Traditional African sports

It is unlikely that the 7th-century Islamic conquest ofNorth Africa radically altered the traditional sports of the region. As long as wars were fought withbow and arrow, archery contests continued to serve as demonstrations of ready prowess. The prophet Muhammad specifically authorized horse races, and geography dictated that men race camels as well as horses. Hunters, too, took their pleasures on horseback.

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Among the many games of North Africa wasta kurt om el mahag (“the ball of the pilgrim’s mother”), a Berber bat-and-ball contest whose configuration bore an uncanny resemblance to baseball.Koura, more widely played, was similar to football (soccer).

Cultural variation among black Africans was far greater than among the Arab peoples of the northern littoral. Ball games were rare, butwrestling of one kind or another wasubiquitous. Wrestling’s forms and functions varied from tribe to tribe. For theNuba ofsouthern Sudan, ritual bouts, for which men’s bodies were elaborately decorated as well as carefully trained, were the primary source of male status andprestige. TheTutsi andHutu of Rwanda were among the peoples who staged contests between females. Among the various peoples ofsub-Saharan Africa, wrestling matches were a way to celebrate or symbolically encourage human fertility and the earth’s fecundity. In southern Nigeria, for instance,Igbo tribesmen participated in wrestling matches held every eighth day throughout the three months of the rainy season; hard-fought contests, it was thought, persuaded the gods to grant abundant harvests of corn (maize) and yams. Among the Diola of the Gambia,adolescent boys and girls wrestled (though not against one another) in what was clearly a prenuptial ceremony. Male champions were married to their female counterparts. In other tribes, such as theYala of Nigeria, theFon of Benin, and the Njabi of the Congo, boys and girls grappled with each other. Among the Kole, it was the kin of the bride and the bridegroom who wrestled. Stick fights, which seem to have been less closely associated with religious practices, were common among many tribes, including theZulu andMpondo of southern Africa.

Contests for runners and jumpers were to be found across the length and breadth of the continent. During the age of imperialism, explorers and colonizers were often astonished by the prowess of these “primitive” peoples.Nandi runners of Kenya’s Rift Valley seemed to run distances effortlessly at a pace that brought European runners to pitiable physical collapse. Tutsi high jumpers of Rwanda and Burundi soared to heights that might have seemed incredible had not the jumpers been photographed in flight by members ofAdolf Friedrich zu Mecklenburg’s anthropological expedition at the turn of the 20th century.

Long before European conquest introduced modern sports andmarginalized native customs, conversion to Islam tended to undercut—if not totally eliminate—the religious function of African sports, but elements of pre-Christian and pre-Islamic magical cults have survived into postcolonial times. Zulu football players rely not only on their coaches and trainers but also on the services of theirinyanga (“witch doctor”).

Traditional Asian sports

Like the highly evolved civilizations of which they are a part, traditional Asian sports are ancient and various. Competitions were never as simple as they seemed to be. From the IslamicMiddle East across theIndian subcontinent to China and Japan, wrestlers—mostly but not exclusively male—embodied and enacted the values of theircultures. The wrestler’s strength was always more than a merely personal statement. More often than not, the men who strained and struggled understood themselves to be involved in a religious endeavour. Prayers, incantations, and rituals of purification were for centuries an important aspect of the hand-to-hand combat of Islamic wrestlers. It was not unusual to combine the skills of the wrestler with those of a mystic poet. Indeed, the celebrated 14th-century Persianpahlavan (ritual wrestler) Maḥmūd Khwārezmī was both.

Typical of the place of sport within a religiouscontext was the spectacle of 50 sturdy Turks who wrestled in Istanbul in 1582 to celebrate the circumcision of the son ofMurad III. When Indian wrestlers join anakhara (gymnasium), they commit themselves to the quest for a holy life. As devout Hindus, they recitemantras as they do their knee bends and push-ups. In their struggle against “pollution,” they strictly control their diet, sexual habits, breathing, and even their urination and defecation.

While the religious aspects of Turkish and Iranian “houses of strength” (where weightlifting and gymnastics were practiced) became much lesssalient in the course of the 20th century, the elders in charge of Japanesesumo added a number ofShintō elements to the rituals of their sport to underscore their claim that it is a unique expression of Japanese tradition. A somewhat arbitrary distinction can be made between wrestling and the many forms of unarmed hand-to-hand combat categorized as martial arts. The emphasis of the latter is military rather than religious, instrumental rather than expressive. Chinesewushu (“military skill”), which included armed as well as unarmed combat, was highly developed by the 3rd centurybce. Its unarmed techniques were especially prized within Chinese culture and were an important influence on the martial arts of Korea, Japan, andSoutheast Asia. Much less well known in the West arevarma adi (“hitting thevital spots”) and other martial arts traditions ofSouth Asia. In the early modern era, as unarmed combat became obsolete, the emphasis of Asian martial arts tended to shift back toward religion. This shift can often be seen in the language of sports. Japanesekenjutsu (“techniques of the sword”) becamekendō (“the way of the sword”).

Of the armed (as opposed to unarmed) martial arts, archery was among the most important in the lives of Asian warriors from the Arabian to the Korean peninsulas. Notably, the Japanesesamurai practiced many forms of archery, the most colourful of which was probablyyabusame, whosemounted contestants drew their bows and loosed their arrows while galloping down a straight track some 720 to 885 feet (220 to 270 metres) long. They were required to shoot in quick succession at three small targets—each about 9 square inches (55 square cm) placed on 3-foot- (0.9-metre-) high poles 23 to 36 feet (7 to 11 metres) from the track and spaced at intervals of 235 to 295 feet (71.5 to 90 metres). Inyabusame, accuracy was paramount.

In Turkey, where the composite (wood plus horn) bow was an instrument ofgreat power, archers competed for distance. At Istanbul’s Okmeydanı (“Arrow Field”), the record was set in 1798 whenSelim III’s arrow flew more than 2,900 feet (884 metres).

As can be seen in Mughal art of the 16th and 17th centuries, aristocratic Indians—like their counterparts throughout Asia—used their bows and arrows for hunting as well as for archery contests. Mounted hunters demonstratedequestrian as well as toxophilite skills. The Asian aristocrat’s passion for horses, which can be traced as far back as Hittite times, if not earlier, led not only to horse races (universal throughout Asia) but also to the development ofpolo and a host of similar equestrian contests. These equestrian games may in fact be the most distinctive Asian contribution to the repertory of modern sports.

In all probability, polo evolved from a far rougher game played by the nomads of Afghanistan andCentral Asia. In the form that survived into the 21st century, Afghanbuzkashi is characterized by a dustymelee in which hundreds of mounted tribesmen fought over the headlesscarcass of a goat. The winner was the hardy rider who managed to grab the animal by the leg and drag it clear of the pack. Sincebuzkashi was clearly an inappropriate passion for a civilized monarch, polo filled the bill. Persian manuscripts from the 6th century refer to polo played during the reign of Hormuz I (271–273). The game was painted by miniaturists and celebrated by Persian poets such asFerdowsī (c. 935–c. 1020) andḤāfeẓ (1325/26–1389/90). By 627 polo had spread throughout the Indian subcontinent and had reached China, where it became a passion among those wealthy enough to own horses. (All 16 emperors of theTang dynasty [618–907] were polo players.) As with most sports, the vast majority of polo players were male, but the 12th-century Persian poetNeẓāmīcommemorated the skills of Princess Shīrīn. Moreover, if numerous terra-cotta figures can be trusted as evidence, polo was also played by aristocratic Chinese women.

There were also ball games for ordinary men and women. Played with carefully sewn stuffed skins, with animal bladders, or with found objects as simple as gourds, chunks of wood, or rounded stones, ball games are universal. Ball games of all sorts were quite popular among the Chinese. Descriptions of the gamecuju, which resembled modern football (soccer), appeared as early as the EasternHan dynasty (25–220). Games similar to modernbadminton were also played in the 1st century. Finally, theMing dynasty (1368–1644)scroll paintingGrove of Violets depicts elegantly attired ladies playingchuiwan, a game similar to moderngolf.

Sports of the ancient Mediterranean world

Rome

Althoughchariot races were among the most popular sports spectacles of the Roman andByzantine eras, as they had been in Greek times, the Romans of the republic and the early empire were quite selectively enthusiastic about Greek athletic contests. Emphasizing physical exercises for military preparedness, an important motive in all ancient civilizations, the Romans preferred boxing, wrestling, andhurling the javelin torunning footraces and throwing the discus. The historian Livy wrote of Greek athletes’ appearing in Rome as early as 186bce; however, the contestants’ nudity shocked Roman moralists. The emperorAugustus instituted theActian Games in 27bce to celebrate his victory over Antony and Cleopatra, and several of hissuccessors began similar games, but it was not until the later empire, especially during the reign ofHadrian (117–138ce), that many of the Roman elite developed an enthusiasm for Greek athletics.

Greater numbers flocked to the chariot races held in Rome’sCircus Maximus. They were watched by as many as 250,000 spectators, five times the number that crowded into theColosseum to enjoygladiatorial combat. Nevertheless, there is some evidence that the latter contests were actually more popular than the former. Indeed, themunera, which pitted man against man, and thevenationes, which set men against animals, became popular even in the Greek-speaking Eastern Empire, which historians once thought immune from the lust for blood. The greater frequency of chariot races can be explained in part by the fact that they were relatively inexpensive compared with the enormous costs of gladiatorial combat. Theeditor who staged the games usually rented the gladiators from alanista (the manager of a troupe of gladiators) and was required to reimburse him for losers executed in response to a “thumbs down” sign. Brutal as these combats were, many of the gladiators were free men who volunteered to fight, an obvious sign ofintrinsic motivation. Indeed, imperial edicts were needed to discourage the aristocracy’s participation. During the reign of Nero (54–68), female gladiators were introduced into thearena.

The Romancircus and the Byzantinehippodrome continued to provide chariot racing long after Christian protests (and heavy economic costs) ended the gladiatorial games, probably early in the 5th century. In many ways the chariot races were quite modern. The charioteers were divided into bureaucratically organized factions (e.g., the “Blues” and the “Greens”), which excited the loyalties of fans fromBritain to Mesopotamia. Charioteers boasted of the number of their victories as modern athletes brag about their “stats,” indicating, perhaps, someincipient awareness of what in modern times are calledsports records. The gladiatorial games, however, like the Greek games before them, had a powerful religious dimension. The first Roman combats, in 264bce, were probably derived from Etruscan funeral games in which mortal combat provided companions for the deceased. It was the idolatry of the games, even more than their brutality, that horrified Christian protesters. The less-obtrusive pagan religious associations of the chariot races helped them survive for centuries after Constantine’s conversion to Christianity in 337ce.

Sports in theMiddle Ages

The sports ofmedieval Europe were less well-organized than those of classical antiquity. Fairs and seasonal festivals were occasions for men to lift stones or sacks of grain and for women to run smock races (for a smock, not in one). The favourite sport of the peasantry wasfolk football, a wild no-holds-barred unbounded game that pitted married men against bachelors or one village against another. The violence of the game, which survived in Britain and in France until the late 19th century, prompted Renaissance humanists, such asSir Thomas Elyot, to condemn it as more likely to maim than to benefit the participants.

Thenascentbourgeoisie of theMiddle Ages and the Renaissance amused itself witharchery matches, some of which were arranged months in advance and staged with considerable fanfare. When town met town in a challenge of skill, the companies of crossbowmen and longbowmen marched behind the symbols ofSt. George,St. Sebastian, and other patrons of the sport. It was not unusual for contests in running, jumping, cudgeling, and wrestling to be offered for the lower classes who attended the match as spectators. Grand feasts were part of the program, and drunkenness commonly added to the revelry. In Germanic areas aPritschenkoenig was supposed to simultaneously keep order and entertain the crowd with clever verses.

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The burghers of medieval towns were welcome to watch thearistocracy at play, but they were not allowed to participate intournaments or even, in most parts of Europe, to compete in imitative tournaments of their own. Tournaments were the jealously guardedprerogative of the medievalknight and were, along with hunting andhawking, his favourite pastime. At thetilt, in which mounted knights with lances tried to unhorse one another, the knight was practicing the art of war, his raison d’être. He displayed his prowess before lords, ladies, and commoners and profited not only from valuable prizes but also from ransoms exacted from the losers. Between the 12th and the 16th century, the dangerously wild free-for-all of the earlytournament evolved into dramatic presentations of courtly life in which elaborate pageantry and allegorical display quite overshadowed the frequently ineptjousting. Some danger remained even amid the display. At one of the last great tournaments, in 1559,Henry II of France was mortallywounded by a splintered lance.

Peasant women participated freely in the ball games and footraces of medieval times, and aristocratic ladies hunted and kept falcons, but middle-class women contented themselves with spectatorship. Even so, they were more active than their contemporaries in Heian Japan during the 8th to 12th centuries. Encumbered by many-layered robes and sequestered in their homes, the Japanese ladies were unable to do more than peep from behind their screens at the courtiers’ mounted archery contests.

Sports in theRenaissance and modern periods

By the time of theRenaissance, sports had become entirely secular, but in the minds of the 17th-century Czech educatorJohn Amos Comenius and other humanists, a concern for physical education on what were thought to be classic models overshadowed the competitive aspects of sports. Indeed, 15th- and 16th-century elites preferred dances to sports and delighted in geometric patterns of movement. Influenced by the ballet, which developed in France during this period, choreographers trained horses to perform graceful movements rather than to win races. French and Italian fencers such as the famedGirard Thibault, whoseL’Académie de l’espée (“Fencing Academy”) appeared in 1628, thought of their activity more as an art form than as a combat. Northern Europeans emulated them. Humanistically inclined Englishmen and Germans admired thecultivated Florentine game ofcalcio, a form of football that stressed the good looks and elegant attire of the players. Within the world of sports, the emphasis onaesthetics, rather than achievement, was never stronger.

While theaesthetic element survives in sports such asfigure skating,diving, andgymnastics, the modern emphasis is generally on quantified achievement. In fact, the transition from Renaissance to modern sports can be seen in a semantic shift; the wordmeasure, which once connoted a sense of balance and proportion, began to refer almost exclusively to numerical measurements.

Behind this epochal transition from Renaissance to modern sports lay the scientific developments that sustained theIndustrial Revolution. Technicians sought to perfect equipment. Athletes trained systematically to achieve their physical maximum. New games, such as basketball,volleyball, andteam handball, were consciously invented to specifications as if they were new products for the market. As early as the late 17th century, quantification became an important aspect of sports, and the cultural basis was created for theconcept of the sports record. The wordrecord, in the sense of an unsurpassed quantified achievement, appeared, first in English and then in other languages, late in the 19th century, but the concept went back nearly 200 years.

The development of modern sports having begun in late 17th-century England, it was appropriate that the concept of the sports record also first appeared there. During the Restoration and throughout the 18th century, traditional pastimes such asstick fighting andbullbaiting, which the Puritans had condemned and driven underground, gave way to organized games such ascricket, which developed under the leadership of theMarylebone Cricket Club (founded 1787). Behind these changes lay a new conception of rationalized competition. Contests that seem odd to the modern mind, such as those in which the physically impaired were matched against children, were replaced byhorse races in which fleeter steeds werehandicapped, a notion of equality that led eventually to age and weight classes (though not to height classes) in many modern sports. Although the traditional sport ofboxing flourished throughout the 18th century, it was not until 1743 that boxer-entrepreneurJack Broughton formulated rules to rationalize and regulate the sport. The minimal controls onmayhem imposed by Broughton were strengthened in 1867 by themarquess of Queensberry.

In the course of the 19th century, modern forms of British sports spread from the privileged classes to the common people. National organizations developed to standardize rules and regulations, to transform sporadic challenge matches into systematic league competition, to certify eligibility, and to register results.

Rowing (crew), one of the first sports to assume its modern form, began to attract a following after the first boat race between the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge (1829) and the inauguration of theHenley Regatta (1839). “Athletics” became popular after Oxford and Cambridge held their first track-and-field meet in 1864. TheAmateur Athletic Association, which emphasized track-and-field sports, was founded in 1880, the Amateur Rowing Association in 1882.

Neither sport enjoyed the popularity ofassociation football. The various versions of football played at elite schools such as Eton, Winchester, and Charterhouse were codified in the 1840s, and England’s Football Association was formed in 1863 topropagate what came to be known as “association football” (or simply “soccer”). TheRugby Football Union followed in 1871. Although theFootball Association and most of itsaffiliated clubs were initially dominated by the middle and upper classes, soccer had definitely become “the people’s game” by the end of the century. For instance,Manchester United, one of Britain’s most storied teams, can trace its history to a club established by the city’s railroad workers in 1880.

The entry of working-class athletes into soccer and other sports, as participants if not as administrators, inspired Britain’s middle and upper classes to formulate the amateur rule, which originally excluded not only anyone paid for athletic performances but also anyone who earned his living by manual labour of any sort.

Globalization

From the British Isles, modern sports (and theamateur rule) were diffused throughout the world. Sports that originally began elsewhere, such as tennis (which comes from Renaissance France), were modernized and exported as if they too were raw materials imported for British industry to transform and then export as finished goods.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, the British expelled the French from Canada and from India and extended British rule over much of Africa. To the ends of the earth, cricket followed the Union Jack, which explains the game’s current popularity in Australia, South Asia, and theWest Indies.Rugby football flourishes in other postcolonial cultures, such asNew Zealand andSouth Africa, where the British once ruled. It was, however, association football’s destiny to become the world’s most widely played modern sport.

Cricket and rugby seemed to require British rule in order to take root. Football needed only the presence of British economic and cultural influence. In Buenos Aires, for instance, British residents founded clubs for cricket and a dozen other sports, but it was the Buenos Aires Football Club, founded June 20, 1867, that kindled Argentine passions. In almost every instance, the first to adopt football were thecosmopolitan sons of local elites, many of whom had been sent to British schools by their Anglophile parents. Seeking status as well as diversion, middle-class employees of British firms followed the upper-class lead. From the gamut of games played by the upper and middle classes, the industrial workers of Europe and LatinAmerica, like theindigenous population of Africa, appropriated football as their own.

By the late 19th century, the United States had begun to rival Great Britain as an industrial power and as an inventor of modern sports. Enthusiasts ofbaseball denied its origins in British children’s games such as cat androunders and concocted the myth ofAbner Doubleday, who allegedly invented the game in 1839 in Cooperstown,New York. A more plausible date for the transformation of cat and rounders into baseball is 1845, when a New York bank clerk named Alexander Cartwright formulated the rules of the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club. Even before the Civil War, the game had been taken over by urban workers such as the volunteer firemen who organized the New York Mutuals in 1857. By the time the National League was created in 1876, the game had spread from coast to coast. (It was not until the 1950s, however, thatMajor League Baseball planted its first franchises on the West Coast.)

Basketball, invented in 1891 byJames Naismith, and volleyball, invented four years later byWilliam Morgan, are both quintessentially modern sports. Both were scientifically designed to fulfill a perceived need for indoor games during harshNew England winters.

Football (soccer) is the world’s most popular ball game, but, wherever American economic and culture influence has been dominant, the attraction to baseball, basketball, and volleyball has tended to exceed that to football. Baseball, for example, boomed in Cuba, where Nemesio Guilló introduced the game to his countrymen in 1863, and in Japan, where Horace Wilson, an American educator, taught it to his Japanese students in 1873. Since basketball and volleyball were both invented under theauspices of theYMCA (Young Men’s Christian Association), it seemed reasonable for YMCA workers to take the games to China, Japan, and the Philippines, where the games took root early in the 20th century. It was, however, only in the post-World War II world that U.S. influence generally overwhelmed British; only then did basketball and volleyball become globally popular.

American football, which now enjoys enclaves of enthusiasm in Great Britain and on the European continent, traces its origins to 1874, when a rugby team from Montreal’sMcGill University traveled to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to challenge a team ofHarvard University students. Adopted by American students, rugby evolved intogridiron football, and in that form it became the leading intercollegiate game. Although theNational Football League was established in 1920 (at $100 a franchise), the professional game was a relatively minor affair until afterWorld War II, when football joined baseball and basketball to form the “trinity” of American sports. (Ice hockey, imported from Canada, runs a poor fourth in the race for fans of team sports.)

In the dramatic globaldiffusion of modern sports, the French have also played a significant role. They left it to an Englishman, Walter Wingfield, to modernize the game oftennis, which originated in Renaissance France, but the French took the lead, early in the 19th century, in the development of the bicycle and in the popularization ofcycling races. The first Paris–Rouen race took place in 1869; theTour de France was inaugurated in 1903. The huge success of the latter inspired the Giro d’Italia (1909) and a number of other long-distance races.

The French also left their mark on sports in another way. In 1894, at a conference held at the Sorbonne in Paris, Pierre de Coubertin selected the first members of a Comité International Olympique (International Olympic Committee; IOC) and arranged for the first Olympic Games of the modern era to be held in Athens in 1896. In 1904 Robert Guérin led a group of football (soccer) enthusiasts in forming theFédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), which England’s insular Football Association was at first tooarrogant to join. The English name of the International Amateur Athletic Federation (1912; since 2001 known as theInternational Association of Athletics Federations; IAAF) suggests that the British were more cooperative in track-and-field sports than in football, but the IAAF’s founder was a Swedish industrialist, Sigfrid Edström.

Japan, one of the few non-Western nations where traditional sports still rival modern ones in popularity, is also one of the few non-Western nations to contribute significantly to the repertory of modern sports.Judo, invented in 1882 by Kanō Jigorō in an effort to combine Western and Asian traditions, attracted European adherents early in the 20th century. In 1964 judo became an Olympic sport.

From 1952, when theSoviet Union emerged from its self-imposed sports isolation, to 1991, when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republicsceased to exist, thecommunist societies of eastern Europe dominated the Olympic Games. In 1988, for instance, theGerman Democratic Republic (East Germany), with a population of some 16 million, outscored the United States, 15 times its size. While anabolic steroids and other banned substances contributed to the East Germans’ triumph, credit must also be given to their relentless application of scientific methods in the search for the ultimate sports performance. The collapse of communism undermined state-sponsored elite sports in eastern Europe, but not before the nations of western Europe had begun to emulate their athletic adversaries by sponsoring scientific research, subsidizing elite athletes, and constructingvast training centres.

In the 20th century, sports underwent social as well as spatial diffusion. After a long and frequently bitter struggle,African Americans, Australian Aboriginal people, “Cape Coloureds” (in South Africa), and other excluded racial and ethnic groups won the right to participate in sports. After a long and somewhat less-bitter struggle, women also won the right to compete in sports—such as rugby—that had been considered quintessentially masculine.

While theBritish Isles may be considered the homeland of modern sports, modernphysical education can be traced back to German and Scandinavian developments of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Men such asJohann Christoph Friedrich Guts Muths inGermany andPer Henrik Ling in Sweden elaborated systems of gymnasticexercise that were eventually adopted by school systems in Britain, the United States, and Japan. These noncompetitivealternatives to modern sports also flourished in eastern Europe during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Among repressed ethnic peoples such as the Poles and Czechs,gymnastics became almost a way of life. For them, gymnastic festivals were grand occasions at which tens of thousands ofdisciplined men and women demonstrated nationalistic fervour.

Gymnastic fervour was not, however, much in evidence among the world’s schoolchildren and college students as they encountered gymnastics in required physical-education classes. Calisthenic exercises designed to improve health and fitness were dull and dreary compared with the excitement of modern sports. Long before the end of the 20th century, even German educators had abandonedLeibeserziehung (“physical education”) in favour ofSportunterricht (“instruction in sports”). For young and for old, for better and for worse, sports are the world’s passion.