Amateurism and American Sports Culture:
The Invention of an Athletic Tradition in the
United States, 1870-1900
S.W. POPE
Popular wisdom has it that amateurism is the original, pure state of sport.
Every four years during the Olympics a bevy of sportswriters and cultural
commentators credit the ancient Greeks for having initiated competitive
athletics out of a deep, genuine love of sport for sport's sake and as an
appropriate activity for praising their gods. In stark juxtaposition,
contemporary labour-management disputes in American professional
sports evoke diatribes about the 'corrupting' influence of professionalism.
In 1995 distinguished New York Times journalist Robert Lipsyte lamented
that sports now 'show us spoiled fools as role models, cities and colleges
held hostage and games that exist only to hawk products'. Not only do
athletes 'stand for anything beyong themselves', but the connection
between player and fan has been 'irrevocably destabilized'. 'Instead of
sports,' he writes, 'we happily root for cartoons competing in athletic theme
parks fueled without apology by violent thrills and endorsement dollars.'
Although Lipsyte identifies Americans' loss of faith in the promise of sport
during the late stages of the Vietnam War ('Vietnam punched the lights out
of manhood'), such statements about the 'corrupting' influence of
commercialism and professionalism on sport are nothing new.1
Since the mid-nineeenth century there has been a persistent tension
about the preferred American sporting ethos which has vacillated between
the extremes of amateurism and professionalism. Over the years, the debate
has been closely entwined with national memory. As historian Warren
Goldstein has argued in his history of early professional baseball, sports
exist on both linear and cyclical levels. The former charts the organizational
and institutional developments, the latter revolves around the repetitive and
generational relationships which have remained remarkably consistent
throughout the past century and a half.
In short, every generation has its doomsayers. Consider how the
following four random statements from 1868, 1915,1927 and 1944 affirm
Lipsyte's 1995 assesssments:
The International Journal of the History of Sport, Vol.13, No.3 (Dec. 1996), pp.290-309
PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDON
ATHLETIC TRADITION IN THE UNITED STATES, 1870-1900 291
somehow or other they don't play ball nowadays as they used to eight
or ten years ago ... I mean that they don't play with the same kinds of
feelings or the same objects they used to. The sordid element of
baseball as a business has cast a shadow over the sport.
Players make too much money and become spoiled, one journalist thought,
parading about, in their automobiles like princes, posing at caberets and
trotteries as little tin-gods.
Today the players regard the game in a different light... It is a means
rather than the end. It has become a business with the boys, who play
for the income.
The player of today is too unwilling to exert himself ... [Once
established] he then falls into an indifferent pace. He somehow
becomes very satisfied with hiself and coasts along.2
Most people cling steadfastly to the notion that 'professional' sport as the
latecomer only quite recently eclipsed the 'original' amateur ethos even
though sport historians have demonstrated that as far back as ancient
Greece, sports promoted gambling, cheating, profiteering, privilege, and
exclusivity. Neither the ancient Greeks nor their western European
descendants had any conception of 'amateur' sport. Professionalism —
money prizes, cash payments, and wagers - was the norm for most athletic
competitions of public note. Certainly nobody in colonial or antebellum
America ever claimed that sports built character, inculcated the spirit of fair
play, or shaped the national identity. Although early sports were local,
participatory, irregularly scheduled, and loosely organized, most events
were accompanied by fervent gambling and valuable prizes for the winners.
The line between amateurism and professionalism was not even drawn in
America until the early 1870s, by which time the nation's leading sport,
baseball, was firmly within the professional orbit.
Nineteenth-century amateurism was an 'invented tradition'. As the
rallying cry of late nineteenth century institutionalized sport, amateurism
represented an attempt to draw class lines against the masses and to develop
a new bourgeois leisure lifestyle as a badge of middle and upper-class
identity. The amateur ethos was, moreover, an ideological reaction to a wellestablished
professional sporting tradition in the United States. The rising
bureaucrats of the movement used the amateur ethos as a mechanism for
institutionalizing their social prejudices into resilient athletic structures.
During the early 1870s they directed their energies toward the professional,
immigrant-working class sport of track and field, then shortly thereafter to
the more familiar environs of collegiate athletics. By the last decade of the
century, the amateurs were enlisted in the emergent Olympic movement.
292 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF SPORT
Throughout this process of gaining the hearts and minds of the national
sporting culture, the amateurists sought, to 'restore' the lost innocence of
sport before the advent of money and business. Even though the notion of
original purity was largely a myth of their own creation, they sold a vision
of an orderly, genteel, harmonious world of sport and healthful recreation,
open to all classes, but under the benevolent governance of principled,
manly middle and upper-class men like themselves.3
Professionalism before the Bureaucrats
For most of the nineteenth century, American sport had yet to be
monopolized by either corporate wealth or a fledgling amateur system
dominated by college presidents, retired military brass, civic leaders and
alumni associations. American sport up until the 1890s was democratic and
pluralistic; as Ted Vincent has written, 'a grocer or saloon keeper had as
much chance as a millionaire of producing an event that grabbed headlines
in the national sporting magazines'. An early sports patron, John Stevens
Cox, offered a thousand dollar prize in 1835 to any man who could run ten
miles in less than hour, and three hundred more if the goal was reached by
one man only. The idea originated in a substantial bet with fellow
millionaire, Samuel L. Gouverneur. Henry Stannard, a farmer, beat a
butcher, carpenter and house painter an won the sizeable cash prize worth
several years' wages.4
Commercialized racing (or pedestrianism) was a huge success through
the 1850s, particularly in New York City, where for a dime urban workers,
gamblers, prostitutes and hustlers could see the swiftest runners from
Britain and America. Immigrant and working class athletes, most notably
the New York Caledonian Society, promoted pedestrianism and awarded
substantial cash prizes to the winners. Such track and field competitions
epitomized the established commercialized sporting tradition dating back to
colonial times.5
Harness racing was the single most popular sport of the early nineteenth
century for the privileged classes. The most famous race of the century
pitted a northern horse, 'Fashion', against the southern horse, 'Peytona', at
the Union Course in Long Island before nearly 100,000 spectators. By the
1820s boat races, too, attracted thousands of spectators. Four-to-six man
crews raced for as much as $20,000, and individual bettors occasionally
risked tens of thousands of dollars.6
Boxing, cockfighting, and billiards were the most popular sports among
the urban, working-class sporting fraternity whose members were bachelors
or spent most of their time apart from their families. The bachelor sports
culture was part of the urban world of saloons, gambling parlours, brothels,
ATHLETIC TRADITION IN THE UNITED STATES, 1870-1900 293
firehouses, theatres, and militia company headquarters where men drank
and caroused in open defiance of Victorian values. Prizefighting under the
bare-knuckle rules was the favoured sport of this underground culture.
Boxers were ethnic and neighbourhood heroes, leaders of tough street gangs
that provided muscle on election days for machine politicians. Boxers
competed in a loosely organized but lucrative professional circuit. In this
same milieu, cockfighting and animal baiting contests were organized by
saloon keepers, particularly in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and
Boston where workers paid from twenty-five cents to a dollar to watch such
contests.7
Organized team sports were the late-comers to the American sporting
scene. A wide variety of simple bat, ball and base games were played
throughout the colonial period into the first four decades of the nineteenth
century, yet most did not attract serious attention.* The most popular early
team sport was cricket, which failed to gain widespread acceptance due to
the underdeveloped ball-playing tradition in America. Whereas England
had a long heritage of ball-playing by young adult males, Melvin Adelman
explains that such activity only became popular in the United States during
the early nineteenth century and even then it was basically an amusement
for children. In short, cricket failed because 'it was too advanced and too
institutionalized for a society that lacked a manly ballplaying tradition'.9
Baseball surged to the forefront of American team sportsjust as cricket's
popularity peaked. During its first generation the game was highly unstable.
Three out of four teams went out of business within two years. Early
professional baseball clubs were group enterprises run by local townspeople
and club officials. Athletes themselves organized and promoted the young
business.10
The game reflected the values of the urban workplace and served
as a kind of halfway house for artisans and clerks who were moving from
traditional work environments to rationalized, industrial capitalist ones.
Early reporters used the language of self-disciplined productive craft labor
to describe successful play." Journalists and commentators showed little
interest in the experience of 'true sport' or 'pure play'. They appealed,
according to Warren Goldstein, not to a particular concept of leisure, but
rather to the standards of the workplace.12
The game became increasingly dominated by people committed to topflight,
openly professional play during the 1860s. Clubs had charged
admission fees, played for large purses, and even secretly paid salaries to
star players since the late 1850s. By 1867 it was well known that the leading
clubs paid their starting nine players either salaries or shares of the gate
receipts. Professional baseball depended upon business management, gate
receipts, and the paid labour of players, but none of these commercial
manifestations aroused serious public indignation or debate." In fact, even
294 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF SPORT
though some newspapers and sports journals differentiated professionals,
amateurs and muffins, such distinctions were based on skill level, not
economics. By this reasoning, as Adelman suggests, professional players
were simply the most proficient, not those that were paid, although players
on the top clubs earned between six and nine hundred dollars a year.14
Professionalism evoked minimal controversy. Several newspapers, like
the New York Times, argued that professional baseball was an obstacle to
equitable competition and posed questionable moral dilemmas. However,
only after the nation's first fully professional team, the Cincinnati Red
Stockings, abandoned 'professionalism' for a type of 'amateurism' in 1870
did any sustained critique emerge. The 'amateurist' objections mostly
opposed professionalism on the grounds that it threatened an alleged
competitive balance and a perversion of the functioning of clubs that
elevated star players above the general membership. Even though twentysix
clubs formed the National Association of Amateur Base Ball Players in
1871, the social relations of early 'amateur' baseball resembled much more
than they differed from the professional game. Minus an explicit paycheck,
the amateur baseball clubs held tournaments, raised funds for travel,
separated play from management and elevated star players over universal
club participation. The Spirit of the Times criticized professional top-flight
play as a system 'simply calculated to benefit nobody but those who chose
to make a regular trade of that which can never be to millions anything but
a sport and a recreation'.15
America's first important sports journalist and leading baseball
authority, Henry Chadwick, maintained that the entire debate was nonproductive
since professional baseball was afait accompli. In his view it
was a legitimate occupation and any 'evils' resulted from parasitic
gambling interests, not paying players for their services. The majority of the
sports press concurred with Chadwick. The early governing body, the
National Association of Base Ball Players, provided organizational stability
to professional play, and with the formation of the National League in 1876,
the pros continued to dictate the major changes in the rules and styles of
play. Thus, the early appeal to a separate world of sport and recreation was
the latecomer, wholly unprecedented and as Goldstein suggests, only arose
after baseball play became baseball work.
Even early collegiate athletics (in what would become the sacred realm
of amateurism) were remarkably commercialized until the 1870s. In 1852 a
railroad entrepreneur, sensing potential profits, transported the Yale and
Harvard crew teams to a meet and initiated commercialized collegiate sport
and the considerable gambling that accompanied it. Within less than a
decade, as sport historian Ronald Smith writes, 'the prestige obtained from
winning, the honor brought to the college, and the interest of the public in
ATHLETIC TRADITION IN THE UNITED STATES, 1870-1900 295
the physical prowess of the educational elites were all in existence'.16
The
pivotal event was a 1869 Harvard-Oxford race on the Thames River.
Spirited renditions of 'Yankee Doodle' and 'God Save the Queen' were
sung by a festive, patriotic crowd of nearly one million. The event
convinced the New York Times editors of the seriousness of the occasion in
the development of big-time, commercialized collegiate sport; the paper
devoted extensive coverage and lengthy editorials to the contest that Oxford
won by a mere three lengths.17
Collegians also received very valuable prizes in crew and track and field
competitions. Harvard crews won expensive black walnut oars and silver
goblets were worth twice an average labourer's annual income. During the
1860s Harvard competed for purses as high as five hundred dollars in
various Boston regattas. Dartmouth College offered such prizes as opera
glasses, silver inkstands, silverware.and special editions of the works of
Macaulay, Milton and Shakespeare in their early 1870s track meets. This
was quite in keeping with the amateur rules well into the twentieth century;
the value of the award did not matter, only that it could be inscribed or
engraved.18
As early as 1866 the Harvard University nine was one of the strongest
teams in the country that played the leading New York professional baseball
teams. The faculty neither frowned on the game nor objected to the team
playing professionals. By 1869 Harvard played a full spring schedule,
beating the Athletics at Philadelphia 35 to 21 and besting the Nationals at
Albany 58 to 17. Harvard finished the season with a 30 to 11 loss to the
nation's leading professional team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings. Yale
played sixty percent of its games against professionals between 1868-74;
and in 1870, Harvard won thirty-four games and lost only nine - eight
against professional teams.19
The Emergence of the Amateur Ethos
Across the Atlantic Ocean a new elitist sports movement brewed
simultaneously with the growth of American collegiate athletics. Invented
by Oxford and Cambridge students and institutionalized by the Londonbased
Amateur Athletic Club, which defined 'amateur' synonymously with
'gentleman', upper-class British sportsmen alleged that their 'social
inferiors' could not comprehend the ethos of amateurism and fair play. They
proclaimed that exclusion was 'the only way to keep ... sport pure from the
elements of corruption ...[namely] the average workman has no idea of sport
for its own sake'. The English apostles of amateurism created a myth and
sanctioned their new practice in timeless tradition by connecting their new
ideas to the ancient Greeks, even though the latter neither distinquished
296 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF SPORT
between amateur and professional, nor entertained such novel Victorian
goals as 'fair play'. Philosopher Paul Weiss discerns that the distinction
between a nineteenth-century amateur and professional was 'mainly a line
between the unpaid members of a privileged class and the paid members of
an underprivileged class'.2n
As in nineteenth-century England, most American colleges scorned but
tolerated sports since they were run by students and were only unofficially
connected to the institutions. William and Mary students pursued hunting,
horse racing, and gambling. Eastern private colleges made rowing the most
popular sport between the 1840s and 1860s. The first collegiate baseball
game was played in 1859, as Amherst trounced Williams 73-32. Students
developed their own extracurriculum usually in open defiance td the in loco
parentis of their school's administration. As Ronald Smith documents,
young college men used what they believed was an inalienable right to
structure an intellectual, social, aesthetic, and physical world of their own.
By the mid nineteenth century the extracurriculum of fraternal rituals,
student government, newspapers, and football rushes was transformed into
the lifeblood of student social and physical life.21
Amateurism quickly spread to elite American colleges in the early
1870s. Influential spokemen for the view that American intercollegiate
sport should remain strictly 'amateur' solidified this doctrine for the public
through their writings and speeches. Even though Yale, the nation's leading
athletic power, had integrated many professional features, their unofficial
football coach and father of the American game, Walter Camp, promoted
the English gentleman model as the preferred exemplar for American
collegiate sport. 'A gentleman does not make his living from his athletic
prowess,' Camp proselytized. 'He does not earn anything from his victories
except glory and satisfaction ... A gentleman never competes for money,
directly or indirectly.'22
The collegiate athletic scene was only one, and perhaps not even the
most important arena, within which the merits of amateurism were debated
in late nineteenth-century America. Devoted apostles of amateurism outside
academe upheld 'pure' English amateurism and lambasted American
collegiate abuses of that noble dream. The first cogent argument for strict
amateurism was presented in 1872 in a pamphlet written by William B.
Curtis. As co-founder of the New York Athletic Club and editor of Spirit of
the Times, the leading sports journal to champion the amateur cause, Curtis
modelled a sports mentality on the English elite. Prior to Curtis's editorship,
the Spirit had covered professional pedestrianism for several decades - a
policy that Curtis summarily ended. Curtis and his compatriot John Watson,
another journalist and member of the Schuylkill Navy Athletic Club of
Philadelphia, defined 'amateur' as 'any person who has never competed in
ATHLETIC TRADITION IN THE UNITED STATES, 1870-1900 297
an open competition, for a stake, or for public money, or for admission
money, or with professionals...nor has even, at any period of his life, taught
or assisted in the pursuit of athletic exercises as a means of livelihood'.
Certainly such standards were at odds with the acquisitive, individualistic,
materialistic sensibilities of the Gilded Age.
Curtis and his colleagues quickly institutionalized their ideas and stole
the spotlight from the once well-established professional pedestrians.
Amateur track and field soon had the Olympics, as well as competitions
arranged by colleges and the new Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), which
monopolized quality coaching, facilities, and public legitimacy. A rising
first-generation of gentlemen amateur bureaucrats recast the popular
working-class spectacles for future upper-class sport enthusiasts. Lingering
puritanical suspicions that athletics were nothing more than a conspicuous
waste of time mandated the rising amateur bureaucrats to cleanse and repackage
sports with appeals to higher moral purposes. In so doing, the new
generation of sports promoters closed class ranks so as not to appear as
'inferior tradesmen, apprentices, and other dissolute persons neglecting
their trades and employments'." Athletic elitism blurred the fact that the
amateurs were decidedly inferior to the professionals and were barely equal
to the quasi-amateur athletes who performed at the massive picnics of ethnic
and working-class clubs. In place of local heroism and money prizes, the
sanctified amateurs were given prestige, as Vincent cleverly observes, much
the same way the Wizard of Oz solved the problem of the cowardly lion by
bestowing a medal. By the 1920s track and field ceased to be something
working-class people dabbled in on holidays and weekends.24
The dialogue that arose within the New York private athletic club
community gave rise to the AAU — the cutting-edge and most enduring
legacy of the early amateur movement. There were several ill-fated, New
York-based amateur regulatory bodies formed during the 1870s. In 1879 the
National Association of Amateur Athletes of America was founded, but
with the departure of the powerful New York Athletic Club (NYAC), the
fledgling organization folded in 1887. On 21 January 1888 the NYAC,
along with the Amateur Club of the Schuykill Navy and fifteen other clubs,
established the AAU, and by the summer of 1889, gained control of the
amateur movement. The following year, AAU legal specialist, Colonel
Abraham G. Mills, proposed a reorganization plan that would change the
AAU from a union of individual clubs to a union of regional associations,
with the United States sectioned into five geographical areas. Mills's
proposal was ratified and shortly thereafter the AAU assumed principal
control over track, lacrosse and basketball but ceded jurisdiction of
collegiate football, soccer, baseball and rowing. With the creation of the
AAU, all college runners, jumpers and throwers were obligated to register
298 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF SPORT
with the Union. In less than a decade the AAU moved rapidly to consolidate
its power, despite the fact that its influence was wildly uneven outside of
Chicago, Milwaukee, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Baltimore and New
Orleans prior to World War I. In so doing, as John Lucas has recently
written, it 'created an atmosphere of both fierce loyalties and persistent
opposition'.25
The amateurists' early negative attacks on professionalism were, in fact,
quite limited. Most critics willingly accepted professionals so long as they
did not intermingle with the 'amateurs'. Thus, between the 1870s and early
1890s amateurists honed their message about the meanings of amateurism
in the media, collegiate circles, and public debate, and developed
organizations like the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) to legitimize their
message within collegiate circles and wider society. Early anti-professional
sentiments and class bias, however tentative, restricted the full emergence
of the professional athlete until the early twentieth century - only after the
amateur code was firmly established in the emergent Olympic movement.
Prior to the 1896 Olympiad, though, amateurists struggled to invent and
define their own identity.
The Amateurism-Professionalism Debate
Despite such ambitious organizational endeavours and the myriad published
supporting statements, it was clear to many people that amateur sport bore
most of the characteristics of the professional model. Yale's athletic budget
clearly reflected this trend. The receipts and expenses were managed by the
Yale Financial Union under the partisan treasurership of Walter Camp
himself. Yale's athletic programme doubled between 1893 and 1903,
equalling the combined salaries of 30 professors and nearly equal to the
incomes of the law, divinity, and medical schools combined.26
Thus the
amateur-professional 'dilemma' developed. If a college acknowledged
outright professional sport, Ronald Smith observes, it lost respectability as
a middle- or upper-class institution. Be amateur and lose athletically to
those who were less amateur, or be outright professional and lose social
esteem. The solution, according to Smith, was to claim amateurism to the
world while in fact accepting professionalism.27
Clearly, amateurism was
harder to define in America where class lines were less distinct and more
fluid than in the mother country.
Another case in point was the contradictory nature of summer baseball.
The White Mountain summer resorts of New Hampshire initiated what for
two decades was considered an innocent pastime for college athletes not
incompatible with proper amateur standards. In reality, summer baseball
was semi-professional entertainment for the very upper middle-class and
ATHLETIC TRADITION IN THE UNITED STATES, 1870-1900 299
wealthy Americans whose children attended the eastern colleges that
promoted the amateur ethos. 'In those earlier days,' a New Hampshire
newspaper editorialized, 'college ballplayers did not think it at all beneath
their dignity to spend the summer at a swell hotel, in exchange for which
pleasure they gladly gave their services on the diamond and cared not who
knew it.' At the conclusion of the summer baseball season the players were
paid by 'popular subscription' without fear that the practice compromised
their collegiate eligibility.2
* By the turn of the twentieth-century summer
ball for pay was one of the most charged issues in intercollegiate sport,
second only to the debate about football's brutality.
The belated question of whether it was acceptable among the educated
and socially elite Americans to earn a living by playing summer baseball
was addressed during the last years of the nineteenth-century. In 1879 Lee
Richmond, a Brown undergraduate, became the first college student to play
professional baseball. The debate escalated during the 1880s and
culminated in a 1898 conference held at Brown. A group of delegates
drafted rules and guidelines that explicitly discouraged summer ball, but
were never ratified by individual schools and thus not collectively
institutionalized. The galvanizing case was Harvard's Walter Clarkson, a
young man from a wealthy Cambridge, Massachusetts baseball-playing
family (two older brothers played in the major leagues; one, John Clarkson,
was a Hall of Famer). After consecutive losses to their chief rival, Harvard,
a Yale athletic adviser investigated Clarkson's summer exploits, but
ultimately could not secure affidavits that he had been paid to pitch in a New
England summer league. Clarkson had been solicited by the Camden team
of the Knox County (Maine) summer league with strict promises of
anonymous cash payments, all expenses paid, and hosted by 'the best [of
local] society'.29
The Clarkson case illustrated the difficulty of obtaining anything other
than circumstantial evidence to disqualify a college athlete on the grounds
of professionalism. Moreover, the ambiguous situation encouraged creative
efforts to defy poorly enforced eligibility thresholds. The most prevalent
tactics included playing under assumed names or receiving weekly
compensation for phantom jobs like waiters or casino attendants. McClure's
Magazine writer Henry Beach Needham concluded that in summer ball
there was 'more lying and subterfuge than in any other evil connected with
intercollegiate athletics'.'"
During the same year, another journalist launched even more penetrating
criticisms about the volatile state of American collegiate amateurism. The
'high finance' of eastern collegiate athletics, Clarence Deming believed,
created 'an atmosphere of wealth' that represented an apt microcosm of
larger society. The student 'must not enter a contest for the smallest money
300 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF SPORT
prize', he acknowledged, but the athlete could accept endorsement money
from tobacco companies or a college subsidy for score-card privileges that
enabled athletes to keep the entire proceeds from the sale of programmes at
games. 'He will be told...that all this is but a reflection on the academic life
of the mania of materialism in the outside world,' Deming wrote, but
shrewdly recognized that 'not so often [is the athlete] told that, even if such
is the fact, it rests upon the culture, the refinement, the scholarship, and the
ideals of the universities to set the pace toward the opposite pole'.31
The summer baseball question was debated into the twentieth century
but never resolved. Summer baseball for pay persisted. During his senior
year Walter Clarkson signed a contract with the New York Yankees. The
Harvard dilemma illuminated the perplexing relationship between
amateurism versus professionalism in American sport.32
In the English
society that gave birth to the amateur ethos it would have been
inconceivable that a college athlete would have turned professional.
However, even in elite American circles, a Clarkson could and did sell his
baseball skills in the spo.rts marketplace.
How can the failure of 'pure' amateurism in nineteenth-century
American collegiate circles be explained? Smith, the recognized authority
on American collegiate sport, attributes the development to deep ideological
differences between Britain and the United States. Just as many Americans
opposed the English aristocracy with its House of Lords, landed nobility,
privileges and pensions, they also ultimately refused the tenets of
amateurism, since 'achieved status in colleges and in athletics became the
American way, rather than the ascribed status' of England's elite
universitites and their athletic programmes. In particular, as Smith writes:
The English amateur system, based upon participation of the social
and economic elite and rejection of those beneath them from
participating, would never gain a foothold in American college
athletics. There was too much competition, too strong a belief in merit
over heredity, too abundant an ideology of freedom of opportunity for
the amateur ideal to succeed. It may be that amateurism can never
succeed in a society which has egalitarian beliefs. It may be that
amateur athletics at a high level of expertise can only exist in a society
dominated by upper-class elitists."
Thus, the amateur-professional dilemma existed from the very beginning in
American intercollegiate athletics. Americans practised a form of
professionalism while simultaneously cloaking their actions in the ideology
of amateurism that resolved the status problems endemic to late nineteenthcentury
society.
This argument has its merits. Certainly critical cleavages existed
ATHLETIC TRADITION IN THE UNITED STATES, 1870-1900 301
between American and British society. Contemporary commentators
advanced such arguments for American athletic exceptionalism; Ralph
Paine proclaimed that 'the whole difference [between English public and
American private school athletics] lies in the fact that in England athletics
are ruled by the spirit of sport; in the United States, by the spirit of
competition'.'4
But even though Britain was officially ruled by a monarchy,
elitist attitudes were passionately challenged and negotiated with a strong,
egalitarian working-class movement that elected labor party politicians.
More importantly, the English amateur sports establishment itself
harboured deep internal ambiguities. The Oxbridge amateur ethos was the
exception rather than the rule of the nineteenth-century British sporting
scene. Originally developed as an amateur and character-building sport by
the public schools, football was rapidly proletarianized during the early
1880s and acquired all the institutional and ritual characteristics with which
we are still familiar: professionalism, the League, the Cup and so forth.
Hobsbawm identifies the defeat of the Old Etonians by Bolton Olympic in
1883 as the symbolic turning point that was widely recognized by
contemporaries as a class confrontation. Similarly, Richard Holt finds the
key shift in the amateur question during this same juncture with the
formation of the Football League in 1885 and the split between Rugby
Football Union and Northern Union in 1894 over broken-time payments so
working-class players could have the leisure time to compete with wealthy
young men. With overt professionalization, Hobsbawm writes, 'most of the
philanthropic and moralizing figures from the national elite withdrew,
leaving the management of the clubs in the hands of local businessmen and
other notables' much less sympathetic to the amateur ethos. In short,
professional football dealt a crippling blow to English amateurism when the
sport was taken over by the proletariat and their business patrons. In the
process, as sport sociologist John Hargreaves writes, workers transformed
these sports into 'a means of expression for values opposed to the bourgeois
athleticist tradition'. A disdain for constituted authority and official rules, a
preference for monetary rewards, and a hedonistic, festive element were all
brought to British mass sports by working-class athletes in open defiance of
the Oxbridge amateurism that Smith claims was so hegemonic."
Americans were no less 'amateur' in their orientation than the British.
Smith's argument for American exceptionalism, however intriguing, fails to
recognize that amateurism was (and is) more an ideological construct than
an actual set of practices and agreed-upon rules. Amateurism was, indeed,
an 'invented tradition' which according to Hobsbawm, is 'a set of practices,
normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or
symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of
behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the
302 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF SPORT
past'. Amateurism, like the other invented traditions of the period,
legimitized certain beliefs, values, institutions, and social relationships.
The invention of amateurism thus must be understood within the larger
context of how a national middle-class elite was formed during the late
nineteenth century. Hobsbawm astutely discerns that as class borders became
more fluid and increasing numbers of people in both Britain and the United
States identified themselves as 'middle-class', the problem of defining a
national elite of the upper-middle classes became highly problematical.
'Since the middle classes were par excellence the locus of social mobility
and individual self-improvement,' he notes, 'entry to them could hardly be
closed.' The problem entailed establishing an identity and class presence for
the relatively large mass of those who neither belonged to the elite nor to 'the
masses'. Amateurism provided a needed class presence and ideology for a
rising generation of middle-class sports'leaders. It was no coincidence, then,
that the institutions (academe and private athletic clubs), the individuals
(educated, socially mobile white males), and messages (meritocracy, fair
play, respectability) of the amateur movement reflected similar vestiges of
middle-class identification in America's Gilded Age and Progressive eras.36
Amateurism Triumphant
Just two decades after its introduction, amateurism seemed doomed by the
early 1890s. The AAU's control of such sports as track and field and
basketball meant little to the larger sporting public whose principal loyalties
were for professional baseball and big-time (professionalized) college
football. Basketball, invented in 1891, was in its infancy and track still
retained its Old World, immigrant associations. Mere organizational
legitimacy was insufficient for an overwhelmingly professional-oriented
sporting culture. Moreover, by the late 1890s there was scarcely a college
which preserved 'pure' amateurism in men's sport. Competition for money
and status, contests against professionals, collection of gate receipts,
support for training tables, provision for academic tutors, recruitment and
payment of athletes, and the hiring of professional coaches pervaded the
intercollegiate athletic scene.
During the 1890s the public debate about 'amateur' sport focused almost
singularly on the brutality of collegiate football. Scores of injuries and
several well-publicized deaths on the gridiron led many concerned,
influential members of the middle-class to call for the game's abolition. Yet,
at its bleakest moment, two apologists for the amateur ethos, Caspar
Whitney and James Sullivan, emerged and effectively saved the movement
from its own contradictions and abuses.
Caspar Whitney was the most influential sportswriter of the turn of the
century and America's most dedicated apostle of amateurism. Born into a
ATHLETIC TRADITION IN THE UNITED STATES, 1870-1900 303
middle-class Boston family in 1861, he became a versatile athlete at St.
Matthew's College in California, where he captained the football, baseball,
and lacrosse teams. He also boxed, fenced and wrestled. After graduation in
1879 Whitney spent five years travelling, exploring and writing in the West.
In 1888 he became the regular feature sports columnist for Harper's Weekly,
a post he occupied until 1899. Less than two weeks after his death in 1929,
the Nation wrote in a reverential obituary that Whitney was 'almost the first
writer of culture and ability to deal with sports, then not considered worthy
of serious treatment in the chief dailies of the country'. His opinions
received 'the widest circulation', particularly his advocacy for fair play and
sport for the joy of the game, for which 'a whole generation of Eastern
college men grew up in lasting indebtedness to him'."
Whitney was zealously dedicated to elitist English amateur sport. His
most influential writing for Harper's grew out of an 1894 trip to England.
His explorations of British sport were presented in a multi-part series
entitled 'A Sporting Pilgrimage', and were published in book form in 1895.
According to Whitney, English college sports were untainted with
commercialism, the winning-at-all-costs mentality, and the attendant
eligibility scandals that characterized American collegiate sport. 'It is
simply a tradition that the colleges and universities shall be represented by
athletes from the student body,' he wrote, and 'no one thinks of asking why,
or attempts to evade the prerogatives of custom'. As was the case in most
of his essays, Whitney could not resist drawing a moral. Americans do great
harm to college sport by making it merely another business venture 'money,
money seems to be the cry, and it will be the curse, if indeed not
the downfall of honest university sport'.3
"
Whitney's amateurist advocacy revealed his strident anti-working class
sensibilities. He was openly contemptuous of working-class athletes, whom
he described as 'vermin' and the 'great unwashed' who lacked 'the true
amateur instinct of sport for sport's sake'. He pleaded for a return to the
'halcyon days' of the 1870s when 'amateur' was still defined in strict class
terms, and 'amateur contests' were restricted to 'the better element'. It was
evil, he argued, to 'bring together in sport the two divergent elements of
society that can never by any chance meet elsewhere on even terms'.39
Clearly, Whitney's sentiments belie Ronald Smith's explanation of the
'failure' of American amateurism. Even though Americans tended to
practise professionalism while cloaking their actions in amateur garb, there
were the true believers, like Whitney, whose polemics contradicted any
uniquely 'American' ideological claims of indifference to the elitist English
model. To be sure, Whitney was not some fringe idiosyncratic element in
American journalism. Prior to purchasing the nation's most influential
sporting magazine, Outing, in 1900, he was Harper's correspondent to the
304 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF SPORT
Spanish-American War, and would later fulfil a similar assignment as a
World War I correspondent for the New York Tribune. Moreover, his nine
books and editorship of Collier's 'Outdoor America' and the American
Sportsman's Library conferred upon Whitney an international reputation.
Whitney did not yet know while writing his 'A Sporting Pilgrimage'
series in 1894 that he would soon discover his sporting Utopia, a
magnificient athletic festival intended for 'the more refined elements' and
which ultimately legitimized the amateur ethos: the modern International
Olympic Movement of Baron Pierre de Coubertin. Whitney was to become
the second American ever appointed to the International Olympic
Committee (IOC) and was president of the United States Olympic
Committee from 1906 to 1910.4
"
James Sullivan was the most important American amateur sport
bureaucrat between 1900 until his death in 1914. As indicated in his
Dictionary of American Biography profile, he was America's 'first sports
czar'. Born in New York City to Irish immigrant working-class parents in
1860 (less than a year before Whitney), Sullivan embarked upon a
journalism career with a job for Frank Leslie's publishing house in 1878.
Sullivan founded the first track and field publication, Athletic News, in
1880, and between 1889-91 became business manager and editor of the
New York Sporting News. Sullivan reached the pinnacle of his editorial
career when he became president of the American Sports Publishing
Company in 1892, a post he held until 1914, wherein he edited the highly
influential 'Spalding Athletic Library' series.41
Unlike Whitney, however, Sullivan's influence transcended the print
media. Sullivan became the chief powerbroker of American amateurism
through a distinquished career within the fledgling sports bureaucracy. As
an ambitious 25-year-old he was elected president of the Pastime Athletic
Club (NY) and was the Club's delegate to the nation's ruling amateur
athletic body. As the first secretary of the AAU in 1888, Sullivan quickly
established a reputation as a fierce and resolute defender of the 'pure'
amateur code. He served stints as president and secretary-treasurer of the
organization between 1906-14. Sullivan also helped form the Public
Schools Athletic League in New York, as well as headed the athletic
competitions at both the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and the 1904 St. Louis
Exposition that hosted the third Olympic Games. As historian Stephen
Hardy notes, Sullivan used the amateur athletic movement as a status
vehicle to rub elbows with select elites. He stressed the importance of
'gentlemen, leading citizens and business men' to the organization and
success of the amateur movement. But, unlike Whitney, as Hardy points out,
Sullivan's mission was not class specific, since he argued that the AAU
should be broadened and that 'athletics should be for the masses and not
ATHLETIC TRADITION IN THE UNITED STATES, 1870-1900 305
[just] for the classes', provided that the masses were organized under the
AAU structure of bourgeois respectability. Hence, Sullivan devoted feverish
energy to solidifying the AAU's authority by designing the athletic
'sanction' notion, which gave the union monopoly powers.42
Sport
historians have been seduced by Sullivan's impressive resume but have
failed to critically examine the deeper connections and inconsistencies that
illuminate a very different picture of American amateur sport around the
turn of the century. We would be well-advised to consider an important
article written in 1910 by America's first Olympic gold medalist, James B.
Connolly. He shrewdly recognized that behind the facade of orderly,
efficient, moralistic banner of amateurism was a handful of self-interested,
power-hungry men, like Sullivan, who were elected to the local and national
AAU boards, but pursued policies to suit themselves. Connolly
demonstrated how most New England clubs were 'fake' ones controlled by
a half a dozen men and their 'safe' friends. The pursuit of lucrative gate
receipts lured not the enemies of amateurism, but 'its very priests' to
provide the best athletes with 'under-the-table payments' and valuable gifts.
For instance, New England AAU boxing and wrestling meets often awarded
gold watches - known among athletes as 'stock' watches - since the
following day the prizes went back to the jewelers' stock once the athletes
returned them for cash. According to Connolly, AAU officials handled the
watches and 'knew both their origin and destination'.45
Sullivan was intimately connected to this 'scandal'. As a full-time
employee, he was well-placed to do great service for the 'House of
Spalding' - the powerful firm intent on becoming the leading athletic goods
trust in America. Although the ostensible project of the AAU was to
promote the amateur athletic spirit, Sullivan's position as handler of the
Spalding firm's advertising predisposed him, according to Connolly, to
promote 'that grand American idea, the [Spalding] Trust'. With the
'Spalding Athletic Library' that carried instructions for various sports,
Sullivan oversaw the publication of 'voluminous Spalding advertising
wherein Spalding educated the public that everything good in athletics had
some connection with his house'. Sullivan's colleagues went along as well.
Luther Gulick, national chairman of the AAU basketball committee,
stipulated that only Spalding balls and baskets were to be used in
championship games; otherwise the referee was to declare a game void.44
In short, Whitney and Sullivan played the role of popular intellectuals
and social leaders for amateur sport, who, in the words of cultural historian
Andrew Ross, patrolled 'the ever-shifting border of popular and legitimate
taste', supervised the passports, the temporary visas, the cultural identities,
the threatening 'alien' elements, served the deportation orders, and who
occasionally made their own 'adventurous forays across the border'.45
306 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF SPORT
Conclusion
Despite the long entrenched legacy of professionalism, American sport by
the early twentieth century embraced the tenets of amateurism. On the
surface, amateurism was riddled with contradictions that neither
corresponded with dominant turn-of-the-century American values, nor the
ideological justifications of 'modern' sport which elevated equality,
specialization, rationalization, professionalization, commercialization, and
quantification. Adelman identifies the impetus for the professional-amateur
dilemma in terms of the changing nature of sponsorship of sport contests.
What distinguishes early professional sport from contemporary forms was a
shift from irregular, private sponsorship to regular, full-blown commercial
sponsorship. With the notable exception of baseball, the erratic, limited
growth of early professional sports' organizational structures - particularly
track and field - made them vulnerable to a hostile take-over by the rising
bureaucracy of amateurism.4
'1
This emergent group of amateurists
articulated a class-biased critique of professionalism in terms of the ways it
corrupted 'true' sport through the exploits of working-class athletes, who
were unschooled in the virtues of the amateur ethos. Sport, they argued,
should be a recreation, not a business. With privileged social, economic and
political connections, this rising generation of amateur spokemen
effectively institutionalized their biases into resilient athletic structures, and
thus defeated a more popular but yet unorganized group of professional
sport promoters.
The revival of the Olympic Games solidified amateurism by linking it to
a burgeoning American nationalism. Unquestionably, the Olympic Games
have been the grandest effort to promote this ideology of amateurism and
sport for sport's sake. Prior to 1896 amateurists promoted a negative case
against commercialized sport. Western elites resuscitated the ancient Games
in 1896 as a form of 'invented tradition', a strategy that, according to Eric
Hobsbawm, established the legitimacy of national cultures by helping
citizens understand the relationships between the state and 'the people'.47
As
such, Olympic spectacles provided the much-needed grist for cultural
commentators and sports journalists, like Whitney and Sullivan, to invent a
virile national sporting identity that, they believed, reflected America's
institutions, social structure, work ethic and racial superiority.
After international sport gained legitimacy in 1896, amateurists shifted
their rhetoric to a more positive tone and attacked professionalism much
less than they had during the 1870s and 1880s. Amateurists had won a
major tactical victory over professionalism, since no American sport
(except possibly baseball) could boast the nationalist cause. In hypocrisy,
commercialism, jingoism and greed, they sold the illusion of amateurism's
ATHLETIC TRADITION IN THE UNITED STATES, 1870-1900 307
purity to an expanding American sports-minded public during the early
twentieth century. Not until the 1960s could professional sports challenge
amateurism's hegemony in the public mind. While contemporaries and
historians have long recognized the shallow and corrupt material interests
of amateurism, this essay illuminates the attraction of the ideal interests to
so many Americans for the past 120 years. Americans have tolerated the
corrupt core of amateurism precisely because of the progressive and
nationalist forces of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made
the ideology an American obligation.
Portland, Maine
NOTES
I am deeply indebted to Stephen Hardy, who encouraged me to pursue this topic. His admonitions
inform this effort. I am also grateful to William Baker for his incisive comments on an earlier
draft of this essay. A modified version of this article appears in my book Patriotic Pastimes:
Sporting Traditions in the American Imagination, 1876-1926 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1996).
1. Robert Lisyte, 'Why Sports don't Matter Anymore', New York Times Magazine, 2 April
1995,51,52,56.
2. Quotes taken from Warren Goldstein, Playingfor Keeps: a History of Early Baseball (Ithaca,
1989), p.1; and Stephen Fox, Big Leagues. Professional Baseball, Football, and Basketball
in National Memory (New York, 1994), p.92.
3. Warren Goldstein, Playing for Keeps, pp.125-6.
4. Ted Vincent, Mudville's Revenge: The Rise and Fall of American Sport (New York, 1981),
p.4; and Jennie Holliman, American Sports, 1785-1835 (Durham, NC, 1931), p.154. For
overviews of colonial and early American sport, see William J. Baker, Sports in the Western
World (Urbana, 1988), pp.82—114; Benjamin G. Rader, American Sports: From the Age of
Folk Games to the Age of Spectators 2d ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1990); Elliott J. Gorn and
Warren Goldstein, A Brief History of American Sports (New York, 1993), pp.3^*6;
Holliman, American Sports, passim; and Hans Peter Wagner, Puritan Attitudes Toward
Recreation in Early Seventeenth Century New England (Frankfurt, Germany, 1982).
5. Gerald Redmond, The Caledonian Games in Nineteenth-Century America (Rutherford, NJ,
1971); Vincent, Mudville's Revenge; and George Moss, 'The Long Distance Runners of
Ante-Bellum America', Journal of Popular Culture 8 (1977), 370-82.
6. New York Herald, 5 May 1845.
7. Gom and Goldstein, A Brief History of American Sports, 55-75. Gorn has written
extensively on the working-class bachelor subculture. See his seminal work The Manly Art:
Bare-Knuckle Prizefighting in America (Ithaca, 1986), and his articles including: '"Gouge
and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch": The Social Significance of Fighting in the Southern
Backcountry', American Historical Review 90 (1985), 18-43; and '"Good-Bye Boys, I Die
a True American": Homicide, Nativism, and Working-Class Culture in Antebellum
America', Journal of American History 74 (1987), 388-410. For recent perspectives on the
burgeoning field of the history of American masculinity, see Mark C. Carnes and Clyde
Griffen (eds.). Meanings of Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America
(Chicago, 1990); and E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in
Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York, 1993).
8. Robert W. Henderson, Ball, Bat and Bishop: The Origin of Ball Games (New York, 1947).
9. Melvin L. Adelman, A Sporting Time: New York City and the Rise of Modern Athletics,
308 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF SPORT
1820-1870 (Urbana, 1986),pp.97-119, quote 110. See also George B. Kirsch, The Creation
of American Team Sports: Baseball and Cricket, 1838-1872 (Urbana, 1989).
10. The classic chronlogical accounts of early baseball are Harold Seymour, Baseball: The Early
Years (New York, 1960); and David Q. Voigt, American Baseball: From Gentlemen's Sport
to the Commissioner System (Norman, OK, 1970). A useful, brief survey is Benjamin G.
Rader's Baseball: A History of America's Game (Urbana, 1992). Besides Adelman's A
Sporting Time, the two most important recent works on the game are Goldstein, Playing for
Keeps; and Robert F. Burk, Never Just a Game: Players, Owners, and American Baseball to
1920 (Chapel Hill, 1994). The vast literature of America's most heavily documented sport is
cogently reviewed in Adelman, 'Captain Voigt and American Baseball History', Canadian
Journal of the History ofSport23 (1989), 285-301; and Larry R. Gerlach, 'Not Quite Ready
for Prime Time: Baseball History, 1983-1993', Journal of Sport History 21 (1994), 103-37.
11. Steven M. Gelber, 'Working at Playing: The Culture of the Workplace and the Rise of
Baseball', Journal of Social History 16 (1983), 3-22; and Adelman, 'Baseball Business and
the Work Place: Gelber's Thesis Reexamined', Journal of Social History 23 (1989),
285-302.
12. Goldstein, Playing for Keeps, 23-4.
13. Ibid., 4-5.
14. Adelman, A Sporting Time, 161, 160.
15. Goldstein, Playing for Keeps, passim. Spirit of the Times, Nov. 26, 1870, 232.
16. Ronald A. Smith, Sports and Freedom: The Rise of Big-Time College Athletics (New York,
1990), pp.33^1.
17. Ibid., pp.40-1. Adelman, A Sporting Time, 196.
18. Smith, Sports and Freedom, p.106.
19. Seymour R. Church, Base Ball: The History, Statistics and Romance of the American
National Game From Its Inception to the Present Time (Princeton, 1902), pp.27-8.
20. For a detailed study of the mid-nineteenth century invention of the amateur myth, see David
C. Young, The Olympic Myth of Greek Amateur Athletics (Chicago, 1984); and 'How the
Amateurs Won the Olympics', in Wendy J. Raschke (ed.), TheArchaeology of the Olympics:
The Olympics and Other Festivals in Antiquity (Madison, 1988). Allen Guttmann examines
this ideology in a broader historical context in 'The Belated Birth and Threatened Death of
Fair Play', YaleReview 74 (1985), 525-37. Weiss quoted in Smith, Sports and Freedom, 167.
21. Smith, Sports and Freedom, pp.13-25.
22. W.C. Camp, Walter Camp's Book of College Sports, pp.1-2.
23. Vincent, Mudville's Revenge, p.62.
24. Ibid., p.69.
25. Arnold W. Flath, A History of Relations Between the National Collegiate Athletic
Association and the Amateur Athletic Union of the United States, 1905—1963 (Champaign,
1964), pp.7-25; and John Lucas, 'The Hegemonic Role of the American Amateur Athletic
Union 1888-1914: James Edward Sullivan as Prime Mover', International Journal of the
History of Sport 11 (1994), 359.
26. Clarence Deming, 'Athletics in College Life', Outlook 80 (1905), 570.
27. Smith, Sports and Freedom, p. 171.
28. The White Mountain Echo, August 20, 1904.
29. Henry Beach Needham, 'The College Athlete: His Amateur Code: Its Evasion and
Administration', McClure 'sMagazine 25 (1905), 262.
30. Ibid.
31. Deming, 'Athletics in College Life', 572.
32. The rise of the professional coach was the other major force in the early movement in
American intercollegiate athletics to adopt the professional model. Although Yale's crew
team introduced the pro coach as early as 1864, with Bill Reid's tenure as Harvard football
coach in 1905, it became clear that the professional model produced victories and national
prestige. See Smith, Sports and Freedom, chapter eleven and Smith (ed.), Big-Time Football
at Harvard, 1905: The Diary of Coach Bill Reid (Urbana, 1994).
33. Smith, Sports and Freedom, p.172.
34. Ralph D. Paine, 'The Spirit of School and College Sport', Century 71 (1905), 116.
ATHLETIC TRADITION IN THE UNITED STATES, 1870-1900 309
35. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition(Cambridge, 1983),
pp.288-9; Richard Holt, Sport and the British:A Modern History(London, 1989), pp.103-7;
John Hargreaves, Sport, Power and Culture:A Social and Historical Analysis of Popular
Sports in Britain (New York, 1986). See also J.A. Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and
Edwardian Public Schools: The Emergenceand Consolidationof an EducationalIdeology
(Cambridge, 1981); and The Games Ethic and Imperialism:Aspects of the Diffusion of an
Ideal (New York, 1986); as well as Stephen G. Jones, Sport, Politics and the Working Class
(Manchester, 1989).
36. Hobsbawm, The Invention of Tradition,pp.1, 9, 291.
37. National Cyclopedia, p.284; Dictionary of American Biography, v., pp.21, 704—5; and
Nation 128(1929), 121.
38. Whitney, 'A Sporting Pilgrimmage', Harper's Weekly38 (1894), 398-9.
39. Whitney, A Sporting Pilgrimage (New York, 1895), pp.166-7; and Young, 'How the
Amateurs Won the Olympics', 58-9.
40. Young, 'How the Amateurs Won the Olympics', 59.
41. A biography of Sullivan has not been written, due in large measure to the fact that his papers
were destroyed in a fire at the AAU headquarters in 1904. See Dictionary of American
Biography,v., p.18;John Lucas, TheModern OlympicGames(New York, 1980), 64-73; and
Stephen H. Hardy, 'Entrepreneurs, Structures, and the Sportgeist: Old Tensions in a Modern
Industry', in Donald Kyle and Gary Stark (eds.), Essays in Sport History and Sport
Mythology (College Station, 1990), pp.64-9.
42. Hardy, 'Entrepreneurs, Structures, and the Sportgeist', 66.
43. James B. Connolly, 'The Capitalization of Amateur Athletics', MetropolitanMagazine (July
1910), 443-54.
44. Ibid., 448.
45. Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture(New York, 1989), p.5.
46. Adelman, A Sporting Time,244, 285; Hardy, 'Entrepreneurs', passim. For the authoritative
discussion of 'modern' sport, see Allen Guttmann, From Ritual to Record: The Nature of
Modern Sports (New York, 1978).
47. Hobsbawm, The Invention of Tradition,pp.299-300.