Spectator Sports
Spectator sports as we know them in America date from roughly the late nineteenth century. Before that time, Americans held contests of skill and prowess witnessed by interested observers. But professional athletes, rules, leagues, teams, regular schedules, paid admissions, sports entrepreneurs, and governing bodies such as the National Collegiate Athletic Association and the baseball leagues are little more than a hundred years old.
Before the modern era, pastimes inherited from England predominated in American sports. Horse racing, stick fighting (cudgeling), animal baiting (trained dogs were set against a bear or bull), cockfighting, informal ball games, and lawn bowling were popular in the colonies and early Republic. These events often took place at rural inns and urban taverns, where publicans sponsored sports and other entertainments to stimulate business. Another important context for early sports were the annual holidays and market days held throughout the colonies, events at which the buying and selling of goods were part of a round of festive activities. Here, early sports reinforced social hierarchies. Various classes might mingle at a horse race or cockfight, whereas those who owned the animals, put up the prizes, and wagered the most money were often prominent citizens, whose social prestige was enhanced by displays of wealth. In all these contexts, however, the line between spectators and participants was thin; the man cheering one heat of a quarter-horse race might be riding in the next.
This division began to sharpen in the 1800s. First, the scale of sporting events increased dramatically. Running races (called pedestrianism) and horse races occasionally attracted crowds in the tens of thousands. Rivalries were regional or even national in significance, and the newspapers devoted increasing space to such events. Although it was illegal, boxing became the preeminent sport among working-class men by midcentury. Brutal bare-knuckle matches attracted a rough crowd of young, usually single men who enlivened their working lives with gambling, drinking, and carousing. Harness racing was a more respectable sport, one popular with the middle class. Advocates of the trotters like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., argued that trotting matches were properly democratic, for any good work animal might also race well, and the matches improved American livestock. Harness racing was a harbinger of what was to come in other sports: detailed records were kept; organizations were formed to regulate competition; rules of competition were standardized; and an ideology was articulated to defend the pastime against charges that it promoted idleness.
By midcentury the old folk game of baseball was being played by clubs of young men eager for recreation and fellowship. New York City was the center of baseball (as it was for most sports of this era), for here men gathered in sufficient numbers to form clubs, sometimes based on occupation or social status. Here too were large numbers of potential spectators. By the 1860s and 1870s, teams were spread throughout the Atlantic seaboard and into the Midwest, and competition had raised the level of play sufficiently that some teams charged admission and paid the players. This was a crucial step toward the professionalization of sports.
When the National League was formed in 1876, many of the trappings of the modern game were in place, including private ownership of clubs, their affiliation with particular cities, the establishment of standardized rules and schedules, the keeping of statistics, and extensive coverage in the newspapers (separate sports pages did not appear until late in the century). Above all, the National League was an organization of clubs; it operated as a cartel to limit players' ability to sell their services to other teams. In their quest for profits, and to expand baseball's appeal to the respectable middle class, owners forbade playing on the Sabbath, as well as drinking, swearing, and gambling at ballparks. In important respects, then, the National League was the prototype for contemporary sports organizations.
By the turn of the century, the most prominent spectator sports of today were well on the way to their present forms. In 1892, the first heavyweight championship prize fight was held under the Marquis of Queensberry rules, which mandated the use of padded gloves and timed rounds. John L. Sullivan lost his title to challenger James J. Corbett under the new regime; the fight was legal (unlike bare-knuckle battles) and was held in an indoor arena before some ten thousand fans. In other words, boxing was no longer the exclusive province of an urban bachelor subculture; it had become a profitable business affiliated with the entertainment industry.
Football's path to acceptance was a different one. From colonial times, college boys had engaged in informal interclass games, some vaguely resembling modern soccer or rugby, others more akin to mass brawling. By late in the nineteenth century, college students--who increasingly came from newly wealthy families or from upwardly mobile middle-class backgrounds--were demanding a more flexible academic curriculum, as well as a range of extracurricular activities, including athletics. Football quickly became the preeminent sport in the eastern colleges. By the end of the century, rules had been standardized, and the game had spread to the Midwest and the Far West. The annual Yale-Harvard game, held on Thanksgiving Day, became an important social event, and elites came from far away to see and be seen at the round of balls, parades, and parties. Football in these years, incidentally, was an extraordinarily violent sport: fractured limbs, broken necks, and even deaths were not uncommon.
Baseball and football dominated the college schedule, and these sports were also played in private men's clubs. But this left the winter months without an organized sport for athletes. Thus, basketball, a fully modern and synthetic sport, was invented in the 1890s at the ymca in Springfield, Massachusetts, by James Naismith to give men an indoor game to play between the end of the football season and the beginning of baseball. (The ymcas, it should be noted, had become important places where urban middle-class men could exercise in what was regarded as a wholesome Christian atmosphere, apart from the drinking, gambling, and swearing of pool halls, bowling alleys, and similar places.)
At the end of the nineteenth century, not only were sports commonplace, but an ideology of athletics had displaced old Victorian doubts that games made men slothful or unleashed base passions. Early in the twentieth century, sports advocates like football coach Walter Camp argued that athletics were part of the nation's success ethic; that team games taught corporate cooperation; that athletes upheld the values of hard work and self-discipline; that men who competed learned about fair play and following rules. The use of the word men here is important, for sports were seen as primarily a male preserve; athletics, it was said, taught manliness. Even today, for many men, playing sports or displaying expertise as a spectator is still a critical part of their self-image as males; sports remain central to how American culture defines masculinity. For women, however, those who participated in sports were often considered unfeminine. They were segregated into their own games and received little remuneration or recognition. Not until the women's movement of the late twentieth century was the definition of femininity reshaped to accommodate athleticism.
The 1920s were a cultural watershed, for during those prosperous years spectator sports moved to the center of American consciousness. The golden age of sports was part of the flowering of the entertainment business, the growth of a leisure-oriented consumer ethic, and the rise of the cult of celebrity. During the 1920s, radio knit together the entire nation with live broadcasts of such events as the World Series or championship fights. Meanwhile, newspapers gave page after page of coverage to these great national affairs (the first Dempsey-Tunney fight in 1926, for example, received over a dozen full pages of coverage in the New York Times). And the movies kept sports stars' images before the public with replays of important games and dramatized versions of their lives. Like movie stars, athletes became celebrities whose faces appeared in countless advertisements and whose salaries were reported in the press and marveled at by adoring fans. Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in baseball, Red Grange in football, and Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney in boxing were the most celebrated in a pantheon of heroes whose public lives exemplified glamour, fame, and the good life.
The twentieth century brought other fundamental changes. Sports became big business. By midcentury, stadiums had been built by municipalities seeking to attract or retain teams, but the clubs themselves were privately owned, worth millions of dollars, and usually quite profitable. Most team owners were very wealthy men who held other large business interests. Old prejudices against professionalism--pro athletes, after all, were usually men of common origins, not genteel amateurs who could afford "sport for sport's sake"--continued to give way, and after midcentury, professional football and basketball competed with baseball in popularity. Players benefited from this state of affairs, and though they had little control over how leagues or teams were run, their salaries rivaled those of chief executive officers of large corporations.
Perhaps the most important change after midcentury was the advent of television in big-time sports. Television contracts involved millions, even billions of dollars, and the medium's requirements affected the timing of events, the status of players, and the rules of games. College teams, like professional ones, craved media exposure, sometimes at the expense of academic standards. Television also had an impact on which events became most prominent. Certain sports, such as tennis, can be seen well on the small screen, whereas a defensive game like soccer, spread over an enormous field, is difficult to cover. Television also expanded the potential audience for sports. Those that appealed to an affluent clientele--golf and tennis, for example--became especially important for the networks because they attracted precisely the audience that sponsors wanted.
Television's potential for reaching new spectators also aided the growth of women's sports. The women's movement in the 1960s and 1970s helped make women's athletics much more popular than ever before. Feminist ideals insisted that women could be strong, competent, and competitive, and sports provided a vehicle for the demonstration of women's physical skills and their ability to succeed under pressure. Moreover, increasing numbers of women as well as men became physically active in the second half of the twentieth century as medical evidence mounted that exercise prolonged life, and as American culture glamourized youth and vigor. Millions of Americans took up jogging, tennis, golf, and other sports; as the numbers of participants grew, so did the audience for professional-level competitions. Marathons, tennis matches, and golf tournaments became enormous media events, and women grew particularly prominent as participants and spectators. Perhaps most important, our very definition of femininity changed to encompass such traits as vigor, physical strength, and competitiveness. As women participated more actively in the worlds of work and politics, athletics became an increasingly important expression of their sensibilities and values.
Finally, the twentieth century saw new ethnic groups grow increasingly prominent in sports, though the particular groups changed over the years as other avenues of social mobility opened. Irish and English immigrants during the nineteenth century succeeded as boxers and baseball players, Scots brought to America their Caledonian events (forerunners to modern track and field), and German immigrants brought gymnastics' antecedents to these shores in their Turner societies. In the twentieth century, Jews became prominent in boxing and basketball, but African-Americans and Hispanics came to dominate the former, and blacks alone the latter.
It is often remarked that sports are a sort of idealized version of the American social structure, offering equality of opportunity purely on the basis of merit. Although this concept is central to sports ideology, the reality is more complex. Amateur athletic clubs were designed in the late nineteenth century specifically to exclude lower-class people and "undesirable" ethnic groups. The most telling example of exclusion, of course, was that of blacks from major league baseball until after World War II. Yet it would be a mistake to say that once Jackie Robinson broke in with the Brooklyn Dodgers, the integration of sports was on the road to completion. On the contrary, blacks became so prominent as players in part because other doors of opportunity in the larger society remained closed; sports were perceived as one of the few ways out of the ghetto. Equally important, the sports business structure paralleled that of American society in the sense that the openings it offered minorities tended to be on the bottom rungs of the ladder. Jobs in management and the front office remained largely closed at the end of the century to blacks and other minorities.
Author:
Elliott J. Gorn
See also Ali, Muhammad; Baseball; Football; King, Billie Jean; Louis, Joe; Mays, Willie; Owens, Jesse; Rickey, Branch; Robinson, Jackie; Ruth, Babe; Sports, Popular Participation in; Thorpe, Jim; Tilden, Bill.
