sport: Definition, Synonyms and Much More from Answers.com

Definition

Sports are group games and individual activities involving physical activity and skills.

Description

Sports help children develop physical skills, get exercise, make friends, have fun, learn to play as a member of a team, learn to play fair, and improve self-esteem.

Participation in sports is a great way of staying active and offers wonderful rewards for mental health. Being involved in sports has been proven to help children learn valuable skills for dealing with life's ups and downs. They teach youth how to interact with others and work as a team. This skill facilitates working with others in other ways such as on a class project or a school play. Sports also help students become more independent and feel better about themselves. The result is positive self-esteem and self-confidence, which are extremely important for determining later happiness and success.

Sports also offer an enjoyable, exciting environment in which to learn how to handle both failure and success. Everyone wins and loses some of the time in both sports and other endeavors. Winning feels great and empowering but can also cause a young person to feel pressure and anxiety in the next attempt to win. Losing usually produces feelings of sadness, depression, and disappointment. Learning how to cope with these different feelings fosters good mental health.

Another aspect of sports that contributes to a healthy mind is goal-setting. Young people who have goals are more likely to be self-motivated and are usually able to accomplish more because they know what they need to do in order to get ahead. Without goals, adolescents tend to lack direction and focus. In sports, goal setting is essential for improving individually and working as a team. This is also true in other pursuits. For example, if a student wants to get better grades, reaching specific goals, such as studying for a certain period of time each night, is the most likely way to achieve them.

SPORTSMANSHIP. American sports culture has increasingly become a business. The highly stressful and competitive attitude prevalent at colleges and in professional sports affects the world of children's sports and athletics, creating an unhealthy environment. The attitudes and behavior taught to children in sports carry over into adulthood. Parents should take an active role in helping their child develop good sportsmanship, according to a 2002 health advisory issued by the journal Clinical Reference Systems.

To help adolescents get the most out of sports, parents need to be actively involved. Quoting from the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry Web site, parental involvement includes the following steps:

• providing emotional support and positive feedback
• attending all or some games and talking about them afterward
• having realistic expectations for your child
• learning the sport and supporting your child's involvement
• helping your child talk with you about experiences with the coach and other team members
• helping your child handle disappointments and losing
• modeling respectful spectator behavior

EXTREME SPORTS. Extreme sports in the early 2000s are becoming increasingly popular among young people. They offer the thrill of facing difficult challenges and overcoming obstacles. Extreme sports get the heart racing and put the body and mind to the test in the face of danger. However, with the many physical and mental benefits of extreme sports comes the risk of injuries. It is essential to work with a trained instructor and use the necessary safety equipment when doing any kind of extreme sport.

Extreme sports are not for everyone. However, those looking for bigger challenges in their quest for physical fitness have many options, including rock and ice climbing, surfing, whitewater rafting, wakeboarding, water-skiing, mountain-bike racing, bicycle stunt-riding, skydiving, skateboarding, and extreme snowboarding. There are many camps around the country that teach extreme sports to kids and teenagers. Anyone can find the nearest extreme sports camp or more general information by typing "extreme sports" on any Internet search engine. There are thousands of Web sites devoted to these activities.

Infancy

An infant is capable of participating in only a limited amount of athletic activity. Still, many parents worry about their child's motor skill development and wonder how they can help develop these skills. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) advises parents that normal play with adults is more than enough physical stimulus to encourage normal development of motor skills. In years of research, no one has produced any evidence that increased stimulation of infants increases development of motor skills in later years.

Swimming is perhaps the only sport infants are really able to participate in. While infants instinctively hold their breath when immersed in water, pediatricians warn that they also swallow water, which can produce hazardous side effects. The AAP advises that infants should not participate in swimming activities until they are at least four months old.

Toddlerhood

Toddlers are naturally curious and exploratory, leading them to develop independence skills such as walking and talking. These should be encouraged by adults, as should frequent interaction with other children their own age. Athletic activity at this age should be free form and spontaneous, with adult interference or direction held to a minimum. The AAP suggests that adult intervention, such as teaching a child to throw and catch a baseball, has little effect on later motor skills development, and they warn that the repetition of such practicing often stifles the natural urge to play creatively. It has also been shown that until children reach ages of five to seven, their vision is not sufficiently developed to follow objects that are moving quickly through their line of sight, such as thrown balls.

Preschool

Children are not little adults when it comes to sports and physical activities. As reported in Heidi Splete's article on age-appropriate sports skills, Sally Harris, a pediatrician at the Palo Alto Medical Clinic in Palo Alto, California, asserts that early childhood sports should focus on skill development rather than competitiveness. Activities should allow children to learn by trial and error with minimal instruction. Competition is mostly a distraction for preschool-age children. Appropriate athletic activities for children of this age are dance, beginning gymnastics (primarily tumbling), and swimming. Free-form play with peers is probably most important, both for its socializing effect and for the creative expression it offers.

Sports activity in early childhood should have three basic components, according to Harris. They are acquisition of basic motor skills, social development by the child's interaction with coaches and teammates, and cognitive development in understanding and following instructions and executing strategy and tactics.

School Age

By the age of five or six, children begin rapidly developing motor skills. Also, posture and balance become automatic, and reaction times become faster. However, learning complex rules is often difficult and trying to teach a child a sport requiring a great deal of instruction, such as baseball, football, or soccer, may only cause frustration and a lack of interest. A child's inability in these areas can also cause a sense of failure and provoke a life-long aversion to organized sports. One good way to get a child interested in sports during these years is to engage in physical activity the whole family can participate in, such as taking long walks or bicycle rides. Most pediatricians suggest that complex team sports that require coaching or memorization should be postponed until a child reaches the age of nine or ten. Between the ages of six and nine years, beginning soccer and baseball are appropriate sports, especially if the focus is on getting children interested in sports or physical activity.

By the time a child reaches adolescence, his or her interest in sports is most likely at its peak. Children of this age often collect sports memorabilia, wear clothes resembling the uniforms of their favorite players, and spend larger amounts of time watching, participating in, and talking about sports. At ages 10 through 12, children can improve traditional athletic skills and master complex motor skills. They are able to play sports involving strategies and teamwork, but growth spurts can bring physical and emotional changes that parents and coaches should be aware of, according to Harris.

In the last several decades of the twentieth century, there was a dramatic decrease in the number of school districts that require physical education classes for students. As a result, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services set an objective to increase the number of children six years of age and older who exercise on a daily basis at light to moderate levels for at least 30 minutes.

A 2002 survey of student participation in extracurricular sports activities at middle schools showed a typical program was offered on average 3.6 hours per week. It also revealed that 26.7 percent of boys and 22.9 percent of girls participated in the activities. The most commonly offered activities at middle schools surveyed were basketball (31.7%), track and field (10.3%), soccer (9.4%), tennis (6.7%), and football (5.4%).

Since the middle schools offered a small number of sports activity programs, the survey recommends middle schools add a variety of noncompetitive activities, such as dance, aerobics, martial arts, jogging, walking, and yoga. Providing programs that appeal to a wider range of students at all grade levels of middle and high school would likely increase participation in extracurricular sports and physical activity programs.

The social benefits of athletics are especially important for young girls. In fact, it has been argued that girls are more in need of the benefits of athletics than boys. Adolescent girls tend to have lower self-esteem than boys, and many suffer from the false belief that their bodies are useful only to the extent that they are attractive to boys. Statistics compiled by the Women's Sports Foundation also demonstrate that young female athletes receive substantial benefits from participation in sports. They found that girls who participated in school athletics are 92 percent less likely to use drugs, including tobacco and alcohol; and 80 percent less likely to get pregnant. Additionally, they are three times more likely to graduate from college.

Common Problems

The most common problem in adolescent sports is sports-related injuries. An estimated 30 million children in the United States play in organized sports but about 35 percent drop out each year, usually due to physical injury or emotional stress. Each year, hospital emergency rooms see more than 2.6 million sports-related injuries in young people, according to an article in the April 8, 2002 issue of U. S. News & World Report.

Among children ages 5 to 14 years, the top sports injuries annually are: bicycling, 336,250; basketball, 193,400; football, 185,740; baseball and softball, 117,250; and soccer, 85,430. The number of other sports injuries include skateboarding, 49,930; hockey, 25,400; and gymnastics, 26,950.

Among young people ages 15 to 24 years, the top sports injuries are: basketball, 277,00; football, 171,290; bicycling, 95,720; baseball and softball, 88,340; and soccer, 68,790, according to the article. Other sports injuries included general exercising, 38,560; snowboarding, 29,700; hockey, 28,070; and skateboarding, 27,470.

Parental Concerns

The National Athletic Training Association encourages parents to ask questions of coaches when their children become involved in sports. These questions include the following:

• What is the level of the coach's education? Does it include training in cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and first aid?
• What does the coach do when an injury happens? What is the protocol for returning to play following an injury?
• Is there an on-site athletic healthcare provider or consulting team physician? Does the coach knows about any health conditions of the child and have phone numbers where parents can be reached in an emergency?
• Are there emergency medications available for children with asthma or allergies?
• What are the inclement weather guidelines, especially for lightning storms and extreme heat?
• Is the athletic equipment safe, properly fitted, and in good condition?
• Are there any supervised preseason and in-season conditioning programs?

When to Call the Doctor

If a child receives a soft tissue injury, such as a strain or sprain, or a bone injury, the best immediate treatment is ice, compression, elevation of the injury, and rest. Get professional treatment if any injury is severe, such as a fracture, profuse bleeding, dislocated joint, prolonged swelling, or prolonged or severe pain. Playing rigorous sports in the heat requires close monitoring of both body and weather conditions. Heat injuries are always dangerous and can be fatal. Children perspire less than adults and require a higher core body temperature to trigger sweating. Heat-related illnesses include dehydration, heat exhaustion (nausea, dizziness, weakness, headache, pale and moist skin, heavy perspiration, normal or low body temperature, weak pulse, dilated pupils, disorientation, and fainting spells), and heat stroke (headache, dizziness, confusion, and hot dry skin, possibly leading to blood vessel collapse, coma, and death). Professional medical help should be sought for heat stroke, heat exhaustion, and any other heat-related illnesses that do not quickly clear up.

Resources

Books

Erickson, Darrell. Molding Young Athletes: How Parents andCoaches Can Positively Influence Kids in Sports. Oregon, WI: Purington Press, 2004.

Fish, Joel. 101 Ways to Be a Terrific Sports Parent: MakingAthletics a Positive Experience for Your Child. New York: Fireside, 2003.

Malina, Robert M., and Michael A. Clark. Youth Sports:Perspectives for a New Century. Monterey, CA: Coaches Choice Books, 2003.

Shannon, Joyce Brennfleck. Sports Injuries Information forTeens: Health Tips about Sports Injuries and Injury Prevention. Detroit, MI: Omnigraphics, 2003.

Periodicals

Goldberg, Michael J. "Kids Dropping Out of Sports." Pediatric News (February 2002): 25.

Ishee, Jimmy H. "Participation in Extracurricular Physical Activity in Middle Schools." The Journal of Physical Education, Recreation & Dance (April 2003): 10.

Lord, Mary. "Dangerous Games: Sports Injuries among Children." U.S. News & World Report (April 8, 2002): 44.

Metzl, Jordan D. "Sports Should Be About Fun." PediatricNews (October 2002): 32.

Splete, Heidi. "Developmental Stages of Sports Readiness Can't Be Rushed: Accept Some Level of Chaos." Family Practice News (Sept. 1, 2002): 33.

——."Work on Age-appropriate Sports Skills: How Much, How Soon?" Pediatric News (October 2002): 28.

Organizations

American Academy of Pediatrics. 141 Northwest Point Blvd., Elk Grove Village, IL 60007. Web site: www.aao.org.

National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and SkinDiseases. 1 AMS Circle, Bethesda, MD 20892. Web site: www.nih.gov/niams.

Web Sites

"Children and Sports." American Academy of Child &Adolescent Psychiatry, January 2002. Available online at www.aacap.org/publications/factsFam/sports.htm (accessed October 14, 2004).

"Sports Injury Prevention: Children and Adolescents." SafeUSA, July 14, 2002. Available online at (accessed October 14, 2004).

[Article by: Teresa G. Odle; Ken R. Wells]

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Sport in America began as premodern participatory contests of strength, skill, and speed that were unorganized local competitions with simple rules. However, as the nation modernized, sport became highly organized with formalized rules and national competition. Sport became commercialized with expert athletes entertaining paying spectators.

The first sportsmen were Native Americans, who competed for religious, medicinal, and gambling purposes. They had running races, but were best known for team ball sports like lacrosse, which had over forty variations. The colonists defined sports broadly to include all diversions. Colonial amusement reflected their European backgrounds, including social class and religion, and their new surroundings in America. Puritans brought their opposition to pagan and Catholic holidays, Sabbath breaking, and time-wasting amusements. They barred brutal sports, gambling games, and amusements that promoted disorder, but advocated useful activities like wolf hunting, fishing, and training-day (military practice) contests like wrestling and marksmanship. The more heterogeneous colonies had more options. New York, with its Dutch heritage, had bowling, kolven (golf), and boat races, and also horseracing after the English took over the colony in 1664. In Philadelphia, control of the community passed from the Quakers to a secular elite who in 1732 tried to separate themselves from lesser sorts by organizing the Schuylkill Fishing Colony, the first sports club in the British Empire.

The South had the most expansive sporting culture. The Anglican Church was more tolerant than the Puritans were, and personal ethics did not prohibit gambling or blood sports. An elite planter class emerged in the late seventeenth century, which tried to emulate the English country gentry. The great planters originally raced their own horses in impromptu quarter-mile matches and wagered enormous amounts with their peers. By the mid-eighteenth century, they were starting to import expensive Thoroughbreds that competed in long distance races at urban tracks established by elite jockey clubs. This public entertainment helped demonstrate the supposed superiority of the great planters over the masses.

Publicans throughout the colonies were the first sporting entrepreneurs, sponsoring animal baiting, gander pulling, cock fights, skittles (an early form of bowling), shuffleboard, and target shooting to attract thirsty patrons. Moral reformers, particularly evangelical ministers of the Great Awakening, opposed these sports. During the Revolution, many patriots frowned on gambling as unvirtuous and elite sports as aristocratic. The Continental Congress in 1778 recommended that the states suppress racing and "other diversions as are productive of idleness and dissipation."

Antebellum Sport

Sport in the first half of the nineteenth century remained premodern, abhorred by proper Victorians who frowned upon it as immoral and wasteful. The sporting fraternity encompassed a male bachelor subculture, including segments of the elite, skilled butchers, street thugs, volunteer firefighters, and Irish immigrants. They enjoyed blood sports, combat sports like boxing (which was universally banned), and gambling sports. Southern plantation owners employed slaves as cock trainers, jockeys, boxers, and oarsmen.

The leading antebellum sportsman was the industrialist John C. Stevens. He restored Thoroughbred racing to New York in 1823; established the Elysian Fields, the preeminent site of antebellum ball sports, in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1831; promoted the first major pedestrian race in 1835; and organized the New York Yacht Club in 1844. Seven years later, Stevens sponsored America, conqueror of the finest British yachts, promoting pride in American naval architecture, craftsmanship, and seamanship.

American sport began a dramatic transformation at midcentury that led to a boom after the Civil War. This was influenced by the processes of urbanization, industrialization, and immigration; by the development of an ideology that created a positive image for sports; and by the rise of new modern games. The ideology of sports was developed by secular Jacksonian reformers—who thought sports could help cope with such negative features of rapid urbanization as soaring crime rates, epidemics, and class conflict—and by religious reformers inspired by the Second Great Awakening, who saw them as a way to fight sin. Both groups believed that participation in exercise and clean sports would improve public health, build character, develop sound morals, and provide an alternative to vile urban amusements. This positive attitude toward sport was supported by the examples of Scottish Caledonian games (traditional track and field contests) and German turnverein (gymnastic societies). Clergymen like Thomas W. Higginson advocated muscular Christianity, the cornerstone of the Young Men's Christian Association movement that harmonized mind, body, and spirit. Health advocates in the 1840s organized the municipal park movement that resulted in the creation of New York's Central Park in 1858. It became a model for large urban parks after the Civil War.

Team sports aptly fit the sports creed. Cricket, a manly and skillful English game, enjoyed a brief fad in the 1840s, but was quickly surpassed by baseball, which had evolved from the English game of rounders. Baseball was simpler, more dramatic, faster paced, and took less time to play. In 1845, Alexander Cartwright drew up the modern rules for his middle-class Knickerbockers club. Early teams were voluntary associations of middle-income men, principally in metropolitan New York, although the game spread quickly along the Atlantic seaboard. Teams were organized by occupation, neighborhood, or political party. The top New York teams organized the National Association of Base Ball Players in 1858 to define rules, resolve disputes, and control the sport's future.

The Late-Nineteenth-Century Sports Boom

The sports explosion was directly abetted by the technological revolution. Communication innovations like telegraphy and telephony helped newspapers report events at distant locations. The New York World in the mid-1890s introduced the first sports section. Daily coverage was supplemented by weeklies beginning with the American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine (1829) and William T. Porter's urbane Spirit of the Times (1831), which promoted angling and horseracing. Other important periodicals included the National Police Gazette (1845), the New York Clipper (1853), and the Sporting News (1886).

The coming of the railroad enabled athletes to journey to distant sites for competition. This potential was demonstrated in 1852, when, to promote rail travel, the Boston, Concord, and Montreal Railroad sponsored the first American intercollegiate athletic contest, the Harvard-Yale crew race at Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire. Railroads enabled baseball leagues to operate and illegal prizefights to take place at out-of-the-way locations. Cheap urban mass transit, especially electrified streetcars, increased access to sporting venues.

Technological innovations also helped sport in many other ways. Thomas Edison's incandescent light bulb improved illumination for indoor events. New equipment was created, such as vulcanized rubber for balls and tires, and new machines made possible cheap, mass-produced sporting goods. The English safety bicycle invented in the late 1880s created a cycling fad among men and women. Riders joined clubs, raced, toured, and attended six-day professional races at Madison Square Garden in New York City.

Social class heavily determined sporting opportunities in this era. The elite, who emulated the English gentry, had the wealth, time, and self-confidence to indulge themselves. They used expensive sports to gain recognition and improved their status by joining restricted athletic, jockey, country, and yacht clubs. Elite colleges became centers of intercollegiate competition, beginning with rowing (1852), baseball (1859), football (1869), and track and field (1873). Participation spread by the 1890s to state and private colleges throughout the nation. Competition promoted manliness, school pride, and the reputation of institutions. Student-run associations ran the teams and recruited gifted athletes through financial aid and easy course loads.

The hardworking new middle class finally became involved in sport because of the sports ideology, the creation of clean new sports, and the accessibility of suburban parks where by the mid-1880s they played on baseball diamonds and tennis courts. Their participation in sport demonstrated "manliness" and offered a sense of self-worth and accomplishment lost in their increasingly bureaucratized work. Manual workers' options were hindered by urbanization, which destroyed many traditional outdoor sports facilities; by the arrival of eastern European immigrants with no athletic heritage; and by the factory system, with its strict time-work discipline, low wages, and long working hours. Lower class urbanites were most active in sports that were accessible and fit in with their environment, like boxing, billiards, and basketball. Progressive reformers promoted sports at settlement houses to help inner-city youth acculturate.

Nineteenth-century sport was virtually an exclusive male sphere. Yet, women, mainly elite daughters whose status protected them from criticism, began to participate after the Civil War. Physicians and female physical educators advocated improved fitness for women to make them more attractive and healthier mothers. Young women partook of sociable coed sports like croquet and ice skating, and individual sports like archery, golf, and tennis, the latter introduced to the United States by Mary Outer bridge in 1875. The cycling fad encouraged the development of sports clothes, including bloomers, shorter skirts, and no corsets. Women's colleges taught physical fitness, but female students preferred team sports and intercollegiate competition. Athletic leaders at the turn of the century modified men's sports, especially the new game of basketball, to make them more "appropriate" for women—that is, less exertive and less competitive. Nonetheless, female physical educators opposed intercollegiate sports as creating undesirable manly values like competitiveness and individualism, and in the 1900s, noncompetitive play days supplanted intercollegiate women's sport.

The Rise of Professional Sport

While most nineteenth-century sport was participatory, the era's most significant development was the rise of professional spectator sports, a product of the commercialization of leisure, the emergence of sports entrepreneurs, the professionalization of athletes, the large potential audiences created by urbanization, and the modernization of baseball, boxing, and horseracing. Baseball started to become a business in the 1860s with the hiring of the first paid players, the opening of Brooklyn's Union Grounds, and the 1869 national tour of the all-salaried Cincinnati Red Stockings. The National Association of Professional Baseball Players, the first professional league, was formed in 1871, supplanted by the more business-minded National League (NL) in 1876. The NL's success led to the rise of rivals, most notably the working-class-oriented American Association—which was created in 1882 but merged with the NL the next season. In the 1880s, major league baseball largely developed its modern character, including tactics, rules, and equipment.

Baseball, dubbed the "national pastime," completely dominated the sporting scene in the early 1900s. Not merely fun, its ideology fit prevailing values and beliefs. It was considered a sport of pastoral American origins that improved health, character, and morality; taught traditional rural values; and promoted social democracy and social integration. Baseball's popularity was reflected by the rise of the American League, the growth of the minor leagues from thirteen in 1900 to forty-six in 1912, and the construction of large fire proof ballparks.

Prizefighting was universally banned until the 1890s, when the bare-knuckle era came to an end—marked by Jim Corbett's 1892 victory over heavyweight champion John L. Sullivan, the preeminent sports hero of the century. Boxing continued to be permitted in just a few locations until the 1920s, when it was legalized in New York. It then became very popular, with heroes like Jack Dempsey fighting in arenas like Madison Square Garden.

Fighters came from the most impoverished backgrounds, hoping to use boxing to escape poverty. There were a few black champions in the less prestigious lighter weight divisions. However, heavyweight champion Jack Johnson (1908–1915) was considered a threat to white supremacy, and there was a crusade to get rid of him. Thereafter, no African American got a heavyweight title shot until Joe Louis, who won the title in 1937. He became a national hero one year later by defeating Max Schmeling, symbol of Nazi Germany. After World War II, boxing was a staple of prime time television, but overexposure and widening public recognition of underworld influences curtailed its success.

Horseracing was rejuvenated after the Civil War under the aegis of politically connected elites. After a successful experiment at Saratoga, New York, in 1863, the American Jockey Club opened New York's Jerome Park (1866), a model for elite courses in Brooklyn; Long Branch, New Jersey; and Chicago. Their success encouraged the rise of proprietary tracks—like those in Brighton Beach, New York, and Guttenberg, New Jersey—run by men closely connected to political machines and syndicate crime. By the early 1900s, every state but Maryland and Kentucky had closed their racetracks, if only temporarily, because of the gambling. In the 1920s, Thoroughbred racing revived because of increasing prosperity, looser morals, ethnic political influence, and underworld influences. Racetrack admissions surpassed admissions for all other sports by the early 1950s, and continued to do so until the early 1980s.

Public interest during the 1920s—the so-called "Golden Age of Sports"—was whetted by increased leisure time and discretionary income, by national radio broadcasts of events like baseball's World Series and heavyweight boxing championships, and by the development of a pantheon of heroes. Every major sport had its great hero, role models who symbolized prowess and traditional and modern values. Idols included Babe Ruth in baseball, Red Grange in football, Jack Dempsey in boxing, Bobby Jones in golf, and Charles Lindbergh in aeronautics. While women were largely limited to "feminine" sports like tennis, figure skating, and swimming, some female athletes—notably tennis player Helen Wills—also became widely celebrated.

The Great Depression hurt sport, though people still looked to recreation for escape. Commercialized sports declined, but less than most businesses, as companies curtailed industrial sports programs, and colleges cut back on intercollegiate sports, particularly football. On the other hand, the Public Works Administration and Works Progress Administration constructed thousands of sports fields, swimming pools, and other athletic facilities.

The United States and the Olympics

American athletes at the first Olympics in 1896 came from elite eastern colleges, yet squads in the early 1900s had many working-class ethnic athletes, including Native American Jim Thorpe, gold medalist in the pentathlon and the decathlon at the 1912 games. The first Olympic Games in the United States were held in St. Louis in 1904, but drew only thirteen nations. The 1932 winter games were at Lake Placid, New York, and the summer games in Los Angeles at the Coliseum. The summer games featured the first athletic village. Babe Didrikson starred, winning two gold medals and a silver in track. An all-around talent, she was the greatest female American athlete of the century. Before the 1936 games at Berlin, there was widespread support for a boycott to protest nazism, but the movement failed. The African American Jesse Owens starred, capturing four gold medals in track, yet returned stateside to a racist society.

Post–world War II Sport

Spectator sports grew rapidly in the prosperous 1950s and 1960s. There were more major sports, the number of franchises rose, and television enabled millions to watch live events. Air travel facilitated major league baseball's opening up of new markets in 1953, when the Boston Braves moved to Milwaukee, and again five years later, when the New York Giants and Dodgers moved to the West Coast. The thirty teams in Major League Baseball, the thirty-one teams in the National Football League (NFL), and the twenty-nine in the National Basketball Association (NBA, founded in 1949) were located throughout the country. This expansion was accompanied by the construction of arenas and stadiums by local governments to keep or attract sports franchises. Television broadcasts promoted growing interest in college football, and created a huge boom in professional football during the 1960s. By the early 1980s, twice as many households watched pro football as baseball. Television also increased interest in golf and tennis, making celebrities of golfers Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus and tennis player Jimmy Connors. Public tastes were broadened, especially through the American Broadcasting Company's Wide World of Sports, which went on the air in 1961, and became the longest running series on television.

Professional athletes became empowered through their unions. Marvin Miller, president of the Major League Baseball Players Association, which began in the late 1960s to secure higher salary minimums, grievance procedures, increased pensions, and representation by agents. The union secured salary arbitration in 1973 and achieved free agency in 1976. Average salaries in baseball rose from$19,000 in 1967 to $1.4 million in 2001. Nonetheless, the value of sports franchises appreciated, as with the Chicago Cubs, worth $500 million in 2002.

Major college sports prospered after the war. National College Athletic Association (NCAA) football gained lucrative television contracts, and attendance reached forty million by 1970. Basketball, a much lower cost sport, had to recover from the point shaving scandal of 1951. By the early 1970s, however, the NCAA basketball champion-ships became a prime annual television event, along with the World Series; the NFL's Super Bowl, first played in 1966; and car racing's premier event, the Indianapolis 500.

Race was the central issue in postwar sport. From the late nineteenth century, African Americans had been barred from competing against whites in most professional sports. This custom was shattered by the pivotal integration of Major League Baseball following the hiring of black player Jackie Robinson in 1947, a huge step in the civil rights movement. Pro football had integrated one year earlier, and the NBA followed in 1950. Desegregation resulted from such factors as the Second Great Migration; African American participation in World War II; political pressure from civil rights workers and politicians like New York's Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia; prointegration columns by African American, communist, and mainstream sportswriters; and the outstanding achievements of Jesse Owens and Joe Louis. Integration moved slowly, and college football teams in the Deep South did not desegregate until the late 1960s. However, in 2002 most players in the NFL, and nearly 80 percent of the NBA, were African Americans, including superstar Michael Jordan, the highest-paid team player of all time.

Women's sports began to boom in the 1970s, as a result of the growing interest of young women in sport, feminism, and improved health, and in reaction to demands for greater American success in international sport. Tennis star Billie Jean King played a major role by demanding equity in prize money, by helping to organize the Virginia Slims circuit in 1971, when she was the first woman athlete to earn over $100,000 in one year, and by defeating misogynist Bobby Riggs in a 1973 nationally televised match. In addition, in 1971, the Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) was established to organize national championships. Then, in 1972, Title IX of the Educational Amendments Act barred sexual discrimination by schools and colleges that received federal assistance. Women were thereafter entitled to parity in athletic scholarships, training facilities, and coaching. By 1996, nearly half of all intercollegiate athletes were women.

The postwar Olympics became an adjunct of the Cold War, supposedly reflecting the relative merits of capitalist and communist social and economic systems. The Soviet Union consistently surpassed the United States, and East Germany nearly matched the United States in 1976, and surpassed it in 1988. One reason for the relatively poor U.S. showing was that it originally had weak women's teams, reflecting national support of only "feminine" sports. National track teams relied heavily on women from historically black colleges, among the few institutions that supported women's track. One black woman runner, Wilma Rudolph of Tennessee State, won three gold medals in track in 1960.

The 1968 Olympics was a target of protest on the part of black athletes encouraged by the civil rights and black power movements, and by the example of charismatic boxer Muhammad Ali. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter forced a boycott of the Olympic Games in Moscow to protest Soviet incursions into Afghanistan. The 1984 Los Angeles games, boycotted by the Soviet Union, and completely organized by the private sector, was a financial success, earning $250 million. American women became much more successful, led by Florence Griffiths-Joyner and Jackie Joyner-Kersee.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, interest in sport was continuing to grow. Not only were major spectator sports, particularly baseball, football, and auto racing, drawing larger crowds than ever before, but television coverage, especially on cable networks like the Entertainment Sports Programming Network (ESPN), continued to expand. Furthermore, men and women's interest in health and personal appearance sustained the fitness movement that began in the 1970s, promoting mass participatory recreational sport among people of all ages.

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———. Touching Base: Professional Baseball and American Culture in the Progressive Era. Rev. ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999.

Seymour, Harold. Baseball. 3 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1960–1990.

Smith, Ronald A. Sports and Freedom: The Rise of Big-Time College Athletics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Tygiel, Jules. Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Wiggins, David K. Glory Bound: Black Athletes in a White America. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1997.

Sport was an essential and socially significant pastime in the early modern world, an arena in which individual identity and ability were expressed by king and milkmaid alike. Capable sportsmanship at tennis, jousting, and even wrestling were increasingly perceived as the markings of a strong monarchy, which determined the athletic displays and rites of passage that prevailed in an aristocratic court. The sporting culture, in turn, was philosophically sanctioned by many humanists who extolled the "gentlemanlike pastimes" of swimming, archery, swordplay, and horseback riding as valuable components of any elite education.

Peasants and those of the lower orders also engaged in sport for their own purposes, reinforcing community cohesion by carving out their own particular spheres of play. Not all sport was universally embraced, however, and over the course of the period Puritans and others began to lament the "devilish" activity that joined other activities such as drinking, gambling, and dancing to produce "moral degeneracy." Nevertheless, sport prevailed against these assaults and emerged from the period more varied and popular than ever.

In the Book of the Courtier (1528), Baldassare Castiglione (1478–1529) set the tone through his admonitions regarding proper court behavior and etiquette, in which sport occupied—at least for males—a central and elevated position. Sport, however, was conceived by such writers in very different terms than those who came before (or perhaps since). For them, personal skill at a game such as archery was offset by the concept of Fortuna ('Lady luck'), a capricious goddess who determined the tides and turns of one's own personal luck. Sport was also imbued with a humanist regard for man, his body as well as his soul. According to Castiglione, the perfect man at court was "well built and shapely of limb," and displayed his physical capabilities by excelling at games of war—archery, horsemanship, and swordplay—as well as less martial physical activity, notably swimming, running, throwing, and jumping. Especially in games of mock war, such as jousting, the point was to achieve individual distinction on a physical level, as one performed on a stage that recalled traditions of military triumph. Even kings entered the game in this sense, as was the case with the famous encounter on the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520, when Henry VIII of England engaged Francis I of France in a wrestling match, alongside other gaming activities.

Despite its dangers and the increasing obsolescence of mounted and armored warfare on the battlefield, jousting sports continued to flourish in the form of fencing, which witnessed a shift to the long thin-bladed rapier and the use of point and the lunge, and with it an increasing emphasis on speed, dexterity, and technique. Another sport in which actual weapons figured prominently was archery, which sustained its popularity even as the bow and arrow became increasingly archaic in war. According to Roger Ascham (1515–1568) in 1546, "How honest a pastime for the mind [is archery]; how wholesome an exercise for the body; not vile for great men to use, not costly for poor men to sustain." Finally, horses also continued in their martial importance, as they were used in the hunt, and in races such as the Italian palio and in England during annual competitions. Dressage, which was an extremely difficult, technical, disciplined—and time-bound—form of classical riding, was undertaken by military academies, though it, too, enjoyed a reputation as a more elevated sporting spectacle, and one that reinforced and perhaps played out social hierarchies in presenting the mounted rider—according to one Tudor writer—as a force of "majesty and dread to inferior persons." At the same time, the increasing precision of horsemanship, in the form of dressage, reflected a greater emphasis on uniformity and mathematical rules, as reflected in the writings of Descartes or by the early modern military shift to the use of drill.

Other activities enjoyed by the upper levels of society included tennis, which became the sport of kings such as Henry VIII, most notably, and was referred to in the writings of Erasmus, More, and Montaigne (with the latter's brother dying after being hit in the head with a tennis ball—no trivial accident when balls were frequently decried as too hard). After 1600, however, tennis declined in popularity, though it continued to ebb and flow in the elite consciousness alongside the new sport of golf.

Meanwhile, though football and related communal games tended to be spurned by elites and their writers, the similar game of càlcio ('soccer') flourished in Italy, allowing gentlemen, in the words of Cardinal Silvio Antoniano, to appear "more erect and more eager, and [enabling] them to meet sadness and depression with unruffled brow." Like other sports of the day, càlcio was affected by increasing bureaucratic intervention and mathematical quantification, as rules were drawn up to establish standards of play as well as objective and (increasingly) recorded scoring systems.

While sport among the elite was lauded by religious and secular leaders, sport among the lower orders was subject to greater condemnation on the part of authorities, who might have feared the disruptive and violent potential it could contain. The church and civic officials had long attempted to curtail football and other peasant games, with writers such as Sir Thomas Elyot (1490?–1546) advocating that football, in particular, be "put in perpetual silence." Urban footballers, or those who practiced their exertions near churches, were particularly odious to churchwardens, city administrators, and other leaders, who understandably feared the destruction of property. The "bloody and murdering" practice of football continued, however, in spite of Puritan hostility and denunciation, and despite the increasingly restricted fields that were fenced in after the enclosure movement in England. While games were allowed within proscribed time periods and special festival occasions such as Shrove Tuesday or May Day, the community- and identity-reinforcing benefits of sports proved too enticing for villagers and townspeople alike.

Such attachments were due in part to the fact that certain sports were so embedded in the peasant tradition, where football—usually involving two opposing teams that kicked or threw the ball against the opponents' goals—extended back centuries. In England the game had mythical origins, with claims that it had originated among Roman legionnaires in Britain, or later, among Saxons. Whatever the truth, the term futball first appears in records of the fourteenth century, with indications that the sport had already existed for a while. Similar to football, but more like modern-day soccer, was the game known in France as la soule à pied, which also extended back to the Middle Ages and involved opposing villages or specifically designated individuals competing to propel a leather ball forward by feet alone. Shouler à la crosse—which would evolve, with American Indian contributions, into modern lacrosse—involved similar feats using sticks, while the stick-based game of hockey—derived either from the French hocquet, meaning 'shepherd's staff', or the Anglo-Saxon hoc, meaning 'hook'—also originated in the Middle Ages.

Less physically taxing than fencing or football, though perceived as sport by upper and lower orders alike, were gambling games and related pastimes such as cockfighting. Though an ancient and universal game, dicing in early modern Europe continued its popularity and used the familiar cubed objects rather than the original knucklebones, though some dice were carved in the image of men or beasts. German mercenaries called landsknechts (literally, 'servants of the country') were particularly renowned dicing gamblers of the time, while knights and ladies, along with children and villagers, also continued to participate. Not surprisingly, objections were raised by Puritans, although enforcement of prohibitions was uneven. Gambling was not simply a "profane exercise" but also quite clearly a sin and banned in places such as John Calvin's Geneva. As one epigrammatic writer put it in 1636, the banning of sport and games resulted in "dull iron times" that made one long for "the Golden Age's Glories." Restrictions were subsequently eased, however, in reaction to the failed suppression of sport; partly as a result, the eighteenth century witnessed a veritable explosion of games and gambling, which continued, as they already had, to provide a sphere in which to exhibit, perform, show off, display physical prowess, and fashion one's identity through the kick of a ball, the lunge of a sword, or the roll of Fortuna-imbued dice.

Bibliography

Baker, William J. Sports in the Western World. Totowa, N.J., 1982.

Cox, R. W. History of Sport: A Guide to the Literature and Sources of Information. Frodsham, U.K., 1994.

Dunning, Eric. Sport Matters: Sociological Studies of Sport, Violence, and Civilization. London and New York, 1999.

Mason, Tony, ed. Sport in Britain: A Social History. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1989.

—SARAH COVINGTON

Dansk (Danish)
n. - sport, atletik, idræt, jagt, fiskeri, morskab, løjer, spøg, flink fyr
v. intr. - lege, have det fornøjeligt
v. tr. - spøge, have det sjovt, tumle sig
adj. - sports-, idræts-, atletik-

idioms:

• Be a sport    vær nu så flink
• in sport    for spøg
• make sport of    lave sjov med
• sporting chance    en fair chance
• sports car    sportsbil
• sports coat    sportsjakke
• sports day    idrætsdag
• sports jacket    sportsjakke
• sports writer    sportsjournalist

Nederlands (Dutch)
sport, sportbeoefening, grappenmakerij, sportief persoon, iets dat rondgegooid wordt, sport bedrijven, grappen maken, iets trots dragen, muteren

Français (French)
n. - sport, (École) activités sportives, jeu/amusement, joueur (bon/mauvais), (Austral) mon pote (fam), (Biol) variant
v. intr. - batifoler
v. tr. - arborer
adj. - sport, de sport

idioms:

• Be a sport    sois chic (excl)
• in sport    pour rire, pour s'amuser
• make sport of    se moquer de (qn), tourner en ridicule (qn)
• sporting chance    (être) possible, (avoir) des chances de
• sports car    voiture de sport
• sports coat    veste sport
• sports day    (GB) fête des sports
• sports jacket    (GB) veste en tweed
• sports writer    journaliste sportif

Deutsch (German)
n. - Sport, Spaß, Sportsmann
v. - zur Schau tragen, sich tummeln, mutieren
adj. - Sport-

idioms:

• Be a sport    Sei kein Spielverderber!
• in sport    zum Scherz
• make sport of    sich über jmdn. lustig machen
• sporting chance    faire Chance
• sports car    Sportwagen
• sports coat    sportlicher Sakko
• sports day    Sportfest
• sports jacket    sportlicher Sakko
• sports writer    Sportreporter

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - αθλοπαιδιά, σπορ, άθλημα, φίλαθλος, περίγελος, (καθομ.) φιλαράκι
v. - παίζω, συμμετέχω σε αθλοπαιδιά, φορώ επιδεικτικά, μοστράρω, αστεϊζομαι, χωρατεύω
adj. - αθλητικός

idioms:

• Be a sport    Κάνε μου τη χάρη
• in sport    (καθομ.) στα αστεία
• make sport of    περιπαίζω
• sporting chance    ευκαιρία νίκης ή διάσωσης
• sports car    ανοικτό διθέσιο αυτοκίνητο
• sports coat    σακάκι σπορ
• sports day    ημέρα σχολικών επιδείξεων
• sports jacket    σακάκι σπορ
• sports writer    αθλητικογράφος, αθλητικός συντάκτης

Italiano (Italian)
sport

idioms:

• Be a sport!    non prendertela!
• in sport    nello sport
• make sport of    farsi gioco di
• sporting chance    possibilità
• sports car    macchina sportiva
• sports coat/jacket    giacchetta sportiva
• sports day    giornata dello sport
• sports writer    recensore di sport

Português (Portuguese)
n. - esporte (m), companheiro, bom perdedor, diversão (m)
v. - jogar, divertir-se
adj. - esportivo

idioms:

• Be a sport!    Seja bonzinho!
• in sport    de brincadeira
• make sport of    zombar de
• sporting chance    grande chance
• sports car    carro esportivo
• sports coat/jacket    paletó (m)
• sports day    dia de competições esportivas na escola
• sports writer    jornalista esportivo

Русский (Russian)
спорт, спортивные игры, любительская охота, рыбная ловля, игра, проделка, насмешка, посмешище, спортсмен, почковая мутация, выставлять напоказ, щеголять, резвиться, транжирить

idioms:

• Be a sport!    будь человеком!
• in sport    шутки ради
• make sport of    высмеивать кого-л., подшучивать над кем-л.
• sporting chance    надежда на успех
• sports car    спортивный автомобиль
• sports coat/jacket    пиджак спортивного покроя, спортивный жакет
• sports day    день спортивных состязаний (в школе)
• sports writer    спортивный комментатор, журналист, освещающий спорт

Español (Spanish)
n. - deporte, juego, diversión, broma
v. intr. - jugar, divertirse, retozar, holgar, bromear, chancearse
v. tr. - ostentar, lucir, hacer alarde de, experimentar una mutación, desviarse espontáneamente del tipo normal
adj. - deportivo

idioms:

• Be a sport    como amigo!, ¡sé amable!, ¡sé bueno!
• in sport    en broma
• make sport of    burlarse o mofarse de
• sporting chance    buena posibilidad de éxito
• sports car    coche deportivo
• sports coat    chaqueta deportiva
• sports day    día dedicado a los deportes
• sports jacket    chaqueta deportiva
• sports writer    reportero o cronista deportivo

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - sport, idrott, lek, tidsfördriv, avkoppling, skämt, skoj, lekboll, leksak, reko karl, bra kille
v. - leka, idrotta, sporta, roa sig, ståta med
adj. - sports-, idrotts

中文（简体） (Chinese (Simplified))
游戏, 消遣, 娱乐, 运动会, 运动, 体育竞技活动, 玩笑, 戏谑, 寻欢作乐, 玩耍, 开玩笑, 嘲弄, 参加运动, 突变, 炫耀, 突变为, 运动的, 适用于运动的

idioms:

• Be a sport    讲点交情!够意思一点!
• in sport    为了好玩
• make sport of    嘲笑, 翻弄, 玩弄
• sporting chance    可能获胜, 可能性各占一半的机会
• sports car    跑车
• sports coat    上衣外套
• sports day    体育比赛日
• sports jacket    男子在非正式场合穿的粗花呢西装外套, 猎装
• sports writer    体育新闻记者

中文（繁體） (Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 遊戲, 消遣, 娛樂, 運動會, 運動, 體育競技活動, 玩笑, 戲謔
v. intr. - 遊戲, 尋歡作樂, 玩耍, 開玩笑, 嘲弄, 參加運動, 突變
v. tr. - 炫耀, 突變為
adj. - 運動的, 適用於運動的

idioms:

• Be a sport    講點交情!夠意思一點!
• in sport    為了好玩
• make sport of    嘲笑, 翻弄, 玩弄
• sporting chance    可能獲勝, 可能性各佔一半的機會
• sports car    跑車
• sports coat    上衣外套
• sports day    體育比賽日
• sports jacket    男子在非正式場合穿的粗花呢西裝外套, 獵裝
• sports writer    體育新聞記者

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 스포츠, 운동회, 웃음거리
v. intr. - 장난치다, (기분 전환하며) 즐기다, (옥외) 운동을 하다
v. tr. - ~의 변종을 만들다, ~을 자랑해 보이다, (시간, 돈 따위를) 낭비하다
adj. - 스포츠의, 경쾌한, 운동용의

idioms:

• Be a sport    스포츠맨답게 해라, 떳떳하게 해라
• in sport    장난으로 , 농담으로
• make sport of    ~을 놀리다, ~을 조롱하다

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - スポーツ, 運動会, 冗談, もの笑い, 娯楽, 変種, 運動
v. - 見せびらかす, 遊ぶ, 楽しむ
adj. - スポーツの, 戸外の着用に適した

idioms:

• in sport    冗談に
• make sport of    ばかにする
• sports coat/jacket    スポーツコート

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) رياضه, تسليه, لعب, رجل طيب (فعل) لعب, لها, تسلى, عبث ب, ارتدى شيئا للتفاخر به (صفه) رياضي‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮ספורט, שעשוע, צחוק, שחוק, אדם הוגן, טיפוס ספורטיבי, יצור משונה‬
v. intr. - ‮השתעשע, שיחק‬
v. tr. - ‮הציג לראווה, התהדר או התפאר ב-‬
adj. - ‮משמש בספורט או בענף ספורט מסוים‬

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