Ask people to name their most cherished memory of school and, as likely as not, you will hear about a victory at football or volleyball or another encounter with organized sport.

Today’s world of college and professional sports owes a great deal to the entrepreneurs of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe who produced the first commercialized spectator sports, in which trained athletes, usually male, engaged in organized competitions for the entertainment of ticket-buying fans. These spectacles were part of the array of new leisure-time activities introduced in this era. When they were not strolling in pleasure gardens, debating philosophy in coffeehouses, or perusing fashions in fancy boutiques, crowds of men and women gathered to watch boxing matches and horse races, as well as rowing, walking, and running competitions.

Kings and aristocrats had raced their horses privately for centuries, but first began breeding them for this purpose in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, producing the thoroughbred strains still prized today. The first large-scale race meets began in the mid-seventeenth century at Newmarket, still home to today’s British racing industry. Originally treated as lowly domestic servants, jockeys gained recognition as independent professionals in the early nineteenth century. Aristocrats also deployed their footmen in pedestrian races, which then grew in popularity and attracted semiprofessional competitors. These races sometimes featured female competitors, including a toddler who in 1749 beat the odds by walking half a mile of a London street in under thirty minutes.*

Professional boxing had less exalted origins in the popular blood sports of the day. In 1719 a London prizefighter named James Figg became the first boxing entrepreneur, opening an “amphitheater” where he staged animal fights and contests among human boxers and swordsmen. With the growing popularity of the sport, the first rules of boxing appeared in the 1740s, calling for fights to include gloves, referees, and judges, and outlawing hitting a man when he was down.

The football and soccer games so central to school spirit in our day arose from the ball games played by peasants across medieval Europe, sometimes taking the form of all-out competitions between rival villages. Elite boarding schools transformed these riotous events into organized and regulated games, because their masters believed that team sports strengthened the body and disciplined the mind. The Rugby School thus produced the first written rules of rugby in 1845. The games of soccer and football developed from these origins in the nineteenth century, and the first professional leagues began in the 1890s.

Along with commercialization of sports came gambling, cheating, and disorderly crowds, problems that continue to confront professional athletics. A spirit of competition and thirst for victory may be seen as constant elements of the human character; however, historical events profoundly shape the way individuals manifest these qualities. In turn, the way we play and watch sports reveals a great deal about the societies in which we live.

*Allen Guttmann, Sports: The First Five Millennia (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), p. 72.

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS