from "God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern world".

Excerpt on sports from chapter titled: "Battle of Eton"

fitting for this board I think, I must confess I'm mainly motivated by whats not taught in modern history classes. absolutely shameless.

Quote:Soccer, Basketball, Cricket, American football, baseball, Rugby, Golf, Tennis, hockey, lacrosse, squash, boxing, swimming, track and field: each one of these sports today is played according to the rules originating in North America or Great Britain. (The same can be said of more sedentary pastimes: Monopoly and Scrabble are the world’s leading board games; poker and bridge are the most widely played card games. All originated in either Britain or the United States.)

Some of these games, like soccer, Cricket, and its American Cousin, baseball, are codified and standardized version of traditional English or even European folk pastimes. Modern Golf is descended from a game played with Pebbles and sticks in early modern Scotland. Modern Tennis was consciously developed under the leadership of the English national croquet association from the medieval sport of kings known as real (for royal) tennis. Lacrosse and hockey are anglicized versions of games traditionally played among the indigenous peoples of North America. Boxing is mentioned in the Illiad; however, the modern sport descends from the rules named after the sporting English Marquess of Queensberry who gave them his sanction in the nineteenth century. The rules, a revision of codes dating to 1743, were published in 1865. Swimming is an activity older than written history, and swimming contest presumably are almost as old; yet the modern sport of competitive swimming in standardized events dates to the foundation of the first amateur swimming association in 1869 in England. The rules of cricket were first codified in 1744: the first printed version of the rules(“laws” to cricket fans) appeared in 1775. The Football Association was founded in 1863; to this day it is the body that governs soccer in Britain, and its rules provided the global basis for the world’s most popular sport. By 1877 the tennis subcommittee of the All-England Croquet Club had completed the work of developing the rules of modern tennis. The first organized track and field contests in modern times were held in 1849 at the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich. Basketball was invented in 1891 in Springfield, Massachusetts; baseball is widely held to have first been played in the modern form in 1839 in Cooperstown, New York. Sir Alfred Willis’s 1854 ascent of the Wetterhorn in Switzerland and the 1857 formation of the Alpine Skiing Club of London are held to mark the inauguration of the modern, organized form of mountaineering; of the seven highest summits in the world, six were first climbed by citizens of the English-speaking world. The rules of field hockey were codified by the British Hockey Association, founded in 1886, rugby in its organized form goes back to the formation of the Rugby Football Union in 1871.

Even an event like the modern Olympics, a revival of the ancient Greek sporting ritual under the sponsorship of Frenchman Pierre de Coubertin, the French aristocrat believed that the British alone had “preserved and followed and the true Olympian tradition.”

The Leadership of the Anglo-Americans in the development of global sport was due to some of the same factors that contributed to the more general role of these societies in shaping the rise of modern popular culture. The relatively affluent Anglo-Saxon world had more people with more time and money to engage in such pastimes, or to pay admission fees to watch others play them. At the same time, their leadership in the transportation revolution meant that they quickly developed the rail networks which made it possible for teams to travel regularly to regional or national contest, allowing the formation of wider leagues. Thanks to the Telegraph, the drama of league competition and timely accounts of distant matches could be made available on the next-day basis for anyone with access to the penny press.

Yet there is more to the story. The English-speaking athletes and sportsmen responsible for the extraordinary burst of athletic creativity combined two passions that are often opposed: the passion of compete and the passion to organize. Competition in these new sports was keener and more complete than ever; yet these sports were also far more highly regulated and controlled than the pastimes out of which they arose. Stimulating competition and excitement was the conscious goal of the organizers; they tried to develop the rules that would make the games as exciting as possible. In some cases, the motive was frankly commercial. A more exciting game would draw larger audiences. In other cases, the motive was love of competition. Standardized rules would allow national and international competitions, and common rules would allow for clear, uncontested winners and losers.

The new rules were not aimed at taming sports. The Marquess of Queensberry rules for boxing, for example, provided for long matches and probably increased the likelihood of brain damage. Over time, as various rule-making bodies have revised the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century rules, close to attention continues to be paid to enhancing the values of the sport for spectators as well as ensuring that the rules of facilitate rather than frustrate the commercial well-being of teams and leagues. Once-rigid lines of between professional and amateur athletics have been blurred, even in the once sacred Olympics. Shorter cricket matches have been designed to increase the sport’s appeal to contemporary audiences; the rules of American professional football have been modified to provide an appropriate number of breaks in play so that televised games have advertising slots to sell to sponsors.
The Anglo-American world has in fact regulated its athletic activities in much the same spirit as it has regulated its financial markets and economic life-and the results have been much the same. Like ivy staked to a trellis, the competitive spirit of the English-speaking world has bound to a regulatory framework intended to heighten and sustain competition, rather than to check and hinder it. The results speak for themselves.

While the world today carries on the business and plays its games very much along the lines that the Anglo-Americans sketched out, the English-speakers do not always win. The first baseball games between Americans and Japanese resulted in the Japanese victories almost as sweeping as the victories Japanese car companies would later enjoy against Ford and General Motors. English teams are not often seen in the finals of the World Cup, and English cricket teams in recent history have held few terrors for competitors in the West Indies, India and Pakistan.

Nevertheless, in a great many fields, sporting and otherwise, the world today is playing the Anglo-Saxon game by Anglo-Saxon rules and the Duke of Wellington was speaking far more profoundly than he knew when he said that the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. The way the Anglo-Americans have organized themselves for competition in business and in sport has been and remains one of the most powerful factors shaping the way the whole world lives.

signed,

GGNiner, unapologetically American in the classical Liberal and English respect.

p.s. SCREW FRANCE