only
minority player (or perhaps one of a handful) on the team, and in some cases
teammates actively worked against the new player.
Jackie Robinson opened the door for other black athletes to crack into all-
white lineups on other teams and in other sports. Just three months later, Larry
Doby became the first black player in the American League, making his debut
INCLUSION, EXCLUSION, AND SEGREGATION 165

on July 5, 1947, for the Cleveland Indians. Unlike Robinson, Doby struggled in
his first season, becoming a star only after months of subpar play. As historian
Louis Moore has argued, though, despite Doby’s less than stellar start, he was
noteworthy because he demonstrated that a black man—even one whose
athletic skill was not leaps and bounds superior to white players—could still
earn a roster spot in the major leagues (Moore 2015).
Black athletes of this generation often encountered violence, especially when
their desegregated teams played against all-white squads. In one especially
vicious episode in 1951, Johnny Bright, a black football player for Drake
University, was slugged in the face by an Oklahoma A&M player after handing
off the ball and watching the play unfold. Journalists covering the game
recorded the attack in a remarkable series of photographs, bringing an otherwise
commonplace episode into the national spotlight. Bright was assaulted several
other times during the game, suffering a broken jaw before being pulled by his
coach. While in time he recovered from his injuries, Johnny eventually moved
to Canada, played in the Canadian football league, became a Canadian citizen,
and lived out his days there. As he described it, “I never get in any problems up
here because of my race” (Schultz 2016: 128; Demas 2010: 61–7).
In other cases, potentially contentious events instead led to heartwarming
moments of acceptance, in which what might be expected to be hostile crowds
actually supported the minority players. Perhaps most famously, South African
president Nelson Mandela utilized sport, and specifically rugby, to help unify a
divided nation. At the 1995 Rugby World Cup, hosted by South Africa, Mandela
entered the stadium wearing the green and yellow jersey emblazoned with a
symbol often associated with apartheid, the springbok. The crowd of 63,000
people–nearly all white–chanted the name of the man they had once feared and
despised, “Nelson! Nelson! Nelson!” According to the captain and star player
of the team, Francois Pienaar, “. . . when the final whistle blew this country
changed forever. It’s incomprehensible” (Smith 2013). Similar scenes played
out in arenas and parks around the world, not only in world championship
competitions, but in local and regional games as well.
The process of integration was hastened by the fact that the ability and skills
of newly introduced players usually improved the team. Indeed, the success of
teams that began utilizing black players became a powerful motivation for those
teams that had not yet integrated to join the process. Integrated teams, in short,
were better than segregated teams. Again, examples abound, but a few instances
of integrated teams defeating still-segregated holdouts have become legendary
in American sports history. In the 1966 NCAA basketball championship game,
the Texas Western Miners—playing an all-black lineup—defeated the all-white
Kentucky Wildcats, 72–65. While some argue that the significance of the racial
makeup of the teams has been exaggerated, as integrated teams had won the
championship several times before 1966—notably the Bill Russell-led San
166 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

FIGURE 6.6: Wilma Rudolph at the first USA vs USSR track and field meet, July
1961. Rudolph crosses the finish line just ahead of Tatiana Shohalkanova in Lenin
Stadium, Moscow, to help the US women’s 400-meter relay team win in a world
record time of 44.3 seconds. National Archives and Records Administration.

Francisco Dons in 1955 and 1956—the fact that the loser in this case was a
team from the South, coached by the legendary Adolph Rupp, suggested that
the days of segregated teams winning titles were numbered.(Fitzpatrick 2000).
Similarly, in college football, the University of Southern California Trojans,
featuring a black quarterback and tailback along with many other black players,
easily defeated the all-white Alabama Crimson Tide in the opening game of the
1970 season, 42–21. Alabama’s legendary coach Bear Bryant had been trying to
recruit black players prior to that game but met great resistance from university
and state officials. The lopsided defeat, though, demonstrated that segregated
teams operated at a disadvantage by limiting their potential talent pool. The
next season, Alabama introduced its first black player (Against the Tide 2013).
In some instances, the process of integration was aided by shifts in the
geopolitical climate. As one example, during the Cold War, marginalized
athletes presented the US State Department with an opportunity to augment its
image abroad as a nation offering equal opportunities for all. Thus, perhaps
ironically, female and African-American athletes featured prominently in the
government’s sports diplomacy program. Black female athletes, such as tennis
INCLUSION, EXCLUSION, AND SEGREGATION 167

star Althea Gibson, who was the headline performer on several State Department
tours beginning in 1955, and sprinter Wilma Rudolph, who toured Africa for
the State Department following her victories in the 1960 Rome Olympics,
provided the double benefit of disputing communist propaganda claiming the
inferiority of both blacks and women in the US (Thomas 2012; Brown 2015).
As previously noted, the Soviet government supported women’s sports even
prior to the advent of the Cold War, but athletic competition versus American
teams only fortified their interest in successful sportswomen.

DESEGREGATION AND INCLUSION IN SPORT

In the post-Second World War era, barriers to participation on the basis of race,
gender, class, and other factors have steadily crumbled around the world.
Excluded groups now brought into majority-dominated sports have had much to
celebrate, introducing their own style and brand of play, and often leading their
teams to victory. And yet, even as the era of segregation passed, and the global
trend swung toward inclusion, true equality in sport remains elusive even today.
The process of integration itself, for those trailblazing athletes, was in most cases
difficult and painful, at times even dangerous and traumatic. Many scholars have
studied the disparities that linger, and examples of discriminatory treatment in
the era of inclusion remain abundant. Finally, in many cases the desegregation of
one team or league has contributed to the decline of once-thriving segregated
teams. Players “left behind” in the age of integration often saw their careers
wither as the demand for their talents in a segregated setting declined.
Black athletes, as they were introduced onto all-white teams and into all-
white leagues, brought with them not only physical abilities, but also a unique
cultural aesthetic that transformed each sport. In baseball, Jackie Robinson and
other black players brought speed and electricity to the basepaths, while Satchel
Paige and other hurlers brought ingenuity, creativity, and fearlessness to the
pitcher’s mound. In basketball, black players enhanced the aerial game, along
with dribbling and passing mastery. And in the NFL, black running backs and
wide receivers carried the ball not only with speed, power, and grace, but also
an array of moves that left defenders grasping at the air. Author Ralph Ellison
described it this way: “Without the presence of Negro American style, sports
would be lacking in the sudden turns, the shocks, the swift changes of pace (all
jazz-shaped) that serve to remind us that . . . the real secret of the game is to
make life swing” (Dinerstein 2005: 170). Cultural critic Nelson George
described such qualities as the “black athletic aesthetic,” a phenomenon that
changed all sports as integration progressed, adding speed, style, grace, elegance,
explosiveness, and improvisation to integrated sports (Dinerstein: 172).
At the same time, black athletes integrating all-white teams confronted a host
of issues. Consider this list of grievances, submitted to campus administrators by
168 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

black athletes at the University of California in 1968, recounted by historian

David K. Wiggins: “The athletes complained that members of the athletic
department made derogatory comments about their personal appearance, athletic
trainers and student coaches unfairly regarded the injuries suffered by black
athletes as cases of ‘hypochondria or gold-bricking,’ coaches grouped black
athletes at positions in which they would encounter maximum competition to
make the teams, the university reneged on its promise to find suitable housing for
black athletes, black athletes were given inferior academic advice and counseling,
and, perhaps most important, the athletic department had failed to hire black
coaches” (Wiggins 1988: 308). Black athletes also endured racist taunts and slurs
not only from opposing teams and fans, but at times from their own coaches and
teammates, and they came to expect a battering on the field from opponents who
frequently targeted them with violent attacks.
Even as black athletes endured such treatment, they became frustrated at the
slow pace of change. Athletes who lived through the Jackie Robinson era were still
likely to encounter segregated teams and, well into the 1970s, many teams brought
on only one or two “token” black players. Scholar Lane Demas notes: “Although
[Jackie Robinson] was the central figure who ‘shattered’ the color barrier, most
major league baseball teams continued to shun integration for the next ten years,
while segregated housing and dining facilities remained the norm for players into
the 1960s” (Demas 2010: 16). Eventually, black athletes grew tired and frustrated
with the process of integration and the problems that continued to plague
integrated sports teams long after the initial barrier was broken. In the late 1960s,
African-American athletes engaged in what Harry Edwards, who spearheaded the
movement, called “The Revolt of the Black Athlete.” Edwards, a sociology
professor and former elite discus thrower, led a group of athletes from San José
State University in a series of protests against racial discrimination in sports,
culminating in what organizers hoped to be a boycott of the 1968 Mexico City
Olympics (Edwards 1969; Bass 2002; Thomas 2012: 133–70). While the boycott
eventually fizzled, Tommie Smith and John Carlos made a memorable protest
following their medaling in the 200-meter sprint in a “black power” salute as the
national anthem played (Witherspoon 2008). Despite the attention drawn to their
protest, conditions for black athletes did not change much in the wake of the
“revolt of the black athlete,” and inequalities lingered in both college and amateur
sports for decades (Hoose 1989).
Women’s opportunities to participate in sport increased steadily in the decades
after the Second World War. As noted, the increased attention to international
sport provided opportunities for women in many nations to compete for the
pride of their nations. The broader advance of women in many societies was
accompanied by advances in the sporting realm. As women fought for the right
to vote, marriage rights, educational freedom, and greater pay, they stood up for
similar representation in sports. The number of women’s events in the Olympics,
INCLUSION, EXCLUSION, AND SEGREGATION 169

and the level of athleticism and endurance required in those events, has risen
steadily since 1948. In the United States, the advent of Title IX of the Education
Amendments of 1972 marked a watershed moment in women’s participation in
sports, as it requires universities to support men’s and women’s sports equally.
While the adjustment to the new law was uneven, and some men’s sports suffered
as a result, women’s participation in sports, particularly at the collegiate level,
has grown exponentially since the implementation of Title IX.
Still, change has not always come easily, and women have often had to protest
and fight for true equality in sports. In some sports, such as figure skating and
tennis, female stars have at times been a bigger draw to fans than males, yet their
compensation and media coverage has often lagged behind. In the 1970s, tennis
star Billie Jean King spearheaded a movement demanding equal pay for women
in her sport, which women eventually achieved at the Grand Slam events, a first
in the sports world. Such equality is still a dream for many female athletes,
however, as the disparity in pay between male stars in the NBA and female stars
in the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) demonstrate. In
2017, members of the US women’s World Cup soccer team, which won the
2016 World Cup in one of the most-watched soccer events in American history,
went on strike, demanding equal pay to men (whose team failed to make the
World Cup tournament in 2018 but nonetheless earn much more per game than
the women). This movement spread globally as well, as women’s teams in
Sweden, Denmark, and Norway staged similar protests. In October 2017, the
Norwegian women’s team became the first in the world to be granted equal pay
to the men’s team (Denmark’s Women’s National Team Calls Off Strike 2017).
While inclusion for women is primarily framed as a quest for equal
opportunity, there have been a number of “battle of the sexes” events, in which
women have competed against—and at times defeated—men. Babe Didrikson
participated in a number of exhibitions against men in the 1930s and 1940s,
even playing in the men’s Tucson Open golf tournament in 1945 (Mell 2013).
Perhaps the most famous such example is the infamous 1973 tennis match
between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs that was given the title “Battle of the
Sexes.” While in hindsight it is clear that King was simply a superior player—a
champion approaching the peak of her career—and that Riggs was little more
than a misogynist blowhard whose game had declined dramatically from his
years as a champion, at the time the outcome was not so certain. Four months
earlier, Riggs had toppled then-number-one-ranked Margaret Court. Thus,
King’s victory, if not completely shocking, at least marked an important moment
for women’s sport (Ware 2011).
Since then, there have been many other instances in which women have
competed directly against men. The sport of golf, in which size and physical
contact are generally not impediments to success, has provided several such
moments, as when Annika Sorenstam—at the time ranked number one in the
170 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

FIGURE 6.7: Jack Klugman, Bobby Riggs, and Billie Jean King in an episode of the
television series The Odd Couple, October 30, 1973. ABC Television. Courtesy
Wikimedia Commons.

women’s game—entered a men’s tournament, the PGA Bank of America

Colonial in 2003, a feat later duplicated by Michelle Wie, who competed in
men’s events thirteen times as a teenager, between 2003 and 2008 (Mell 2013;
Kelley 2017). Women have also competed directly against men in the college
basketball 3-point championship, an informal event at the end of each season,
but one drawing considerable fan interest. In 2015, to much fanfare Cassandra
Brown of the University of Portland defeated the top men’s competitor, Kevin
Pangos of Gonzaga (Grippi 2015). More recently, women have notched
noteworthy successes in the made-for-television sport, American Ninja Warrior,
in which competitors attempt to complete incredibly difficult obstacle courses.
Despite the reality-TV dramatic tone of this event, one cannot deny the genuine
athleticism of the competitors. In this sport, women compete on exactly the
same courses as men, with no handicap or special benefits, and in recent years
the top women have defeated many male competitors. In 2014, celebrated
Ninja Warrior Kacy Catanzaro became the first woman to race up “the warped
wall,” a 12-foot-high wall that competitors must run up and clear. She improved
on that achievement by completing not only the qualifying course but also the
more difficult city finals course. A number of women have since surpassed her
INCLUSION, EXCLUSION, AND SEGREGATION 171

accomplishments, most notably Jessie Graff, who in 2016 finished second in the
Los Angeles city finals (bested by only one male competitor) and completed
stage one in the national finals and stage two in the USA versus the World
competition, feats matched by only a handful of men in the sport (Reith 2017).

CONCLUSION
While athletics is a far more egalitarian realm today than it was a century
ago, many instances of unfairness remain. The power structure throughout
international sports is overwhelmingly dominated by white men, who comprise
the majority of commissioners, owners, athletic directors, coaches, officials, and
other administrators. Even considering the progress that has been made, scholars
Adrienne Milner and Jomills Henry Braddock II assert, “In sports specifically,
women and racial minorities have restricted opportunities for participation and
both groups are significantly underrepresented in decision-making positions
compared to their male and white counterparts” (Milner and Braddock 2016:
2). More alarming still, in recent years, scandals such as the NFL’s Richie
Incognito/Jonathan Martin affair—in which Incognito and other players
verbally abused Martin and other players and staff across a variety of racial,
ethnic, and sexual lines—reveal that racism and other forms of discrimination
still thrive behind closed doors. Revelations of a long history of sexual abuse of
female athletes by former USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University
trainer Larry Nasser, among a number of other recent scandals, indicate that
women as well continue to confront intense challenges in the male-dominated
realm of sports. Finally, researchers in recent years have begun examining
discrimination and mistreatment of athletes who identify within the queer or
trans spectrum, a group that until recent years has almost universally kept their
identities secret while participating in sport. Growing acceptance of such
individuals in society has brought some of their stories into the open, creating a
new realm for discussion among sports scholars.
At the same time, sport continues to provide an arena in which minorities
can aspire to achieve great monetary success and fame, and also to use a public
platform to draw attention to persistent inequalities, both within and outside of
the world of sports. The protest of Colin Kaepernick and other NFL players—
who began sitting and/or taking a knee during the playing of the national
anthem beginning in 2016—brought new prominence to issues of police
violence and systemic inequality in the United States, even if that conversation
is far from resolved. Sport, which has at times been at the forefront of social
equality and at other times has lagged behind, ultimately is a part of the broader
culture of any given society and thus represents both the good and the bad.
Until all of society achieves total equality, sport will continue to stand as an
example not simply of inclusion or exclusion, but rather some elements of both.
172
 CHAPTER SEVEN

Minds, Bodies,
and Identities
MIKE CRONIN

INTRODUCTION: WAR BODIES, SPORTING BODIES

A few months after the start of the First World War, Irish socialist James
Connolly asked whether warfare could be civilized. He was clear-cut in his view
that war could never be civilized, but rather that the act of war and the ensuing
loss of life and bodily mutilation would be justified to the public by the jingoistic
propaganda of one side or the other. In assessing the force of British jingoism,
that was already evident by the start of 1915, he wrote that “it all depends, it
appears, upon whose houses are being bombarded, whose people are being
massacred, whose limbs are torn from the body, whose bodies are blown to a
ghastly mass of mangled flesh and blood and bones” (Connolly 1915: 1).
The First World War served as a rupture in European history. Not only were
approximately 20 million people killed across Europe, but a similar number
had to try and rebuild their lives with mutilated limbs and bodies or else
shattered minds (Bourke 1999; Carden-Coyne 2014; Anderson 2016).
During the First World War organized elite sport was largely, although not
completely, suspended across Europe (Mason and Riedi 2010; Vamplew 2014).
But sport and the imagery of the fit and healthy body signing up to fight was a
key part of the propaganda of the early years of the war. Among the allied
nations, the sportsman as a model fighter was a key driver in voluntary
recruitment. Such images were particularly prominent in the United Kingdom,
Australia, New Zealand, and Canada (Phillips 1996). One recruitment poster
from the United Kingdom in 1915 stated that “Rugby Union Footballers Are

173
174 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

Doing Their Duty. Over 90 percent Have Enlisted.” Building on the linkage
between the sacrifice of the rugby player and national service against the
Germans, the poster asked “British Athletes: Will You Follow Their Glorious
Example?” (Collins 2009). Sportsmen from across the British Empire did follow
that example, and many elite sportsmen of the era and countless others who
belonged to their local club paid with their lives or had their bodies shattered on
the Western Front, at Gallipoli, and elsewhere (Sandford 2015; McCrery 2015;
Cooper 2013; Walker 2015; Elliott 2015).
The appeal of sportsmen to the War Office, as it sought to gather the
necessary thousands upon thousands of men necessary to fight the war, was that
they were fit, and they understood the concept of the collective. Sport, since it
had emerged from the public schools of England had been built around the idea
of the team—a unit that would work together and offer personal sacrifice for
the glory of the group (Mangan 2009). Such selflessness and leadership became
a common trope in the propaganda war between 1914 and 1918. Time and
again the newspapers were full of stories of sportsmen turned soldiers who
transferred their playing field skills to the battlefield. One of the most powerful
stories in Britain was that of Lieutenant Colonel Edgar Mobbs who was killed
at the Ypres Salient in 1917. He was singlehandedly attacking a German
machine-gun position that had laid waste to his men when he was killed, but
was successful in his mission. That his selfless act was heroic was not enough.
As a keen rugby player Mobbs was seen to have led his “team” by example and
sacrificed himself so that the team could survive and win. Second Lieutenant
Spencer, who had been at Bedford School with Mobbs and had been one of the
last to speak with him, later wrote:

In the tornado of shelling he got ahead and seeing a number of his men cut
down charged it to bomb it – and he went down. For a man of his standing
and rank it was magnificent ... I saw the old three-quarter in his own
25 yards get the ball from a crumpled scrum and get clean through and on.
One of England’s finest rugby players, in the greatest game man can play.
—livesofthefirstworld.war.org 2018

The correlation between sport and war has been commented on, approved of,
and criticized by a plethora of writers over the years (Baxter 2011; Blackburn
2016). What is clear is that sport, especially team sport, reduces the value of
individual identity in the name of the collective. Team identities, the group,
have, across the twentieth century, become central to our understanding of
most professional sport. For all the popularity of individual sports such as
tennis or golf, it is the team sports of soccer, football, baseball, and the like that
have dominated the cultural imaginations and emotional attachments of
spectators and the pages of the press (Brown and Jennings 2009).
MINDS, BODIES, AND IDENTITIES 175

Men like Edgar Mobbs volunteered and died in the First World War for the
glory of their nation. Sport had taken a series of evolutionary decisions in the
second half of the nineteenth century that made the patriotic decisions of
sporting men like Mobbs make perfect sense. Shortly after the evolution of the
major team games in Britain and their spread to other parts of the globe, the
club became the common unit of sporting organization. After a number of years
of infrequent fixtures based around club challenges, the model adapted by most
team sports was an annual cup competition (usually played on a national basis),
and later the establishment of a league based around a season of regular weekly
fixtures (Taylor 2005; Taylor 2007). In sports across the Western world, in the
latter decades of the nineteenth century, this led to a great enthusiasm for not
just playing sport, but also paying to watch “your” local team compete. As sport
is based around competition, it was perhaps natural in an age of nationalism
and imperial expansion in the late nineteenth century that those who organized
sport turned to the national team as a way of competing and measuring
themselves against other nations. The first international fixtures took place
within Britain between England and Scotland in soccer (1872) and rugby
(1871), and had been preceded by international contests in cricket (USA versus
Canada in 1844) and in rowing (Harvard versus Oxford in 1869). The
enthusiasm for such international fixtures then spread more widely so that
many European countries began competing in soccer internationals and the
British Empire family started playing against each other in test matches in rugby
and cricket (Warner 1912; Mitchell 2012; Eisenberg 2005).

IDENTITIES
The same impulse that would give rise to the initial jingoistic passion for fighting
the First World War was also evident in sport. Spectators and, through the
media, the general public were entranced by the idea of national competition,
essentially measuring whether “our” country was better than “theirs.” Soccer,
rugby, and cricket internationals drew in large numbers of spectators (e.g.,
Scotland versus England, Hampden Park, Glasgow, April 4, 1908, attracted
121,445 spectators), as did boxing matches where national representatives,
although individuals, fought for the glory of their nation in the hope that
they would emerge as the world champion (e.g., the 1938 Max Schmeling
versus Joe Louis bout was estimated to have had a radio audience of 60 million
people).
The advent of international sport meant that the identity of the individual
sportsman or woman was subsumed by the nation. They became part of a
collective, larger unit where they represented the hopes, dreams, and prestige of
their country. In this way the international team came to represent and bring
alive the nation in the way that Eric Hobsbawm imagined when he stated that:
176 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

“The imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of eleven

named people” (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Bairner 2015). It is also important
to note that sport organized itself around national representative teams in ways
that mirrored the parallel emergence of the organized nation state in the later
nineteenth century. In an age where such emergent or established nations were
often challenged internally through ethnic and religious dissension, or else
challenged by competing imperial powers, sport gave the nation one of its few
commonly agreed manifestations of collective identity.
A landmark decision in terms of sporting identities at the national and global
level was the advent of international organizing bodies and competitions. The
first of these, inspired by Pierre de Coubertin, was the IOC and, from 1896, the
Olympic Games. De Coubertin chose the nation state as the organizing unit
for the Olympic Games. Despite his belief that the Olympics would be a force
for peaceful interaction (and this has often happened, as with the 2018 Winter
Olympic rapprochement between North and South Korea), the high-profile
contest between nations and their competing ideologies and political concerns
has led to much rancor. From the decision to exclude the defeated nations of the
First World War from the 1920 and 1924 Games, through the Nazis politicization
of the Berlin Olympics for propaganda purposes and on to the Munich killings
of 1972, the 1976 Apartheid Boycotts, and the reciprocal Cold War boycotts of
1980 and 1984, the Olympics have been near constantly used for political
purposes (Goldblatt 2016a; Bairner 2014). This politicization speaks volumes
about the high profile of sport, which has been ably assisted by the mass media
(and the close focus on medal tables and the effects of defeat or victory on the
national morale), and also the way in which ideological maneuverings in the
sporting arena can be seen as examples of soft power as opposed to harder
decisions about formal sanctions or military action (Sarantakes 2010; Chappelett
and Kübler-Mabbott 2008).
In addition to the political usage of mega events such as the Olympics to
score ideological points or to highlight perceived injustices, simply winning has
also been a major driver of state policy toward sport (Houlihan and Lindsay
2015; Dennis and Grix 2017). Following the establishment of the IOC as a
multisport mega event, other individual sports followed suit. FIFA was
established in 1904 and began its World Cup in 1930. Cricket was organized
initially as the Imperial Cricket Conference in 1909, and later as the International
Cricket Conference from 1965. It began its World Cup in 1975, and rugby,
under the auspices of the International Rugby Board, began its World Cup in
1987. Such tournaments have been a source of immense national pride either
by way of hosting or winning. Mega events are seen as morale boosters, events
which bring the collective nation together (Horne and Manzenreiter 2006). In
winning (or at least performing well in) such events, the nation can be seen to
either prove its ideological strength (e.g., the Miracle on Ice and the victory of
MINDS, BODIES, AND IDENTITIES 177

the USA men’s hockey team over the USSR at Lake Placid in 1980), bring
about a sense of national cohesion when a country is seemingly in crisis (e.g.,
the success of the multiracial French soccer team at the 1998 World Cup at a
time of racial tension in the country), or else announce the arrival of a new or
emergent nation on the world stage (e.g., the inclusion of the former Soviet
states in international competition from 1996, the success of demographically
small nations such as Ireland at the 1990 World Cup or Iceland at the 2016
European Championships, or the arrival of “new” sporting nations on the
world stage such as the Cameroonians at the 1990 World Cup finals or the
Jamaicans in bobsled at the 1988 Winter Olympics) (Dine 2002; Free 2005;
Whannel 2008).
For all the positive and negative legacies of international competition in
sport, it has emerged over the last century and a half as the most powerful
organizing unit in the context of mega events (although this may be changing in
light of corruption scandals within both the IOC and FIFA, the insular power
of the US media market and that nation’s specific high-profile elite sports of
football and baseball, and the global spread of the European soccer leagues and
the UEFA Champions League through digital media) (Conn 2017; Sage 2016).
Given the emotive power of the nation competing at international mega events
and the global media reach of these occasions, it often appears that representative
athletes decked out in national colors and standing for “their” flag and “their”
anthem are powerful signifiers of a larger collective identity. But what rights or
choices do athletes have within the confines of international sport that has
wedded itself so closely to the nation state?

INDIVIDUALS AND NATIONS

The major global sporting federations have all developed strict rules around
the question of what constitutes a national representative. Throughout the
twentieth century, as the world became ever more globalized, so did sport. In
national leagues the advent of an international transfer system for talent resulted
in players of many different nationalities appearing in sports as diverse as US
baseball, Australian Rules football, Indian Premier League cricket, and the
majority of European soccer leagues (Lanfranchi and Taylor 2001). But how
should the question of national identity be policed at the level of international
competition? It is evident that many players (especially during the South African
apartheid era) sought to switch national allegiance so that they could play their
sport on the international stage. This has also been true in recent years when
elite African runners have been attracted by financial inducement to switch
nationality so that they could compete for other nations such as Turkey. Such
examples, no matter what they may say about the identity of an individual
athlete, are still based on choice. No matter how contentious Zola Budd’s
178 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

decision to switch to British citizenship so that she could compete at the 1984
Olympic Games, it was her choice. For many athletes, however, their identity
was not a matter of choice, but rather rules forced them to question their sense
of self or their athletic goals.
The black power salute given on the Olympic podium in Mexico City by
Tommie Smith and John Carlos in 1968 has become one of the defining
photographic images of the Olympic Games and the intersection of sport and
politics. Carlos and Smith were using the podium to highlight the plight of
African Americans and the second-class status that they endured in the US.
They were expressing firmly-held personal views which spoke to their identities
as both Americans and, critically, as black men. The IOC and the US Olympic
Committee could not countenance such politicization of the Games, and the
two men were swiftly ejected from Mexico and widely pilloried in the media
(Bass 2002). It seemed that while states could choose to politicize the Olympics
through boycott and other means, the individual athlete was not supposed to
highlight any aspect of their own identity that might be problematic.
In 1976 many African nations chose to boycott the Montreal Olympic
Games in opposition to New Zealand’s sporting contacts with apartheid South
Africa. The Guyanese 200-meter runner James Gilkes argued that he should
not be prevented from competing in the Games due to decisions made by his
national Olympic Committee. He appealed to the IOC that he should be
allowed to compete as an individual under the Olympic flag, but his request was
denied. The IOC effectively decided that the individual was not a identity that
it recognized. Only nation states and the relevant national committee could
make decisions about whether or not individuals attended the Games.
In 1992 Wayne McCullough boxed his way to a silver medal fighting for the
Republic of Ireland. McCullough was actually a Protestant from Northern
Ireland. Due to decisions made in 1922 at the time of Irish partition, the Irish
Amateur Boxing Association (IABA), the body recognized by the IOC as having
jurisdiction over Irish boxing, continued to select its boxers from the Irish
Republic and Northern Ireland. Thus McCullough, no matter that he identified
as Northern Irish and British, had to fight for the Republic, a “foreign” country,
if he wanted to box at Olympic level. Within his community McCullough was
sharply criticized, and his medal, as it came under an Irish tricolor rather than
the Union flag, was little celebrated. McCullough rightly stated that the rules
of the IABA and the IOC left him with no choice but to fight for the Republic,
but in a place like Northern Ireland, at that time in the middle of a three-
decade-long sectarian conflict, McCullough was viewed by sections of his
community as a traitor (Cronin 1997). Global rules around national identity
and those national sporting federations recognized by the IOC were not flexible
in their approach to deal with the localized minutiae of a violent internecine
communal war.
MINDS, BODIES, AND IDENTITIES 179

In 2000 Sydney hosted the Olympic Games and the organizing committee
celebrated and projected to the world a positive view of Australia (Lenskyj
2002). However, like all such mega events, there are always those who feel that
organizing committees fail to recognize or even suppress alternative identities
that problematize the macro national narrative. For Sydney specifically, and
Australia generally, the question that dogged them throughout the Games was
how they included and recognized the place of indigenous Aboriginal people
within history and contemporary society. The “home” athletic star of the Games
was the 400-meter runner Cathy Freeman. She would take gold in that event,
but on her victory lap she draped herself in both the Australian national flag
and the flag of the Aboriginal nation. While the Aboriginal flag was not
recognized by the IOC, Freeman was not, unlike Carlos and Smith three
decades earlier, thrown out of the Games or admonished in any way. But
Freeman’s dual-flagged lap of honor illustrates a key question in relation to
identity (Elder, Pratt, and Ellis 2006). Is national identity simply applied to
athletes by virtue of the rules of international sporting federations, or do
athletes have any degree of personal choice when it comes to who they
represent? Did Emil Zátopek want to represent and bestow glory on the
Czechoslovak communist regime he raced for? (Askwith 2017). Did the US and
other athletes who were told they could not attend the 1980 Olympic Games
in Moscow accept that their one chance at Olympic glory may have passed due
to the intricacies of geopolitics? Did Prince Ranjitsinhji, although a loyal son of
Empire, secretly dream of an Indian national cricket team even when he played
test matches for England in the 1890s? (Wilde 2005). Did Rory McIlroy fail to
compete at the Rio Olympics because he feared the Zika virus or because the
rules of his sport had defined him as Irish rather than British as indicated by his
passport? (irishnews.com 2018). What of Ben Johnson who, shortly after his
1988 gold medal was taken away from him because of a failed drug test, was
then also rejected by his home press as being a Jamaican immigrant rather than
a Canadian? (Jackson 1998). Or Mo Farah who, despite his huge success, is
problematized as not being truly representative of Britain but is labeled as a
Somali immigrant and a Muslim? (Black 2016). And what of those Russians
who were informed by the IOC that they could compete at the 2018 Winter
Olympics so long as they were cleared of any suspicions of drug taking by an
independent panel and, if cleared, would not represent “their” nation but
would compete as Olympic Athletes from Russia? The emergence of modern
sport coincided with the establishment of the modern nation state, and this was
the organizational model that global sporting federations have been wedded to
ever since. But while competing for the nation may be the pinnacle of most
athlete’s careers, for many others their own sense of identity is denied. Athletes
are therefore the tools in the sporting wars and contests between nations rather
than individuals with personal agency.
180 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

NATIONAL AND LOCAL ALLEGIANCES

Whatever the complexities of identities as they relate to international events, it
is clear that the four-yearly cycle of Olympic Games and World Cups (particularly
in soccer) creates huge financial, sporting, and propaganda successes that are
enthusiastically embraced by sports followers around the world. However, as
these are not events that dominate the annual calendar, it is national sports and
competition that are most significant on a regular and ever repeating schedule.
The nineteenth century was critical for establishing dominant national sporting
choices. Britain as the “home” of sport spread its games through its formal and
informal empires so that those nations that took to sports such as cricket and
rugby still dominate the elite of the game (Ryan 2008). In addition to those
nations that adapted the sports of the imperial center, others rejected them. The
US evolved the sports of football, baseball, and basketball, Ireland rejected
British sports and revived Gaelic games, while Australia developed its own form
of football rules (Mandelbaum 2010; Cronin, Duncan, and Rouse 2009; Collins
2018). There were also areas of the globe that clung to traditional forms of
sport, or else were closed through economic and developmental levels to the
advent of organized, “modern” sport, such as much of Central and Saharan
Africa until the distance-running boom from the 1970s.
Through the twentieth century these patterns of sporting choices and
allegiance have been completely transformed as the sporting world has become
ever more globalized. The number of nations affiliated to either the IOC or
FIFA increased steadily throughout the twentieth century, but until the 1970s
most national sports cultures were concerned with home tournaments. While
the media, in the form of the printed press and the radio, massively transformed
the levels of interest in sport (and in particular the advent of live commentary
and the communal listening to contests that were taking place elsewhere), it
was television that changed everything (Booth 2018).
The local club, in whatever sport, was what most people identified with. The
hometown heroes (whether they were good or bad) were what was accessible.
So while there were interwar stars who, assisted by the media, became nationally
known, such as Babe Ruth in the US, most supporters identified with and
attended their local stadium. The local club took many forms across the world.
It could be the professional club playing elite sport for paying spectators and a
wider media audience, or it could be the private members’ golf, tennis, or tenpin
bowling club. Both types of clubs reflected their communities. The former would
speak to civic pride, to a sense of togetherness, of shared grief at defeat or
elation in victory. The latter, often based around various class and professional
interests, would not have spoken to civic pride, but would have represented the
community interests and shared values of people who identified each other as
“similar.” Both these types of clubs, no matter how the interest in the same sport
MINDS, BODIES, AND IDENTITIES 181

might be shared around the globe, were actually rooted in the local. Individual
and community loyalties to their team or club did not transfer across city or
regional boundaries, let alone national ones. US sports were only of interest to
Americans and those nations in their sphere of influence, the followers of the
EFL would have little knowledge of the same game in Bolivia and vice versa,
and only the Basques cared about pelota. Television, more so than radio which
had broadcast sporting events between nations from the 1930s, broke down the
concept of the local and made sporting allegiances far more transnational.
What traditionally dominated the sporting landscape, with the exception of
certain solo sports (tennis and golf) and motor sport, were team sports based on
national leagues. In recent times local ownership has been replaced by a global
network of ownership models, or else, especially in Spanish soccer, fan-owned
cooperatives. Such leagues, with a number of weekly (or in baseball almost
daily) fixtures, allow fans to get their fix. Global digital television and gambling
also means that there is a match on somewhere 24 hours per day. Boundaries
have broken down, and nation-specific ideas of the game transformed by a
global talent market that readily moves individual players to increase salaries or
elongate careers (such as European soccer players moving to the US Major
Soccer League or the Chinese Super League).
Given the global nature of sport and the extensive media coverage available,
there has been a move away from the local or “home” team. Many commentators
have noted how fans now have a multitude of clubs that they support or follow.
There may be the local club, but also an EPL team, a favored NFL team, and so
on (Farred 2008). “Support,” or at least enthusiasm, can run across time zones
and geography so that “fans” now have a network of “their” favored soccer
club, NFL club, cricket team, and so on that sits alongside their local team.
Global television now beams the top-quality leagues into new marketplaces,
assisted by aggressive ownership and overseas selling tactics (e.g., Manchester
United’s US ownership and promotional tours to China, Leicester City owned
by a Thai family, the visits of various NBA teams to China, and so on). This has
been accompanied in recent years by the placing of players from key markets
into the teams of televised leagues (e.g., Park J. Sung from South Korea to
Manchester United, Yao Ming from China to the NBA’s Houston Rockets,
Australian Chris Lynne to the Kolkata Knight Riders in Indian Premier League
Cricket, and so on) so that viewers turn to “foreign” leagues to watch their
“homeborn” stars. This is not simply about maximizing broadcasts rights for
leagues and teams, but also breaking into new markets (China and India, in
particular). For major franchises in Europe and the US the need to break into
and dominate new markets seems more important than the development of the
local. What is favored is selling the Red Sox or Real Madrid to the Chinese
market as the “authentic” product over developing a locally-based league in
China itself. Sport is increasingly about fans who watch on television or online
182 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

rather than ever expecting to be in the stadium itself. As such, viewing a “foreign”
team means that the formerly local becomes global (glocalization) and sporting
cultures move readily and ever more rapidly across geographical and political
borders.

MARGINALIZED IDENTITIES
For all the aggressive selling of sport on a national and global level, there have
been radical changes over the decades in terms of who follows sport. There
remains a gender imbalance in that the majority of sports followers, paying
spectators, and television subscribers are male (James and Ridinger 2002). There
are also point-of-price issues that have transformed sporting spectatorship. Most
team sports began, at the spectator level, as games for the working class and were
rooted in a place of origin (tickets for the first Super Bowl in 1967 were $12, by
2012 this had increased to $1,200, while in English soccer the price of a ticket
for Liverpool cost £4 in 1989 and had risen to £45 in 2012—a price increase of
1,025 percent). In most Western nations, buying tickets has become ever more
expensive and middle class (Malcolm, Jones, and Waddington 2000). The
combined issues of old and unsafe stadiums in Europe (particularly highlighted
by the tragedies at Heysel, Hillsborough, and Bradford), plus the enhanced in-
stadium experience and profit maximization in the US, has led to the traditional
local support base being priced out. Going to the game is now often less of a
source of local pride and commitment but, often for the big games, the result of
a corporate invite or a bucket-list adventure where cost is not an issue. In terms
of access, questions of class continue to dog sports like golf and tennis, as do
questions of race. For all the breakthrough narrative that was applied to the
Williams sisters in tennis or to Tiger Woods in golf, the games are both still
perceived as the preserve of those who can afford access to the pricey and
restricted membership of the private club. The media, despite the enormous
growth in sports coverage across all platforms, has not aggressively challenged its
self-sustaining belief that the sport fan who is attractive to their sponsors is and
will remain a white male who is interested only in the key male sports. Despite
the various programmes to encourage women’s participation in sport, equal
opportunity policies such as Title IX in the US, and the number of superlative
women athletes, the media’s daily coverage of what they define as “women’s
sport” still averages at less than 6 percent of total output (Bernstein 2002).
The nature of individual, community, national, and international relationships
within sport is then multifaceted and ever-changing. There is often the
hometown team and a network of clubs catering for the interest in local sports.
Depending on the country there is state provision of facilities (particularly
notable in the Nordic countries and Australasia), and in many there is a key role
for schools and colleges to encourage sport and feed the professional games
MINDS, BODIES, AND IDENTITIES 183

(most significantly in the US) (Heinemann, 2005). What has also become
common since the 1980s are those solo or lifestyle sports and practices (the
lifestyle gym, jogging, surfing, mindfulness practices, and so on) that may push
the definitions of what is meant by sport but take its practitioners away from
the club or the crowd setting and into a solo or non-community setting for their
“physical” activity (Puttmann 2000). Concomitantly, while the idea of doing
activities or sports alone, particularly in the natural setting of the surf or the
outdoors, may challenge the traditional idea of community, the advent of social
media has actually served to bring disparate people (surfers, hikers, and even
“traditional” fans) closer together. Stories, narratives, plans, and tips are shared
online so that a virtual community can be built around a solo or geographically
disparate sporting activity (Thorpe and Olive 2016).

MINDS AND EMOTIONS

At whatever level sport has taken place (elite or mass participation, as participant
or spectator, local or global), it is often discussed and framed in emotional
terms, that a practice, place, or team/athlete can lead to a personal attachment
between the individual and a sporting entity. In this vein, sport and its followers
are often spoken of in language which relates to a form of secularized religion
(the famous adaption that sport, rather than religion in the Marxist view, is
now the opiate of the masses), that stadiums serve as cathedrals, players as the
officiating ministers, and the spectators as the grateful supplicant (Alpert 2015).
While many people watch sport out of a passing interest, or maybe get drawn
into watching the “big” tournaments and events through the media, many “die-
hard” supporters talk about their “love affair” with their team. This extends to
players—especially those who are local or long serving—and these individuals,
who are often honored in the naming of stands or the erection of statues, are
used as a measure for the loyalty, effort, fidelity, and affection of future players
(Schultz 2007; Osmond, Phillips, and O’Neill 2006). Equally the stadium itself
is not only seen as a place of weekly secular worship, but as a place which is
loved (or in the case of a rival team, hated) (Von Houtum and Van Dam 2002).
In recent decades, as clubs and franchises have sought to relocate their grounds
to extend their facilities, to take advantage of available undeveloped urban field
sites or else move into those stadiums that were constructed for mega events,
there have been problems. The new ground is not where the spectator “grew
up.” The ghosts of the past and formers glories are left behind and abandoned,
or else the atmosphere isn’t the same and the sense of communal passion has
been blunted. Sport is thus about rooted geographical place as much as it is a
manifestation of the imagined community. This has been especially apparent in
the negative reactions to, for example, West Ham United’s move from Upton
Park to the London 2012 Olympic Stadium. Some owners seem alert to the
184 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

dangers of the new and, for example, the Fenway Sports Group (FSG) has
shown itself reluctant to move its two franchises from their traditional setting,
favoring heritage over extra profit. As such the Red Sox remain at Fenway
(where they have been since 1912) and Liverpool FC at Anfield (since 1892),
despite the fact that the limited capacity of those stadiums do not necessarily
lead to profit maximization (Cronin 2017).
One issue that has dogged sport, no matter what the setting, has been
spectator violence, especially in soccer. The boundaries of where such violence
takes place have shifted from western to eastern Europe in recent years, but the
issue of “ultra” supporters expressing their absolute devotion to their team
through passionate organization and violent rivalries with other supporter
groups has led to regular incidents of disorder (Guschwan 2007). In addition to
the violence that has been common in many national soccer leagues, such
“battles” between rival groups have also blighted European club competition
and various World Cup finals. At its worse such fan violence, or else the
demonization of fans by the state, led to death and the horrors of Heysel,
Hillsborough, and others such as the Port Said Stadium disaster in 2012 that
left seventy-nine dead. In the context of crowds (a concern of civic authorities
since the late nineteenth century), sporting gatherings are not always viewed as
sites of order, fair play, and the enforcement of rules, but can also be sites of
disorder, criminality, and death (Dunning 1999). Security issues at mega events
(attacks on the Olympics in Munich in 1972 and Atlanta in 1996, and the
Boston Marathon in 2013) and the threat of attack on major sporting venues
(especially a concern in the wake of 9/11) have also created a different mentality
of what is meant by the orderly/disorderly crowd. Even if the crowd itself is
well policed and well behaved, and stadiums constructed to the most modern
design (since 1990 all but one of the top five deadliest incidences of stadium
fires, stampedes, or death through violence have all taken place in the
“developing” world), there is always the threat and concern that security will
be breached by an ill-intentioned exterior party (in 2012 it was estimated that
the London Olympic security bill exceeded £1 billion) (guardian.com 2018).
Safety, in various forms, is becoming a costly issue for sporting bodies, as well
as organizing clubs and federations.

ATHLETES AND MORALITY

Clearly stadiums, no matter what the contemporary security issues, as well as
those media companies that invest billions in purchasing the rights to broadcast
sport, would be empty or viewerless if it wasn’t for the draw of star athletes.
These skillful proponents of their games, whether as individuals, as part of a
team, or as international representatives, are carriers of the hopes and dreams
of supporters. There have always been, since the dawn of modern sport, stars
MINDS, BODIES, AND IDENTITIES 185

who were feted by the media and the public. The way this has been done and
the riches that the elite now accrues has changed dramatically over the decades.
That said, the wastage of athletic talent, those youngsters that don’t make it to
the elite level, is enormous. And many athletes who do make it, then have their
careers cut short by injury. The aftercare provided by clubs and federations for
failed or injured athletes remains poor. Given that the athlete’s identity is so
tied up with what they have excelled at since an early age (often at the cost of
educational and personal development), it is perhaps unsurprising that the
figures for postcareer divorce, bankruptcy, imprisonment, or addiction are so
high (Gernon 2016). For those that do make it in the modern age their reach is
potentially enormous. It is no longer simply a question of an athlete’s in-play
activity, but the value that they add, by way of profile and endorsements, off-
pitch. The value of Ronaldo to his club Juventus is not simply as a player but
what he brings by way of endorsements and exposure. He has the second
biggest following on Instagram (125 million) and the biggest on Facebook (122
million) globally. Ronaldo earns £365,000 per week for playing soccer, but
adds an additional £73 million per year by way of endorsements and brand
connectivity. The solo star that somehow transcends, or is even bigger than
their sport, is also clear with the case of Tiger Woods. He dominated golf until
his world was changed by a very public car crash and accusations of marital
infidelity in 2013. He spent a number of seasons playing poorly or sidelined by
a back injury, but his absence led to a 135-percent decrease in those watching
golf on US television each week until his return to the tour in 2018 when the
viewing figures rebounded (ibc.org 2018). In cases such as Ronaldo, Woods,
and many others it is clear that, while sport may have countless communal
signifiers, it is also now dominated by fans following individuals who embody
a brand and a lifestyle.
One factor in the world of sport, and indeed wider society, that has changed
significantly across the twentieth century is the behavior expected from sporting
stars. While much of this is the product of ever more extensive, and some would
argue intrusive, media coverage into their lives, sports stars are supposed to not
only perform to the peak of their abilities on field, but are also supposed to act
as role models and heroes in everything they do off-field. It is unquestionable
that some of the break-through sport stars of the interwar period who became
front-page news as celebrities were not individuals of high moral standing, and
problems such as addiction, infidelity, and drug abuse were common. However,
it was not seen as the role of the press or of sports governing bodies to take a
position on the private lives of athletes so long as it did not affect the sense of
on-field fair play (Sharpe 2003; Nathan 2003). This has changed dramatically in
recent decades, and now every aspect of a sports star’s identity is poured over
to assess whether they are worthy of our adulation (and by proxy “our” money).
Whether it was the destruction of Lance Armstrong’s status as supreme athlete,
186 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

cancer survivor, and philanthropist by systematic drug taking, the murder cases
against New England Patriot Aaron Hernandez, or the marital infidelity of Tiger
Woods, the media, sponsors, and the public react strongly against athletes that
appear to have transgressed the moral codes that society applies to them (Walsh
2013). “Our” heroes who hit, kick, or throw a ball so well are also supposed to
be ideal human beings with a strong moral compass. Alongside the collapse of
careers in ignominy or imprisonment, there are also stories of redemption, such
as that of Mike Tyson, who was transformed from World Champion and
convicted rapist to film star and motivational speaker. Likewise the perennial
problem of various forms of substance abuse in sport has led, in English soccer
in particular, to inspirational stories of self-destruction leading to recovery and
role-model status (in particular, the former Arsenal FC player Tony Adams and
his Sporting Chance charity for athletes with addiction issues) (Adams 2017).
For all that society will judge the fallen athlete, it will also applaud and embrace
the recovered, the redeemed, and the apologetically humbled. In this, society
allows the narrative of the athlete to be culturally constructed as a fallen player,
who redeemed themselves and became the star who came back or gave back
(Rhoden 2006).

FAITH
Part of the redemption story for athletes, indeed many of society’s attitudes
toward sport, are shaped by the moral and ethical foundations of games and their
meaning that were laid down in the nineteenth century. In that era sport was
positioned, especially in educational settings, as standing for Muscular Christianity
(Putney 2003). Generally, while sport has often been positioned as a form of
secular religion that enraptures people, it has infrequently been connected to or
utilized by formal religion. But what of those athletes whose identity is tied to an
actual faith? Whether it was Eric Liddell refusing to run on the Sabbath at the
1924 Olympics, the public reaction against Muhammad Ali’s embrace of Islam
that was connected with his refusal to serve in Vietnam, Sandy Koufax’s refusal
to play MLB on Jewish holidays, the Williams sisters acknowledgment of their
adherence to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, or Tim Tebow’s public bowing for God
when he scored, the religious identity of athletes has been a source of popular
confusion (Hamilton 2017; Marqusee 1995; Butterworth 2013). Sport has
largely been culturally constructed as secular. As such (largely Western) athletes
that identify as religious are considered as an anomaly.
With the emergence in recent decades of many developing nations on the
sporting world stage, issues around religion in sport have been complicated by
the appearance of athletes with non-Christian beliefs. This has also, in many of
these countries, led to broader questions about the applicability of sporting
practice and the relationship between sport, bodies, and gender. With the
MINDS, BODIES, AND IDENTITIES 187

postcolonial emergence of nations with self-selected governmental cultures, so

the number of Muslim states has grown. A religion that has a complex
relationship with sporting bodily practices, and especially the issue of decency
around clothing, Muslim athletes have faced many cultural challenges in
breaking into the elite. Despite such challenges a considerable number of
Muslim athletes have been successful on the world stage, and in recent years
this has included “appropriately” dressed women such as the Bahraini runner
Roqaya Al Gassra, the Egyptian swimmer Rainia El Wani, and the Algerian
runner Hassiba Boulmerka (who received death threats in the run-up to the
1992 Olympics because of her decision to wear shorts and not cover her arms
and legs). With the move of traditionally Muslim nations into sports hosting,
sponsorship, and mega events (especially the examples of Dubai and Qatar that
have actively sought relationships with leading global sports federations and
events), many of the broader questions of how sport interfaces with religion
will be addressed anew.

SEXUALIZED BODIES, HEALTHY BODIES,

BROKEN BODIES
Alongside questions of faith and religious identities are wider issues of how
sporting cultures have historically attempted to move beyond their foundational
appeal to men. Gender has been one of the most vexed issues confronting sport
in the period (Hargreaves and Anderson 2014). The issues not only relate to
how women can access and be equally represented in the media coverage of
sports, and as spectators, but also raises questions relating to the promotion of
women’s bodies in particular as sexualized rather than sporting (Sherry,
Osbourne, and Nicholson 2016). Despite the high media profile women athletes
are afforded on the professional tennis tour and during the Olympic Games,
season by season, year by year, women’s sports are constructed as secondary—
indeed, why does the media insist on the binary definition of sport versus
women’s sport? Associated with the issues surrounding the identities of sporting
women (which are further complicated by questions of race and religion), there
is a long history of a violent, sexually abusive attitude that male athletes
(underpinned by “team spirit” and “locker room culture”) take toward women.
While the levels of awareness, investigation, and arrest around male athletes
and the male team rape of women has increased, the rapacious culture around
sport means that society continues to construct male athletes as strong and
sexual and women as (coerced) vehicles for male “pleasure” (Krien 2015;
Luther 2016).
The complexity throughout the twentieth century and beyond was how sport,
a practice that produces and then valorizes the fit, healthy, and “attractive” body,
rationalizes elite athletic performance with the sexualization and commodification
188 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

of the body. In the digital age, and with the ever-relentless rise and proliferation
of pornography, so the sporting body has been moved to occupy a similar space
(Dines 2011). This has not only led to claim and counterclaim about the
exploitation of women athletes or their choices to exploit “glamor” images for
financial reward, but also a growth in the commodification and eroticization of
the male sporting body (what has been termed as “Sporno”) (Daniels 2016;
marksimpson.com 2018). For all participants in sport, as well as those millions
who watch, the issue of sexuality is tied up with the collective cultural construction
of the sporting body. In addition to questions of sex, gender, and sexuality,
bodies are also configured around questions of race, nationality, disability, and a
host of other factors. These are both geographical and historical constructs, but
are also part of an ever-changing landscape of how bodies are read due to public
morality, religious attitudes, fashion, the media, and so on (Besnier, Brownell,
and Carter 2017).
Whatever the myriad of ways in which the sporting body may be positioned,
culturally constructed, and read, actual participation in sport is positioned
around the world as a positive. Sport is understood as a practice which improves
health, assists in resisting the onset of disease, combats obesity and other
problems, and leads to higher levels of socialization and community interaction.
While the statistics from a variety of government reports supports this
contention, the numbers of people playing sport, especially in the postteenage
years, remain lower than they should be as people switch from being active
participants to spectators (Nicholson, Hoye, and Houlihan 2011). For those
who remain playing sport through their lives, sport can also be dangerous. In
pursuit of better performance a host of supplements have existed across the
decades and many of these have had questionable benefits or been injurious to
health. Young bodies are also endangered by overtraining and overexertion,
while injury on-field remains a problem for all active sports people. While the
growth of sports medicine and associated off-the-shelf products, now a
multibillion-dollar industry, has been a positive for most athletes seeking a
return to health, there have also been problems with questionable practices and
athletes returning to play before fully fit and thereby heightening the chances of
further and more severe injury (Heggie 2013; Carter 2014). Also, the playing
of sport exposes many people with preexisting conditions to exertions they
should not be undertaking, and in many dangerous or extreme sports exposes
the participant to risk of life-changing injury or death (McAnallen 2017). Fifty-
one Formula One drivers have been killed since 1952, thirty-two competitors
or spectators have been killed in the Tour de France since 1903, and in the US
it is estimated that a hundred competitors are killed each year while taking part
in equestrian sports. Sport also leaves a deadly or disabling legacy postcareer.
The recent NFL concussion cases are now accompanied by a wider global
awareness of the issue, and many question marks remain over the long-term
MINDS, BODIES, AND IDENTITIES 189

impact on the body of playing rugby, soccer, and many other sports. As well as
head injury, there are the long-standing problems associated with joint damage
and mobility that are a legacy of playing contact sports (Fainaru-Wada and
Fainaru 2014).
Sports medicine, indeed sport, has always been concerned with the fitness
and wellness of athletes. And yet the pursuit of the top prize or the quick fix to
recover from injury has led many athletes (by personal choice or as part of a
state-sponsored program) to use performance-enhancing drugs. While against
the rules of sport the problem has been endemic at the elite level with testing
regimes struggling to keep pace with the cheating efforts. But this is not simply
a case of athlete’s choosing to improve performance (as if a neutral personal
choice), but the whole doping issue raises difficult questions about how such
“medicalised” regimes impact on the long-term health of athletes and the image
of sport (Johnson 2016).
Sport has undergone radical transformations since 1920. Many of these
changes have been internal (the search for better performance, the growth of
mega events, and so on), while others see sport reflecting external forces
(geopolitical changes, the advent of the digital age, and others). What is
fascinating, for all the ways in which sport underpins and creates a myriad of
identities and a collective, cultural sense of the meanings of bodily practice, it
is the international sports bodies who, despite their myriad of faults, have been
most responsive to the role sport should play in society. In 2012, when London
hosted the Olympic Games, the event (in line with the growing philosophy of
all mega events) was not conceived solely as a fourteen-day sports happening,
but rather an event that would leave the city with a lasting legacy. The Olympics
were conceived in 2012 as an event that would not only leave London sporting
memories, but also a legacy of improvements in transport, housing, sports
facilities, well-being, and a host of other positive transformations for the city
and those who lived there (Holt and Ruta 2015).
That London filled its venues for the Olympics was seen as a great success.
But what of those broken bodies of war that this chapter began with? Britain
after the Second World War became the home of the idea of using competitive
sport as part of physical rehabilitation for the war wounded. The Stoke
Mandeville Games, that began in 1948 as a European team event for the war
wounded, would grow into the global Paralympic Games (first held in Rome in
1960). From 1988, in Seoul, the Paralympic Games were held directly after the
closing of the Olympic Games. At London in 2012, for the first time, the
Paralympic venues were full to capacity, and a city, the media, and the nation
embraced the disabled competition in the same way, not only with enthusiasm
but with athletic appreciation, as they had the Olympic Games. Media coverage
was extensive, and the Paralympics went mainstream (Jackson, Hidges, and
Scullion 2015). Given the concomitant rise of the Special Olympics, the Invictus
190 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

Games, Deaflympics, and others, it is clear that athletes, event organizers, the
media, and the public have largely moved beyond a definition of competitive
sport as something that is only for the able-bodied. Into the future, societies will
undoubtedly choose to fight wars, men and women will be maimed in accidents,
and children will be born with disabilities. In the twenty-first century it does
appear that a central shift has happened in terms of what then is meant by sport.
It is there to be taken part in, enjoyed, and celebrated irrespective of bodily
ability, a huge transformation from the end of the First World War when broken
and mutilated bodies were considered not only unfit for fighting but inadequate
and incapable for sporting contest. This is not to suggest that contemporary
sport is somehow perfect. Individual and collective identities, cultural
understandings and representations of sport, national and religious histories
and ideologies, and the desires that circulate around the use, representation, and
manipulation of bodies will all continue to influence what sport will be and how
society will respond to it. However sport continues to change and evolve, it is
certain that it will reflect and shape our cultural understanding of minds, bodies,
and identities in the decades to come.
 CHAPTER EIGHT

Representation
STEVEN A. RIESS

Cultural historians study the change of human civilization over time. They focus
on people’s beliefs, rituals, ideas, identity, social norms, institutions, and
materials, with particular attention to the meanings of that culture’s elements
(Hutton 1981). Cultural historians before the Second World War focused on
high culture, but thereafter, because of the influence of cultural anthropology,
they began to study popular culture, that includes everyday experiences and
artifacts that express mass values and attitudes. Since the late 1960s, scholars
have studied sport’s interaction with high and low culture, and also sport as an
independent element of culture with symbolic acts, representation, and struggle
over meaning of sport’s myths and realities.
American cultural historians have relied heavily on anthropologist Clifford
Geertz’s concept of “thick description,” a process of studying and contextualizing
human behavior. This was modeled by his analysis of the cultural significance
of Balinese cockfighting which he called “deep play,” that illuminated the
network of social relationships in that traditional society (Geertz 1973). This
process encouraged historians to study the sporting world and individual sports
as cultural texts. A new trend that soon followed was an emphasis on memory
as a cultural historical category, followed by the “linguistic turn” in the 1980s
that emphasized the importance of language, a perspective in far greater vogue
in Europe than the US. Cultural scholars outside North America are far more
reliant on theory, particularly the polyschematic analyses of Michel Foucault,
along with advocates of the visual and audio turns.
Culturally-minded sport historians employ cultural analysis as a window
through which to understand the broader society. They are concerned about
such matters as race, ethnicity and gender, employment of science and

191
192 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

technology to enhance performance, the formation of identity for fans and

team supporters, cultural diplomacy, and sports myths that influence and shape
behavior (Arcangeli 2012; Burke 2004; Cook et al. 2008).
This essay will examine some major trends in the cultural analysis of sport.
We will begin with the literary turn, specifically the influence of adult fiction on
our understanding of sport as a cultural institution, followed by an analysis of
the role of music, and then the visual turn, with particular attention to cinema.

SPORTING FICTION
The United States
Serious American fiction in the period 1920–1945 rarely employed sport in
their narratives, and almost never focused the entire story on a sporting topic,
which reflected the negative attitudes of sophisticated authors and critics to
sport. The main exceptions were ardent sportsmen and Nobel laureates Ernest
Hemingway and William Faulkner. This view changed after the war when sport
became an increasingly prominent subject among the sport-minded literati.
They realized that sport was a suitable subject for literature because it offered
many opportunities to explore fundamental and contradictory American values
(Oriard 1982: 53). I suspect they were also impressed by the growing success of
sports movies, including National Velvet (1944), based on Enid Bagnold’s
juvenile novel (1935).
Literary critic Christian Messenger divides the twentieth-century sports
novel into three categories, beginning with the ritual sports hero who sought
“mastery over nature, himself, an animal, or another person in a natural arena,”
the individual sports hero, and the team sports hero. I amend his model by
dividing the latter category into school heroes and professional heroes. The
ritual sports hero goes back to James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo. Such
heroes represented anti-modernism, and were pretty much gone by 1960
(Messenger 1990: 29–30). He is a solitary, Adamic figure seeking self-knowledge
in the wilderness, striving only for himself, while renouncing public pressures
and public rewards (Segal 1983: 33).
Faulkner admired huntsmen like his character Ike McCaslin, who turns down
his rights to the family plantation to live in the woods in “The Bear” (1935).
There he learned such important traits as humility, courage, responsibility,
compassion, and independence.
Hemingway was probably more into sports than any major American writer,
and forty-three of his forty-nine short stories were about sports. His oeuvre
began with fisherman Nick Adams in “Big Two-Hearted River” (1925) and
largely ended with Santiago of The Old Man and the Sea (1952), Santiago went
eighty-seven days with no catch, but like his hero Joe DiMaggio, a fisherman’s
REPRESENTATION 193

son, will never give up. Santiago perseveres, hooking a huge Marlin that took
three days to land, but sharks ravage his prize, leaving him with nothing but his
dignity and pride.
Hemingway was very interested in bullfighting, discussed in The Sun Also
Rises (1926) and his non-fiction Death in the Afternoon (1932). Hemingway
knew that “the bullfight is not a sport in the Anglo-Saxon sense of the word,
that is, it is not an equal contest. . . . . Rather it is a tragedy; the death of the
bull . . ., in which there is danger for the man but certain death for the animal”
(Hemingway 1932: 22).
Hemingway was also fascinated by boxers, whom Messenger considers the
last natural heroes because of their atavistic behavior, but they clearly are also
individual heroes, dependent upon themselves in the moral equivalent of
combat. Hemingway admires the amateur athlete Robert Cohn, in The Sun Also
Rises, despite his religion, because he boxed and became a champion at Princeton
to prove his manliness and counter anti-Semitism.
Messenger identifies two major themes in boxing novels: the boxer as
predator and prey; and the conflict between youth and age (Messenger 105).
The later is exemplified by Bruno “Lefty” Bicek, a young Polish American in
Nelson Algren’s Never Come Morning (1942), who wants to escape the slums,
and in novels and films like Rocky (1975), when much of the tale revolves
around the boxer and his trainer. One of the most important novels that dealt
with the theme of predator and prey was James Jones’s From Here to Eternity
(1951), a National Book Award winner, that examined the dilemmas facing
Private Robert Prewitt, a career soldier and former boxer serving in 1941
Hawaii.
The natural hero was supplanted in the 1950s by school and professional
team sport heroes. The former was a post-Civil War development when,
according to Eric Segal, “battlefield carnage is sublimated into noble (but not
fatal) strife on the playing field.” It began with Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge
of Courage (1895), and the juvenile heroes of Gilbert Patten’s Frank Merriwell
and Frank Johnson’s Dink Stovey, culminating with the twenty-four-volume
“Chip Hilton” series (1948–66, 2002) by Claire Bee, the Hall of Fame Long
Island University basketball coach. John R. Tunis was an outstanding author of
twenty-three boys’ books that stressed confidence in them to learn fairness,
courtesy, respect, compassion, and kindness gained through discipline,
perseverance, and learning from defeat (Epstein 1987: 50–6).
Messenger argues that F. Scott Fitzgerald had a very strong ambivalence to
the school sports hero. He originally worshipped the athletic aristocrat in his
early short stories and his first novel, This Other Side of Paradise, but subsequently
loathed young men like former Yale football stars Tom Buchanan in The Great
Gatsby (1925) and Dick Diver in Tender is the Night (1934), who are ultimately
failures as adults (Segal 1983: 33).
194 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

Novelists often wrote about great high-school or college athletes who failed
to accomplish much in the long run, like Irwin Shaw’s protagonist in The Eighty
Yard Run (1941). Erich Segal also points to Robert Lowell’s “Waking in the
Blue,” where the poet looks at one of his fellow inmates in the sanitarium: “I
grin at Stanley / now sunk in his sixties, once a Harvard all-American fullback,
(if such were possible!) . . . more cut off from words than a seal” (33).
Literary scholar Michael Oriard considers the athlete-hero a representative
man, “a symbol of youth and joy and the love of play . . . an expression of the
excessive privileges and responsibilities we give to a few despite our insistence
on the equality of all,” embodying much that is both the best and worst in
America, celebrating excellence and soaring aspirations (Oriard 1982: 68).
Oriard rates John Updike’s Rabbit Run (1960) as the best novel dealing with an
ex-athlete. Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom is a 26-year-old former athlete trapped by
an unsatisfactory marriage and a job selling kitchen gadgets, seeking to define
“an essential paradox in the American character” (Oriard: 161). He tries to
recapture his stardom by playing golf, but only occasionally achieves excellence.
Updike wrote three more Angstrom novels, including Rabbit Redux (1971), by
which time he was a pathetic, dependent, childlike figure.
One successful novel about high-school sports in an unusual setting is
Chaim Potok’s The Chosen (1967), a study of the clash between tradition to
modernity and assimilation. The plot begins in 1944 with a ball game between
two Orthodox yeshivas, starring Danny Saunders, son of a Hasidic rabbi.
Playing baseball for him is a big step outside of his highly traditional, all-
encompassing religious culture. He will eventually move away from his
community (Fox 2002).
The third, and most popular, paradigm encompasses professional team
sports heroes. They typically have to learn how to fit into the squad without
losing their individual identity in a conflict with authority. These icons often
become anti-heroes through a forced or voluntary personal rebellion when cut
or benched or belittled as a “loser.” The outcome could be physical suffering or
economic manipulation, or the player might gain self-knowledge, leading to
rebellion or a renewed drive for heroism (Messenger 1990: 16–18).
MLB received negligible literary attention during the interwar era, when
most baseball fiction was written by hacks, humorists, sportswriters, or authors
of juvenile books. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) was not a baseball
novel, and only briefly discusses the recent Black Sox Scandal. Jay Gatsby’s
mentor, Jewish gangster Meyer Wolfsheim, was widely believed to have fixed
the 1919 World Series. Nick Carraway, Gatsby’s buddy, believes such an attack
on America’s national pastime is unthinkable, but Gatsby assures him that it
certainly could happen. Why isn’t he in jail? Gatsby responds vaguely: “They
can’t get him, old sport. He’s a smart man” (78). As Fitzgerald scholar Robert
Johnson, Jr. points out, “The Great Gatsby and the Black Sox scandal both
REPRESENTATION 195

stand today as enduring symbols of the American Dream gone awry” (Johnson
2002: 43).
The novel that made baseball a topic for the literati was Bernard Malamud’s
The Natural (1952) (Messenger 1990: 335–6), which had all the appurtenances
of a serious novel with symbolism, mythology, allusions to Sir James Frazier’s
The Golden Bough, and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, plus an in-depth analysis
of American mores. According to scholar Allen Guttmann, “Malamud realized
that baseball was the perfect vehicle for an American version of a universal
myth” (Guttmann 1998: 247).
Malamud’s protagonist, Roy Hobbs, is a phenomenal teenage pitcher on his
way for a tryout in 1924 with the Cubs, but was shot by the mysterious Harriet
Bird, and disappears. He reappears fifteen years later, seemingly from nowhere,
an obscure but sensational batter to play for New York Knights manager Pop
Fisher, a name reminiscent of the fisher king, whose impotence has made the
ball field an infertile wasteland (Guttmann 246). Roy brings with him his special
bat “Wonderboy,” reminiscent of Excalibur, suggestive of Roy’s batting potency.
He strikes a home run off the right field facade that burst the lights, creating
fireworks, leading to three days of rain, representing Roy’s power to bring life
to his dismal team (Shmoop Editorial Team 2008).
Hobbs seeks success, redemption, a sense of belonging, and transcendence of
human vices, but he is materialistic, prey to temptation, and ultimately chooses
the wrong goals and the wrong woman, conniving with gamblers to lose the
final game of the season. Messenger argues that Hobbs striking out in his last
at-bet means he must begin a new cycle of suffering. He has cut himself off
from the past and cannot return home, the goal of every batsman (Messenger
1990: 337).
One year later, academician Mark Harris wrote the first of his four Henry
Wiggins novels, The Southpaw (1953). The initial volume recounts the
teenager’s successful rookie season with the New York Mammoths when he
discovers that his heroes are merely human beings, the owners are ruthless
capitalists, and sportswriters were liars (Harris 1990).
Harris’s second novel, Bang the Drum Slowly (1956), continues with
Wiggins, now a star pitcher and insurance salesman. He becomes obsessed with
the welfare of substitute catcher Bruce Pearson, a naive, uneducated southerner,
constantly belittled by his teammates. Bruce’s health is declining, and Henry
sends him to the Mayo Clinic, which reports back that Bruce is fatally ill. Henry
devotes the season to enabling Bruce to be the best player he can be and to end
his life with dignity. Wiggins is the only player at the funeral, stunned at the lack
of respect shown a fallen player by his “teammates” (Cochran 1987: 153).
The next major baseball novel was Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball
Association, Inc: J. Henry Waugh Prop. (1968), a highly regarded “black comic”
novel that bounces back and forth between the real world and the fantasy world
196 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

of fifty-six seasons Henry made up by playing with dice. Coover turns American
life into a game, writing an allegory in “which the myth of baseball, religion,
and the American dream are all called into question” (Collins 2013: 31).
The most ambitious book on baseball is Philip Roth’s immodestly titled The
Great American Novel (1973). “Through baseball,” Roth wrote, “I came to
understand and experience patriotism in its tender and humane aspects . . .
without the reek of saintly zeal. . . . The game “was a kind of secular church that
reached into every class and region of the nation and bound us together in
common concerns, loyalties, rituals, enthusiasms, and antagonisms” (Roth 1973).
The Great American Novel is a satirical narration of the demise of the Patriot
League, once the third major league, whose records were erased by the House
Committee on UnAmerican Activities. Roth found in baseball a way to dramatize
the “struggle between the benign national myth that a great power prefers to
perpetuate and its relentlessly, very nearly insidious reality” (Roth 1985: 89–
90). Roth uses baseball as a model for other forms of mythmaking, ridiculing
patriotism as the national religion, attacking conscious efforts to create myths,
and disparaging anti-radicalism in American politics.
Eric Rolfe Greenberg’s The Celebrant (1983) was rated by literary scholar
Eric Solomon as the finest baseball novel ever (Solomon 1998: 256). It is a
historical sports novel, taking place in the early 1900s. The protagonist is Jackie
Kapinski, a Jewish immigrant, ring designer, and assimilating baseball fan,
infatuated with the New York Giants star pitcher and Christian gentleman,
Christy Mathewson. This tale of acculturation focuses on the American loss of
Eden, the fall of innocence, the burden of being a hero, and the enticements
that taint success (Messenger 1990: 258).
August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Fences (1987) is one of the few
serious plays about baseball. He challenges the ideology of baseball and the
American dream through his protagonist, Troy Maxon, a former Negro League
star. He is a 53-year-old garbage collector who believes blacks were born with
two strikes against them. Critic Susan Koprince explains that Wilson created a
“subversive narrative” that shows that the myths of baseball “must ultimately
make room for a new and revolutionary mythos: that of the defiant African
American” (Koprince 2000: 357).

British Sports Fiction

Despite the great tradition of the English novel, British authors have shied away
from sporting topics, perhaps out of a misplaced sense of snobbery. There were
only two outstanding works on sport. Alan Sillitoe’s short story, “The Loneliness
of the Long Distance Runner” (1959), is the best-known work of British sport
fiction, largely because of the 1962 film of the same name. Smith is a poor
Nottingham teenager arrested for petty theft and sent to a prison school for
rehabilitation. He is a promising athlete, and the governor pushes him into
REPRESENTATION 197

crosscountry racing, hoping success in the big meet against a prestigious public
school would normalize Smith, give him status, and elevate the borstal’s prestige.
Smith easily takes the lead in the five-mile event, but when he nears the finish line,
he stops running to defy his school’s repressive administrators. John Bale (2008)
argues that Sillitoe sees sport as a form of oppression that should be contested.
David Story, a former professional rugby league player, author of The
Changing Room (1971), won the MacMillan Fiction Award for This Sporting
Life (1960), a short novel about a coal-mining rugby player in Wakefield,
recruited by a local club after he displayed his aggressiveness in an evening
brawl. He makes the team, but is portrayed as never more than a great ape,
vulnerable to the ravages of time (Hutchings 1987: 35).

The Hockey Literature of Canada

Canadian novelists who write about sport nearly all write about hockey, the
national sport, although William Patrick Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe (1982) , adapted
as the movie Field of Dreams (1989), is the most prominent sports book by a
Canadian. There have been over a hundred Anglo-Canadian hockey novels
published since the 1990s, virtually all by anglophone men, raising questions
about francophones and females identifying with the sport. Jason Blake (2010)
and Michael Buma (2012) both see hockey as an excellent point thorough
which to study Canadian culture. Blake’s Canadian Hockey Literature argues
that the sport so saturates local life that it is second only to sex when it comes
to marketing. Blake focuses on five central themes: nationhood, the hockey
dream, violence, national identity, and family. He sees hockey as a symbol of
Canadian nationhood, useful for unifying a diverse nation and as a social force
in shaping family life. Buma’s thesis is that hockey novels typically reinforce
traditional versions of Canadian masculinity (tough, northern, and white) and
the place of the sport in Canadian identity as an expression of national character.

FILM AND SPORT

There were nearly 600 sports films produced in the United States (Pearson et al.
2008) from 1930 to 1995 involving twenty-one sports, primarily boxing,
football, auto racing and baseball. Over 90 percent that dealt with sport history
were male biographies that fit Hollywood’s requirement that it operate within
“the traditional American mythology.” They emphasized achievement through
individual hard work over teamwork and fair play (Baker 1998: 221).
Bruce Babington (1987) reported that there were at least 446 boxing films
produced by the mid-1980s, including over 200 by 1915. Filming fights was
much easier to produce than other major sport because the contests took place
inside a confined ring. Boxing had a dramatic story to tell about impoverished
men who became pugilists to escape the inner city and the physicality and
198 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

brutality of the sport, along with the underworld involvement in the sport, and
the post-boxing struggles of men who had their brains mashed in. Aaron Baker
found there were about eighty films about baseball and football in the interwar
era, virtually none of which were memorable. Then between 1941 and 1970
there were merely thirty-four Hollywood productions about baseball, football,
and basketball. Fourteen were dramas, and the rest were comedies, musicals,
and fantasies (Nolan 2009: 254).
Since the 1990s, American motion pictures about sport, primarily baseball
or football, have ranged from feature films to documentaries, and dealt with
such issues as class, politics, race relations, hooliganism, sexism, disability, and
the impact of religion. Film industries elsewhere also focus on their primary
sports. European sports films focus on soccer, Bollywood on cricket and field
hockey, and Hong Kong on the martial arts.
Sports films dealing with historic events are by definition historical, but
historian Robert Rosenstone points out that sport films are also historical
documents that stressed the viewpoints of the screenwriter, director, and
producer. Sports films typically focus on the star’s athletic performances, and
his/her goals and points of view. As Rosenstone explains, they portray the past
while looking back in time through present concerns, providing “the audience
with a ‘moral message and (usually) a feeling of uplift’ ” (1995: 3, 55).
Baker’s Contesting Identities: Sports in American Film (2006) explores the
cinematic representations of sports and athletes over time, in relation to socially
constructed identities of class, gender, and race. He finds that cinema since the
1970s exhibited certain simplistic and recurrent traits, such as pairing constraining
attributes like competition and sportsmanship; winning and sportsmanship;
and individual excellence and team effort. These films gave attention to male
minorities exercising agency, but rarely to strong women (xxiii–xxiv). Their
directors typically portrayed sport as a site of cultural divergence that reproduces
dominant cultural values while simultaneously eradicating conflicts arising when
several of these values opposed each other.
Baker found that filmmakers encouraged audiences to identify with
protagonists whose individual situations caused visible positive results through
hard work and natural talent. The typical hero was a clean-cut young man who
endorsed traditional values and lived life with a bit of childlike behavior (181–
2), though increasingly the hero will question and critique the existing dominant
representation of athletic heroes. These actors often will achieve transcendence
through their physical activity.

Basketball Films
Basketball films were a minor genre until the 1980s. The first significant
Hollywood productions were The Harlem Globetrotters (1951) and Go, Man,
Go (1954), both featuring African-American actors. In 1971 in the era of
REPRESENTATION 199

student rebellion, Jack Nicholson produced, directed, and cowrote Drive, He

Said. Collegiate All-American Hector Bloom, a surefire NBA first draft choice,
is a rebel living on the fringes of the drug culture and student radicalism, who
constantly fights with his coach.
The most important historic basketball film is Hoosiers (1986), based on
Milan High School (enrollment 161) that won the Indiana state championship
in 1954. The film is a nostalgic allegory about a rough, tough big-city basketball
coach who learns the importance of teamwork and community in a small
Indiana town. Winning the state title, a popular convention in sports films,
reestablishes a moral order rewarding the hard work and determination of the
underdog team and its coaches (Baker 1998: 220).
Baker argues that, since the mid-1980s, feature films like White Men Can’t
Jump (1992), Above the Rim (1994), Space Jam (1996), and He Got Game
(1998), offered a representation of a black style of basketball drawn from the
NBA that reinforced the racial status quo, while reaffirming the values of
whiteness as dominant. Author bell hooks felt that the overemphasis on black
athletes’ individual exceptionalism contributes to a “spirit of defeat and
hopelessness” among lower-class blacks, convincing them they could only get
rich by success in sports. Baker agrees with writer John Edgar Wideman that the
NBA sold to white audiences what journalist Nelson George calls a “Black
[athletic] aesthetic” that fits traditional positions about identity in African
American society. One perspective is that Michael Jordan’s creative improvisation
comes from jazz and other elements of black culture. This has considerable
crossover appeal, and proves to many observers that blacks have access to the
American dream. But there is also the less optimistic view of the hyper masculine
menace depicted by powerful men like Charles Barkley and various “gangsta”
players (2003: 31–2).

Boxing in the Movies

Boxing films began to earn serious recognition with The Champ (1931), the
story of a warmhearted father who dies in the ring trying to earn money to raise
his son. Then came Kid Galahad (1937) in which a mobster fixes a fight, and
Golden Boy (1939) about an Italian boxer whose hands are broken by gangsters,
destroying his ambition to become a violinist.
Postwar boxing was extremely popular, with fights almost nightly on TV.
The sport became a staple of film noir, characterized by pessimism and fatalism,
involving mobsters with scenes depicting dark city streets, taverns, and night
clubs. One of the best boxing films was Body and Soul (1947), a fictionalized
account of the life of three-time world champion Barney Ross, one of the
greatest Jewish fighters of all time. The film starred Jack Garfield, a former
amateur boxer. The film’s title reflected the mob’s complete control over star
pugilist Charley Davis, who agrees to fix a match, but changes his mind. He is
200 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

depicted as a victim of the slums and the capitalist system (Schwartz 2004). Two
years later Kirk Douglas starred in Champion, the story of Midge Kelly who
used boxing to get ahead, even if he had to step over loved ones standing in his
way. He becomes champion, but in defending his crown Kelly receives a terrible
battering. He dies in the locker room, a product of a misspent life.
One of the biggest movies of the early 1950s was From Here to Eternity
(1953), based on the James Jones novel, that won eight Oscars. Private Prewitt,
played by Montgomery Clift, is an experienced boxer, recruited to box for the
company team, but refuses, having come to hate the violence of the ring. He
gets harassed, imprisoned, and goes AWOL. When Prewitt returns to the base
at dawn on December 7th, he is shot to death by a patrol.
One year later Marlon Brando plays a washed-up boxer in On the Waterfront,
who tells his brother “I coulda been a contender instead of a bum, which is
what I am.” Then in 1956, The Harder They Fall, loosely based on the career of
former heavyweight champion Primo Carnera, served as a strong condemnation
of boxing. The next big boxing movie was The Great White Hope (1970), based
on an Arthur Sackler Pulitzer Prize-winning play about the racism Jack Johnson
encountered as a perceived threat to prevailing American norms.
In 1976 Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky was a personal tour de force, which he
wrote and starred in. The rags-to-riches story won Oscars for best picture, best
director, and best editing. Rocky was an obscure Philadelphia boxer, who by
happenstance gets a championship fight and, following vigorous hard work and
preparation, goes the distance against an historically great champion. Three
years later, in the first of seven sequels, the myth of the self-made man is realized
and Rocky becomes champion.
Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980), based on Jake LaMotta’s autobiography,
is the most realistic and artistic boxing movie. Shot in black and white, it is
considered one of the greatest films ever made. The fight scenes, featuring
Academy Award winner Robert De Niro, were outstanding. Scorsese stressed
the character of the New York Italian-American community, its strict codes of
masculinity, the gritty language of the street, and the brutality of boxing.

Football Movies
Film historian Ronald Bergan (1982: 45) identifies three stages of football
movies, beginning with the b-grade “rah rah” college movie in the 1920s and
1930s. The best was the Marx brothers’ Horse Feathers (1932), a satire mocking
the corrupting influence of sport on the American college campus. The next
stage was the inspirational drama in which football symbolizes character
building and American civilization like Knute Rockne: All-American (1941),
which fails to recognize Notre Dame’s corrupt athletic program in the 1920s
and 1930s. The third stage was comprised of post-Vietnam professional football
REPRESENTATION 201

FIGURE 8.1: Time magazine cover “Horse Feathers.” – 1932 Paramount film with the
Marx Brothers (from left Harpo, Groucho, Chico and Zeppo). The title was a 1920s
colloquialism for “nonsense.” The satire focuses on a game between two colleges that
employed imaginative schemes to recruit professional talent and evade the prevailing
amateur code. This photograph reflects how they scored the game-winning
touchdown. Pictorial Press. Alamy Stock Photo.

movies. The pro game was by then recognized as the national pastime, but these
films, including the comedies North Dallas Forty (1976) and Semi-Tough (1977)
presented highly critical views of professional football, focusing on the game’s
violence, management’s abuse of players, and the widespread use of drugs.
There was also the very serious Black Sunday (1977), which reminded viewers
of the potential danger of sitting in a crowded stadium in the era of international
terrorism.
202 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

Baseball at the Cinema

Baseball films prior to the Second World War were largely forgettable comedies.
Then in 1942 The Pride of the Yankees appeared, and earned eleven Oscar
nominations. Gary Cooper stars as Lou Gehrig, an immigrant’s son who lived
the American dream until he contracted ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) and
had to retire. He tells his fans at Yankee Stadium, “Today, I feel I’m the luckiest
man on the face of the earth.” A few modest biographies appeared after the war,
including The Babe Ruth Story (1948), The Stratton Story (1949), The Jackie
Robinson Story (1950), starring Robinson in the first baseball film about an
African American, and the innovative Fear Strikes Out (1957), the story of
Boston Red Sox outfielder Jimmy Piersall, who suffered a mental breakdown
due to parental abuse. There was also a highly successful musical comedy, Damn
Yankees (1958), about a middle-aged real-estate agent who sells his soul to the
Devil so the hapless Washington Senators can beat the hated Yankees.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, baseball movies became works of art, starting
with Bang the Drum Slowly (1973), followed in 1976 by The Bad News Bears,
and The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings. The Bears was a team
of unathletic preteen misfits whose parents hire alcoholic ex-minor-league
pitcher Morris Buttermaker (Walter Matthau) to coach them. He stresses the
American way of play: win at any cost. The club makes it to the championship
game, but after their star female pitcher is injured, Buttermilk realizes that
winning isn’t everything, and put his subs in the game, and they nearly win. The
movie teaches that winning is not everything and that one can play the game of
life without changing or evading the rules, and even by non-conforming.
The Bingo Long All-Stars depicts a barnstorming African-American team in
the 1930s, who were underpaid and mistreated by the Negro Leagues, but
unable to join MLB because of their race. At the end of the movie, their young
phenomenon “Esquire” Joe Calloway is recruited and signed by a white scout,
indicating there will be a future for outstanding black ballplayers.
From 1984 to 1989, movie fans were treated to four of the greatest sports
films of all time, overcoming Hollywood’s lack of confidence in sports movies’
commercial viability (Ansen 1988). Malamud’s Natural was finally made into a
movie in 1984 with an all-star cast, including Robert Redford as Roy Hobbs.
The narrative stays very close to Malamud’s novella until the end when Hobbs
rejects a bribe to lose the big game. Though suffering from food poisoning, he
hits a massive home run to win the pennant, and returns home with his long-
lost girl friend. Several critics were aghast, notably John Simon, who contrasted
Malamud’s story about the “failure of American innocence” with director Barry
Levinson’s “fable of success” (Simon 1984), but noted film critic Gene Siskel
describes the outcome as “an uplifting celebration of the individual” (Chicago
Tribune 1984).
REPRESENTATION 203

The one major historical baseball movie of this era was John Sayles’s Eight
Men Out (1988), based heavily on Eliot Asinof’s 1963 book of the same title
that examines the fixed World Series of 1919. Sayles was extremely sympathetic
to the eight accused players, widely thought to be underpaid compared to their
peers, and poorly treated by owner Charles Comiskey. Three players confessed
their participation in the fix to the Grand Jury, yet the seven indicted players
were all acquitted because the confessions were “misplaced.” The ruling
confirmed the conventional belief that American athletes always tried their best.
Nonetheless new MLB commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis immediately
threw all eight suspected fixers out of baseball.
Sayles imposed his own perspectives on the narrative (Ryan 2010: 115–28).
The auteur considers history a complex drama of multiple actors and interests
whose representation involves interpretation and revision, influenced by the
dynamics of social power, including the media’s to revise public memory. Sayles
centered the audience’s attention on Joe Jackson and Buck Weaver, whose
excellent Series play seemingly indicated their non-participation in the fix, and
evidence of how honest working people’s contributions are often unrewarded
and unrecognized (Baker 1998: 220).
Bull Durham (1988), rated by Sports Illustrated ( 2003) as the greatest sports
movie of all time, was a baseball fable, a comedy, and a love story (Ansen 1988).
Ron Shelton’s brilliant screenplay focuses on lifelong minor leaguer, the highly
professional “Crash” Davis (Kevin Costner), sent to the lowly Class A Durham
Bulls to teach the gifted rookie pitcher “Nuke” LaLoosh (Tim Robbins) how to
make it in “The Show.” The third person in the story is Annie Savoy (Susan
Sarandon), a baseball groupie devoted to the “Church of Baseball,” who
annually selects one Bull to be her lover and student. Nuke gets his call up to
the majors, while Crash breaks the minor-league record for career home runs
and gets released, epitomizing the cruelty of pro sports. Literary scholar Frank
Ardolino sees the plot as a story of maturation, celebrating “the joys of uniting
innocence and experience” (1990: 43).
Finally, Field of Dreams (1989) is a fantasy-drama adapted from W. P. Kinsella’s
novel Shoeless Joe (1982). Dreamer Ray Kinsella (Costner) is a 35-year-old Iowa
corn farmer who plows under part of his acreage to build a ball field, having
heard a voice tell him, “If you build it, he will come.” Joe Jackson appears in the
field with his teammate Sox. Ardolino (44) sees the movie as “a nostalgic and
populist retreat into a pristine past brought about by the willingness of the hero
to pursue his personal vision of baseball as a religion and as the means of
reconciliation with his dead father.” The mystical ball field erased memories of a
sinful past, replacing it with a pastoral paradise where miracles occur as fans
return to their youth and innocence (Tudor 1997: 169).
Joakim Nilsson, and several other critics, take a less benign view of the
movie, which they argue was popular for fulfilling needs of “Reaganite
204 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

entertainment” that stressed the need to dream, recreate the innocence of

childhood, and return to a simpler, more conservative time. It is seen as “full of
right-wing utopianism, escapism, a wish to rewrite history, a focus on fathers
and patriarchy, and magical solutions to historical and political dilemmas.”
Nilsson argues it represents the transformation of the idealistic young men and
women of the late 1960s into the conservative materialists of the 1980s (Nilsson
2000).

The Lives of Fast Eddie Felson

One of the most intriguing Hollywood sports movies was The Hustler (1961).
Felson (Paul Newman) is a gifted pool shark, struggling for identity and meaning
inside and outside the seedy world of billiard parlors in pursuit of wealth, fame,
and fortune. He sought to leap from hustling to defeat champion Minnesota
Fats and capture the American dream. His defeat resulted, not from a lack of
skill, but the absence of character. In The Color of Money (1986), Felson is back
on the circuit, and becomes the target for a new hotshot. This time Felson uses
his experience to reach the edge of victory, but then just walks away, having
satisfied any need to prove himself (Ebert 2002).

Sport and the British Cinema

The British have not made a lot of sports films, and even fewer cricket films
than Bollywood. The most important British sports picture is Chariots of Fire
(1981), winner of four Oscars, a dramatization of the 1924 Olympic Games,
when the British were ardently trying to maintain their stature as a track power,
and won 34 medals, including nine gold. The film focuses on outsider Harold
Abrahams, a son of wealthy Jewish immigrants who encounters considerable
anti-Semitism, and Eric Liddell, a devout son of Scottish missionaries, who sits
out his main event, the 100-meter sprint because a heat was scheduled for the
Sabbath. Abrahams wins the 100 meters and Liddell the 400 meters. The
movie’s main point was that British competitors were gentlemen of great honor,
who stood up for their principles. Ellis Cashmore argues “the film is most
profitably understood as an invigorating sermon for the 1980s” (2008: 56).
Unfortunately, the picture is a weak historical source, with at least thirty factual
errors (“Chariots of Fire Goofs” 1981).
The most recent significant British sports film was the independent hit Bend
It Like Beckham (2002), that made around $70 million. The heroine is an
18-year-old Punjabi Sikh living in London, whose parents forbid her from
playing soccer because she is a girl and because her father, a star bowler in
Kenya, is still bitter that he could not play cricket after moving to England. Jess
joins a local women’s team, wins a scholarship to an American college, and
turns her conservative world upside down. As The Times of India explained, the
REPRESENTATION 205

film “is really about the bending of rules, social paradigms and lives – all to
finally curl that ball, bending it like Beckham, through the goalpost of ambition”
(“Bend it Like Beckham is Like Curry” 2002).

Women Sports Heroines

Since sport was long perceived as a male preserve, few films were made with
sportswomen as protagonists. Women in early sports films were historically
cheerleaders or either girlfriends or wives of athletes present primarily as
companions and sexual partners whom coaches worry might drain their lover’s
strength.
The first major film with a female athlete was National Velvet (1944), the
story of the stereotypical 14-year-old, horse-crazy Velvet Brown (Elizabeth
Taylor), resident of a small English town. She won a gelding in a raffle, trains
him for the Grand National steeplechase, and decides to ride him. Females are
barred from participating, but she disguises herself and wins. However, she is
discovered to be a girl and gets disqualified.
For years there were few acting roles for women as athletes. However, there
were two beautiful female athletes who starred in Hollywood productions.
Norwegian Sonja Henie, winner of three Olympic titles and ten world
championships, starred in eleven motion pictures between 1936 and 1945,
often musical comedies in which she often skated. Esther Williams, a world-
class swimmer in the late 1930s, acted in some thirty films between 1942
and 1963, which included a number of aqua-musicals. She was a major star in
the late 1940s when she played the owner of a baseball team in the musical
Take Me Out to the Ball Game (1949), with Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra. She
also starred in Million Dollar Mermaid (1952), the biography of Australian
swimmer Annette Kellerman. That year Katherine Hepburn starred in Pat and
Mike, playing an independent golfer who knew she could not count on a man
to help her career (Daniels 2005: 37).
Thirty years later, Robert Towne broke new ground in Personal Best (1982),
a highly sympathetic portrayal of elite female athletes from both competitive
and emotional perspectives. Torey Skinner (Patrice Donnelly) and Chris Cahill
(Muriel Hemingway) are lovers, who live and train together until Chris ends up
with a male lover. The film depicts a sporting culture willing to grant women
the status of an athlete, but deny them any alternative voice within the system.
Christian Messenger applauds the movie “for showing possibilities of women’s
athletic competition, while softening the explosive clash of sexualities in sport”
(1990: 174).
In 1992 Penny Marshall directed the landmark A League of Their Own, a
fictionalized version of the AAGPBL (1943–54), which made around $90
million in profits, and did a great job educating the public. Women in the war
206 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

era were considered second-class citizens, though many were skilled ballplayers,
whose diamond achievements in the AAGPBL gained them respect and self-
confidence. However, once the war ended, their athletic accomplishments were
largely forgotten, and patriarchy resumed. Hollywood has recently moved far
from its traditions by following the rise of women boxers, most notably in Clint
Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby (2004).
In 2017 two non-fiction films appeared, the brilliant I, Tonya, and the not so
brilliant Battle of the Sexes, based on the 1973 Billy Jean King–Bobby Riggs
tennis exhibition. I, Tonya received rave critical acclaim for its take on figure
skater Tonya Harding, a two-time Olympian, who was convicted of conspiracy
to hinder prosecution following her associates’ physical attack on her prime
rival Nancy Kerrigan.

The Documentary
Documentary films report real events to entertain and inform their audiences.
The first sports documentary was a film of the James Corbett–Frank Fitzsimmons
heavyweight championship fight in 1897, but the sport genre did not become
very popular until the 1990s. The industry did not have a lot of respect for
sports documentaries as art or as marketable, especially if the interpretations
countered studio executives’ viewpoints. The first sports film to win an Oscar
for best documentary was The Horse with the Flying Tail (1960), followed by
The Man Who Skied Down Everest (1975). There have been four winners since
1996, including When We Were Kings (1996) and O.J.: Made in America (2016).
The Olympics have been a major focus for documentarians. The big step
forward came with Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1938), based on some fifty
hours of footage. The nine-hour production was an unabashed pro-Nazi
production that began by trying to tie the ancient Greek games to Germany.
The movie started with athletic statuary that seemed to come to life, followed
by the lighting of the Olympic torch at Mt. Olympus, and then its transport
north to Berlin, all to make Germany the heir to ancient Greece. Leni stresses
the physical beauty of athletes with considerable employment of slow motion
to emphasis the artistry of performances. By then Nazi photography and other
artwork was rife with depictions of beautiful young Nordic men and women
engaged in training and athletics (Kühnst 1996: 324–9). Riefenstahl promoted
the film as a fair portrayal that highlighted Jesse Owens’s accomplishments, but
the narrative was heavily weighted toward fascist victories, and the propaganda
value promoting Nazi ideology and values is obvious. Other outstanding
Olympic documentaries were the Tokyo Olympiad (1965) by Kon Ichikawa,
who focused on the human and emotional side of the competitors, and Bud
Greenspan’s nine films covering 1984–2010.
The growing influence of documentaries was abetted by their popularity on
TV, especially PBS and cable networks HBO and ESPN seeking content to
REPRESENTATION 207

attract viewers and improve their reputation for quality viewing. ESPN took a
big step forward with SportsCentury (1999), a major venture into original
documentary productions, leading to the creation of ESPN Films in 2008, and
“30 for 30,” a celebration of ESPN’s thirtieth anniversary, a relatively serious
and artistic discursive form that highlighted each auteur’s personal perspectives.
As of 2016, the series has produced over 150 films.

MUSIC AND SPORTS

Sport historians have not paid much attention to the sensory turn. However, sport
has been a subject in virtually every modern genre, from jazz to Broadway, and
rock ‘n’ roll to hip-hop. The first American sporting song may have been Stephen
Foster’s “Camptown Races” (1850), played at every Kentucky Derby since the
1920s. Their themes range from men on death row seeking help from a boxing
champion to tunes bringing back memories of youthful times like the baseball
songs “Glory Days” by Bruce Springsteen (1984), and John Fogarty’s “Put Me in,
Coach”(1985). There have been over 1,000 tunes about baseball, including “Take
Me Out to the Ball Game” (1908), sung daily at Wrigley Field since 1982.
One of the most culturally significant sport lyrics come from a stanza that
concludes Simon and Garfunkel’s memorable “Mrs. Robinson,” from The
Graduate (1967), expanded one year later into a Grammy-winning hit. The key
verse asks “Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio? / Our nation turns its lonely
eyes to you.” Paul Simon later explained, “In the 50s and 60s, it was fashionable
to refer to baseball as a metaphor for America, and DiMaggio represented the
values of that America: excellence and fulfillment of duty . . . combined with a
grace that implied a purity of spirit, an off-the-field dignity and a jealously
guarded private life” (Simon 1999).
The playing and singing of songs during sporting events is commonplace
today to promote a sense of community. American college students often sing
the school’s fight song during football games, like “The Victors” composed in
1898 for the University of Michigan’s football team. They also sing the alma
mater, often at half-time.
The first singing of a song at a major league game occurred during the 1903
World Series when Boston fans tried to unnerve the visiting Pittsburgh team.
This did not catch on in North America, but has been extremely popular at
European soccer games for several decades. FanChants.com catalogued over
26,000 soccer chants. The singing increases fan support of the home team, while
often denigrating the opponent These simple chants are sung to well-known
melodies of popular songs. Manchester United supporters sing “United Take Me
Home” to the melody of John Denver’s “Country Roads.” A few nations are also
known to employ loud instrumental music for local and international games like
the South African vuvuzela or the Brazilian drums (Brill 2014).
208 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

Highly politicized nationalistic anthems are rarely played at sporting events,

except for the US, where the Star Spangled Banner (1814) is regularly sung at
contests starting at the high-school level. It only officially became the national
anthem in 1931, but during the First World War it was performed at the 1918
Boston Red Sox–Chicago Cubs World Series during the seventh inning stretch.
Thereafter the song became a regular feature of special baseball occasions like
Opening Day, national holidays, and the World Series.
The anthem was played so often after the Second World War that many
commentators thought the experience was devalued and insufficiently respected.
The Cubs halted the practice after the war, and only resumed in 1967. During
the Vietnam era, the NFL required players to stand at attention through the
performance. The national anthem became a big political issue in 2016 when
Colin Kaepernick began to sit during its playing as a protest against racial
injustice and oppression. One year later a broader protest movement developed
after President Donald Trump encouraged NFL owners to fire protesting
players. No NFL team signed free agent Kaepernick, who filed a grievance
blaming them for collusion against him. In 2019 he withdrew the complaint
after reaching a confidential settlement with the league.
In the rest of the world, except for Canada, Belgium, and a few other nations,
their national anthem is seldom played during sporting events other than
national competitions. Observers denigrate the practice as “too American.” In
addition, team sports like soccer are heavily comprised of non-nationals, except
for international matches when teams sing the songs then with unusual fervor,
reflecting the special moment (Bologna 2018), which one study found leads to
better teamwork (Slater et al. 2018).
Professional basketball has a long historic connection to music, starting in
the 1920s when games were often staged at ballrooms, like Chicago’s Hotel
Savoy, the original home of the Harlem Globetrotters, where dances followed
the ball game. Another connection, unique to early black traveling teams, was
the employment of improvisation and creativity to the predominant conservative
style of play, which scholars attribute to their fascination with jazz. The mode
of play was further updated in the 1980s by the rise of hip-hop (Caponi-Tabery
2008; George 1992).
Just a couple of professional football teams had bands. The Washington
Redskins Marching Band first played in 1938, and the all-volunteer band is still
in existence. Baltimore’s “Marching Ravens” also had a band, a custom dating
to the Colts of the All-American Football League in 1947.
MLB had just one band, the rag-tag, fan-based Dodgers Sym-phony Band at
Ebbets Field in the 1940s, best known for playing tunes that belittled umpires.
Chicago’s Wrigley Field briefly introduced organ music in 1941, but did not
resume it until 1967. Elsewhere organists became very popular in the 1950s,
playing popular tunes between innings as well as team themes and ditties when
REPRESENTATION 209

relief pitchers walked to the mound. The organ was largely displaced in the
mid-1970s by loudly played prerecorded pop and rock music (Riess 2011).
The strongest connection between bands and American sport was at
interscholastic and intercollegiate football and basketball games. They played
to support their teams and promote a shared identity among fans. The University
of Notre Dame organized the first college band in 1887, marching in military
block formation. Then in 1907 the University of Illinois band introduced
intricate half-time patterns of marching that included the formation of words
and letters, evolving in the 1920s into a complex “Three-In-One” march,
comprised of three distinctive marches up and down the field.
Since the 1940s, HBCU bands have employed a radically different style for
their performances, employing highly syncopated, foot-stomping, and rapid
body-moving rhythms, originating with rhythm and blues and later moving on
to hip-hop. By the 1960s, these bands became a bigger show than the game and,
through television, became nationally renowned.

Visual Culture
Visual culturists examine photographs, paintings, sculpture, postage stamps,
and clothing for insights into sport. Art critic Mike O’Mahony, the leading
scholar on sport and visual culture argues in Olympic Visions (2012) that such
an approach “can provide vital evidence not only of how the [Olympic] games
actually looked at various historical moments, but also how the different modes
used for the visual representation of the Games impacted upon how they were
interpreted and understood, not least by audiences whose only access to the
Games was through this form of visual mediation” (9).

Sport Apparel Clothing worn by athletes and spectators had a broader

significance than protection against the elements. Uniforms identify members
of a side in team sports, and reflect the demands of a particular sport within the
confines of prevailing social standards, such as the length of tennis dresses.
French tennis star Suzanne Lenglen played at Wimbledon in 1920 in a short
pleated dress, sleeveless silk blouse, knee-length silk stockings, a silk bandeau in
place of a hat, and makeup. Prevailing sports styles were a model for sportswear,
which emerged as a fashion category in the US in the 1920s. This casual fashion
that stressed comfort was commonly worn to sporting events. High-end
sporting wear was dominated by Parisian designer Jean Patou, working with
Lenglen (Vere 2018: 69; Bates and Warner 2011).
Sporting attire today is more revealing than ever, often to promote
performance in aesthetic-oriented sports like gymnastics, figure skating, and
diving; speed and endurance sports like track; or weight-class sports like
rowing; but not football or hockey, where participants are heavily padded. Yet
210 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

in certain sports, particularly volleyball and track and field, women’s uniforms
are distinctly smaller and tighter than their male peers, presumably for reasons
other than performance.
Photographs of the clothing of sports crowds in the interwar period,
especially hats, help historians identify their social class. However, this needs to
be contextualized because Americans used to wear their best clothing whenever
they left the house. Men of all classes, for instance, often wore ties and jackets
when they went to the beach, the movies, or a baseball game (Riess 1999).
Alison Goodrum (2015) reminds us about the importance of fashion among
elite sports fans. She points out that the racetrack in the interwar years was a
glamorous place for people of wealth to wear the latest comfortable, exciting,
“and even provocative” fashionable fun styles. Such conspicuous display was
for years a part of the social life of the “horsey set.”
In 1977 female runners invented the “jogbra” for athletic support, and it
soon accounted for 6.1 percent of the bra market. The garment achieved
international fame in 1999 when Brandi Chastain scored the winning goal for
the US in a shoot-out to win the soccer world championship. She pulled off her
shirt to reveal her bra. By then it had become increasingly acceptable for women
to wear it as “a stand-alone piece of outerwear.” Women who wore sports bras
and bare midriffs presented themselves according to Canadian scholar M. Ann
Hall as “slim, strong, sinuous, athletic and healthy” (Schultz 2014: 158).
Kasia Boddy has written an outstanding study of American tennis star Helen
Wills who was the subject of many narrative and visual representations. She
analyzed Wills in the context of Henry James’s Daisy Miller and Charles D.
Gibson’s “Gibson Girl,” drawn as the epitome of physical attractiveness. Boddy
argues that Wills’s style of playing, her clothing, and her facial expressions
represented a certain type of modern American femininity, the classic next-
door Californian girl, adored not just by white Americans, but also Mexican
artist Diego Rivera, who positioned her in the middle of his 1931 Allegory of
California (Boddy 2018).
Physical appearance, including body art and hairstyles, can be important
visual representations. A prime example was the dramatic change in the present
corporeal and hair look among members of the Brazilian women’s national
soccer team from 1996 to today. In 1996, the squad was overwhelmingly dark-
skinned, short-haired, working-class Afro-Brazilian. Today, the squad is
predominantly lighter-skinned, straight-haired, and middle class, conforming
to white heterosexual norms (Snyder 2018).
Athletes’ hairstyles were not originally significant symbols when coaches
pressured them to conform to prevailing styles to demonstrate their obedience.
This changed among American men in the 1970s when Afros, long hair, and
moustaches were worn to display personal independence. Teenage women
athletes have for years worn hair ribbons with school colors to demonstrate
REPRESENTATION 211

FIGURE 8.2: American tennis player Helen Wills Moody (1905–98). She was the best
women’s player in the world in 1927–33, 1935, and 1938, winning thirty-one Grand
Slam tournament titles. She was a worldwide celebrity, admired for her beauty and
graceful play. Photo by Agence de press Meurisse. Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

their femininity. Schultz argues that women commonly wear a ponytail as a

practical way to deal with longer hair, but also to “en-gender a normative,
athletic femininity in the context of U.S. women’s sports” (Schultz 2014: 8).

The Postage Stamp In 1984 Donald Reid called for historians to study postage
stamps for their symbolic value. There have been over 300 monographs on philately
and history, but only a handful on sport including one dissertation (Reid 1984;
Herndon 1991). In 1920, Belgium, host of the Olympics, issued two stamps in
honor of the Games, and France four years later issued a set of four stamps focusing
on ancient Greek sport. The US produced two stamps in 1932 promoting that
year’s Winter and Summer Games, followed seven years later by a stamp that
commemorated the one hundredth anniversary of baseball. We now know that this
tale was a myth, since baseball was not invented by Abner Doubleday in
Cooperstown, New York, indicating the need for caution in employing philately in
history. The USSR was a huge producer of postage stamps that included Bolshevik
212 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

FIGURE 8.3: Centennial of Baseball, 1839–1939, by U.S. Post Office. The U.S.
government published a stamp to honor the anniversary of Abner Doubleday’s
supposed inventing of baseball in Cooperstown, NY in 1839. Hi-res scanning of
postage stamp by Gwillhickers. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

heroes, major Revolutionary events, economic projects, and sports, heavily aimed
at propaganda. In 1936, Russia printed what was possibly the first non-Olympic
postage stamps in the world, which included a female competitor, indicating the
government belief in the importance of women’s sport (Rowley 2006).
Gary Osmond and Murray G. Phillips recently examined how sport stamps
represent the past, a project facilitated by philatelic exhibitions, the new
museology, and the employment of semiotic theory that helps one understand the
culture, customs, and ideology of a particular stamp. This theory emphasizes
guided, preferred, or dominant meanings that may result in overlooking individual
identities and intentionalities, and contextualizes the people involved in
production. They also suggest such approaches as content analysis, deconstruction,
and gaze theory (Osmond and Phillips 2012).
They examined cricket stamps depicted on the postage of thirty nations
between 1962 and 2006. They focused on a 1979 30-cent Tokelau stamp depicting
batsman and wicketkeeper, wearing just a loincloth, employing a highly animated
stance on a sandy field. The authors read the stamp as a sign of national pride,
lacking any imperial symbol or evidence of a foreign imposed sport (1055–6).

Fine Art O’Mahony’s examination of Soviet sport focused on a time

when athletics played a vital role within its social and cultural life through
REPRESENTATION 213

FIGURE 8.4: Woman relay runner at the Moscow Spartakiada, 1928. Postcard
commemorating the Russian All-Union Spartakiade. Color lithograph on off-white
wove postcard. Artist Gustav G. Klutsis (1895–1938). Private collection. Photo by Fine
Art Images/Heritage Images. Getty Images.

state-sponsored programs seeking to create the hard-working and patriotic

New Soviet Person. Fizkultura (“physical culture”) was well depicted in
literature, film, popular songs, stamps, plates, medals, and parades. Public
exhibitions and popular journals were full of paintings, prints, and photographs
representing athletes, and sports monuments were erected in public parks and
sports facilities (2006).
O’Mahony notes that Soviet art under Stalin was hardly outstanding, but
notable statutes were produced by Iosif Chaikov, paintings by social realist
Aleksandr Deineka (whose pictures connected sports to militaristic and heroic
traits), and photomontages by Alexander Rodchenko, a futurist avant-gardist,
who used extreme perspectives in his photographs of motorcyclists, divers, and
speed skaters, until sent to a labor camp in 1931. Constructivist Bolshevik
214 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

FIGURE 8.5: Cover of Spartakiada RSI magazine, 1928. Female discus thrower. Artist
Gustav Klutsis. State Art Museum of Republic Latvia, Riga. Hulton Archive. Photo by
Fine Art Images/Heritage Images. Getty Images.

Gustav Klutsis was renowned for his collage posters promoting the Spartakiade
in 1928, particularly one with the image of a female discus thrower
photomontaged against an image of an attentive Lenin and two columns of
marching athletes (O’Mahony 2006; Kühnst: 321–3).
Russian women athletes were first depicted on sport magazine covers in
1928. Four years later, the government printed posters and postcards promoting
women’s use of parks for fitness and, in 1935, a poster promoting GTO
standards in fitness depicted a woman throwing a hand grenade, and another
swimming. Such activities were not mainly promoted for women’s health, but
to better prepare them for work, national defense, and an alternative activity to
such bad habits as going to church (Rowley 2006).
REPRESENTATION 215

O’Mahony is well known for his recent study of Olympic Visions (2012), an
analysis of Olympic art that encompassed paintings, statues, posters, films, and
sporting paraphernalia like medals, mascots, and cigarette cards used to
promote certain Olympiads, document results, and produce a lasting impression.
The Olympics itself awarded medals from 1912 to 1948 for art inspired by
sport in architecture, literature, music, painting, and sculpture. Bernard Vere
explains that O’Mahony wrote a history of the Games in which “our reception
of athletic achievement has been mediated by imagery and the political, social,
race and gender messages that those images have carried” (Vere 2013: 451).
The coming of photography made painters less essential in depicting sporting
moments prior to the late nineteenth century, but they still brought their own
sensibilities to their projects. No one was more important than the American
George Bellows, a leader of the Ashcan school, whose “Dempsey v. Firpo”
(1924) depicted the shocked expressions of the wealthy ringside crowd in

FIGURE 8.6: Dempsey vs Firpo, 1924. Oil on canvass by George Bellows (1882–
1925). Purchased with funds from Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s Whitney Museum
of American Art, New York. Champion Jack Dempsey fought Argentinean Angel Firpo
on September 23, 1923 at the Polo Grounds. Firpo was knocked down seven times in
the first round, Dempsey twice, and the second time was knocked out of the ring. It
took him 14 seconds to return to the ring. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
216 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

round one when the champion was knocked out of the ring. Bellows also
painted less passionate sporting moments among the elite, like Tennis at
Newport (1919) and Tennis Tournament (1920), depicting a world where
women wore stylish hats and dresses and employed colorful parasols to protect
themselves from the sun, accompanied by men dressed in white flannel trousers
with dark blazers.
Norman Rockwell, the great American illustrator, was acclaimed for his
numerous paintings of sporting subjects for the Saturday Evening Post that
captured the mundane, uplifting, and disheartening moments of sport. Allen
Guttmann identifies Four Sporting Boys: Baseball (1951) as his most culturally
significant work, depicting boys wearing baggy versions of major league
uniforms as they choose up sides (Guttmann 2011: 162).
Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, and many other German artists in
the 1920s detested bourgeois sport as unhealthy, egotistical, unhealthy,
chauvinistic, and overly concerned with winning. However, they supported
sport as a positive force for working-class interests, including class consciousness
and human dignity. This was reflected in Dadaist Hannah Hoech’s photocollage
Toughening (1925), that attacked the reactionary German Gymnastics
Association’s rigidity and examined the contradictions in sport by showing a
young woman flow into the hard lines of a soccer player and an airplane (Kühnst
1996: 300, 303).
European artists since the Second World War were often sports fans and
participants, including Pablo Picasso, who drew Soccer Players (1961), and Joan
Miró, whose abstract The Skiing Course (1966) depicts skiers near a steep slope
(Kühnst 1996: 337–8). Sporting art was heavily influenced by pop art, which
employed images from all elements of popular culture. In 1962 the renowned
Andy Warhol, possibly driven by hero worship, produced an ink and oil silk
screen titled “Baseball” comprised of forty-two shades of Roger Maris at bat.
Sixteen years later, his Athletes was a synthetic polymer and silk screen of ten
portraits of athletes in static poses.
The most prolific producer of sport artwork since the 1960s was Leroy
Neiman, whose work is belittled by most critics as unimaginative and minimally
abstract (Guttmann 2011: 222; Vogan 2016). On the other hand, Kühnst points
out that Neiman’s Stretch Stampede (1979) produced a tension comparable to
Edouard Manet’s Horse Race at Longchamp (1867) (Kühnst 1996: 368).

Photography Sport historians have long used journalistic photographs for

illustrative purposes, and for at least forty years as evidence in their scholarship
for such matters as crowd composition, riotous behavior, and changes in
sportswear and equipment. But they have only recently become aware that
photographs may be misleading because of how they were shot or cropped. For
example, Life magazine’s Mark Kaufmann produced an image of Tamara Press
REPRESENTATION 217

winning the 80-meter hurdles at the 1960 Olympics that seemed to show her
barely ahead of a teammate in second, but she was actually fifth. O’Malony
shows how in the 1950s and 1960s, misleading American photographs of Soviet
athletes were employed for political purposes during the Cold War (2006: 30–
1, 34).
Certain photographers of sporting images were truly artists, like Ben Shahn,
whose Handball (1939) was a representation of a popular working-class urban
sport (Guttmann 2011: 164), and Robert Mapplethorpe, who photographed
body-builders Arnold Schwarzenegger and Lisa Lyon. European artists have
produced portraits of Formula One idols like Belgian Jacky Ickx that are
reminiscent of the armor of medieval knights, while Jean Tinguely’s collage,
Panorama Formula 1-Circus, showed how racing was entangled in the economics
and technology of the automobile business (Kühnst 1996: 353–4, 365–6).

Statuary There are relatively few sport statues in the interwar era, mainly
bronzes produced by Canadian Dr. R. Tait McKenzie (1867–1938), or in the

FIGURE 8.7: Fanny Blankers-Koen (1954). Dutch heroine who won four gold medals
in track at the 1948 London Olympics. Blijdorp District, Rotterdam, Netherlands.
Sculpture by Han Rehm. Photograph by Door Wikifrits. Courtesy of wikimedia
commons.
218 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SPORT IN THE MODERN AGE

FIGURE 8.8: The Olympic Black Power Statue at San José State University honoring
Tommie Smith and John Carlos was completed in 2005 by “Rigo 23.” The sculpture
purposefully omitted second-place medalist, Australian Peter Norman, a supporter of
the Olympic Project for Human Rights, as per his request to ensure attention was
focused on Smith and Carlos. Photo by Lawrence Fan. Courtesy of Lawrence Fan.

postwar period, but they have become very popular since the turn of the
century. The most notable are 92-percent male, including the top-rated “The
Spirit,” a statue of Michael Jordan in front of Chicago’s United Center by Omri
Amrany and Julie Rotblatt-Amrany (Bocicault and Danner 2014). Fanny
Blankers-Koen has been the subject of several sculptures, perhaps the most of
anyone. The first was Han Rehm’s “Monument to Fanny Blankers-Koen”
(1954) in Rotterdam, depicting her winning an Olympic relay. O’Mahony
interprets the statue as honoring her endurance and perseverance, but also
honoring the European struggle to survive the Second World War (2012: 59–
60).
Perhaps the most analyzed statue to date has been “Victory Salute,” which
commemorates Tommie Smith and John Carlos demonstrating for civil rights
on the victory platform in Mexico City. It is located on the campus of their
alma mater, San José State University. Historian Maureen Smith asserts that the
statue was initiated to redress their mistreatment and honors their Olympic
triumph and demonstration for civil rights. The statue omits silver medalist
REPRESENTATION 219

Australian Peter Norman, who supported the protest and later recommended
the artist leave him out of the podium, providing space for visitors to stand in
solidarity with the civil rights heroes (Smith 2009: 394, 406).

CONCLUSION
The cultural analysis of sport has opened up for historians new ways of
understanding the historic development of sport around the world by opening
up new kinds of sources for studying sport, and how to understand them. The
postmodern historian is going beyond such primary sources as newspapers,
diaries, financial reports, government documents, and is more astutely studying
photographs than in the past. They are now studying fiction, music, and art so
they may historicize individual works of art as a text reflecting their artist’s own
viewpoints. Many of the most outstanding studies are not by sport historians,
but humanists from literature and art, who bring their own expertise to the
study of sport, without overly relying on cultural theory, a trend that I welcome.
220
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 CONTRIBUTORS

Sheldon Anderson is Professor of History at Miami University, USA, specializing

in the history of sports and Cold War diplomacy. He is author of The Forgotten
Legacy of Stella Walsh: The Greatest Female Athlete of Her Time (2017);
The Politics and Culture of Modern Sports (2015); Condemned to Repeat It:
“Lessons of History” and the Making of U.S. Cold War Containment Policy
(2008); A Cold War in the Soviet Bloc: East German–Polish Relations, 1945–
1962 (2000); and A Dollar to Poland is a Dollar to Russia: U.S. Economic Policy
Toward Poland, 1945–1952 (1993). He also coauthored International Studies:
An Interdisciplinary Approach to Global Issues (2018).

Mike Cronin is Academic Director of Boston College in Ireland. He has published

widely in the areas of sport and social history, and particularly the linkage
between sport and identity. His publications include Sport and Nationalism
in Ireland: Gaelic Games, Soccer, and Irish identity Since 1884 (1999), and
he coedited Sporting Nationalisms: Identity, Ethnicity, Immigration, and
Assimilation (1998); With God on Their Side: Sport in the Service of Religion
(2002); and Sport and Postcolonialism (2003). He was Director from 2008 of
the Gaelic Athletic Association’s Oral History Project, which can be viewed at:
https://www.gaa.ie/the-gaa/oral-history/.

Brian M. Ingrassia is Assistant Professor of History at West Texas A&M University

in Canyon, Texas, USA. He is author of The Rise of Gridiron University: Higher
Education’s Uneasy Alliance with Big-Time Football (2012), and series editor of
Sport and Popular Culture. He has contributed articles and reviews to scholarly
journals including The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Georgia
Historical Quarterly, Southwestern Historical Quarterly, and The Journal of Sport
History.
251
252 CONTRIBUTORS

William J. Morgan is Professor Emeritus in the Division of Occupational Science,

University of Southern California, USA, and studies ethics, critical theory,
and political theory. He edited the Journal of the Philosophy of Sport; Ethics
in Sport (3rd ed., 2018); and co-edited with Mike McNamee The Routledge
Handbook of the Philosophy of Sport (2015). He is author of Why Sports
Morally Matter (2006); Leftist Theories of Sport: A Critique and Reconstruction
(1994); and Sport and Moral Conflict: A Conventionalist Theory (2020). He is
a former president of the International Association of the Philosophy of Sport
and received its Distinguished Scholar Award in 1994.

Steven A. Riess is the Bernard Brommel Distinguished Research Professor,

Emeritus, at Northeastern Illinois University, USA. He is the former editor of
the Journal of Sport History, series editor of Sports and Entertainment, and
author of several books including Sports in Industrial America, 1850–1920
(rev. 2nd ed., 2013); The Sport of Kings and the Kings of Crime. Horse Racing,
Politics, and Crime in New York, 1865–1913; Touching Base: Professional
Baseball and American Culture in the Progressive Era (rev. 2nd ed., 1999); and
City Games: The Evolution of American Society and the Rise of Sports (1989).

Matthew Taylor is Professor of History and Director of the Institute of History at

De Montfort University, Leicester, England. He is the author of The Association
Game: A History of British Football (2008) and Football: A Short History (2011),
and has edited special issues on the history of sport in the London Journal, Labor
History, and the Journal of Global History. He is currently cowriting a number
of articles on the history of boxing in Britain. His most recent book is Sport and
the Home Front: Wartime Britain at Play, 1939–45 (2020).

Jean Williams is Professor of Sport at the University of Wolverhampton,

England, and a heritage consultant to museums and the cultural sector including
as Nonexecutive Director of The Silverstone Experience; consultant to The
FIFA World Football Museum and The FA; and Academic Lead for the Hidden
Histories of Women’s Football at The National Football Museum. Recent
publications include ‘A History of World Cup Posters 1930–2014’ in Daniel
Haxall’s The Visual Identity of Football (2018); with Rob Hess, Women, Football
and History: International Perspectives. A Special Edition of The International
Journal of the History of Sport, 32:18 (2016); and A Contemporary History of
Women’s Sport: Part One 1850–1960 (2014).

Kevin B. Witherspoon is Chair of the Department of History & Philosophy

at Lander University in Greenwood, South Carolina, USA. He has received
numerous awards at Lander, including the Distinguished Professor Award in
2014. His first book, Before the Eyes of the World: Mexico and the 1968 Olympics
CONTRIBUTORS 253

won the 2009 North American Society for Sport History Book Award. His most
recent book, Defending the American Way of Life: Sport, Culture, and the Cold
War, coedited with Toby Rider of Cal State-Fullerton, USA, was published in
2018. His current research focuses on the U.S.–Soviet sports rivalry during the
Cold War.

Wray Vamplew is Emeritus Professor in Sports Studies at the University of

Stirling, Scotland, where he was appointed as Scotland’s first Chair in Sports
History. He has authored and edited more than twenty books and over a hundred
academic papers and reports. His 1988 monograph Pay Up and Play the Game
won the initial North American Society for Sport History Book Award. His
books include The Turf: A Social and Economic History of Horse Racing (1976)
and, with Tony Collins, Mud, Sweat and Beers: A Cultural History of Sport and
Alcohol (2002). He coedited with Joyce Kay An Encyclopedia of British Horse
Racing (2005).
254
 INDEX

Italic numbers are used for illustrations.

Abdul-Jabbar, Kareem (Lew Alcindor) 109 animal welfare 139–41

abuse of athletes 34–5 apartheid 19, 73, 119, 131–2, 156, 165,
Adair, Daryl 150 178
African Americans appearance of players 121–2
and athletics 17 Archer, Robert 156
and baseball 10, 25, 61 Ardolino, Frank 203
and basketball 11, 26–7, 30 Argentina 13, 74, 123–4, 132
and boxing 11, 24 Armstrong, Gary 143
discrimination 168, 171 Armstrong, Henry 164
and football 12, 27–8 Armstrong, Lance 124
integration of 119–20, 167–8 Arthur, Michael 157
racism against 168, 171 Ashe, Arthur 73
segregation of 154–6, 155, 159–61, associated products 96–8
160 Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP)
symbols of change 162–4, 163 29
women 166–7 athletics. See track and field athletics
Alcindor, Lew (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) attitudes to sport 127
109 Australia
Algren, Nelson, Never Come Morning cricket 15, 104, 125
193 gambling 136, 137
Ali, Muhammad 24, 73–4, 126 indigenous people 179
All-American Girls Professional Baseball rivalries in 145
League (AAGPBL) 18, 116–17, 116, stadiums 65
161, 205–6 track and field 89–90
amateurism 20, 50–1, 52, 89–90, 109–14, women in sport 161
111 workplace sport 95–6
American Football League (AFL) 27 Australian Rules football 88–9, 95–6
American Ninja Warrior 170 Austria 5, 9, 13
Anderson, Eric D. 157 auto racing 28, 63–4, 85, 217

255
256 INDEX

Babington, Bruce 197 behavior

Bad News Bears, The (film, 1976) 202 of crowds 23, 100, 122, 146, 184, 207
Baker, Aaron 198, 199 of players 121, 122, 124, 185–6
Bale, John 114, 197 Bellows, George 215–16, 215
Baller, Susan 157 Bend It Like Beckham (film, 2002) 204–5
Bang the Drum Slowly (Harris) 195 Bergan, Ronald 200
Bannister, Roger 113–14 Berlage, Gai Ingham 161
Bartali, Gino 134 Berlin Olympics (1936) 16–17, 17, 62,
baseball 129, 130
East-West Classic 159 betting
in fiction 194–6 on basketball 29–30
films about 198, 202–4, 205–6 and goals of sport 46
fine art 216 and golf 101
“fixing” of 135, 203 match fixing 100, 122–3, 135–6, 203
global championship 78 moral views of 135, 136–7
integration 167 relationship with sport 97
and Japanese Americans 158 on thoroughbred racing 11, 12–13
lighting of 62–3 in USA and Britain 33
Negro Leagues 61, 159 Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor
and patriotism 121 Kings, The (film, 1976) 202
player safety 108 Black Lives Matter 128
postage stamps 211, 212 black power salute 128, 168, 178, 218–19,
rivalries in 144–5 218
rules 107 Black Sox scandal 135
seasonality of 75 Black Sunday (film, 1977) 201
semipro industrial teams 3 Blake, Jason 197
song about 207 Blankers-Koen, Fanny 18, 217, 218
stadiums 59–60, 61 Blatter, Sepp 23
unwritten rules 126 blood sports 139–41, 193
and women 161 Boddy, Kasia 210
during World War II 18 bodies, attitudes towards 187–90
See also Major League Baseball (MLB) Body and Soul (film, 1947) 199–200
basketball 152 “Bodyline Series” 125
and African Americans 120 Bolt, Usain 93
betting on 29–30 Bolz, Daphné 93
betting scandals 123 Bond, Barry 34–5
films about 198–9 Booth, Douglas 156
integration 165–6, 167 Bouillon, Antoine 156
and Mexicans 158 bowling 3, 8–9, 8
music and 208 boxing
rules 109 and African Americans 162–4
seasonality of 75–6 cheating 122
segregation of 159–60 in fiction 193
shot clock 76 films about 197–8, 199–200, 206
and women 152, 169, 170 fine art 215–16, 215
before World War II 11, 12 Holocaust, during 158
See also National Basketball Association Irish boxing, status of 178
(NBA); netball “Rumble in the Jungle” 24, 73–4
Bates, Christopher 90–1 and slum youths 3
Bauhaus art 216 television coverage 97–8
INDEX 257

unwritten rules 126 Catanzaro, Kacy 170

and violence 137–9, 137 catering 97
before World War II 11 Celebrant, The (Greenberg) 196
after World War II 24 celebrity endorsements 20
Braddock, Jomills Henry II 171 Champion (film, 1949) 200
brawls 109 Chariots of Fire (film, 1981) 204
Brazil 22, 65, 210 cheating 44, 122–5
Bright, Johnny 165 See also match fixing
Britain Chicago, USA
amateurism 50–1, 110, 113 baseball 3–4, 18, 63
attitudes to sport 127 bowling 3, 8–9, 8
club ownership 86 stadiums 59, 59, 72, 72, 76–7
criticism of sport 142 child labor 100
development of sport 102 Chile 62, 132
fiction about sport 196–7 China 19, 20, 35, 132–3, 133–4
films about sport 204–5 Chosen, The (Potok) 194
gambling 136–7 Christianity and sport 133–5, 136–7, 138,
hunting 140 186
imperialism and sport 14–15, 14, 60, citizenship of athletes 177–8
119, 120–1, 180 civil rights laws. See Title IX Educational
public facilities 94 Amendments Act (1972)
spectator sport 12–13, 18, 24 class and sport 2–3, 182
sporting culture 1–2 Clemente, Deirdre 97
stadiums 58–9, 74 clothing 69, 90–1, 96–7, 100, 209–10
Sundays, sport on 134–5 club ownership 86–7, 98–9
workplace sport 95 clubs 94, 175, 180–1
World War I 174 coaching 92
See also England Cochran, Charles 99
Brown, Cassandra 170 cockfighting 139
Brundage, Avery 52 Cold War 18, 31, 52, 126, 166–7, 217
Budd, Zola 177–8 collegiate sport
Bull Durham (film, 1988) 203 and African Americans 120
bullfighting 140–1, 193 amateurism 89
Buma, Michael 197 betting scandals 123
Burns, Ken 149 integration 165–6
before World War II 12, 62–3
Camden Yards, Baltimore 71 after World War II 29–30
Canada See also National Collegiate Athletic
baseball 74 Association (NCAA)
hockey 11, 26 colonialism. See imperialism and sport
hockey literature 197 Color of Money, The (film, 1986) 204
Olympic Games 66 Colter, Kain 112
preferred sports 15 commercial amateurism 89
Sundays, sport on 134, 135 commercialization 103, 104
Caribbean, cricket in 14 communities, disadvantaged 147
Carlos, John 19–20, 128, 168, 178 communities, representation of 88
Carnera, Primo 200 community sport 182–3
Carter, Jimmy 20 conflict 127–47
Cashman, Richard 145 gambling 135–7
Cashmore, Ellis 204 playing and watching 141–2
258 INDEX

politics and protest 128–33 Damn Yankees (film, 1958) 202

religion 133–5 dangers of sport 92–3, 108–9, 138–9,
rivals and friends 142–6 188–9
unity and cooperation 146–7 dark products 99–100, 101
violence 137–41 Davis, Janet M. 139
Connolly, James 173 Death in the Afternoon (Hemingway) 193
constitutive rules 106–9, 108 Demas, Lane 168
consumerism, influence of 67–9 Didrikson, Babe 16, 32, 115, 169
Cooper, James Fenimore 192 Dimeo, Paul 99
cooperation and unity 146–7 disabled athletes 118, 126
Coover, Robert, The The Universal Baseball disadvantaged communities 147
Association, Inc: J. Henry Waugh disasters 74, 122, 143, 184
Prop. 195–6 discrimination. See racism; segregation
Cornelissen, Scarlett 157 Doby, Larry 164–5
corporate sponsorship 3–4, 8, 95, 98, documentary films 206–7
101 dog racing 13, 136–7
corruption 21, 23, 97, 125 Drive, He Said (film, 1971) 198–9
See also match fixing drugs 34–5, 52–3, 99–100, 124–5, 189
costs of sport 182 See also substance abusers
Coubertain, Pierre de 48–9, 109, 112–13, Dyreson, Mark 50, 103
114–15, 176
Crane, Stephen, The Red Badge of Courage East Africa 117
193 East Germany. See German Democratic
cricket Republic
amateurism 110 economic factors, influence on sport 2
and anti-apartheid protest 131 Edelman, Robert 141
in Australia 104, 145 Edwards, Harry 168
and British colonies 14–15, 14, 60, 121, Eight Men Out (film, 1988) 203
133, 157 Ellison, Ralph 167
length of games 76, 107 emotions and sport 183–4
match fixing 136 England
postage stamps 212 anti-apartheid protests 131
stadiums 65, 65 hooliganism 23, 74, 122, 143
Sundays, sport on 135 match fixing of soccer 135–6
unwritten rules 125 Nazism, protests against 129–30
women and the home 114 soccer 21, 22, 88, 123–4
before World War II 12 women and boxing 139
criminal activities 11, 24, 100 See also Britain
criticism of sport 142 English Premier League (EPL) 22, 74, 86,
crowd behavior 23, 100, 122, 146, 184, 87, 88, 96
207 entrepreneurship 98–9
crowd-control measures 74 equipment 90
cultural aesthetics 167 ethnic minorities 118–19
cultural differences 113 See also African Americans; Native
cultural exceptionalism 88–9 Americans
cultural exchanges 19 Europe
Cultural Olympiad 83 development of sport 102
cultural values 120–6 and soccer 13, 21–2
cycling 85–6, 93, 114, 124 socialist sports 3–4, 4–5
Czechoslovakia 4 women’s sport 9
INDEX 259

exploitation of workers 100 stadiums 60–1

external purposes of sport 45–9, 54 timing of 75
before World War II 12
facts and the theory of sport 40 See also Australian Rules football;
fair play 133 National Football League (NFL);
faith. See religion and sport soccer; Super Bowl
Falkland Islands 123–4 football pools 136
fantasy sports 78 footballs 100, 102
Farah, Mo 179 Formula One 217
fascism and sport 141 Foster, Andrew “Rube” 10
fashion 96, 209–10 four-minute mile 113–14
Faulkner, William 192 fox hunting 140
Fear Strikes Out (film, 1957) 202 France
Fédération Sportive Féminine Nazism, opposition to 130
Internationale (FSFI) 115 and soccer 23
Federer, Roger 29 stadiums 60, 61, 62, 70
Fences (Wilson) 196 stamps 211
fiction 192–7 See also Tour de France
field hockey 14 Freeman, Cathy 179
Field of Dreams (film, 1989) 203–4 From Here to Eternity (film, 1953) 200
FIFA World Cup From Here to Eternity (novel, Jones) 193
African participation 119
cheating 123–4 Gallico, Paul 115
corruption and mismanagement gambling. See betting
23 Garcia, Ignacio 158
crowd behavior 146 gay athletes 31–2, 118
cultural significance 84 “Gay Games” 118
human rights campaigns 132 Geertz, Clifford 191
stadiums 61 gender and sport 30–2, 118
women’s sport 23 See also women
films 197–207, 201 gentleman-amateur concept of sport
fine art 212–16, 213–15 50–1
First World War 173–4 geographical attachment 183–4
fishing 192–3 George, Nelson 167
fitness movement 31 German Democratic Republic 20, 21, 34,
Fitzgerald, F. Scott 193 124–5
The Great Gatsby 194–5 Germany
football club ownership 86
African Americans and 120 development of sport 102
films about 198–9, 200–1 Jewish women 9
globalization of 102–3 and the Olympic Games 20
integration 166 Olympic Games (1936) 16–17, 62
intercollegiate sport 30 public facilities 93–4
music and 208 and soccer 22
performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) socialist sports 4–5, 5
34 women and boxing 138–9
player safety 108 working-class sports 3
racial violence 165 Gilkes, James 178
rules 106 Giulianotti, Richard 143
seasonality of 75 Gleaves, John 113
260 INDEX

globalization of sport 78, 102–3, 126, 180, Holt, Richard 94

181–2 homosexual athletes 31–2, 118
goals of sport 41–2 hooliganism 23, 122, 184
golf 28–9, 69, 94, 101, 169–70 Hoosiers (film, 1986) 199
Goodrum, Alison 210 Hopcraft, Arthur 136
Grace, W. G. 110, 114 Horse Feathers (film, 1932) 200, 201
Graff, Jessie 170–1 horse racing 11, 13, 18, 23–4, 68, 205
Grange, Harold “Red” 111, 112 Houston Astrodome 67, 68, 71
Grant, Bud 112 Hoyzer, Robert 123
Great American Novel, The (Roth) 196 Huggins, Mike 13
Great Depression 6, 10, 11, 12, 62 human rights campaigns 132–3
Great Gatsby, The (Fitzgerald) 194–5 humanitarian relief 147
Great White Hope, The (film, 1970) 200 hunting 140
Greenberg, Eric Rolfe, The Celebrant 196 Hustler, The (film, 1961) 204
Gropius, Walter 216 hybrid internal purpose of sport 49–54
Guttmann, Allen 154, 195, 216
gymnastics 94 I, Tonya (film, 2017) 206
ice hockey 11, 26, 75, 124, 197
hairstyles 210–11 icons 9–10
Hall, M. Ann 210 identities 127–8, 143, 175–6, 179
halls of fame 97 idols 9–10
Harder They Fall, The (film, 1956) 200 illuminated sports 62–3
Harding, Tonya 206 imperialism and sport 14–15, 14, 119,
Harlem Globetrotters 11, 160, 160, 161 121, 156–7, 180
Harris, Mark inclusion. See integration
Bang the Drum Slowly 195 India
The Southpaw 195 cricket in 14, 14, 65, 133, 136
Hemingway, Ernest exploitation of workers 100
Death in the Afternoon 193 field hockey in 14
The Old Man and the Sea 192–3 rugby in 133
The Sun Also Rises 193 Indianapolis 500 28, 63
Henderson, Edwin Bancroft 164 indigenous cultures 2, 179
Henie, Sonja 205 indoor ski slopes 73
Henoch, Lilli 9 industrialists, contribution of 3, 8, 95
heritage 97 instant replay 104, 107
heritage stadiums 76–7 institutional character of sport 39–41
heroes in fiction 193–6 instruction 92
Heysel Stadium Riot 122, 143 integration
high-school sports 12, 75, 194, 199 African Americans and 119–20
hiking 68–9 process of 165–6, 167–71
Hill, Declan 100 in USA 25, 26–7, 27–8, 30
Hillsborough Stadium 74 See also segregation
Hinch, A. J. 107 internal purposes of sport 41–5, 54
Historically Black Colleges and Universities international fixtures 175–6
(HBCUs) 8, 154, 159, 209 intersex athletes 116, 118
Hobbs, Jack 12 Ireland 98, 178
Hobsbawm, Eric 175–6 Islamic cultures 117–18, 152–3
hockey. See field hockey; ice hockey Italy
Hoech, Hannah 216 participatory sport 141
Holocaust 17, 158 public facilities 94
INDEX 261

religion 134 Lenglen, Suzanne 209

and soccer 13, 22, 123 length of games 76
stadiums 62 lifestyle sport 183
lighting of sport 62–3
Jackie Robinson Story, The (film, 1950) 202 Lipsyte, Robert 150, 151
James, C. L. R. 60, 157 Llewellyn, Matthew 113
Japan localization of sport 180–1
and the Olympic Games 18, 19 Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner,
stadiums 60, 65–6, 66 The (Sillitoe) 196–7
thoroughbred racing 24 “Long Count” heavyweight championship
Japanese Americans 158 11
Jewish sport 9, 158 Loroupe, Tegla 117
jogging 31, 68–9 Louis, Joe 11, 163–4, 163
Johnson, Ben 124, 179 Lowell, Robert 194
Johnson, Jack 162–3, 200 lusory goals of sport 41, 42, 43, 44, 54
Johnson, Robert Jr. 194–5
Jones, James, From Here to Eternity 193 MacLean, Malcolm 157
Jones, James H. 96 Major League Baseball (MLB)
Jordan, Michael 27, 199, 218 African Americans and 10, 25, 119, 120
appearance of players 121–2
Kaepernick, Colin 128, 208 behavior of players 121
Kassimeris, Christos 143 betting scandals 123
Kaufmann, Mark 216–17 cheating 123
Kay, Joyce 94 credo of 121
Kellerman, Annette 6 expansion of 74
Kennedy, John F. 31 integration 168
Kentucky Derby 68 length of games 76
Kenya 117 lighting of 63
Keys, Barbara 133 performance enhancing drugs (PEDs)
King, Billie Jean 34–5
“Battle of the Sexes” match 31, 69, 169, player safety 108
170 rules 107
equal pay fight 29, 117 segregation 25, 119, 149, 150, 155–6,
outing of 32 164–5
on transsexuals 118 stadiums 64–5, 68, 70, 71, 77
Kłobukowska, Ewa 118 before World War II 9–10, 10
Klutsis, Gustav 214, 214 after World War II 25–6
Knute Rockne: All-American (film, 1941) Malamud, Bernard, The Natural 195
200 male participatory sport 2–6, 4–5
Koprince, Susan 196 Mandela, Nelson 165
Kühnst, Peter 216 Mapplethorpe, Robert 217
Kuper, Simon 143 Maradona, Diego 123–4
marathon running 117, 122
LaMotta, Jake 122, 200 marching bands 208, 209
LBGQT athletes 31–2 mascots 84
League of Their Own, A (film, 1992) 205–6 match fixing 100, 122–3, 135–6, 203
league structures 87 McCormick, Father Richard A. 138–9
leftist use of sport 4–5, 4–5 McCullough, Wayne 178
legacy of sport 189 McEnroe, John 122
leisurewear 96–7 McGwire, Mark 34
262 INDEX

McHale, Kevin 109 amateurism 111–12, 111

McIlroy, Rory 179 basketball 75–6
medical neglect 92–3 growth of 29–30
mega events 82–6, 97, 176–7, 184 integration 165–6
See also FIFA World Cup; Olympic National Football League (NFL)
Games; Super Bowl; Tour de France African Americans and 120
Melbourne Cricket Ground 65 integration 167
memorabilia 84 protests against racial inequality 128–9
menstruation 91 seasonality of games 75
merchandise 96, 97 segregation 156
Messenger, Christian 192, 193, 205 stadiums 67–8, 70
Mexican Americans 158 television coverage 67–8
Mexico timing of 75
Olympic Games (1968) 19, 66, 128, before World War II 11–12
168, 178 after World War II 27–8
stadiums 63, 74 National Hockey League (NHL) 11, 26,
Mikan, George 108, 109 75, 124
mile record 113–14 national teams 175–6
Milliat, Alice 9, 115 National Velvet (film, 1944) 205
Milner, Adrienne 171 nationalism and sport 103, 142
mismanagement in soccer 23 nationalistic goals of sport 46–7, 60
Mitchell, Jackie 161 nationalities of players 88, 177–8
Mobbs, Lt. Col. Edgar 174 Native Americans 10, 12
Møller, Verner 99 Natural, The (film, 1984) 202
Moore, Louis 165 Natural, The (Malamud) 195
morality and athletes 184–6 Nauright, John 156
Moscow Olympic Games (1980) 20 Nazi sport 16, 17, 206
Moss, Richard J. 94 Nazism, protests against 129–30
motor racing 28, 63–4, 85, 217 Negro Leagues 61, 159
“Mrs. Robinson” (song) 207 Neiman, Leroy 216
museums 97 netball 161–2
music and sport 207–9 Never Come Morning (Algren) 193
Muslim athletes 153, 186–7 New Deal 6
Mussolini, Benito 13 New Zealand 15, 131–2, 152, 161
NFL Europa 103
Nathan, Daniel 135 Nicholson, Jack 198–9
national anthems 208 Nielsen, Erik 89–90
National Association for Stock Car Racing night games 63
(NASCAR) 28 Nike 118
National Basketball Association (NBA) Nilsson, Joakim 203–4
black aesthetic 199 non-white games 118–20
Black Lives Matter 128 North Dallas Forty (film, 1976) 201
rules 108, 109
shot clock 76 O’Bannon, Ed 112
stadiums 72 Old Man and the Sea, The (Hemingway)
timing of games 75 192–3
after World War II 26–7 Olympia (film, 1938) 206
National Collegiate Athletic Association Olympic Games
(NCAA) amateurism 109, 110–11
African Americans and 120 Berlin (1936) 16–17, 17, 62, 129, 130
INDEX 263

cultural events 83 Phillips, Janet 91

films about 204, 206 Phillips, Murray G. 212
fine art 215, 215 Phillips, Peter 91
human rights campaigns 132–3 Phillips. Simon 95
indigenous people and 179 photography 216–17
individual, competing as 178 physical abuse 35
Islamic countries 117–18 Pienaar, Francois 165
legacy of 189 Piersall, Jimmy 202
memorabilia 84 Pitino, Rick 112
notions of sport and 50–4 player nationalities 88
opening and closing ceremonies 83–4 player products 90–6, 91, 93
Paralympic Games 118, 126, 189 playing and watching 141–2
performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) political goals of sport 47, 48–9, 55 n.2
34, 124–5 politics and protest 128–33
political goals of 48–9 pool 204
politicization of 176, 178 postage stamps 211–12, 212
postage stamps 211 Potok, Chaim, The Chosen 194
and South Africa 119 pre-lusory goals of sport 41–2, 43–4, 54
stadiums 61–2, 65–6, 77–8 prestigious sports 2–3
villages 62 prices of tickets 182
women’s events 114–15 Pride of the Yankees, The (film, 1942) 202
before World War II 15–17 prize fighting. See boxing
during World War II 17 products 81–104
after World War II 18–21 associated products 96–8
O’Mahony, Mike 212–13, 215, 217, 218 dark products 99–100, 101
On the Waterfront (film, 1954) 200 entrepreneurial motivations 98–9
organizing bodies 176 globalization 102–3
Oriard, Michael 194 modification 103–4
Orwell, George 142 player products 90–6, 91, 93
Osmond, Gary 212 spectator products 82–90, 85
Owens, Jesse 17, 17, 93, 164 transformation 104
ownership of clubs 86–7, 98–9 professional conception of sport 51–2,
52–3
pain 92–3 public facilities 93–4
Palmer, Arnold 28–9 public finance 70–1
Paralympic Games 118, 126, 189 Puerto Rico 139
participatory sport purpose of sport 37–56
development of 141–2 external purpose(s) 45–9
female 6–9, 6–8, 69, 114–18, 116, hybrid internal purpose(s) 49–54
168–71 institutional character of sport 39–41
male 2–6, 4–5 internal purpose(s) 41–5
patriotism 121 purpose, nature of 38–9
Peatling, G. K. 142
Pelé 22 Rabbit Run (Updike) 194
performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) 34–5, racial inequality, protests against 128–9
52–3, 99–100, 124–5, 189 racing. See auto racing; dog racing;
personal attachment 183–4 thoroughbred racing
Personal Best (film, 1982) 205 racism 10, 11, 19–20, 168, 171
Pfister, Gertrud 152–3 See also integration; segregation
Philippines 60, 72 Raging Bull (film, 1980) 200
264 INDEX

Ranjitsinhji, Prince 179 timing of 104

Ratjen, Dora 32 and World War I 173–4
Rayl, Susan J. 160 Ruiz, Rosie 122
Red Badge of Courage, The (Crane) 193 rules 105–26
Red Sport International (RSI) 5 amateurism 109–14, 111
Regalado, Samuel 158 constitutive rules 106–9, 108
Reid, Donald 211 cultural values 120–6
religion and sport 46, 133–5, 136–7, 138, non-white games 118–20
186 and the purpose of sport 38–9, 42–3,
religion, secularized 183 44–5
replays 104, 107 women’s sport 114–18, 116
replica shirts 96 “Rumble in the Jungle” 24, 73–4
representation of sport 191–219 running 31, 68–9, 117, 196–7, 204
fiction 192–7 running tracks 93
film 197–207, 201 Runstedtler, Theresa E. 164
music 207–9 Russia
visual culture 209–19, 211–15, amateurism 110
217–18 cultural exchanges 19
resorts 73 development of sport 102, 141
Ribowsky, Mark 159 fine art 212–14, 213–14
Richards, Renée 118 and the Olympic Games 18, 19, 20, 21,
riding 114 179
Riess, Steven 145 performance enhancing drugs (PEDs)
riots 122, 143 34
Ritchie, Ian 53 postage stamps 211–12
rivalries 142–6 socialist sports 5
Robinson, Jackie 25, 119, 149, 150, 164, women in sport 153–4, 154
202 workplace sport 96
Rockne, Knute 147 Ruth, Babe 9, 59–60, 121
Rockwell, Norman 216
Rocky (film, 1976) 200 safety of players 92–3, 108–9, 138–9,
role models 185–6 188–9
Ronaldo 185 salaries 3, 9, 10, 25, 26, 27
Roosevelt, Theodore 51 Scalia, Antonin 38–9
Rosenstone, Robert 198 Scandinavia, development of sport 102
Ross, Barney 199 Scanlon, Jennifer 157
Roth, Philip, The Great American Novel Schultz, Jaime 211
196 Scott, Robert Falcon 113
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 48 Seabiscuit 11
Rowley, Alison 153 Searle, John 40, 42–3
Ruck, Rob 159 seasonality of sport 75
Rudolph, Wilma 19 Second World War 17–18, 63, 158, 161
rugby secularized religion 183
amateurism in 109, 110 security of venues 184
and anti-apartheid protest 119, 131 Segal, Erich 193, 194
in Australia 145 segregation 149–71
in fiction 197 desegregation and inclusion 167–71,
in India 133 170
integration 165 exclusion 150, 151–6, 154–5
professionalization of 90, 110 high-school sports 61
INDEX 265

resistance 156–62, 160 See also English Premier League (EPL);

symbols of change 162–7, 163, 166 FIFA World Cup; Heysel Stadium
See also integration Riot
Semenya, Caster 118 social entrepreneurs 98
Semi-Tough (film, 1977) 201 social media 183
Serbia 72 social stratification 68
sexual abuse 171, 187 socialist sports 4–5, 4–5
sexualization of athletes 187–8 softball 9
Shackleton, Ernest 113 solo sport 183
Shahn, Ben 217 Solomon, Eric 196
Sheppard, David 135 songs 207
shoes 90 Sörenstam, Annika 29, 169–70
shooting 140 South Africa
Sillitoe, Alan, The Loneliness of the Long apartheid 131–2, 156
Distance Runner 196–7 integration 165
Simon, John 202 and the Olympic Games 19, 119
Simon, Paul 207 preferred sports 15
Simpson, Kevin E. 158 South America and soccer 13, 21, 22
singing, by fans 207 Southpaw, The (Harris) 195
skiing 73 Soviet Union. See Russia
“sledging” in cricket 125 Spain 22, 86, 140–1
Smith, Maureen 218–19 spectacle, sport as 99
Smith, Tommie 19–20, 128, 168, 178 spectator products 82–90, 85
soccer spectator sport 9–13, 23–9
amateurism 110 Spitz, Mark 20
club ownership 86 sponsorship 3–4, 20
communities, representation of 88 Sport and Development for Peace (SDP)
criticism of 142 147
crowd behavior 23, 100, 122, 184 sports bras 210
film about 204–5 Sports Halls of Fame 97
globalization of 102, 103 sports science 92
Holocaust, during 158 sportswear 69, 96, 209–10
instant replay 107 stadium tours 97
league structures 87 stadiums
match fixing 123, 135–6 Golden Age 58–61, 59
Nazism, protests against 129–30 before World War II 62–3
player safety 108–9 after World War II 63–7
rivalries in 143–4, 145 modern 68–74, 145
rules 106 twenty-first century 76–8
in Russia 5 stars of sport 185–6
seasonality of 75 statues 217–19, 217–18
singing by fans 207 stereotypes 160–1
stadiums 61, 74 Stewart, Kenneth G 96
substance abusers 186 Story, David, This Sporting Life 197
Sundays, sport on 135 substance abusers 186
value of clubs 22 Suits, Bernard 41, 44
women’s 23, 117, 169 Summerskill, Edith 138
before World War II 13 Sun Also Rises, The (Hemingway) 193
during World War II 18 Sundays, sport on 134–5
after World War II 21–3, 21 Super Bowl 67–8, 84–5
266 INDEX

swimming 6–7, 20, 124–5 films about sport 197–204

swimming pools 93, 94 Great Depression, response to 6, 62,
Switzer, Kathrine 69 94
integration 165–7, 167–8
taking a knee 128–9 Nazism, protests against 130
Tapie, Bernard 123 and the Olympic Games 15, 16, 19–20,
Tatum, Jack 109 21
Taylor, Matthew 102 Olympic Games in 67
technology 93, 107 postage stamps 211, 212
television coverage 59, 66, 67–8, 97–8 professional conception of sport 51–2
tennis 29, 76, 91–2, 95, 97, 122 rivalries in 144–5
See also King, Billie Jean segregation 154–6, 155
terrorism 20, 184 separate sports 158
Thanksgiving games 75 and soccer 21, 23
This Sporting Life (Story) 197 spectator sport 9–12, 10, 18, 23–9
Thomson, Bobby 123 sporting culture 2
thoroughbred racing 11, 13, 18, 23–4, 68, stadiums 58, 59, 59, 63, 64–5, 67, 68,
205 69–73, 72, 76–7
ticket prices 182 women’s sport 139, 166–7, 168–71
Tilden, Bill 32 working-class sports 3
timing of sport 75–6, 98, 107 unity and cooperation 146–7
Title IX Educational Amendments Act Universal Baseball Association, Inc: J.
(1972) 31, 69, 117, 169 Henry Waugh Prop., The (Coover)
Tomlinson, Alan 102 195–6
Tour de France 85–6, 93, 124, 134 unwritten rules 125–6
track and field athletics 16, 32, 124–5 Updike, John, Rabbit Run 194
tragedies 74, 122, 143, 184 Uruguay 84
training methods 52, 92–3, 113–14
transgender athletes 32 Vail, Colorado 73
transsexual athletes 118 value
Treagus, Mandy 161, 162 of athletes 185
Trump, Donald J. 128–9 of clubs 22, 26, 28
Trumpbour, Robert 58 Vamplew, Wray 89, 98, 106, 109, 111
Tulu, Derartu 117 Vere, Bernard 215
Turkey 117–18 video replay 104, 107
Tyson, Mike 186 violence 109, 137–41, 137, 165, 184
visual culture and sport 209–19, 211–15,
Ueberroth, Peter 20 217–18
unions and sport 4 Vonn, Lindsey 55 n.2
United Arab Emirates 24, 73
United States of America Walsh, Stella 115–16
amateurism, commercial 89 Warhol, Andy 216
betting, moral views of 135 Warner, Patricia 90–1
club ownership 86–7 Washington, Kermit 109
cockfighting 139 welfare capitalism 3, 8, 95
communities, representation of 88 Welldon, Rev. J. E. C. 120–1
companies, sponsorship by 3–4, 8 Wembley Stadium 58–9, 77
cultural exchanges 19 West Indies 60, 157
development of sport 102 Western Electric (WE) 8
fiction about sport 192–6 Wie, Michelle 170
INDEX 267

Wiggins, David 149, 151, 168 participatory sport 6–9, 6–8, 69,
Williams, Esther 205 114–18, 116, 168–71
Williams, Serena 29 sexualization of 187–8
Wills, Helen 210, 211 and soccer 23
Wilson, August, Fences 196 stereotypes 160–1
Wilson, Harold 131 and tennis 29
Wimbledon, catering at 97 Woods, Tiger 29, 185
winning 42, 44 Workers’ Olympiads 4–5, 4–5
Winter Olympics 15, 18, 19, 20, 73 working-class sports 3, 8–9
women workplace sport 95–6
African Americans 166–7 Works Progress Administration (WPA) 6
and baseball 161 World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) 34
and basketball 152 World Baseball Classic (WBC) 78
and boxing 138–9 World League of American Football 102–3
clothing 91, 209–10 World War I 173–4
coverage of sport 182 World War II 17–18, 63, 158, 161
exclusion of 152–4 wrestling 99
films about 204–6 Wright, Richard 163–4
fine art 214, 214
gender and sport 30–2 Young, Christopher 102
and golf 29 Yugoslavia 46–7
menstruation 91
and netball 161–2 Zátopek, Emil 179
Olympic Games 16, 18–19 Zionist sports clubs 9, 13
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