Sports and Urban
Geography
I have some comments on your citation practice, for which
see below.
I don't know if you have read Brendan Behan's _Borstal Boy_ (1958)
. He has some interesting observations about the
relationship between Soccer and Rugby. Behan was born into the
urban working class, a Dubliner, and became a member of the
IRA as a teenager. In 1939, at the age of sixteen, he was sent to
England as a terrorist. He promptly got caught, and, being
underage, was sentenced to a Borstal School. He wound
up serving his time at an "open" Borstal, Hollesley Bay, on
the Suffolk coast, with a bunch of boys who were mostly in
for minor theft, and a few "HMP" cases. This was short
for "His Majesty's Pleasure," or preventative
detention, ie. boys, who had killed someone under provocation,
typically their girlfriends in fits of jealousy. An authentic
teenage gangster would have gone to a "closed" Borstal instead. In
sending Behan to an open Borstal, the British government tacitly
conceded his claim to be a Prisoner of War. In the
1930's, the IRA was openly running youth programs in Ireland, on
much the same basis as the Boy Scouts. Behan was both literate,
and an apprentice house painter-- in short, he was conspicuously
distinct from a career criminal. There was considerable
reason for everyone to believe that Behan was effectively in the
service of the Irish government, or a faction thereof,
and that England's remedy was ultimately to resolve its
differences with Dublin. The prison doctor said to Behan, "I
suppose this is all jolly good for your election manifesto when
you want to enter the Irish Parliament, but it's damm' well
not fair to me, wasting my time." (p. 144) The general ethos
of Hollesley Bay was pretty much that of a boarding school,
except that the boys did agricultural and construction
work, instead of cramming latin. There is no question which the
average boy would prefer. The staff organized a rugby team, which
played against a British Army team. Rugby was part of
a more or less conscious plan of re-ruralizing kids, similar to
Father Flanagan and Boys' Town.
At home in Dublin, Behan had played soccer. As he put it,
soccer "... is the game of the streets, where the ball is
kept low and does not break many windows, and you are not often
brought down on the hard asphalt." (p. 323) This, of course,
assumed that the street would be essentially empty, because
there were few automobiles at this date. Effectively, the
logic of Dublin soccer was the same as that of Harlem basketball,
with the sole difference that America has a lot more
automobiles than Europe did. Both are exercises in inventing
a game which will fit into the minimal open spaces of urban
proletarian housing. Under American conditions, the "found space"
was likely to be a vacant lot, thirty feed wide, surrounded by
blank walls, where a rowhouse had once stood.
Parenthetically, I ran across a British illustration, circa 1830,
showing a recognizable game of proto-basketball played in
England's Newgate Prison, in a huge, more or less barnlike
barracks room.
American football, as James A. Michener noted in his _Sports
in America_ (1976), was associated with underground
coal mining and steel mill towns. The places where boys played
football with sufficient seriousness to get college athletic
scholarships were places where the achievable good job, deep
underground, was as dangerous as combat. Now, of course, most of
the underground mines are gone, and the
pattern is different. American coal towns tend to have a lot
of open spaces, suitable for playing American football,
unlike, say, Welsh coal towns.
The classic proletarian spectator sports vary from country
to country, but they have certain common characteristics. One of
the most important characteristics is that the sport is not
a game-- on the contrary, it is a Darwinian struggle for escape
from the conditions of the players' birth. As Michener
notes, the odds are about 50,000 to one against the
player achieving any kind of long-term success, even while
sacrificing his chance to get an education. The highest form of
spectator sport is the gladiatorial games, and there is a tendency
for spectator sports to devolve into gladiatorial games,
driven by the logic that if a player is sufficiently injured, he
will not be able to play, and will therefore lose by
default. Look at Pat Conroy's novel _The Great Santini_ for
a good exposition of this logic.
In the United States, soccer is an amateur game, precisely because
it is not played professionally, and it would be fairly
difficult and expensive to import a "mercenary" into a game played
by fifteen-year-olds. The point is, you don't want to play
with people whose rational calculation involves putting someone in
the hospital to improve the odds, or who routinely have
criminal associates. Michener discusses this kind of thing
extensively, especially as applied to American Little League
baseball. _Sports In America_ is the single "must read" book about
sports in general. By contrast to things like football,
American soccer is the modern feminist little girl's game, par
excellence, displacing ballet lessons.
===================================================================
Notes:
In the first place, TinyURL's just do not work very well.
Especially in the case of newspaper articles, the URL's are
notoriously unstable, and it is important to cite things by the
numbers. With cut-and-paste, this is no more difficult than
spell-checking.
Now, I take it that you are referring to the following four
articles:
===================================================================
---------------------------------------------------
David Steele, "After years of rejecting its pitch, I'm on soccer's
side," _Baltimore Sun_, Originally published Jul 10, 2006
http://www.baltimoresun.com/sports/bal-sp.steele10jul10,0,5923543.column?coll=bal-sports-columnists
[Sudha Shenoy replied that she meant: Robert Loiederman, 'American
optimism explains refusal to embrace soccer', op-ed in the
Baltimore Sun, 8 June 2006]
------------------------------------------------
Jonathan V. Last, "Foul!: Why, despite everything, America will
never embrace soccer," _Weekly Standard_, 06/22/2006 12:00:00 AM
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/012/360zlcro.asp
--------------------------------------------------------
Frank Cannon & Richard Lessner, "Nil, Nil: The nihilism of
soccer: The more you look, the less there is to see,"
_Weekly Standard_, 06/23/2006 12:00:00 AM
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/012/384qgmke.asp
-----------------------------------------------------
Tim Swanson, "Separation of Sport and State," Ludwig Von Mises
Institute, Posted on Wednesday, July 05, 2006.
http://www.mises.org/story/2233
[Sudha Shenoy replied that she meant: Michael levin, 'Capitalism
& American Sport'.]
----------------------------------------------------
[She further cited: Neil Tranter, Sport, Economy, and Society in
Britain 1750-1914 (Cambridge UP 1998) ]
============================================================================
Another interesting article is:
--------------------------------------------------------
Steve Sailer, "One World Cup:
Soccer gives American elites the chance to celebrate
nationalism in other countries but not ours," _The
American Conservative_, July 17, 2006 Issue
http://www.amconmag.com/2006/2006_07_17/article.html
-------------------------------------------------------
Which touches on the
professional/amateur distinction.
-----------------------------------------------------
Brendan Behan, _Borstal Boy_, 1958, pbk. ed. Berkley Windhover,
1975
(07/13/2006 11:27 AM)
Well, personally, I
think you're being very Old Etonian about it! There seems to be
abundant evidence that all these games, and all their possible
variations, were commonly played from time-immemorial, long
before they were supposedly invented. What happened in the
nineteenth century was that schoolmasters came along and
wrote up rulebooks, probably in an effort to separate the
rambunctious play of boys from actual fighting, and further,
that university faculty adopted these games as part of an effort
to turn undergraduates back from young-men-about-town into
schoolboys.
I think one might add a technological factor. Organized team
sports of this general type emerged at just about the time that
the steam engine (in the form of the railroad) began to pose a
threat to the horse. The classic upper-class sports were horse
sports-- racing of course, but also fox-hunting, pig-sticking,
and polo (a comparatively recent Indian import). One might
perhaps make use of V. G. Kiernan's arguments about pistols,
swords, and dueling. On a stagecoach, it was at least
possible to ride on the top of the coach, and fraternize with
the driver, and maybe even drive the coach under his
supervision. A train was different. It was an obviously much
faster way to go a considerable distance, but it boxed the
traveler firmly into the identity of passenger. I suppose one
could read Jules Verne's _Around the World in Eighty Days_ as a
failed attempt to cast machine travel in a heroic vein. When one
strips away the contrived accidents, the horrible truth is
revealed-- all one had to do was to buy a ticket, and one
would get there as fast as possible. It was in this mental
climate that people suddenly started formulating leagues
and world championships for games previously played by
little boys and peasants, and not taken very seriously.
When I was a kid in Texas, circa 1970, there was a kind
of free-form rugby that we used to play,
called "quarterback smear," with no scoring, and no fixed
teams, just scrum for the sake of scrum. It seems to
have subsequently become known as "smear the queer." One would
guess that this renaming is a way of deliberately making it
socially unacceptable, probably with a view to fencing out the
school teacher. The business of scorekeeping is
essentially an adult introduction, with no relationship to the
child's sense of time. When you find a scorekeeper, that is a
sign that the game has been diverted from its inner essence to
adult purposes. The question is, which adult
purposes?
James Michener summed up his critique of commercialized sports,
in his analysis of the Soap Box Derby scandal: "The evil always
begins with adults who desperately want to win championships
which were denied to them when they were boys. They use
children, often not their own, to achieve this dream, and in
doing so, pervert the normal experiences of youth."
(Michener, Sports in America, p. 153, pbk. ed.) Discuss.
(07/14/2006 04:03 PM)
http://www.hnn.us/articles/128604.html
(now)
https://historynewsnetwork.org/articles/128604.html
You May be Confusing Soccer With Football.
There was a discussion along these lines in Liberty and
Power four years ago, based on a post by the late Sudha Shenoy,
the Von-Mise-ian economist, "Everyone Watches
Soccer/Cricket/Rugby Union, Except (Of Course) the Americans: Some
Reflections."
[See above]
Soccer, and Rugby, and American Football are all more or less
co-extensive in origin. They are different rulebooks imposed on
the same sport, with certain tactics prohibited. For that
matter, basketball is a well-known variation of football. If you
need to play football in a small space, the simplest way to
slow players down is to make the goal more compact, so
that it is not feasible for players to run out and around
each other. Similarly, you make various rules
about the extent to which players are allowed to
fight with each other. Primal Football existed from
time immemorial, but Formalized Football (Soccer, Rugby,
American Football, etc.) cannot be said to be any older than
the rulebooks. American Football took its definitive shape
with the outlawing of the "flying wedge." The
flying wedge was outlawed, circa 1900, because
it was too dangerous, and too many players were getting
killed.
I think the man you are thinking in relation to the Onieda
team would be Gerrit Smith Miller, not Gerrit Miller Smith.
Gerrit Smith (1797 – 1874) was a social reformer,
anti-slavery activist, women's rights and temperance
activist. In those days, the causes were all related. His
daughter, Elizabeth, born 1822, married Charles Dudley Miller in
1843. Their son, Gerrit Smith Miller (1845-1937, named for his
grandfather), was sixteen in 1862, when he organized a game
of some kind at Harvard, and was apparently waiting to be
old enough to go off to the Civil War-- the real big game. He
eventually went home to his grandfather's estate to breed
cattle, and carry on the family social causes. His
son, Gerrit Smith Miller, Jr. (1869 - 1956) was a zoologist.
In 1962, the rules of the game were probably not
very strictly defined because it was still a comparatively
amateur game. No one thought it was remotely as
important as being at Shiloh or Gettysburg.
=============================================
Gerrit Smith Miller:
This is apparently the source you read, and a bit mangled:
http://www.soccerhall.com/history/us_soccer_history.htm
------------------------------------------------------------------
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrit_Smith
http://wesclark.com/rrr/yank_fb.html
http://www.nyhistory.com/gerritsmith/esm.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrit_Smith_Miller
http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/ead/htmldocs/RMM03700.html
-----------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.soccerballworld.com/Oldestball.htm
http://homepages.sover.net/~spectrum/oneidas.html
http://www.celebrateboston.com/first/football-club.htm
http://www.nytimes.com/1992/08/09/travel/l-black-history-843992.html
==================================================
http://www.the-game.org/history-flyingwedge.htm
http://www.la84foundation.org/SportsLibrary/JSH/JSH1993/JSH2001/jsh2001f.pdf
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170809/12171637963/paris-olympic-committee-to-consider-esports-2024.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/2017/08/11/paris-olympic-committee-to-consider-esports-2024/#comment-676189
The Olympics' First Encounter With the Machine.
When the Olympics were restarted in 1896, with significant changes
to
about 1920, decisions had to be made about new sports. Unlike
classical
antiquity, it was now normal for people to augment their strength
by
horse-power or machine power. For sports to be meaningful, some
kinds
of limits had to be set. The Olympics excluded motor-sports.
Automobiles were the leading "high-tech" of the time, but they
were
excluded. The organizers allowed four fairly uncontroversial
post-classical sports
(sailing, archery, fencing, and bicycling), and two conspicuous
innovations.
One innovation was horses, the other was firearms. But no room was
made
for motor-sport.
There had been chariot races in the old Olympics, but they had
been
notoriously corrupt, and they had tended to produce criminal
organizations. The Ancient Roman Blue and Green racing factions
were
roughly the equivalent of Mafia families. The new Olympic horse
events
were dressage, cross country, and jumping, that is, the amateur
styles
of riding. The regular type of horse-racing, in a circle, with
paid
jockeys, was excluded, and so was the racing of horse-drawn
carriages.
There was a tradition of the early-nineteenth-century upper
classes
racing light carriages with teams of horses, over the public
roads.
However, this tradition was linked to gambling, and specifically
to
"deep play," that is, people gambling for larger sums than they
could
afford to lose. Europe was still rural enough in 1896 that lots of
middle-class people had horses. There was however, a distinction
between the kind of riding which involved owning one horse, versus
that
which involved owning ten or a hundred horses. Precision riding,
the
type favored by the Olympic committee, involved teaching one horse
to
do things he didn't think he could do. Read Anne McCaffrey's _The
Lady_
(1987) for an understanding of this kind of riding. In England,
there
was a volunteer cavalry militia, known as the Yeomanry, in which
the
privates were expected to provide their own horses. In the first
instance, it consisted of farmer's sons, with the horses they used
around the farm, but upwardly mobile shopkeepers were sending
their
sons to riding stables to become "horsey." There was this whole
pattern
of horsemanship which was, in effect, a branch of the Boy Scouts,
about
being "A Soldier of the Queen."
Olympic shooting sports were based around the air-rifle and the
twenty-two caliber round. In large sections of Europe, air rifles
are
used for target shooting sports. This reflects gun control,
restrictions on hunting, and of course, greater population
density.
Even rabbits are protected game in Europe, and the ordinary man in
the
street cannot plead a need to hunt. There were competing forces in
society. The Army, getting ready for the First World War,
generally
wanted every young man to be taught to shoot. Landowners were
concerned
about poaching. Factory owners were concerned about worker
rebellion.
etc. etc. Recreational shooting was channeled into a type of gun
which
had minimal military or crime potential, but which would provide a
base
for teaching the use of military rifles when the time came. The
pattern
of European school or recreational club sports was reflected in
the
Olympics.
The twenty-two caliber round, the next step up from the
air-rifle, is
essentially a rabbit-hunting round. The Wikipedia entry for 50
meter
pistol refers to indoor range shooting with a Flobert pistol.
Circa
1900, Flobert guns were notorious for cheapness. As the 1900 Sears
catalog said "We do not recommend or guarantee these 22-cal
Flobert
rifles. Buy a good rifle-- it will pay in the end." The price for
a
Flobert Rifle was about two gold dollars, say a hundred dollars in
modern money, and the price of a single-shot 22-cal Remington was
about
five gold dollars, or two hundred and fifty dollars in modern
money.
Sear's attitude over a range of goods seemed to be that they would
sell
you cheap and dirty stuff, but they wanted to make sure you knew
what
you were getting into.
Upper-class shooting sports took two major forms. One was shooting
birds with shotguns, shooting huge numbers of birds, far above
modern
bag limits, which were driven towards the hunters by "beaters,"
that
is, hunt servants. This is the theme of the film _The Shooting
Party_,
in which an over-ambitious player recklessly shoots and kills one
of
the hunt-servants. The other form of upper-class shooting was
Safari or
Trophy-hunting, going to Africa or Asia to shoot one of the
recognized
big-game animals: Lions, Tigers, Bears, Elephants, Rhinoceroses,
or
Buffalo. This last had its own form of corruption. There were
Great
White Hunters, professionals of the type of the Swedish Baron Bror
Blixen, or his English rival Denys Finch-Hatton, rivals both in
hunting
and in love, who would do whatever they needed to do, in a remote
corner of the world, to ensure that their wealthy clients went
home
with the requisite numbers and types of trophy heads. Finch-Hatton
was
eventually killed in a crash of the airplane he used to seek out
game
animals. Blixen is reported to have taken to riding down animals
in an
automobile.
The pattern for Olympic riding and shooting was that they were
edited
down to forms which did not require very large sums of money,
which did
not link up with organized crime, or involve obviously
irresponsible
behavior. These approved tendencies converged in the Modern
Pentathlon
(1912), which was calculated
to appeal to young army officers, of the type of George S. Patton.
The
contestant had to ride a horse, to shoot, to fence, to swim, and
to
run.
However, the compromise did not extend to the automobile. Circa
1900,
automobile racing, in the grand manner, tended to mean Count X,
and his
chauffeur, driving
Count X's 6-seater German automobile from Paris to Madrid, in
competition with Baron Z, and his 6-seater French automobile and
chauffeur. The
chauffeur was also the mechanic, and did the ongoing work required
to
keep the machine going
This kind of racing was affectionately satirized in the 1969 movie
_The
film Those Daring Young Men in Their Jaunty Jalopies_. After
a few bad
accidents, automobile racing shifted to circular tracks, only a
few
miles long, which could be closed off. As motorcycles became
available,
within the economic reach of the working classes, people started
racing
those, but it tended to be done in fairgrounds, and soon,
motorcycle
gangs emerged. By the 1930's there was the phenomena of the
terrorist
motorcycle gang, eg. the French pro-Nazi Croix de Feu ("Cross of
Fire"). The recent events in Charlottesville are a return of this
pattern.
The next step up from driving automobiles was flying airplanes.
Here's
a curious story: one of the Battle of Britain aces in 1940
was a man
named Douglas Bader, a double leg amputee. About 1930, he had
crashed
an airplane, and lost his legs. In the 1930's, the RAF was small
and
club-able, and no one wanted to tell Bader he was done for. By the
time
they got up the nerve, he had learned to walk on artificial legs,
and
to drive again, and to fly again. A legless man has certain
advantages
in flying-- the blood can't flow down into legs which aren't
there, so
he is less likely to black out in high-gee turns. Bader eventually
got
shot down over France, and his artificial legs got broken in a
parachute landing. The Luftwaffe mechanics had a go at repairing
the
artificial legs, while they sent off a message via Switzerland
requesting delivery of Bader's spare pair. In due course,
the RAF
delivered the legs, dropping them by parachute during a bombing
raid.
However, by that time, Bader had escaped (temporarily) on the
Luftwaffe-repaired pair. In another event of the battle, Peter
Townsend, who would eventually make Group Captain, and become
Princess
Margaret's boyfriend, shot down a German pilot. So he went
to visit
the German pilot in hospital, bearing a gift of cigarettes. That
was
the way noble knights were supposed to behave to each other.
Cigarettes
were not disapproved of at that date-- they were included in
soldier's
rations at the rate of about five cigarettes per meal. To put it
in
modern terms, think of the gift as a box containing about a
hundred
dollars worth of assorted nuts, dried fruit, etc. This was the
gift of
politeness. The gift of intimacy would have been a
bottle of whiskey, because a man given a bottle of whiskey is
likely to
become drunk, and start singing improper songs at the top of his
lungs,
to the great annoyance of the chief nurse.
Now, the Olympics is faced with a new technology, Computers and
Electronics. The Olympics must edit this technology, rather than
blindly rejecting it, or uncritically accepting it. They might say
that
they will accept Tetris, but they will not accept Grand Theft
Auto.