From Ritual to Record

"This is a classic. The book argues very well how modern sports arose mainly in England in the 19th century and to a lesser degree in the United States. This entity called sports, which had myriad precursors in the form of localised games, competitions and various physical pursuits that were quite disorganised and, above all, not intelligible to outsiders, changed in the 19th century in these capitalist countries that created a world of organised leisure. And this then becomes the bailiwick for modern sports, which features secularisation, quantification, equality of opportunity to compete, the establishment of uniforms, of institutions, of written rules and the quest for records, which incidentally was not something that concerned the Greeks in their Olympic Games many centuries before. By creating records and rules you create an awareness of the sport over time, you permit a discourse with history and over different eras that has become such an essential ingredient of all our modern sports languages. This modern construct of sport became part of an overall educational mission of the English public schools, in which the idea of a healthy mind and a healthy body assumed pride of place. Furthered at Oxbridge, sports mutated into an integral part of what constituted a real gentleman. In this milieu, the only thing that mattered in sports was participating, not winning, a rather understandable phenomenon since most of sports’ protagonists were already winners by dint of their social standing and wealth. But once sports – particularly association football, but others as well – entered the world of workers, to whom this formerly leisurely pastime mutated into a welcomed means of livelihood, winning not only became everything, it was the only thing, to paraphrase Vince Lombardi, the legendary NFL coach of the Green Bay Packers."