Before Baseball, Football, and Basketball

1. Before Baseball, Football, and Basketball

2. What are “sports” • One historian writes, “sports is a window into historical processes in which men and women, social classes, and racial and ethnic groups struggle over different ways to live, how to work and play, and what to value.”

3. Roles and Functions • What do sports do for individual people? • Physical • Psychological/emotional • For Men and Women? • For society? • For the economy? • For politics? • For a region? • For a nation? • For an ethnic/racial group? • For an occupational group? • For a socio-economic class?

4. Old World: Merry Old England • Agrarian Society • Religion v. Leisure • James I’s “Book of Sports” • James: The “common and meaner sort…need such exercises as may make their bodies more able for warre, when We, or our successors shall have occasion to use them.”

5. Merry Old England: Common Folks • Piping, dancing, bear-baiting, cudgeling, bowling, foot races, hurling, jousting, hammer throwing, archery, cockfighting, wrestling. • Typically associated with alehouses

6. Merry Old: Kings and Gentry • Hunting • Horse racing • Jousting

7. Colonial America • Religious tensions re: leisure • Puritans were suspicious of anything that might divert or distract one from their personal confrontation with God. Too much leisure was a danger to godliness.

8. Puritans • Christmas 1621, Plymouth Plantation. Governor Bradford and the other Saints did not choose to recognize the celebration of Christmas. Thus, Bradford expected every one in the colony to report to the fields for work as usual. The non-Saints however balked at working on Christmas, and they insisted on taking a holiday. Bradford relented. When the Saints returned from their work they found to their consternation that those who remained behind had spent the day “pitching the bar, and some at stool ball and such like sports.” Bradford subsequently ruled that if colonists insisted on celebrating the holiday, they do so in quiet reflection within their homes and not outside sporting about. (Bradford, Plimouth Plantation, 97)

9. Puritans • Puritan leisure had to have a practical component: hunting provided food; cudgeling or sword play honed military skills, simple ball games were innocent enough. Sociable’s were okay, like quilting bees and cornhuskings, as long as they didn’t infringe on Sabbath. Exercise or recreation that refreshed people for their work qualified as okay—so dancing that was not licentious was good. • Keys: Protestant self control. God looked favorably on work.

10. Virginia • King James’ notions appealed to a broad segment of the population, typified by the settlers to the Chesapeake, who clearly enjoyed gaming and competition. In the early days, Virginia was settled overwhelmingly by single men. In Virginia men of little social status could go hunting and fishing at will, something reserved to the aristocracy in England. Hunting had been the royal sport. Probably more popular: drinking and gambling.

11. Getting organized • 1664: The first organized sport in America, horse racing, begins when the first English Governor of New York, Richard Nicolls, establishes the Newmarket Course at Hempstead Plains, close to the present site of Roosevelt Raceway. The purpose was to encourage the improvement of horse breeding. Five years later, the first sweepstakes race is held. • N.B.: 1664 was the year that English forces took NY from the Dutch and awarded it to the Duke of York.

12. Virginia • As field labor and manual work became associated with the lower classes and slavery, the gentry became ever more focused on leisure—games and conviviality, i.e horse racing, cockfighting, and hunting. Other activities included boating, wrestling, fencing, horseshoes, bowling, and cudgeling. Wealthy planters like William Byrd (1674-1744) had a bowling green, played cricket and ninepins, and had a billiard table. Dancing, partying, and gambling were key social activities.

13. Virginia Horse Racing • Horse racing served as a performance of conspicuous consumption as planters imported thoroughbreds, established stables, bred horses, had trainers, jockeys, and stablemen. • Horse racing exhibited the tension between an orderly social display of harmony as the whole community came together, but at the same time, racing unleashed the fire of reckless competition. At stake, prowess and manliness, not to mention the gambling stakes. Horse racing was a duel that tested not only the horses but the combat skills (whips, knees, elbows) of the riders. The indigenous format was a straight quarter mile track, but by the mid 1700s they adopted the English style of course racing.

14. 18th Century • Characteristics of traditional life blend work and leisure. Ninety-five percent of people in 18th century America lived in an agrarian environment. Families lived and worked together. • Urban gentry started their own clubs during the 18th century, such as the “Mount Regal Fishing Club,” the “Glouscester Hunting Club.” Middling sorts who frequented the tavern scene were enticed by darts, bowling greens, pit bulls versus bears, and gambling.

15. Ball games: A ball and a stick Ball, old cat, barn ball, town ball, rounders Cricket

16. Early References B is for Baseball The ball once struck off Away flies the boy To the next destined post And then home with joy A Little Pretty Pocketbook, 1744

17. The American Game • 1791 Pittsfield, Mass., town meeting records. • it read: "... for the Preservation of the Windows in the New Meeting House ... no Person or Inhabitant of said town, shall be permitted to play at any game called Wicket, Cricket, Baseball, Bat Ball, Football, Cat, Fives or any other game or games with balls, within the Distance of Eighty Yards from said Meeting House."

18. 19th Century • Class stratification • Separation of work and home • Urbanization • Industrialization • Immigration • Wage labor (Time) • Reform (self-improvement and voluntary societies) • Domesticity (female) v. Public, aggressive, business (male)