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The history of sports extends back to the Ancient world in 7000 BC. The physical activity that developed into sports had early links with warfare and entertainment. [1]
- Mary Bellis
- Games with Bats & Balls: Cricket, Baseball, and Softball. Cricket: The game of cricket originated in south-east England sometime in the late 16th century.
- Basketball. The first formal rules for basketball were devised in 1892. Initially, players dribbled a soccer ball up and down a court of unspecified dimensions.
- Rugby and American Football. Rugby: The origins of rugby can be traced back over 2000 years to a Roman game called harpastum (from the Greek for “seize”).
- Golf. The game of Golf is descended from a game that originated in the Kingdom of Fife on the eastern coast of Scotland in during the 15th century. While there were similar games in other parts of Europe at the time that involved swatting a rock with a stick around a predetermined course, the game as we know it—including the innovation introduction of the golf hole—was invented in Scotland.
- Overview
- History
- Traditional African sports
- Traditional Asian sports
- Sports in the Middle Ages
- Sports in the Renaissance and modern periods
- Globalization
sports, physical contests pursued for the goals and challenges they entail. Sports are part of every culture past and present, but each culture has its own definition of sports. The most useful definitions are those that clarify the relationship of sports to play, games, and contests. “Play,” wrote the German theorist Carl Diem, “is purposeless activity, for its own sake, the opposite of work.” Humans work because they have to; they play because they want to. Play is autotelic—that is, it has its own goals. It is voluntary and uncoerced. Recalcitrant children compelled by their parents or teachers to compete in a game of football (soccer) are not really engaged in a sport. Neither are professional athletes if their only motivation is their paycheck. In the real world, as a practical matter, motives are frequently mixed and often quite impossible to determine. Unambiguous definition is nonetheless a prerequisite to practical determinations about what is and is not an example of play.
There are at least two types of play. The first is spontaneous and unconstrained. Examples abound. A child sees a flat stone, picks it up, and sends it skipping across the waters of a pond. An adult realizes with a laugh that he has uttered an unintended pun. Neither action is premeditated, and both are at least relatively free of constraint. The second type of play is regulated. There are rules to determine which actions are legitimate and which are not. These rules transform spontaneous play into games, which can thus be defined as rule-bound or regulated play. Leapfrog, chess, “playing house,” and basketball are all games, some with rather simple rules, others governed by a somewhat more complex set of regulations. In fact, the rule books for games such as basketball are hundreds of pages long.
As games, chess and basketball are obviously different from leapfrog and playing house. The first two games are competitive, the second two are not. One can win a game of basketball, but it makes no sense to ask who has won a game of leapfrog. In other words, chess and basketball are contests.
A final distinction separates contests into two types: those that require at least a minimum of physical skill and those that do not. Shuffleboard is a good example of the first; the board games Scrabble and Monopoly will do to exemplify the second. It must of course be understood that even the simplest sports, such as weightlifting, require a modicum of intellectual effort, while others, such as baseball, involve a considerable amount of mental alertness. It must also be understood that the sports that have most excited the passions of humankind, as participants and as spectators, have required a great deal more physical prowess than a game of shuffleboard. Through the ages, sports heroes have demonstrated awesome strength, speed, stamina, endurance, and dexterity.
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No one can say when sports began. Since it is impossible to imagine a time when children did not spontaneously run races or wrestle, it is clear that children have always included sports in their play, but one can only speculate about the emergence of sports as autotelic physical contests for adults. Hunters are depicted in prehistoric art, but it cannot be known whether the hunters pursued their prey in a mood of grim necessity or with the joyful abandon of sportsmen. It is certain, however, from the rich literary and iconographic evidence of all ancient civilizations that hunting soon became an end in itself—at least for royalty and nobility. Archaeological evidence also indicates that ball games were common among ancient peoples as different as the Chinese and the Aztecs. If ball games were contests rather than noncompetitive ritual performances, such as the Japanese football game kemari, then they were sports in the most rigorously defined sense. That it cannot simply be assumed that they were contests is clear from the evidence presented by Greek and Roman antiquity, which indicates that ball games had been for the most part playful pastimes like those recommended for health by the Greek physician Galen in the 2nd century ce.
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It is unlikely that the 7th-century Islamic conquest of North Africa radically altered the traditional sports of the region. As long as wars were fought with bow 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.
Among the many games of North Africa was ta 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, but wrestling of one kind or another was ubiquitous. Wrestling’s forms and functions varied from tribe to tribe. For the Nuba of southern Sudan, ritual bouts, for which men’s bodies were elaborately decorated as well as carefully trained, were the primary source of male status and prestige. The Tutsi and Hutu of Rwanda were among the peoples who staged contests between females. Among the various peoples of sub-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 the Yala of Nigeria, the Fon 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 the Zulu and Mpondo 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 of Adolf Friedrich zu Mecklenburg’s anthropological expedition at the turn of the 20th century.
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 Islamic Middle East across the Indian subcontinent to China and Japan, wrestlers—mostly but not exclusively male—embodied and enacted the values of their cultures. 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 Persian pahlavan (ritual wrestler) Maḥmūd Khwārezmī was both.
Typical of the place of sport within a religious context was the spectacle of 50 sturdy Turks who wrestled in Istanbul in 1582 to celebrate the circumcision of the son of Murad III. When Indian wrestlers join an akhara (gymnasium), they commit themselves to the quest for a holy life. As devout Hindus, they recite mantras 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 less salient in the course of the 20th century, the elders in charge of Japanese sumo added a number of Shintō 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. Chinese wushu (“military skill”), which included armed as well as unarmed combat, was highly developed by the 3rd century bce. Its unarmed techniques were especially prized within Chinese culture and were an important influence on the martial arts of Korea, Japan, and Southeast Asia. Much less well known in the West are varma adi (“hitting the vital spots”) and other martial arts traditions of South 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. Japanese kenjutsu (“techniques of the sword”) became kendō (“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 Japanese samurai practiced many forms of archery, the most colourful of which was probably yabusame, whose mounted 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). In yabusame, accuracy was paramount.
In Turkey, where the composite (wood plus horn) bow was an instrument of great power, archers competed for distance. At Istanbul’s Okmeydanı (“Arrow Field”), the record was set in 1798 when Selim 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 demonstrated equestrian 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 of polo 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.
The sports of medieval 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 was folk 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 as Sir Thomas Elyot, to condemn it as more likely to maim than to benefit the participants.
The nascent bourgeoisie of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance amused itself with archery 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 of St. 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 a Pritschenkoenig was supposed to simultaneously keep order and entertain the crowd with clever verses.
The burghers of medieval towns were welcome to watch the aristocracy at play, but they were not allowed to participate in tournaments or even, in most parts of Europe, to compete in imitative tournaments of their own. Tournaments were the jealously guarded prerogative of the medieval knight and were, along with hunting and hawking, his favourite pastime. At the tilt, 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 early tournament evolved into dramatic presentations of courtly life in which elaborate pageantry and allegorical display quite overshadowed the frequently inept jousting. Some danger remained even amid the display. At one of the last great tournaments, in 1559, Henry II of France was mortally wounded 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.
By the time of the Renaissance, sports had become entirely secular, but in the minds of the 17th-century Czech educator John 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 famed Girard Thibault, whose L’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 the cultivated Florentine game of calcio, a form of football that stressed the good looks and elegant attire of the players. Within the world of sports, the emphasis on aesthetics, rather than achievement, was never stronger.
While the aesthetic element survives in sports such as figure skating, diving, and gymnastics, 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 word measure, 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 the Industrial Revolution. Technicians sought to perfect equipment. Athletes trained systematically to achieve their physical maximum. New games, such as basketball, volleyball, and team 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 the concept of the sports record. The word record, 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 as stick fighting and bullbaiting, which the Puritans had condemned and driven underground, gave way to organized games such as cricket, which developed under the leadership of the Marylebone 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 by horse races in which fleeter steeds were handicapped, 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 of boxing flourished throughout the 18th century, it was not until 1743 that boxer-entrepreneur Jack Broughton formulated rules to rationalize and regulate the sport. The minimal controls on mayhem imposed by Broughton were strengthened in 1867 by the marquess 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 the Henley Regatta (1839). “Athletics” became popular after Oxford and Cambridge held their first track-and-field meet in 1864. The Amateur Athletic Association, which emphasized track-and-field sports, was founded in 1880, the Amateur Rowing Association in 1882.
From the British Isles, modern sports (and the amateur 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 the West Indies. Rugby football flourishes in other postcolonial cultures, such as New Zealand and South 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 the cosmopolitan 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 Latin America, like the indigenous 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 of baseball denied its origins in British children’s games such as cat and rounders and concocted the myth of Abner 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, that Major League Baseball planted its first franchises on the West Coast.)
Basketball, invented in 1891 by James Naismith, and volleyball, invented four years later by William Morgan, are both quintessentially modern sports. Both were scientifically designed to fulfill a perceived need for indoor games during harsh New 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 the auspices of the YMCA (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.
Dec 3, 2023 · Sports have been around since the dawn of civilization. Ancient Egyptians, Chinese, and Indians practiced various forms of physical activities, such as archery, wrestling, martial arts, and chariot racing. These sports were often linked to religion, warfare, or royalty.
- Basketball. Basketball is the only major American sport with a clearly identifiable inventor. James Naismith wrote the sport’s original 13 rules as part of a December 1891 class assignment at a Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) training school in Springfield, Massachusetts.
- Football. How Teddy Roosevelt Saved Football. Closely related to two ancient English sports—rugby and soccer (or association football)—American football originated at universities in North America, primarily the United States, in the late 19th century.
- Baseball. More to History: The Father of Negro League Baseball. References to games resembling baseball in the United States date back to the 18th century.
- Lacrosse. Lacrosse, America's oldest team sport, dates to 1100 A.D., when it was played by the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois people, in what now is New York and areas in Canada bordering the state.
Aug 2, 2024 · Chariot races, animal hunts, and gladiatorial combat represented the sport and mood of the era, with the largest events held in grand arenas like the Colosseum. Ancient Romans wanted the sports of the time, to showcase their power and control, rather than celebrating athletic ability and finesse.
Feb 10, 2024 · Ancient Origins: The roots of sports can be traced back to ancient civilizations where physical contests were held to celebrate strength, agility, and skill. The ancient Greeks, for example, organized the Olympic Games, a festival dedicated to Zeus and featuring a variety of athletic events.
