SPORT.

"What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?" queried the historian and political reformer C. L. R. James in the preface of Beyond a Boundary (1963), his lyrical exploration of political, social, and racial relations in the twentieth-century West Indies and British Empire. He answered throughout the book that those who only know sport really know nothing of value. Sport, he insisted, was an essential part of the fabric of modern cultures, the democratic art of the globe's common folk, the stage on which a myriad of social issues were contested. Intellectuals who dismissed sport as mere games or mass opiates misunderstood the fundamental power of sport for shaping modern culture, James insisted. James wrapped his arguments for West Indian political independence and the equality of people of color in the British Empire in discourses on cricket and the ideals of fair play. "It isn't cricket," James insisted, whether he was decrying poor sportsmanship within the boundaries or denouncing racism on the cricket pitch or in any other human endeavor.

In the course of his meditation on sport, James also claimed that ideas about sport were interwoven with ideas about identity, citizenship, gender, and every other facet of human culture in ancient as well as modern societies. Following the lead of James, scholars since the 1960s have contended that ideas about sport are inextricably linked to ideas about politics, economics, and other facets of culture. The vast majority of investigations about the power of sport in shaping and revealing cultural mentalities have concentrated on modern history, especially on modern Western societies. A smaller contingent has excavated the athletic ideologies of classical Western antiquity. The sporting lives and ideas of non-Western and non-modern peoples remain mostly unexplored. Regardless of the time period or culture studied, however, recent scholarship insists that those who know only the details of sporting practices and nothing about the larger cultures which shape and are shaped by those practices really know nothing of value.

Sport and Traditional Cultures

Modern conceptions of the contrasts between tradition and modernity frame contemporary studies of the history of ideas about sport, physical education, and body culture. Perhaps the most influential work in shaping contemporary paradigms, Allen Guttmann's From Ritual to Record (1978), grounds the history of athletic competition firmly in the modernity versus tradition dialectic. While contemporary scholars certainly bring differing theoretical perspectives to the study of ideas about sport, they rarely question the notion that traditional and modern physical cultures are essentially different entities.

Even though a few historians argue that traditional physical activities are so different from modern athletics that sport can only be understood as a product of modernity, a range of evidence indicates an ancient lineage for sport. Sport, in various forms, has been a part of cultural life since the origins of the human species. As most anthropologists contend, the hunters and gatherers of early human history lived in societies with abundant leisure. Their sports played a critical role in teaching the skills and teamwork necessary for hunting and warfare. Athletic contests served as sites for the demonstration of physical prowess—particularly male prowess. Sports were also embedded in the religious rituals of hunters and gatherers, as they are enmeshed today in the sacred practices of the world's few remaining traditional cultures.

The archaeological evidence for sport among hunters and gatherers, or among the early farmers in the new agricultural societies that began to emerge in various places around the world circa 7000 b.c.e., is limited and sketchy. Carvings and inscriptions related to sport appear occasionally in ancient Western, American, and Asian civilizations. The first compelling written evidence regarding ancient ideas about sport appears in Homer's Iliad (c. 750 b.c.e.) and Odyssey (c. 725 b.c.e.). Homer's work reveals Greek aristocrats who used competitive sport as a vehicle for demonstrating prowess. Significantly the ancient Greeks used the same word, agon, to refer to athletic contests and combat. Winning honor and glory in war or sport marked the zenith of Greek masculine achievement.

Ancient Greeks formalized and rationalized competitive athletics, moving from funeral games and irregular contests to well-organized sporting extravaganzas held at a variety of sites, and especially in sacred places to honor Greek gods. The most important Greek athletic festival, celebrated every four years beginning in 776 b.c.e., was the Olympic Games. The Olympics evolved into a vital celebration of pan-Hellenic identity for the balkanized Greek city-states. Greek citizens felt compelled to make a pilgrimage to Olympia at least once in a lifetime. Homages to and exposés of the Olympics appeared frequently in Greek literature, philosophy, and drama. Greek city-states sponsored athletic programs to develop stars to win fame for their hometowns in the games, especially at Olympia.

The Olympics reveal much about Greek culture. Participation and spectatorship were limited to males. Only freeborn Greek citizens could compete in the Olympics. Victors won olive-wreath crowns symbolizing their accomplishments. Early twenty-first century scholarship indicates that the Greeks had no conception of what moderns label amateurism. While Olympic champions received only symbolic garlands from the sponsors of the festival, their city-states subsidized their training and bestowed enormous riches on those who brought glory to their polis.

The Greeks also sponsored sporting contests in which athletes competed directly for lucrative prizes such as the Panathenaic Games. Athletes earned fame and fortune in ancient Greece. Public acclaim translated their athletic prowess into political clout. Male athletes served as icons of physical beauty and objects of erotic desire. The athlete embodied Greek notions of physical perfection and inspired artistic re-creations of the human form. By the 500s b.c.e., a class of professional athletes appeared in Greece. The time, effort, and attention lavished on athletics earned condemnation from Greek intellectuals such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, who did not object to athletic competition in principle but disparaged the narrow focus on bodily prowess to the exclusion of all other characteristics of good citizenship required of elite athletes. These thinkers argued that athletics should be one of many components in the general training of good citizens. Such arguments sparked a debate about the meaning and purpose of sport that has raged in Western societies ever since, raising issues regarding whether sport should serve the general education of the common citizen or whether sport should serve exclusively to test the extremes of human capability.

Traditionally scholars have argued that, with a few exceptions such as an athletic festival for women hosted at Olympia in honor of the goddess Hera or odes to the athletic prowess of Spartan maidens, Greek athletics were relentlessly patriarchal. In the 1990s, a debate over the level of participation by Greek women in athletics began. Some revisionists posit a much more substantial role for women in Greek sport, noting that female names appear on lists of Olympic victors. In one famous case, a woman who owned a chariot team won an Olympic race. Other revisionists argue that contextual readings of the evidence reinforces rather than revises the patriarchal nature of Greek sport, contending that an accurate interpretation reveals that the Spartan female chariot owner was in fact a surrogate put forward by her male relatives to further embarrass the defeated chariot teams and demonstrate that wealth rather than masculine skill won equestrian competitions.

Greek athletics spread throughout the ancient world during the Hellenistic era. Greek stadia, gymnasia, and hippodromes appeared in cities throughout the ancient West. Even after the conquest of Greece by Rome, Greek athletics remained the normative conception in ancient Western cultures. The Romans, like other cultures influenced by the Greeks, both adopted and resisted Greek ideas. Some Roman patricians patronized the Olympic and other Greek games and propagated Greek notions of the importance of physical education in the general development of the citizenry. Other Roman elites, with the support of many plebeians, rejected Greek athletics as too hedonistic and effete for Roman tastes. The Greek custom of competing in the nude offended Romans such as the philosopher Cicero, who condemned Greek sport as undermining family, duty, and state.

Still, like the Greeks, the Romans promoted chariot racing and built huge monuments for sporting contests. The Romans practiced a different set of spectacles that emerged from a different history. The ludi Romani represent the first appearance of mass spectator sport in history. The Roman games comprised three basic disciplines. The circuses, by far the most popular and common of the three spectacles, devoted themselves to chariot racing. The munera presented gladiatorial combats to the masses. The naumachia, the rarest of the Roman games, were elaborate reconstructions of famous naval battles. Each of the Roman games was deeply intertwined in the political conflicts of Roman society. Chariot teams at circuses promoted political factions. Gladiators fighting to the death reminded both Roman citizens and barbarians that the empire had been built on violence. Significantly very few of the gladiators were Roman citizens. The vast majority were war captives, criminals, or political or religious dissenters sentenced to the arena for the amusement of the masses. Opposition to gladiatorial games from both Roman and non-Roman sources highlighted the cruelty of the munera. Foes of Roman games also condemned them as part of a "bread and circuses" policy practiced by imperial governments to buy the consent of the masses with the dole and sporting delights. These condemnations of sport as an agent of statecraft bent on diverting the people from social problems have remained staples of sporting critiques into the contemporary era.

Greek and Roman sports were exceptional in their imperial reach and sophisticated organization but traditional in most other aspects. Traditional sports were frequently part of sacred rites and were generally martial exercises for training warriors. Traditional sporting practices were almost invariably local and loosely organized. Traditional games varied from place to place and from time to time, and were based on custom rather than formal rules. Traditional sports were incredibly durable, lasting in similar form for thousands of years. Finally traditional sports were, like traditional social relations, structured around social inequalities. Hierarchy, kinship, ethnicity, and gender habitually shaped participation. Women were generally excluded from the sports of traditional societies, especially as participants and sometimes as spectators.

Sport and Modern Cultures

Histories of sport reveal that modern cultures conceptualize physical activity differently than traditional societies. Modern sport tends toward the secular rather than the sacred. A focus on equality, both in the conditions of competition and in opportunities to compete, consumes modern sport. Modern sport replicates modern social structures in other ways as well, manifesting the peculiar modern manias for specialization, bureaucratization, rationalization, and quantification in unique ways. In modern history, sport is embedded in the major trends of modernity itself, industrialization, urbanization, and nationalism. Most significantly, at least from modern perspectives, has been a new conceptualization of sport as a useful tool for solving social problems that has replaced an understanding of sport as part of the steady rhythms of traditional life. The idea of sport as a social utility certainly has roots in older traditions, as Greek and Roman concepts about athletics as training for citizenship testify. However in the modern period the idea of sport as a useful tool grew to grand historic dimensions.

In early modern Europe, sports served the emerging centralized monarchies by symbolizing power and cultivating popular support. Monarchs commandeered the older sporting practices of the aristocracy in order to celebrate regal prowess and wealth. To gain popular support as they moved to usurp the power of the nobility and clergy, European monarchs transformed popular peasant pastimes into political rights to win over the masses. At the same time sport became a central element in the education of European elites. The Renaissance witnessed the excavation of classical notions of sound minds in sound bodies. Renaissance thinkers insisted that a complete education developed physical as well as intellectual faculties. Utilitarian notions of sport also developed in unexpected places. Early-twenty-first-century scholarship has revealed that Protestant reformers, far from the sport-hating puritans of stereotype, in fact endorsed a variety of athletic endeavors as long as they were undertaken to make people better workers, better citizens, better soldiers, and better Christians.

Purposeful sport that served specific social ends was firmly established in Western societies in the early modern period. During the same epoch, the sports of non-Western cultures moved rapidly toward extinction. The "Columbian Exchange" in sport was initially a one-way street. Indigenous sports, such as the elaborate ritual of the Mesoamerican ball game, were destroyed by Western conquest. Modern sports developed almost exclusively in Western cultures. Western cultures sometimes appropriated pastimes such as lacrosse, a game with heritages in both Europe and the Americas, but they relentlessly modernized them. A survey of sports including the largest global athletic event, the modern Olympic Games, reveals that, with one exception, all developed from Western sources. That one exception, judo, was invented by pro-Western innovators in Japan who sought to modernize their own nation through the introduction of Western-style sports. The global sporting culture that has emerged since the mid-1800s is a product of the West.

The rise of the modern nation-state, beginning in Europe and North America in the eighteenth century, fueled rapid growth of the idea of sport as a useful social tool. In sport many nationalists thought that they had discovered an elemental force for making the French Revolution's three criteria for modern nationhood—liberty, equality, fraternity—into social realities. Through modern sport they proclaimed the end of the old sporting order of ancien regimes and the rise of new national pastimes, from cricket to prize fighting to varieties of football to baseball. They recognized, as C. L. R. James later noted, that when the modern masses had the liberty to choose their leisure they gravitated to sport. Sport also became a testing ground for modern notions of equality. Class, ethnicity, race, and gender boundaries increasingly came under attack on playing fields in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The ideal, if not always the reality, of equality, played to mass audiences in sporting dramas through "great experiments" in racial integration such as the tales of Jackie Robinson in U.S. baseball, Edson Arantes do Nascimento (better known as Pelé) in Brazilian soccer, and Learie Constantine in British cricket.

It was, however, the third element of the French Revolution's prescription for modern nationalism where sport found the most fertile loam. More than any other modern institution with the exception of war, sport provides the necessary conditions for the blossoming of fraternity, the patriotic bonds that bind citizen to citizen. Sport and physical education as agents of fraternal bonding first developed during the 1700s and 1800s in the English-speaking world and in Germany. In Germany, which was occupied by France and not yet unified as a modern state, a powerful national movement known as the Turners arose. The Turners were devoted explicitly to promoting physical fitness and implicitly to creating a nation of soldier-athletes to win independence for the fatherland. The movement married exercise to patriotism. Turners formed the core of the German revolution against French hegemony and fought for a unified German nation. The Turner movement spread to German communities in Europe and the Americas, and sparked imitations in Denmark and Sweden. The inherent Germanness of the physical education system, however, ultimately prevented global diffusion of the Turners.

At the same time, in the heartland of the industrial revolution, modern competitive sports developed in Great Britain, its colonies, and its former colonies. National games such as cricket, soccer football, and rugby football emerged. Promoters sold these games as the fraternal foundation of Greater British identity. Resistance to British national games from sections of the English-speaking world sparked the modernization of Gaelic football and hurling in Ireland and the invention of baseball and American football in the United States. Through these games, and the massive literature that grew to support them such as the classic English sporting novel, Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857), Anglo-American cultures crafted the idea that participation in sport taught modern peoples the basic tenets of citizenship. In Anglo-American ideology sport promoted moral virtue, balanced individual and communal needs, and fostered fair competition in every social endeavor. Sports, as Anglo-American promoters ceaselessly preached, were essential tools in the construction of modern nationhood.

While the gymnastic exercises of German Turners failed to find a receptive global audience, Anglo-American sports soon became a worldwide phenomenon. As the world's major imperial power, Great Britain's games spread throughout the world. As a rising imperial power, the sports of the United States also spread. With the birth of the modern Olympic Games in 1896, an event midwifed by the baron Pierre de Coubertin, a French Anglophile who fervently believed in Anglo-American sporting ideology, modern Western sport moved toward global hegemony. During the twentieth century, the Olympic Games and the World Cup soccer tournament—a 1930 spin-off from the Olympics—became the world's most popular spectacles. Soccer football, originally a British pastime, became "the world's game," spreading from the West to the rest of the world through emulation and diffusion rather than at imperial gun-point. Non-Western cultures clearly chose to adopt this European import.

Encased in rhetorical claims that sport promoted peaceful internationalism, the global spread of sport during the world's bloodiest century (the 1900s) revealed that most of the world's cultures had converted to the Anglo-American faith that sport was a crucial element for fueling patriotism rather than athletic pacifism. As sport became the common language of global culture, it represented a dialect that forged national rather than global identities and was spoken with equal fluency by dictatorships as well as democracies. Sport represented an essential bonding agent in the "imagined communities" of many modern nations. Initially national sporting cultures embraced men but discouraged or excluded women from serving as patriotic athletes or fans. As ideas of gender equity altered social relations in modern nations, the homosocial boundaries of sport came under assault. By the end of the nineteenth century, women had begun to participate as both spectators and players in increasing numbers. The emergence of women in sport was frequently equated to women's emancipation and suffrage. When U.S. swimmer Gertrude Ederle became the first woman to conquer the English Channel in 1926, beating the times of all the men who had previously navigated those waters, her feat was hailed as a triumph that rivaled the acquisition of women's voting rights.

In spite of the feats of Ederle and other women, male performances remained normative in modern sport. Women athletes were frequently prized as much for their sexual appeal as for their athletic prowess, a consumer culture trend since the early twentieth century that perhaps explains the early-twenty-first-century global fascination with tennis player Anna Kournikova. Fans in many nations both cheered and leered when women Olympians stoked the fraternal furnaces of athletic nationalism. In cultures where women athletes raised direct challenges to gender orders, such as in some modern Islamic states, female champions such as the Algerian runner Hassiba Boulmerka aroused violent reactions.

Sporting conflicts over ideas about gender reveal that in the early-twenty-first century sport remains a powerful site for debating social concepts and practices. The history of ideas about sport indicates that the question that began C. L. R. James's meditation on cricket and West Indian culture should be expanded. What do they know of sport who only sport know? Insights into human societies develop at the intersection of sport with the myriad other facets of culture, from politics to religion to gender to economic interchange. In the history of ideas, sport represents a popular common pursuit for many societies at many times that can reveal much about the dynamic complexities of human cultures.

See also Body, The .

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Mark Dyreson