WEEK 1 Introduction to AST256 Sport in History

WEEK 1

Introduction to AST256 Sport in History

Prepared by Tony Joel and Roy Hay

Why study sports history?

In 1999, the Australian Society for Sports History (ASSH) selected a rather provocative theme for

its sixth biennial Sporting Traditions conference: ‘The End of Sports History’. If this were true,

then it would have marked one of the shortest trajectories in the history of academia!1

Scholarly study of sports history is a comparatively new branch of historical investigation. Despite

widespread popularity among the general public, sports were regarded as non-serious, recreational

activities linked most closely to the lower orders of society and consequently dismissed as

somehow unworthy of serious academic inquiry. A few pioneers had produced histories of

individual sports or even tried their hands at synthetic accounts that contextualized a range of

sporting activities in a broader societal setting. Even so, sports history was virtually non-existent

until the 1960s when it gradually emerged as an offshoot of the new trend toward social history

around this time. Some serious studies were published and societies dedicated to the study of

sports history were founded in the Anglosphere (particularly Britain, the United States, and

Australia).2 Academic journals soon were launched in these and other countries around the globe.

As the salience of sport in society throughout history gained increasing recognition, units focused

on sports history started to appear in History Departments at universities and students were

attracted in small but significant numbers. From across the wider discipline, however, academic

respectability still was granted only slowly and grudgingly owing to the aforementioned sentiment

that sport supposedly was too trivial to warrant serious inspection. Gaining wider acceptance

remains an ongoing challenge; indeed, Deakin belongs to the select minority of Australian

universities who offer a unit dedicated to sports history.

Before going any further, then, let’s pause momentarily to think about the significance of this

decision. Deakin’s undergraduate History offerings are rather limited, so we need to choose carefully

when deciding what topics should be covered. Consequently, this means that sports history has been

1 ‘ASSH History: Sporting Traditions Conferences’, Australian Society for Sports History.

<http://www.sporthistory.org/ASSH%20History.htm>[Last accessed 8 October 2020].

2 For instance, see James Walvin, The People’s Game: The Social History of British Football (Allen Lane, London: 1975).

LEARNING MODULE 1. Introduction to AST256 Sport in History

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selected at the expense of many other fascinating and worthwhile topics that could have been offered

in its stead. As a group, we historians hold vigorous discussions on what units we should (and, by

extension, should not) teach. At a time when vocational attributes are increasingly supplementing —

if not supplanting — academic goals as the preferred outcomes of study, why do we believe that

students should tackle a unit on sports history? Well, our aim certainly is not to provide you with an

opportunity to discuss last weekend’s results while picking up an easy credit point over summer. A

soft option this unit is not! It aims to introduce you to the serious study of sport in history — but we

try to make it interesting, informative, and even amusing along the way.

Consider this statement: whether calculated in political, economic, social, or cultural terms, in the

twenty-first century sport is a major part of society. Upon reading this remark, perhaps you

immediately thought of professional leagues such as the AFL here in Australia, the NBA, NFL, MLB,

or NHL in North America, or European football (soccer) leagues such as the EPL, Bundesliga, La

Liga, or Serie A. Or maybe you thought of quadrennial international extravaganzas like FIFA’s World

Cup and the Olympic Games. Alternatively, you may have reflected on a more local level, thinking

about how your small hometown comes to life on a Saturday afternoon when the football and netball

club plays host to a fierce rival. Or what about how (amateur) tennis, golf, bowls, track-and-field, and

surf life-saving clubs can serve as meeting points and the fabric of local communities, or how racing

carnivals attract eager crowds from far and wide? In October 2013, a statue of racehorse Black Caviar

was unveiled in Nagambie — a small country town located between Melbourne and Shepparton now

actively promoting itself as the birthplace of this retired thoroughbred named WTRR World

Champion Sprinter three years in a row (2010-12). It is a similar move to what occurred some years

earlier, when the little western Victorian township of Terang started advertising itself as ‘The Home

of Gammalite: Dual Inter Dominion Winner’ after this standardbred racehorse won Oceania’s

foremost harness racing event back-to-back in 1983 and 1984. Such initiatives are not merely forms

of memorialisation, but rather involve hard-headed locals who have calculated that it can help to raise

a town’s profile and attract potential visitors or perhaps even investors.

Visitors inspecting the Black Caviar monument three days after its unveiling by then Victorian premier Denis Napthine,

Nagambie. October 2013. Photo: Tony Joel


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Themes mentioned here are not necessarily recent developments, but rather trends that can be

traced back many decades. And from a local level all the way to the world stage, sports permeate

modern societies. How long has this been the case? How do particular sports shape and reflect the

societies in which they are played? And what commonalities and dissimilarities can we identify over

time? These are some of the questions that we shall explore together during the first couple of weeks

of trimester.

For centuries, sports have been promoted as a character-building experience that can even help win

wars. Remember the apocryphal remark attributed to the Duke of Wellington that the battles of

the Napoleonic Wars were won on the playing fields of Eton. Also, it is no coincidence that sports

like the javelin throw and archery can trace their lineage back to epochs in which spears along with

bows and arrows were typical weapons of the day. More recently, major sports including all the

football codes, cricket, athletics, swimming, boxing, tennis, baseball, basketball, golf and many

others have become big business. They both shape and reflect globalisation, which reaches into

most areas of our lives today. Sports support major industries such as the media, tourism, building

and construction, science and medicine, while technological advances are spurred by the

production of sporting goods from sneakers and carbon fibre bikes to swimwear and car parts.

In 1843, Karl Marx famously commented that religion ‘is the opium of the people’.3 Drawing

inspiration from this line of thinking, critical analysts have viewed sports as hegemonic products of

modern and increasingly secularized capitalist societies: acting as the new opiate by diverting

attention away from key social problems or evils and dulling the revolutionary zeal of the working

classes. And as we shall discover during the trimester, sports have enabled the perpetuation of myths

and repressive systems, allowing people to believe that they could escape from discrimination

through participation but, in fact, miring players, officials, spectators, and others in a web of deceit,

drugs, lies, cheating, and corruption. Sport, too, has been seen as fundamentally gender-biased and

discriminatory against minority groups. Some of these groups, however, have created their own

sports activities such as the Paralympics, gay games, Aboriginal sports festivals, ethnic tournaments

conducted by migrant communities and so on.

Popular sentiment suggests that sport has served as a major facilitator of upward social mobility.

And there are some inspirational stories that help to perpetuate this myth. Pelé and Diego

Maradona, for instance, are universally acknowledged as two of the greatest footballers of all time

and both emerged from very humble beginnings: Pelé, who grew up in a poverty-stricken area of

São Paulo in Brazil, recalls playing ‘the beautiful game’ with other neighbourhood kids by stuffing

an old sock full with rags or newspaper because they could not afford a real ball4; and Maradona

similarly was raised in a shantytown on the outskirts of the Argentinian capital Buenos Aires.

Closer to home, Dawn Fraser, born and raised in the working-class suburb of Balmain in Sydney’s

inner west, became one of Australia’s sporting icons and most recognisable public figures after

3 Marx made this famous remark in an introduction he drafted for a work that he actually never completed. See ‘Works of

Karl Marx 1843. A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction’. Marxists Internet Archive. <http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm> [Last accessed 11 November 2019].

4 Pelé with Robert L. Fish, Pelé: My Life and the Beautiful Game (Doubleday, New York: 1977) p. 16.


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winning eight Olympic medals (including four gold). Critics, however, are quick to point out that

only a small percentage of individuals manage to succeed at the highest level and for every Michael

Jordan or Haile Gebrselassie there are tens of thousands of disadvantaged African American or

Ethiopian youngsters.

When pursued to extremes (with or without the assistance of drugs), sporting activities can change

from being a healthy outlet for the expenditure of energy and a way to keep fit to become irreversibly

destructive of the human body. Sport often seems to cultivate aggressive nationalism. It has been

associated with sectarianism and also with racial and other forms of discrimination or vilification.

Sport actively promotes or encourages violence, and sometimes has been accompanied by

hooliganism, death, and disaster. Such charges raise fundamental questions about the relationship

between sport and society throughout history. Has sport typically reflected the society in which it

has occurred, or has it some independent dynamic of its own that impinges on and even alters that

society? Can we determine general relationships or does the comparative study of the history of

sport throw up a multitude of divergent patterns, which requires influence to be teased out in each

case? Here is an interpretation offered by the influential British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm.

Taken from The Age of Extremes, his general history of the short twentieth century, in this passage

Hobsbawm is referring to the early decades of the 1900s:

In the field of popular culture the world was American or it was provincial. With one

exception, no other national or regional model established itself globally, though some had

substantial regional influence (for instance, Egyptian music within the Islamic world) and an

occasional exotic touch entered global commercial popular culture from time to time, as in

the Caribbean and Latin American components of dance-music. The unique exception was

sport. In this branch of popular culture—and who, having seen the Brazilian team in its days

of glory will deny it the claim to art?—US influence remained confined to the area of

Washington’s political domination. As cricket is played as a mass sport only where once the

Union Jack flew, so baseball made little impact except where US marines had once landed.

The sport the world made its own was association football, the child of Britain’s global

economic presence, which had introduced teams named after British firms or composed of

expatriate Britons (like the Sao Paulo Athletic Club) from the polar ice to the Equator. This

simple and elegant game, unhampered by complex rules and equipment, and which could

be practised on any more or less flat open space of required size, made its way through the

world entirely on its merits, and with the establishment of the World Cup in 1930 (won by

Uruguay) became genuinely international.

And yet, by our standards, mass sports, though now global, remained extraordinarily primitive.

Their practitioners had not yet been absorbed by the capitalist economy. The great stars were

still amateurs, as in tennis (i.e. assimilated to traditional bourgeois status), or professionals paid

a wage not all that much higher than a skilled industrial worker’s, as in British football. They

had still to be enjoyed face-to-face, for even radio could only translate the actual sight of the

game or race into the rising decibels of a commentator’s voice. The age of television and

sportsmen [sic] paid like film-stars was still a few years away.5

5 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991 (Michael Joseph, London: 1994) p. 198.


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Here Hobsbawm sheds some light on how and why, as we discussed above, Pelé and his

childhood friends found themselves playing association football (soccer6) in the streets and

parks of São Paulo: a simplistic yet captivating game, it spread around the world (at least

partially as a consequence of the British Empire’s global influence) and could be played by

virtually anyone more or less anywhere. Hobsbawm’s passage, moreover, teases out a number

of key themes that we shall tackle regularly throughout this unit: the growth from simple origins

to global reach; the importance of codification as part of expansion; questions about class;

capitalism leading to increased professionalisation; the influence of technology; and the

emergence of sporting celebrity status.

What is sports history?

So far, we have taken something incredibly important for granted. To study sport in an academic

context, first we need some definitions for what we are doing. How, then, do YOU define sport?

Before reading on, pause for a moment and consider what you think does, and does not,

constitute sport. What parameters have you set? Even if your thoughts are fairly provisional at

this stage, please write down your ideas so that you have a record upon which to reflect at later

times during the trimester.

According to your views, is the following an acceptable working definition?

Sport is a competitive endeavour undertaken for pleasure or reward by

individuals or teams according to a set of rules and in some organised form. It

may or may not involve physical exercise and it may or may not attract spectators.

Key elements here include the ideas of:

• competition

• pleasure and/or reward

• individual participation or teamwork

• rules and organisation

Optional — or, in other words, inessential — aspects include:

• physical exercise

• spectators

Do the above conditions fit your preconceived ideas of what constitutes sport? If not, how do you

differ? Any such working definition throws up intriguing questions. Think of some examples that

you’ve always considered to be ‘sport’. Do they meet all the key elements listed above? If not, does this

6 In Britain, the slang public school term for association football was ‘soccer’, while rugby union was known as ‘rugger’.

To differentiate the world game from indigenous forms of football, the term soccer was adopted in the United States and Australia. Initially, in Australia association football was called British football, then soccer football, before being shortened simply to soccer. Other, more derogatory, terms have been used along the way. For a discussion, see Roy Hay, ‘British Football, Wogball or the World Game? Towards a Social History of Victorian Soccer’, in John O’Hara (ed.), Ethnicity and Soccer in Australia, Studies in Sports History Number 10, Australian Society for Sports History, Campbelltown, 1994. pp. 44-79.


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raise doubt over whether they really are a sport or perhaps something else such as exercise, fitness

training, a leisure activity, or a game? For instance, according to the key criteria listed above, an

argument could be mounted that chess is a sport (not just a ‘boardgame’) whereas something like

cycling, karate, or a gym session is nothing more than ‘personal fitness’ unless it involves a properly

organised race, tournament, or competition. Are you already starting to change your views to

incorporate some or all of the above criteria? Or do you remain firm in your original ideas?

Setting Some Early Parameters

Now we turn to the question of sport in history. How should we approach studying what sports people

have engaged in over the centuries? Another issue about definition arises here. Can we be sure that

the meaning of the word ‘sport’ has not changed along the way? If you read through most early works

on sport you will find very little about activities such as cricket, athletics, or football, and nothing

whatever about tennis, basketball, or motor racing. The last one on the list gives the obvious clue that

some of these sports simply did not exist in medieval or early modern times. They came into being at

a specific point in history — in many cases in the very late nineteenth century. Some were invented,

often quite deliberately, though some others evolved more slowly and organically. Others derived

from ancient progenitors, but were transformed in this key period in ways that marked a greater or

lesser break with the past. We must be sensitive to changes in the meaning and use of words, of

concepts like amateurism and professionalism, and the social groups applying these terms. Perhaps,

then, part of your learning experience in this unit on sport in history involves the search for these key

periods of time when what constituted sport changed significantly in character. Commonalities and

dissimilarities are important: we need to ascertain what survived of ancient forms, what disappeared,

and what has come down to us as part of our contemporary culture.

READING: Now please turn to your extract by Alan Guttmann, ‘Defining Characteristics of Sport’ taken from his

classic work entitled From Ritual to Record: The Nature of Modern Sports (Columbia University Press,

New York: 1978) pp. 15-21, 26-27, 31-41, 45, 47-48, 51-52, 54-55. (n.b. Please read the scanned excerpt

provided via the above link as a digitisation rather than consulting the e-book, because some irrelevant

passages have been edited out and also the e-book’s pagination is different to what is listed here.)

Guttmann tries to delineate the key differences between modern sports and those that existed in

past times. As soon as you begin to read this extract you will realise that big questions are raised

about the very terms in which he and we are attempting to conceptualise the differences. Can we

talk about modern and pre-modern sports? Or does it cause us to think in terms of a bipolar world,

with only one key divide worthy of consideration? When used to describe sports, are terms such as

primitive, traditional, folk, and ancient any less value-loaded? Without getting totally bogged down

in semantics, we must acknowledge that terms and definitions matter and as far as possible we must

employ them sensitively, openly, objectively, and consistently if we are to make progress in building

our historical knowledge and understanding of this topic.

Before reading on, please pause momentarily to think of the characteristics that Guttmann suggests

are significant. Then reflect on each term’s significance when compared between modern sports

and what came before.


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Ideas that Guttmann lists include: secularism; equality; specialisation; rationalisation;

bureaucracy; quantification; and records. Are there any items that you would add to this list?

Remember: Guttmann first published his study in the 1970s. Do you think that he would amend

his list if he were to rewrite this study today?

READING: Now please turn to The Primrose Path.pdf by Sir Derek Birley, taken from the journal The Sports

Historian, vol. 16, no. 1, 1996, pp. 1-15.

Australians, with their aggressive egalitarian outlook, often poor scorn on the concept of amateurism,

dismissing it as an unconscionable relic of the British class structure and something totally lacking in

justification. Birley is a trenchant critic of amateurism, too, but as an objective historian he wants to

understand how it came into being, was perpetuated, and still resonates in the sporting world. You

are not expected to embrace the concept of amateurism in this unit, but we insist that you try to follow

Birley’s lead and attempt to understand the notion.7 [7]

READING: Now please turn to your extracts by Richard Cashman, entitled ‘The British Heritage’ and

‘Australia: A Paradise of Sport?’ taken from his book entitled Paradise of Sport: The Rise of

Organised Sport in Australia (Oxford University Press, Melbourne: 2000) pp. 1-14, 205-08.

Cashman’s study largely deals with Australia, and yet he is well aware of the international dimensions

of sports — particularly in their transmission to and early development in Australia. Although this

unit does not have a prescribed text, we highly recommend you dipping into Cashman’s book if you

get the opportunity. The first 14 pages that you are asked to read here provide some explanation of

the British background to early Australian sport. The few concluding pages included in this excerpt

engage with the question of whether Australians are somehow different in their attitudes to sport.

Class, gender, ethnicity, power, economics, religion, and numerous other themes recur throughout the

unit. We have adopted this approach so that you become aware of the all-pervasive influence of these

categories in any scholarly study of sport in history. An obvious structure would have seen us build

weekly topics around particular sports, but we felt that this would likely impoverish your appreciation

of the interconnections between various key themes. Building weekly topics around individual sports,

moreover, would run the risk of promoting study of ‘the history of (a) sport’ as opposed to our focus on

studying sport in history. (We shall further unpack this crucial distinction over the next couple of weeks.)

Instead, the alternative approach that we have selected sees weekly topics built around major

developments and/or key themes rather than particular sports. Not only does this accentuate our key

notion of studying sport in history but, furthermore, it provides plenty of scope for exploring all kinds

of sports over many years. By extension, it also enables you to pursue research aligned to your own

sporting interests when it comes time to tackle the major assessment tasks.

7 For further details, see Lincoln Allison, Amateurism in Sport: An Analysis and a Defence (Frank Cass, London: 2001). Allison’s

longer work provides another view of the concept of amateurism in sport in comparison to your Reading extract by Birley.


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UNIT STRUCTURE

WEEK 1. INTRODUCTION: WHY STUDY SPORTS HISTORY?

Key issues covered include: the importance of sport in society throughout history; establishing a working

definition of what does and does not constitute sport; setting some early parameters for how we can

approach sports history; and understanding the crucial distinction to be made between studying the

history of (a) sport and studying sport in history.

WEEK 2. SURVEYING CENTURIES

A whirlwind trip from classical times (Ancient Greece and the original Olympics), through to the

medieval period and up to the early modern era.

WEEK 3. ORIGINS OF MODERN SPORT

Following the Industrial Revolution, was there a great divide? Some key issues covered include:

amateurism vs. professionalism; muscular Christianity; race and imperialism; modernity and how

spectator sports functioned as distraction and fun.

WEEK 4. SPORTING NATION

An exploration of the role of sport in Australian society, from yesteryear up to today. Australia (with

Melbourne as its ‘sporting mecca’) can mount a strong case for being one of the world’s most ‘sports

mad’ nations – but is it unique?

WEEK 5. NATIONAL INTERESTS, NATIONAL FERVOUR

To examine the nexus between sport and nation-building within the international arena, we examine the

modern Olympics, the Bodyline series in cricket, and the relationship between football and fascism.

WEEK 6. AROUND THE WORLD

Technological advances in the twentieth century had a profound impact on sport, both for sportspeople

and spectators.

WEEK 7. SPORTS TRAINING AND PREPARATION

The shaping of the sporting body, ‘artificial’ aids to sporting prowess, and drugs in historical perspective.

WEEK 8. SPORT, SEX, GENDER, AND RACE

To explore key issues relating to race, gender, and sex(uality), we focus on Australian football as our

main case study.

WEEK 9. SPORTING TRIUMPHS, TRAGEDIES AND RIVALRIES

For rivalry, we focus on two fascinating case studies by comparing and contrasting the Boston Red Sox

and New York Yankees (baseball) with Liverpool and Manchester United (football/soccer)

WEEK 10. ELITE SPORT AS SOCIAL PATHOLOGY

Key themes covered include: sport as business through the ages; (professional and especially male) sport

as media; the nexus between sport and celebrity; and modern-day fandom.

WEEK 11. CONCLUSION: MORE THAN A GAME?

We shall adopt a trivial approach as we reflect on what has been covered in the unit.

Documents

WEEK 1 Introduction to AST256 Sport in History