Sports

Sports Amateur Sports and RecreationProfessional Sports
Amateur Sports and Recreation Sports in the Colonial Era and the early nineteenth century were participatory leisure activities, based on traditional European folk games. They were enjoyed for their own sake or for the thrill of gambling, except among Puritans and Quakers who required their recreations to be moral and beneficial to the individual or society. Early American sports were mainly noncompetitive field pursuits like hunting, fishing, and fox hunting, or competitive gambling activities like horse racing, bowling, and billiards. Leisure sports were first organized by the elite Schuykill River Fishing Colony of Philadelphia in 1732. By the 1740s, jockey clubs in New York City, Williamsburg (Virginia), and Charles Town (now Charleston), South Carolina, were building racetracks and scheduling competitive horse races.

Antebellum sports were dominated by a male bachelor subculture whose favorite diversions such as boxing, horse racing, and billiards were disdained by the Victorian middle class as dangerous, immoral, or a waste of time. Middle‐class resistance to sport ended following the development of a positive sports creed in the 1840s and 1850s by moral reformers and health professionals. This ideology justified participation in such athletic activities as gymnastics, introduced by German immigrants, and the new game of baseball, which purportedly improved health and strengthened character. Victorians stressed amateurism—participation in sport for its own sake—a concept primarily developed by mid‐nineteenth‐century elite English sportsmen to avoid competing with athletes from lower social backgrounds. The line dividing amateur and professional was originally status, not cash. In the United States, antebellum amateur and professional cricket players and trackmen competed against each other, and college crews hired professional trainers. Amateurism first became an issue in the 1860s when certain baseball clubs used financial incentives to recruit top players.

Amateur Athletic Clubs.

Amateurism was propelled by the rise of status‐conscious elite sports clubs that became increasingly fearful of scheduling events with lower‐class athletes and worried that full‐time professionals, who allegedly did anything necessary to win, would take over their games. In 1876 the New York Athletic Club (NYAC) drew up an amateur code based on English precedents to regulate its competitions, barring anyone who had competed for money, played with professionals, or taught or coached athletics for a living. These rules were adopted by other athletic clubs and, in 1879, by the new National Amateur Athletic Association of America (N4A).

The American amateur code, unlike the English, historian Benjamin Rader points out, did not rest on a body of established customs or the patronage of an aristocracy for whom style transcended victory. Upper‐middle‐class and elite Americans were accustomed to winning in business at all costs, and their clubs hypocritically skirted N4A rules, recruiting top athletes, regardless of social background, to assure victories and gain prestige. Inducements included free initiation and membership, room and board, employment, and even cash. In 1878 the prestigious Manhattan Athletic Club (MAC) recruited the Jewish athlete Lon Myers, a bookkeeper by profession, who held every American track record from fifty yards to the mile, by hiring him as club secretary. Top performers like Myers further profited by selling their prizes—medals, silverware, gold watches, and so forth—for cash; an 1884 MAC benefit for Myers raised four thousand dollars.

Gilded Age track‐and‐field champions were mainly students and clerks, partly because the amateur code discouraged working‐class participation. Amateur blue‐collar athletes had difficulty training because of long working hours, low wages, and lack of access to equipment, facilities, coaching, and sponsorship. Those who did succeed—typically artisans (especially printers) or municipal workers, like policemen, who had flexible hours and jobs that called for physical fitness and strength—mainly competed at annual picnics sponsored by employers, unions, benevolent societies, ethnic organizations, or political parties.

In the 1880s, emulating the lifestyle of the English country gentry, wealthy Americans established country clubs, beginning with one in Brookline, Massachusetts (1882). Membership in these suburban clubs was more prestigious than in the urban athletic clubs. Their main competitive sports, for men and women, were golf and tennis. Tennis also became popular with the middle class as courts were laid out in public urban parks. Middle‐class women, already active in such leisure sports as sleighing, ice skating, and croquet, became avid cyclists during the bicycle craze of the 1890s.

In the early 1880s, to attract older, more socially prominent members, the NYAC altered its recruitment policies to emphasize prestige rather than athletic skill. It also campaigned against perceived violators of the amateur code, particularly by the MAC, and fought professionalism by helping to establish the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) in 1888. The AAU quickly became the dominant organization in amateur sport, disqualifying athletes who violated the amateur codes and erasing their records. By the early 1900s, however, the AAU itself faced criticism for duplicity because favored promoters provided star athletes with “under‐the‐table” payments, and the practice of redeeming prizes for cash persisted, especially among boxers.

The Olympic Games.

The Olympic Games, revived in 1896, became by 1912 the centerpiece of amateur competition in track and field, swimming, and boxing. Historian Steven Pope argues that the Olympics solidified amateurism by linking it to nationalism. Most early Olympic stars were collegians or alumni competing for noted athletic clubs, but a substantial proportion, especially in strength events, were working‐class athletes representing less prestigious organizations like New York's Irish‐American Athletic Club.

The most infamous amateur controversy involved the football and track star Jim Thorpe (1888–1953), who won both the pentathlon and decathlon at the 1912 Olympics. When it was revealed several months later that Thorpe had briefly played minor league baseball, and was therefore a “professional,” he was forced to return his medals.

Avery Brundage, president of the International Olympic Committee from 1952 to 1972, tried to protect amateurism as the concept came under increasing pressure. After World War II, the Communist bloc sent to the Olympics state‐subsidized athletes Americans considered “professionals.” U.S. competitors were typically younger and primarily supported by college athletics scholarships. The purity of Olympic amateurism further waned in the 1960s as athletes, especially Austrian skiers, accepted payments to endorse products. The amateur‐professional division largely collapsed in the mid‐1970s when the Olympics introduced open competition. The Amateur Sports Act of 1978 enabled American Olympic aspirants to accept appearance payments, earn money on the international track circuit, work as consultants, and do commercials if the funds were placed in trust accounts for living and training expenses. By the 1990s, the distinction between amateur and professional had become virtually meaningless, as evidenced by the basketball “Dream Team” at the 1992 Olympics.

Intercollegiate Athletics.

In addition to voluntary sports clubs, intercollegiate athletics was the other main bastion of amateurism. Even here, however, a win‐at‐all‐costs attitude led to professionalization. As early as 1900, historian Robert Smith points out, sport at elite institutions like Yale had become commercialized and professionalized, providing a model for other colleges.

Rowing, the first male intercollegiate sport, began in 1852 with the Harvard‐Yale race. It was followed by cricket, baseball (the main college sport in the 1870s), football, and track. The best college baseball nines periodically played pro teams. From 1865 to 1875, Yale's squad played twice as many professional clubs as college squads. The College Baseball Association (1879), the first intercollegiate baseball league, had little control over player eligibility and could not cope with the problem of summer baseball. Beginning in the 1880s, top collegians played during the summer break, often under pseudonyms, on semipro, resort, and professional teams, either for a salary or other compensation, without losing their amateur standing.

Intercollegiate competition in football, which would soon supplant baseball as the most popular intercollegiate sport, began in 1869. By the 1890s, teams were hiring professional coaches and recruiting athletes with scholarships, easy courses, and high‐paying jobs. In 1905, for instance, James J. Hogan, Yale's twenty‐seven‐year‐old football captain, received free tuition, a fancy suite, a vacation in Cuba, and a monopoly of American Tobacco Company products sold on campus.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association, founded in 1906 to make football safer and reform and enforce eligibility and financial rules, faced a herculean task. Intercollegiate athletes of the 1990s were still ostensibly amateurs who forfeited their eligibility if they received financial compensation in their sport beyond their grants‐in‐aid, but periodic scandals underscored the difficulty of preserving the distinction.

Women's intercollegiate competition, popular at elite women's colleges at the turn of the century, was halted by physical educators fearful that women were too delicate for vigorous competition and desirous of avoiding the negative consequences of men's sport. They preferred “play days” and intramural activities. Only in the 1970s, owing to the revived women's rights movement and Title IX of the Educational Amendments Act of 1972, did the emphasis in women's athletics return to competitive sport.

Opportunities for urban immigrant boys to participate in sports expanded during the Progressive Era, encouraged by YMCAs, settlement houses, the staffs of inner‐city parks, and public schools intent on socializing them and providing an alternative to morally suspect street amusements. Competitive high school sports programs arose in the late nineteenth century, based on the collegiate model, to promote school spirit and community pride and develop athletic skills. By 1923, forty‐five states held statewide high school competitions. Working‐class adult participation in amateur sports promoted by companies whose welfare‐capitalism programs included financing lifelong sports like bowling and softball, and by the New Deal's Public Works Administration, which built and improved thousands of parks and beaches.

Participatory sports grew significantly in the 1980s and 1990s, influenced by middle‐class health and fitness anxieties, concerns about physical appearance, and the women's movement. These years saw a great increase in cycling and jogging, exercising at health clubs, and even marathoning, which was sponsored by hundreds of cities. Entries in the New York City Marathon rose from 126 in 1972 to over 20,000 in the mid‐1980s. Despite the perennial intrusions of professionalism, amateur sports remained a vital force as the twentieth century ended.
See also Bicycles and Bicycling; Education: Collegiate Education; Education: The Rise of the University; Feminism; New Deal Era, The; Popular Culture; Social Class; Working‐Class Life and Culture; YMCA and YWCA.

Bibliography

Ted Vincent , Mudville's Revenge: The Rise and Fall of American Sport, 1981.
Allen Guttman , The Olympics: A History of the Modern Games, 1982.
Donald Mrozek , Sport and American Mentality, 1880–1910, 1983.
Allen Guttman , The Games Must Go On: Avery Brundage and the Olympic Movement, 1984.
Ronald A. Smith , Sports and Freedom: The Rise of Big‐Time College Athletics, 1988.
Steven A. Riess , City Games: The Evolution of American Urban Society and the Rise of Sports, 1989.
Benjamin G. Rader , American Sports: From the Age of Folk Games to the Age of Televised Sports, 3d ed., 1996.
S.W. Pope , Patriotic Games: Sporting Traditions in the American Imagination, 1876–1926, 1997.
Mark Oyreson , Making the American Team: Sport, Culture, and the Olympic Experience, 1998.

Steven A. Riess

Professional Sports Professional athletes compete for cash or other remuneration. The first professional sportsmen were probably New York oarsmen in the 1810s who competed for prizes in rowing races; long‐distance runners, called “pedestrians,” in the 1830s and 1840s, who raced for cash purses at enclosed tracks; and pugilists who competed for side bets. Professional sports boomed in the late nineteenth century, as the nation became sufficiently urbanized to support commercial leisure. During this era, sport became modernized, entrepreneurs marketed quality sports to spectators, and paid athletes worked full time at their craft.

A few professional sports in the Gilded Age, like track, were carryovers from the Antebellum Era. The Caledonian games celebrating traditional Scottish highland culture dominated track and field from the early 1850s until the mid–1870s, offering cash prizes of a few hundred dollars for running races and such events as throwing the caber (a long, heavy pole) and pitching the heavy stone. Professional runners also competed at working‐class picnics and amusement parks, often sponsored by saloonkeepers or local politicians who shared their winning wagers with the athletes. Long‐distance running at indoor arenas continued to be very popular in the 1870s. In these years, too, a brief fad developed for six‐day foot races that covered over five hundred miles. Winners in the prestigious Astley Belt series of 1878–1879 made as much as twenty thousand dollars—the top earnings of professional athletes. But thereafter, amateurs completely dominated track, and pro records went unrecognized. Professional track returned in the 1970s once Olympic athletes were permitted openly to accept appearance fees and prize money. Cycling became a professional sport in the 1890s, with riders often subsidized by manufacturers advertising their product.

Horse racing was popular as well. Jockeys had little status in the Antebellum Era, when southern riders were usually slaves. The occupation gained stature after the Civil War, however, as horsemen recognized that good jockeys helped win races, and soon jockeys were among the highest paid athletes. By the early 1900s, a top jockey could make ten thousand dollars a year just from retainer fees. A large portion of riders were African Americans, including Isaac Murphy, whose career earnings totaled over $250,000. They encountered considerable jealousy and prejudice from white competitors, however, who formed secret unions to force them out of this extremely lucrative occupation.

Boxing drew tough men from the bottom ranks of society. The pugilist John L. Sullivan (1858–1918) won fame in the late nineteenth century, even though prizefighting was nearly universally barred because of its brutality and corruption. The Irish dominated the sport until the 1920s, and thereafter recruitment followed a pattern of ethnic succession, ending with men of color. New York legitimized prizefighting under a boxing commission in 1920, and by the 1930s there were thousands of professional pugilists.

Professional golf and tennis developed more slowly. The U.S. Open began in 1894, and the Professional Golfers Association tournament in 1916, but early pros were mainly teachers. Purses were modest until the pro tour became popular in the 1960s, led by Arnold Palmer. The Ladies Professional Golf Association, founded in 1946, received little attention until the emergence of stars like Nancy Lopez in the 1970s. Pro tennis dates to the 1930s, but its period of dramatic growth began with the advent of major international championships, starting with Wimbledon in 1968 and Forest Hills (U.S. Open) a year later. Women's purses, originally 10 percent of men's, eventually achieved near parity through the efforts of pioneers like Billie Jean King.

The first paid team athletes were antebellum cricketeers, but the model professional team sport was baseball. In 1860 pitcher James Creighton of the Brooklyn Atlantics became the first compensated ballplayer. Others soon followed, including players for the New York Mutuals, sponsored by Tammany Hall (New York's Democratic party organization), who held government sinecures. Sporting journals supported professionalization to facilitate working‐class participation and improve the quality of play. The first fully professional team was the Cincinnati Red Stockings of 1869, whose players earned from six hundred to two thousand dollars a season. The rise of professional baseball continued with the founding of the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs in 1876, the rival American League in 1901, and their merger in 1903.

Most early pros, typically from skilled, blue‐collar backgrounds, had little control over their income or working conditions, and were subjected to the reserve clause, which prevented them from leaving their teams. But competition for players gradually raised salaries, attracted better educated and higher‐status athletes, and elevated the occupation's prestige. The early professional ballplayers were mainly urban, white, native‐born Americans of English, Irish, or German origins. African Americans were completely excluded from organized professional baseball after 1898, and restricted to their own teams and leagues.

Professional football and basketball were originally minor, unstable sports with short‐lived professional leagues (1902 and 1898, respectively). The National Football League (NFL) was formed in 1920, but franchises came and went until the early 1930s. The NFL only gained major stature in the 1950s because of television coverage. The National Basketball Association, founded in 1949, went through a shaky period as smaller cities dropped out or teams relocated. From the mid–1920s on, both sports recruited players overwhelmingly from the college ranks.

As of 1998, there were thirty major league baseball and NFL teams, twenty‐nine professional basketball teams, and twenty‐six professional hockey teams. As cities competed to gain or protect sports teams that symbolized urban prestige and supposedly promoted economic development, professional franchises became extremely lucrative. In 1994 the average football franchise was worth $129 million; basketball, $114 million; and baseball, $111 million. Players' incomes similarly skyrocketed following the end of reserve clauses. Average baseball and basketball salaries rose from about nineteen thousand dollars in 1967 to over one million dollars by 1993. Buttressed by enthusiastic fans, powerful economic interests, and saturation television coverage, professional sports occupied a secure niche in American popular culture as the twentieth century ended.
See also Advertising; Automobile Racing; Bicycles and Bicycling; Mass Marketing; Social Class; Urbanization; Working‐Class Life and Culture.

Bibliography

Harold Seymour , Baseball, 3 vols., 1969–1990.
Melvin Adelman , A Sporting Time: New York City and the Rise of Modern Athletics, 1820–70, 1986.
Elliott Gorn , The Manly Art: Bareknuckle Prize Fighting in Nineteenth Century America, 1986.
Steven A. Riess , City Games: The Evolution of American Urban Society and the Rise of Sports, 1989.
Stephen Fox , Big Leagues: Professional Baseball, Football, and Basketball in National Memory, 1994.
Eric M. Leifer , Making the Majors: The Transformation of Team Sports in America, 1995.
Benjamin G. Rader , American Sports: From the Age of Folk Games to the Age of Televised Sports, 1996.

Steven A. Riess