Sport and recreation in the United States

Eventually the American spirit of innovation may reach the schools and infuse their physical education programs with the imagination they are sometimes lacking. The phenomenon of women playing on otherwise all male teams has existed for some time and could become more common in future. For the most part, however, women's sport will continue to grow on its own. Because they are such dynamic social phenomena, sport and physical culture in the US will not simply continue to reflect trends in the wider society but will sometimes lead the way on the path toward change [5, p.2-5].

From this chapter we’ve learned that sports in North America go back to the Native Americans, who played forms of lacrosse and field hockey. During colonial times, early Dutch settlers bowled on New York City's Bowling Green, still a small park in southern Manhattan. However, organized sports competitions and local participatory sports on a substantial scale go back only to the late 19th century. Schools and colleges began to encourage athletics as part of a balanced program emphasizing physical as well as mental vigor, and churches began to loosen strictures against leisure and physical pleasures. As work became more mechanized, more clerical, and less physical during the late 19th century, Americans became concerned with diet and exercise. With sedentary urban activities replacing rural life, Americans used sports and outdoor relaxation to balance lives that had become hurried and confined. Biking, tennis, and golf became popular for those who could afford them, while sandlot baseball and an early version of basketball became popular city activities. At the end of the 20th century, Americans were taking part in individual sports of all kinds—jogging, bicycling, swimming, skiing, rock climbing, playing tennis, as well as more unusual sports such as bungee jumping, hang gliding, and wind surfing.

During the whole history of the USA sport there was developing more and more.It attracted and even now attracts great numbers of the Americans of different ages, sexes and nationalities.As we can see, sport helps to prevent American teenagers from different pernicious habits and actions, to involve them in social work.Thanks to sport many people don’t suffer from various illneses and deseases. But althouth all that sounds so pleasant and encouraging, American sport has its disadvantages. Almoust all Americans believe that the impossible is possible. So they always try to reach the top by all means and very often it leads to irretrievable consequences that may change the life not only of one person but the whole country.

2.                HE VARIETY OF AMERICAN SPORTS

2.1.         Professional sport

2.1.1. The business of Sport

Professional sports in the US comprise one of the largest business enterprises in the country. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent every year on everything from tickets to television contracts and players' salaries. The most popular team sports are football, basketball, and baseball. In recent years hockey has been increasing in popularity and some believe that if the National Hockey League (NHL) can rid itself of unnecessary fighting it will begin to challenge the other three in terms of spectator interest. The other great world team sport, soccer, has had a difficult time in gaining a foothold. After a brief burst of success in the 1970s, professional soccer in the US has assumed a minor status in relation to the other major sports.

Golf and tennis are the most popular individual professional sports. Businesses that aspire to national and international recognition are willing to spend tens of millions of dollars per year on sponsoring golf and tennis in order to have their names associated with these sports. It should be pointed out that only a few players at the top are able to achieve real wealth and fame and that many of the lesser players struggle hard to make ends meet.

Boxing is a sport that has become increasingly controversial over the years as its dangers have become more and more apparent. It is particularly disturbing to see one of the sport's greatest personalities, former heavy weight champion Muhammad Ali, struggle with the brain damage he has suffered from taking too many blows to the head. Nevertheless, the attraction of the sport appears to be irresistible to some, and efforts to make boxing safer or even to eliminate it altogether, have proven fruitless.

Although the sports mentioned above receive the most attention from the news media, other sports such as car racing and horse racing are tremendously popular in the US. Motor sports are a whole world of their own. They include racing on oval tracks, both by stock cars, that is, cars driven on highways, and special Indy cars (named for the famous Indianapolis Speedway), sports car competitions, and quarter mile sprints called drag races. In addition, there is all sorts of racing for motor cycles over dirt tracks, paved tracks, and obstacle courses with jumps. Just as in other sports, fans have their favorite drivers in motor sports who sometimes take on the status of folk heroes. The race car driver Richard Petty, who has recently retired is a good example of this.

Most people are not aware that the sport with the largest number of spectators in the US is horse racing. This is largely because it is possible to gamble on horse races and there are so many different racing fixtures throughout the country. Other sports which are based on betting are harness racing, greyhound dog racing, and jai alai. Jai alai, pronounced "hi li," is a fast moving game from the Basque country of Spain that involves throwing a ball with a special basket called a cesta against a wall.

One particularly American, and also Canadian, form of sport is the rodeo. Calf roping, bronco riding, and bull riding are just some of the best known rodeo events. As you might expect, rodeos are most popular in the western states and the western provinces of Canada. The Calgary Stampede, held every year in the Canadian city of Calgary, Alberta, is the world's most famous rodeo.

There are also several sports that are out of the main stream but nevertheless have numerous followers. These include roller derby, in which roller skaters try to push each other off of a track, and professional wrestling, which features pre-rehearsed moves and a lot of primitive play acting. Many feel that these two are not really legitimate sports and call them, together with events such as racing cars through the mud, "junk sports."[2, p.305-307]

2.1.2. Major sports

2.1.2.1.                 Baseball

The roots of the national pastime, or "game" (never the national "sport"), may certainly be traced to the English children's game of rounders —which was also known as early as 1744 by the name of "baseball," despite A. G. Spalding's effort in 1908 to concoct a myth of purely American origins. Under the name of "town ball" the game was popular throughout the colonies, and absorbed enough of students' time for it to be banned at Princeton in 1787. There was a Rochester Baseball Club in 1820s, and the elder Oliver Wendell Holmes said that he had played the game at Harvard in 1829.

Until the Civil War there were really two distinctly different variants of the game. Throughout New England there was the "Boston" game, while the rest of the country played the "New York" game. The critical difference was that the Boston game permitted a base runner to be retired by throwing the ball at him, a practice called "soaking" the runner.

The first baseball clubs of the 1840s and early 1850s were gentlemanly in membership and decorum. Games between status-conscious clubs like the New York Knickerbockers and Brooklyn Excelsiors were friendly preludes to formal dinners with musical entertainment furnished by the host club. These social teams were soon displaced by workingmen's clubs, with memberships drawn from labor organizations, from city government services (the police or the sanitation departments), or sponsored by political machines as part of their election strategy. The most successful and longest-lived teams tended to be ones with political support. Political parties could provide government sinecures for the players, allocations for building enclosed stadiums, and permission to play Sunday ball. The popularity of Sunday ball (and the ownership of many teams in the American Association bv brewers) made the game a prime target for militant Protestant reformers. The battle over Sunday baseball was one of the most lively survivals of the Sabbatarian movement into the latter part of the century.

The less violent character of the New York game (no "soaking") made it more appropriate for play in urban centers between teams that had neighborly reasons for restraining their killer instincts. In 1858 the National Association of Baseball Clubs was formed with a nucleus of sixteen New York area teams. In 1868 Cincinnati organized the first semi-professional team; it was there also that the first unashamedly professional team was born in 1869, today's Cincinnati Reds.

Full-fledged professional teams first appeared in the Midwest, founded by local boosters eager to publicize their city and to demonstrate its vitality. The Cincinnati Red Stockings of 1869 were financed by the sale of stock in the team corporation; likewise the Chicago White Sox in 1870. In 1870 the National Association of Amateur Baseball Players tried to expel the Cincinnati and Chicago professionals, and soon afterwards, in March 1871, the professional clubs met and established the National Association of Professional Baseball Players [6, p.2-4].

Organized baseball as we know it today dates from a secret meeting of the owners of the investor-owned teams in 1876. The National Association had been torn by discord between corporately owned teams like the White Sox and the Reds, and poorer teams that were essentially player-run cooperatives. The owners of the richer teams were determined to rationalize the business and to combat the public perception of professional ballplayers as willing accomplices of gamblers in betting coups (known then as "hippodroming"). Led by baseball's first robber baron, William Hulbert of the Chicago White Sox, the owners decided to declare war on the player-owned cooperative clubs. The owners specifically restricted membership in their new National League to clubs that had clarified the role of players as employees. This league, which was the nucleus of today's major leagues, began with clubs in Philadelphia, Hartford, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Louisville, St. Louis, and New York. It had to struggle against rival leagues for the next thirty-nine years, vanquishing some (the Players' League and the Federal League) and merging with others (the American Association in 1891 and the Western, later American, League in 1903).

The first few years of the new league were precarious ones, with cutthroat competition between the National League and its rivals. On September 29, 1879, the National League owners met and decided on the strategy that eventually was their salvation, the reserve clause, a contract provision that gave a player's club the right to "reserve" his services for the next season. In effect it transformed a yearly contract into a lifetime indenture. Until 1883 only the top five players on each team were protected by the reserve clause, but these were precisely the players whose salaries were the greatest burden to the owners. As the clubs reserved more and more players, finally covering the entire roster, the players found that their salaries were declining and their working conditions worsening, and so in 1885 John Montgomery Ward, a standout shortstop for the Giants and later a lawyer, organized the Brotherhood of Professional Baseball Players.

Still not satisfied, the owners drew up a player classification system in 1888 to stabilize and reduce salaries according to a standardized evaluation of a player's relative ability (something like today's free agent compensation pool). Ward was in Egypt on baseball's famous round-the-world tour when he found out about this. He immediately abandoned the tour and, together with most of the other National League stars, declared war on the owners by organizing their own "Players' League." Ward managed to enlist the support of almost all the star players and most of the sporting press, and he and the ball players spent the winter of 1889-90 promoting the new league in union halls, saloons, and wherever fans could be found.

The 1890 season was really a war between the National League, led by A. G. Spalding, and Ward's Players' League. At the end of the season the Players' League had surpassed the National League in attendance, but the total attendance had been spread too thin for anybody to make much money. The players also made some grievous mistakes. They spurned an appeal to join the American Federation of Labor and they refused to play Sunday ball, which was clearly suicidal. Worst of all, they placed too much power in the hands of their financial backers, relying on the investors to be fair to their ballplayer partners.

At the end of the season all the Players' League teams had shown a profit, while most of the National League teams were on the verge of bankruptcy. It seemed as though the players had won. But when the National League offered to meet with representatives of the American Association (a rival league organized on the usual investor-controlled basis) and a committee representing the Players' League capitalists, the money men met and sold the players out. They merged the three leagues in a way that left the investors firmly in control. This merger resulted (after dropping some weaker teams) in a twelve-team alignment: Baltimore, Washington, Cleveland, and Louisville (all of which eventually folded); Boston, Brooklyn, Chicago, Cincinnati, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis. In 1892, with the National League's monopoly once again secure, the most hated features of the reserve clause were reinstated and salaries again were slashed. The players had lost all control over their game, and they would not regain it until the reserve clause was finally thrown out in 1975. This clause, although grossly unfair to the players, undoubtedly contributed to the growing popularity of the game by ensuring the stability of the team rosters and by casting the players in roles with which blue collar fans could identify.

The 1890s also saw another development that probably helped ensure the popularity of baseball. That was the enforcement of Jim Crow, which turned every major league baseball game into a ritual demonstration that America was a white man's country. During the 1890s blacks had to organize their own teams, and eventually a two-league system emerged, with a Negro National League in 1920, and a Negro Eastern League in 1921, both of which collapsed during the early Depression. A second Negro National League appeared in the late 1930s, and a Negro Ameri­can League in 1936. Both leagues died in 1952 when black stars in large numbers began to be signed to major and minor league contracts after Jackie Robinson's pioneering year with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947.

The National League's 1903 merger with the Western (American) League created a structure of two eight-team leagues and a World Series (also dating from 1903). This arrangement remained intact until 1953, when the Boston Braves moved to Milwaukee.

The years after World War I saw baseball mature into America's premier sports culture with a full array of mythic underpinnings: an immaculate conception (the Cooperstown legend of Abner Doubleday's invention of the game), a myth of the fall (the fixed 1919 World Series), an Odysseus (Ту Cobb), an Achilles (Babe Ruth), a Zeus (Judge Landis), an aristocracy (the Yankees), and a rabble (the Dodgers). More than any other American sport, baseball lends itself to legend. The statistical records give each game a mythic dimension as the hits, runs, errors, and strikeouts are melded into the record books. The mythic power of the game, however, also takes its toll, as even on the lowest level parents and coaches try to ride the miniature exploits of their midget performers into the realm of sports fantasy [3, p.209-210].

2.1.2.2.                 Basketball

The evolution of basketball exhibits a more complicated mixture of elite uplift and ethnic aspiration. Basketball started as part of the nineteenth-century crusade to Americanize (or Christianize) the immigrants; it was quickly taken over by those targets for genteel uplift as a way ethnics could express their national pride and compete with other immigrants.

Basketball was invented in 1891 at the YMCA's leadership training institute in Springfield, Massachusetts. One of the physical instructors at the institute, James Naismith, developed rules for what he called "A New Sport": tossing a soccer ball into a backboardless peach basket. Naismith evidently intended that the ball be moved only by passing, but players soon discovered other ways to advance the ball without carrying it. At first they juggled the ball overhead (volleyball style) as they ran, but when juggling was outlawed the superior technique of dribbling was developed by players in the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association Leagues. Other early improvements included the removal of the bottom from the peach basket, fastening the basket to a backboard, and for a time surrounding the court with wire fencing to keep the ball in play (hence the term "cagers" for basketball players).

The "New Sport" became particularly popular at YMCAs and settle­ment houses in immigrant neighborhoods in the large cities. In New York the University Settlement House fielded championship teams, and by the 1930s there were Jewish Recreational Council Tri-State Championships, Lithuanian National Championships, Polish Roman Catholic Championships, a National Federation of Russian Orthodox Clubs, Catholic Youth Organization leagues, B'nai B'rith leagues, and countless other ethnically based leagues and teams.

The first professional teams were also ethnic, and had names like the Detroit Pulaskis, the Brooklyn Visitations (Irish), the Newark Turnverein, the Original Celtics (largely Jewish and based in New York City), the Harlem Renaissance, the Hebrew All-Stars, and the Buffalo Germans. The ethnic professional teams were succeeded by industrial teams sponsored by factories as part of employee relations programs. This was particularly common among the rubber companies in the Akron, Ohio, area. Industrial teams were the nucleus of the National Basketball League (NBL) when it was organized in 1937. In 1946 the Basketball Association of America (BAA) was organized by the owners of large arenas in major cities; only arena owners were permitted to enter teams. The NBL and the BAA competed until 1949, when the National Basketball Association (NBA) was formed by combining teams from the two leagues) [3, p.212-213].

The evolution of basketball technique and strategy occurred as innovative players overcame the resistance of a conservative coaching establishment. During basketball's first forty years coaches taught the two-handed set shot that turned basketball into an intricate pattern of weaves and passes designed to produce two and three man picks (human walls between the shooter and the defender) to give a player a chance to attempt this easily blocked shot. In 1937 Hank Luisetti of Stanford University scandalized the coaching fraternity by breaking all scoring records with a one-handed jump shot. Orthodox coaches labeled Luisetti a freak, an exception to the rule, but the more farsighted of them realized that the jump shot was impossible to defend against and that the old patterned play game was obsolete.

Another example of a plausible theory refuted by practice was the coaches' belief that big men were too clumsy to play basketball, despite the obvious advantage of their height. Professional basketball today displays several marked characteristics; the most obvious is the appearance of bigger and bigger men at all positions who possess, in addition to extraordinary size and strength, the quickness and ball handling agility that once seemed the special province of "smaller" players (i.e., shorter than six feet six inches) [11, p.97-98].

2.1.2.3.                 Football

Football is unarguably today's preeminent spectator sport; televised professional football is arguably the preeminent spectacle of any kind in today's American culture. In some parts of the country high school football is the only religion with no dissenters, and in some areas the state university football team is the community's common bond and proudest boast.

Football is for most Americans their tribal game, and it has always appealed to their herd instinct. The game can be traced back to the annual autumn free-for-all battles between the new freshmen and sophomores at Harvard in the 1820s. A combination of the free-for-all, soccer, and rugby survived at Harvard until 1874, when the school played two football games against McGill University of Canada. In the first game Harvard's own peculiar rules were used; the second game followed the rules of McGill's fairly orthodox version of British rugby. The Harvard students decided that the Canadian game was more enjoyable, so they voted to play according to those rules thereafter.

It was at Yale that the game of rugby developed into a game closely resembling today's football. The man behind this evolution was Walter Camp, who played football at Yale from 1875 until 1882, when he began training the team, eventually becoming head coach. During the Camp era Yale established a winning record the likes of which has never been seen again. From 1872 until 1909 Yale won 324 games, lost 17, and tied 18, and from 1890 to 1893 Yale outscored its opponents 1265 to 0! Walter Camp changed rugby into football when he replaced the scrum with a pass from the line of scrimmage. Camp was also responsible for the down-yardage system; he introduced American style below-the-waist tackling, and initiated the annual selection of an All-American team.

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