Oh, lessons from the world's top professors anytime, any place, world history examined and science explained. This is One Day University. Welcome. Well you found it. You found our little corner of the podcast world where we take some of the brightest academic minds in the business and let them tell stories that will make you smarter. Who am I. I'm your host, Mike Coscarelli. I'm not a professor, just a guy in his thirties with a deep love of history and a heck of a voice, if I do say so myself. I'm here to bring you into the world of One Day University as we dive deeper and deeper into an academic topic that we personally think you'll love. I have vetted these myself, trust me, they're great. This is our first episode of our first season, and the subject matter is a crowd pleaser, sports, specifically sports in America and how they came to be, the incarnation of the product that we now know, and how it has become ubiquitous in our society, not just for the games that are played on the field, but it's impact in our culture as a whole. This season is going to feature lectures from Matt Andrews. He's a professor of American History at the University of North Carolina and Chapel Hill, and he is a professor real rock star. In this first episode, Matt will be explaining some of the early origins of sport in Western culture, as well as examining the philosophy that some have that regards sport as a religion itself. So, without any further ado, enjoy your lesson. Here's Matt. My name is Matt Andrews. I'm a professor of American History at the University of North Carolina and Chapel Hill, where I teach courses on sport in American history. And for well over a decade now, I have employed this strategy of using sports as a lens through which to explore the very significant issues from the American past. And I know this strategy works. Not to brag here, but okay, maybe a little. But my students love these courses. There is never an empty seat. Three of the last four years, our student newspaper has named me u n c's best professor. I'm not sure what happened that other years some sociologist, I think, but I am sure about this. These courses are popular because the story of American sport opens a very popular window onto these larger significant themes, and these courses are popular because of the passion and the enthusiasm I have for the topic, and I am very excited to bring my passion for sport and politics and American history to this course. In this course, I will take you back to the moments where sports reflected the larger themes and issues in American history, but also to the moments where sports affected or changed American history itself. We will run the Boston Marathon in nineteen sixty seven, where a woman dared to be on the race course and a man named Jock tried to drag her off. We will take a trip back to pe class in elementary school and discuss why we did the presidential fitness test as children. Here's a hint, it's because of them Russians. We will sit front row at a boxing match in Reno, Nevada, in where all of the worst racial impulses in this country were put on prominent display, and where the fight's outcome led to the murder of dozens of Americans. That actually happened. So we have a lot to discuss, and so I say let's get to it. For our first lecture, I want to set the stage by exploring one of the very important themes in early American sport history. I want to explore some of the links between sport and religion, and I'm going to get historical and specific in just a moment, give you some real American history. But let me begin by trying to be somewhat philosophical about the religion of sport. It has become a cliche to say that sport is a religion in American society, though I think it's an accurate statement. When people make this argument that sports are a modern day religion, they point to many of the similarities between sports fandom and religious zeal, like adherence to a particular religious belief. Sports fans are devoted to their favorite team, and they have faith that their team will win the big game. We worship our favorite athlete. So we will talk about many of these athletes in this course. And the games themselves are embedded in ritual, the playing of the national anthem before every sporting event being the most obvious, and we will talk about where that ritual comes from in a later lecture. The athletes themselves, they interact with their sport in ways similar to religious engagement. There's is a life of dedication and sacrifice and commitment. So the emotions we possess and the very vocabulary that we use to talk about sports in the United States, they parallel the way that we think and talk about religion. Here's a specific example to help drive this idea home. In an upcoming lecture on the origins of baseball, I am going to tell you about the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Think about what goes on here and the words we use to describe it. Every year, thousands of base fall loving Americans make the pilgrimage to the Hall of Fame. So just as Muslims have their Mecca and Christians have their Bethlehem, baseball fans have their Cooper's Town. Every year, a handful of players are enshrined into the Hall of Fame. This is the place where they become immortal. It's all very similar to the process of beatification, or making someone a saint in the Catholic Church. For some baseball fans, the Baseball Hall of Fame is itself a holy site. The travel writer and historian Bill Bryson. He went to Cooperstown and wrote, for those of us who are baseball fans and agnostics, the Hall of Fame is as close to a religious experience as we may ever get. And yes, I know people can get carried away when talking about the religious significance of sports, especially baseball. But did you know that a baseball has one hundred and eight sties? And did you know that there are one hundred and eight sins in Buddhism, one hundred and eight Hindu deities, one hundred and eight prayer beats in a Hindu rosary. I believe I just blew your mind or or not. One last recent example of the way we conflate sport and religion. In one of the last lectures in this course, I'm going to talk about Tiger Woods and a cheating scandal that he was embroiled in. Tiger Woods endured a startling fall from grace and hey, grace, there's another religious term. But then in twenty nineteen, Tiger Woods shocked the sports world by regaining his winning form and triumphing in the Masters. I remember when he won the tournament. A dean at the Duke Divinity School tweeted greatest comeback ever except for Easter. There you have it, a direct comparison between a golfer and Jesus of Nazareth. There is a great book called The Meaning of Sports by Michael Mandelbaum, and I will mention some of my favorite books about sports in this course. And in this book, Mandelbaum suggests that modern sports fill the same needs and provide the same satisfactions that religion provided in an earlier era. Sports provide a welcome and needed diversion from the arduous routines of daily life, and this was one of the purposes of pre modern religious worship. Sports provide us with a model of coherence and and and clarity, just like the stories told him say the Bible. Sports provide easy to understand narratives where moral lessons are taught, where we speak of characters in terms of good and bad, good and evil, and think about the way Yankees and Red Sox fans think about each other. And sports provide heroic examples to admire and emulate, once again to worship. In a later lecture, I will describe Jackie Robinson as a saint, and I will tell you why I think that, And then finally, right or wrong. We invest so much time and emotion and meaning in our sports, our sports fandom rises to the level of religious zealotry. One of the things we're going to do in this course is critique the American sports fervor. Maybe it's not healthy. Maybe we've gotten a little carried away in this department. The nineteenth century political philosopher Karl Marx he once called religion the opiate of the masses, meaning religion distracted workers from the on the earth oppressions that they were enduring. This was his argument. Well, some say that sports are the new opiate of the masses. They distract us from caring a out what really matters. And it is a sobering thought. What if we added up all the hours that we sports fans have spent in our lives, not even playing sports, just watching sports, And what if instead we devoted those hours to try and to make the world a better place. Whatever our vision of that better world is something to think about. Okay, So some preliminary ruminations about sport and religion. After the break. Lacrosse is invented in the Pacific Northwest, and we dive into the sport that made the British love their bulldogs so much. Now let's get to some actual history here. I want to explore some specific links between sport and religion in early American history. I want to give you some examples of how sport and religion have often been inseparable in American history. And then I want to explore some early religious opposition to the games and sports people were playing. And so let's begin by talking about Native American sport. Actually, no, I take that back. Let's begin by talking about me. I am certain that you will find it fascinating to know that when I was a kid, I used to love to play with my sister's hula hoop. But instead of using the hula hoop the way it was advertised to be used, you know, swiveling it around your hips, my best friends and I we used to roll it down a sloped driveway and then try to throw things through it. Rocks, tennis balls, my sister's stuffed anim holes, and Barbie dolls. That was our hoop game. In fact, that's what we called it hoop game, and we played it for hours board suburban kids that we were well. I have since learned that some American Indian tribes played a similar game. For example, the Salish and the Pacific Northwest played a game in which a small wicker hoop was rolled and men forty feet away attempted to impale the rolling circle with a spear. The Salish Indians played this game to sharpen their hunting skills, so there was a utilitarian aspect to it. It prepared them to be better hunters and providers for their family, but there were prohibitions when they would play this game. The Salish never played their hoop game during the salmon spawning season, fearing that the invisible spirits of the salmon you know, passing through the village on their way up stream, might be injured, and decided never to return again. So right away, here are a couple important ideas. First play is universal. All cultures have games, play and sports. But as my version of the hoop game and the Salish version suggests, context is everything. The same game can mean different things to different people. And as I told you, my friends and I were just a bunch of goof offs passing the time. The Salish Indians where they were likely enjoying themselves when they played this game, but their game was both useful it improved their hunting skills, and it was embedded in spiritual belief. Same game, different meaning, same game, different purpose. Context matters. And to reemphasize my larger point here, we see that ideas about religion, the sacred. They were one of the contexts for that Salish hoop game. Here's another example of Native Americans sports, the classic example. I suppose stickball, which French explorers saw being played and they called it lacrosse lacrosse meaning the hooked stick man. What what a sight. Some of these stickball contests must have been. Native American lacrosse games could involve as few as twenty participants or as many as five hundred, and the goals they might be a few hundred feet apart, or evidence suggests as far as three miles in distance. The games they lasted for several hours or as long as three days, with the competitors pausing only when the sun went down. And these games, we know, we're very, very violent. Archaeologists have unearthed bashed Indian skulls that were damaged not in battle, they think, but by stickball violence. But once again, if we dig deeper, we can find spiritual meaning in all this. These games served a social purpose. Young men would play stickball to train themselves as warriors for for future battle, you know, for for for this reason. But like with the Salish hoop game, there was religious meaning to these contests. There were spiritual rituals and sacred beliefs that went hand in hand with this sport. The Cherokee were big stickball players, and the Cherokee believed that their athletes were not to engage in sexual intercourse a full month before a match for fear that they would lose their virility. They were not to eat rabbit before a match for fear of becoming timid. They were not to eat frog for fear that their bones would turn brittle. And shamans or holy men, they prepared and blessed the competitors with prayers and sacred chants pipe smoking in the Cherokee nation, these shamans they took a sharpened turkey bone and they would slash the skin of the competitors in order to bleed out their impurities and timidity, and then the games themselves. They were played for religious reasons, a way to honor their creator, or to ask favors of their creator, perhaps to ward off disease, or or asking for some much needed rainfall for the Cherokee. Sport and religion were inseparable, that their sports were religious displays, and we will see many, many examples of this idea in our course. But here's another important link between early sport and religion. Sports themselves were religious battle grounds. People argued over the appropriateness of sport for a religious people. And for this argument, I'm going to go to England because the arguments over sports over there are going to be brought to earlier America by English colonists. As we are going to see in this course, not only are many American sports English in origin, but so many of our attitudes about sports they come from England as well. So let's talk about English sports and games, and say the sixteen hundreds, the same century that Europeans began leaving Europe boarding tiny little wooden boats and heading west to the America's the sixteen hundreds was before the era of the Industrial Revolution. When so it was when almost all of England was rural, and English sports in this era were part of what we call English festive culture. Rural English festive culture. Most days out of the year, the English people they labored in their fields, right endlessly. But these occasional festivals were a break from that toil. And a festival might be an honor of a parish saint, so there's a religious link, or it could be a non religious celebration like may Day, or perhaps a wedding, but whatever the reason, these festivals were marked by hardy eating and drinking. Music was played. There was dancing and flirting and fornicating, and there were games and sports. There were foot races. There were games like quoits, in which a player tried to throw an iron ring over a peg, sort of like horseshoes. There was skittles and nine pins. These are both early forms of bowling. There were wrestling contests. There was the you gotta see it to believe it's sport of shin kicking, which is exactly what it sounds like. It is literally just two dudes kicking the other in the shin until only one is left standing. They actually still do this at rural country fairs in England. There was cudgeling, which is a fancy word for men beating each other with sticks. Sometimes wicker shields would be used for protection, but the goal was to use a long, heavy stick to knock your opponent down or to draw blood. Now, cudgeling mimicked sword fighting, and I do want to briefly emphasize this aspect of sport as well. Sports were often used to help prepare young men to be soldiers, to be warriors. You know, sports prepared men for battle. That's one of the reasons why the winner in a wrestling match, or a cudgeling contest, or a rock throwing contest was so valorized by the community. He was proving his worth as a warrior, as a defender of his community. It wasn't always the human beings who bled in these festivals and and carnivals. Animal blood sports were a special favorite among the English. Throwing stones at a rooster tied to a post was a very popular pastime. Whoever killed the rooster got to keep the carcass, presumably for eating. Cock fights in which spectators wagered on the outcome of two battling roosters. These were even more popular. And then there was bull baiting. The English had a sporting fetish that involved unleashing bulldogs and note the name bulldog onto a tethered bull, and the bulldogs would gang up and try to kill the bull by sinking their teeth into the bull's neck or it's or it's scrowed them twisting and thrashing, and people wagered on the bloody mayhem. How long would it take the dogs to kill the bull? How many dogs would die trying? They love their bulldogs in England, and that the bulldog was so admired for its tenacity it became one of the national symbols of Britain. But to get to this idea about rely just opposition, not everyone in England celebrated this rowdy, bloody and as they saw it, sinful sporting culture. And so before we come over to the America's in our next lecture, we need to discuss the way that sports became a cultural battle ground in Britain, because, as I said, this conflict is going to be transported across the Atlantic. Attitudes about sports were part of a larger culture war in England, a culture war embarked upon by the Puritans. Puritans were a group of religious radicals who basically believed that the English Church and English culture were not sufficiently pious. The Puritans argued that the English King, who is the head of the Church of England, he is not godly enough. They argue that the English people spent way too much time engaging in all this festive merrymaking and too little time in hard work and d contemplative prayer. And the Puritans found Sunday merriment especially distasteful. And as the Puritans gained more and more converts and more and more political power, they mounted campaigns to suppress all games and sports on the Sabbath in areas that the Puritans dominated, they banned sports in games, and it is for this reason that the Puritans were often referred to as spoil sports. So the Puritans opposed the sports of the English festive culture. But the Puritans encountered heavy opposition for these views, and not just from the commoners who like their drinking and merriment and blood sports. They encountered opposition from the King of England himself. One of the most interesting early documents about sports was authored by King James the First in sixteen eighteen. It was titled a Declaration of Sports, and it was a declaration that King James ordered be read from every church pulpit in the nation. And this Declaration of Sports was a counter attack on Puritan views about sports It was an early rationale or justification for sports. It describes why sports were not just good, but why they were necessary. King James argued that sports refreshed people who work all day every day. So takeaway sport and leisure activities as the Puritans want to do, and men will become less enthusiastic and ineffective workers. King James, and to be clear, I'm not talking about Lebron James. I'm talking about the actual King of England in the early sixteen hundreds. King James argued that sports helped prepare men for war, remember cudgeling, so to limit sports would be to weakend national defense. Very importantly, King James argued that sports dive orded men from the harmful activities of excessive alcohol, drinking and idle and discontented speechmaking, by which the King meant sedition, political plotting, treason. And I think this is very interesting. Here is an early argument that sports are an important form of social control. Sports help maintain the political status quo because they keep men out of seditious spaces. It's all very similar to the arguments for opening up youth centers in the United States in the sixties and seventies, nineteen sixties and seventies. You know, let's encourage midnight basketball in order to keep young people off of the streets and out of trouble. These are all arguments and justifications for sport that we will see again and again in this course, and to point to next time, this argument between the Puritans and the King of England. This is an argument that is going to be transferred to the American colonies where we will pick up our story next time. But I have one more very quick task today, and this is my bad. I haven't even told you what a sport is yet. If we're going to be talking about sports in this course, I think we need a working definition of what a sport is. And I'm going to end today just by offering up to the first definition is short and sweet to words, A sport is a physical contest. There is an aspect of physicality to it. So chess and checkers and scrabble are not sports by that definition. Is poker a sport? And it's on ESPN all the time? We could argue about this, but I say no, sports are physical, but they are also contests, meaning this, there are rules and there is a goal, There is a winner and a loser. So you're walking alongside a creek and you see two kids skipping rocks. That's ut, but it's not a sport. But then they tell you they are having a rock skipping contest. They want to see who can skip the rock, the furthest or the most number of times bingo rules. There will be a winner and a loser. Now it's a sport. Now it's something to get excited about. Once again, we could argue all day about this. Is stock car racing a sport? I say yes. Is cheerleading a sport? I say yes, but only when different cheerleading squads are competing for the scores of judges. Otherwise I say no. But just so you know, I will transgress my own definition of sport. In this course. We will explore pastimes like hiking and jogging and yoga in this course, and those endeavors are not usually contests. Though I hear that competitive yoga is now a thing, which doesn't make any sense to me, but whatever, But that's our working definition of sport a csical contest, though I could add a third word to that definition. Non utilitarian sports are non utilitarian physical contests and I merely add that word to separate sports from war. But since we were just in England, how about we end with this definition of sport. It's a definition that comes from England, where they like to say if you can smoke while doing it, it's not a sport. So think about that one and I will see you next time, I hope in the American colonies. That's all for now, next time. On the Untold History of Sports in America, presented by One Day University, the Puritans bring sport to the American Colonies.

Oh, lessons from the world's top professors anytime, any place, world history examined and science explained. This is One Day University. Welcome. Well you found it. You found our little corner of the podcast world where we take some of the brightest academic minds in the business and let them tell stories that will make you smarter. Who am I. I'm your host, Mike Coscarelli. I'm not a professor, just a guy in his thirties with a deep love of history and a heck of a voice, if I do say so myself. I'm here to bring you into the world of One Day University as we dive deeper and deeper into an academic topic that we personally think you'll love. I have vetted these myself, trust me, they're great. This is our first episode of our first season, and the subject matter is a crowd pleaser, sports, specifically sports in America and how they came to be, the incarnation of the product that we now know, and how it has become ubiquitous in our society, not just for the games that are played on the field, but it's impact in our culture as a whole. This season is going to feature lectures from Matt Andrews. He's a professor of American History at the University of North Carolina and Chapel Hill, and he is a professor real rock star. In this first episode, Matt will be explaining some of the early origins of sport in Western culture, as well as examining the philosophy that some have that regards sport as a religion itself. So, without any further ado, enjoy your lesson. Here's Matt. My name is Matt Andrews. I'm a professor of American History at the University of North Carolina and Chapel Hill, where I teach courses on sport in American history. And for well over a decade now, I have employed this strategy of using sports as a lens through which to explore the very significant issues from the American past. And I know this strategy works. Not to brag here, but okay, maybe a little. But my students love these courses. There is never an empty seat. Three of the last four years, our student newspaper has named me u n c's best professor. I'm not sure what happened that other years some sociologist, I think, but I am sure about this. These courses are popular because the story of American sport opens a very popular window onto these larger significant themes, and these courses are popular because of the passion and the enthusiasm I have for the topic, and I am very excited to bring my passion for sport and politics and American history to this course. In this course, I will take you back to the moments where sports reflected the larger themes and issues in American history, but also to the moments where sports affected or changed American history itself. We will run the Boston Marathon in nineteen sixty seven, where a woman dared to be on the race course and a man named Jock tried to drag her off. We will take a trip back to pe class in elementary school and discuss why we did the presidential fitness test as children. Here's a hint, it's because of them Russians. We will sit front row at a boxing match in Reno, Nevada, in where all of the worst racial impulses in this country were put on prominent display, and where the fight's outcome led to the murder of dozens of Americans. That actually happened. So we have a lot to discuss, and so I say let's get to it. For our first lecture, I want to set the stage by exploring one of the very important themes in early American sport history. I want to explore some of the links between sport and religion, and I'm going to get historical and specific in just a moment, give you some real American history. But let me begin by trying to be somewhat philosophical about the religion of sport. It has become a cliche to say that sport is a religion in American society, though I think it's an accurate statement. When people make this argument that sports are a modern day religion, they point to many of the similarities between sports fandom and religious zeal, like adherence to a particular religious belief. Sports fans are devoted to their favorite team, and they have faith that their team will win the big game. We worship our favorite athlete. So we will talk about many of these athletes in this course. And the games themselves are embedded in ritual, the playing of the national anthem before every sporting event being the most obvious, and we will talk about where that ritual comes from in a later lecture. The athletes themselves, they interact with their sport in ways similar to religious engagement. There's is a life of dedication and sacrifice and commitment. So the emotions we possess and the very vocabulary that we use to talk about sports in the United States, they parallel the way that we think and talk about religion. Here's a specific example to help drive this idea home. In an upcoming lecture on the origins of baseball, I am going to tell you about the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Think about what goes on here and the words we use to describe it. Every year, thousands of base fall loving Americans make the pilgrimage to the Hall of Fame. So just as Muslims have their Mecca and Christians have their Bethlehem, baseball fans have their Cooper's Town. Every year, a handful of players are enshrined into the Hall of Fame. This is the place where they become immortal. It's all very similar to the process of beatification, or making someone a saint in the Catholic Church. For some baseball fans, the Baseball Hall of Fame is itself a holy site. The travel writer and historian Bill Bryson. He went to Cooperstown and wrote, for those of us who are baseball fans and agnostics, the Hall of Fame is as close to a religious experience as we may ever get. And yes, I know people can get carried away when talking about the religious significance of sports, especially baseball. But did you know that a baseball has one hundred and eight sties? And did you know that there are one hundred and eight sins in Buddhism, one hundred and eight Hindu deities, one hundred and eight prayer beats in a Hindu rosary. I believe I just blew your mind or or not. One last recent example of the way we conflate sport and religion. In one of the last lectures in this course, I'm going to talk about Tiger Woods and a cheating scandal that he was embroiled in. Tiger Woods endured a startling fall from grace and hey, grace, there's another religious term. But then in twenty nineteen, Tiger Woods shocked the sports world by regaining his winning form and triumphing in the Masters. I remember when he won the tournament. A dean at the Duke Divinity School tweeted greatest comeback ever except for Easter. There you have it, a direct comparison between a golfer and Jesus of Nazareth. There is a great book called The Meaning of Sports by Michael Mandelbaum, and I will mention some of my favorite books about sports in this course. And in this book, Mandelbaum suggests that modern sports fill the same needs and provide the same satisfactions that religion provided in an earlier era. Sports provide a welcome and needed diversion from the arduous routines of daily life, and this was one of the purposes of pre modern religious worship. Sports provide us with a model of coherence and and and clarity, just like the stories told him say the Bible. Sports provide easy to understand narratives where moral lessons are taught, where we speak of characters in terms of good and bad, good and evil, and think about the way Yankees and Red Sox fans think about each other. And sports provide heroic examples to admire and emulate, once again to worship. In a later lecture, I will describe Jackie Robinson as a saint, and I will tell you why I think that, And then finally, right or wrong. We invest so much time and emotion and meaning in our sports, our sports fandom rises to the level of religious zealotry. One of the things we're going to do in this course is critique the American sports fervor. Maybe it's not healthy. Maybe we've gotten a little carried away in this department. The nineteenth century political philosopher Karl Marx he once called religion the opiate of the masses, meaning religion distracted workers from the on the earth oppressions that they were enduring. This was his argument. Well, some say that sports are the new opiate of the masses. They distract us from caring a out what really matters. And it is a sobering thought. What if we added up all the hours that we sports fans have spent in our lives, not even playing sports, just watching sports, And what if instead we devoted those hours to try and to make the world a better place. Whatever our vision of that better world is something to think about. Okay, So some preliminary ruminations about sport and religion. After the break. Lacrosse is invented in the Pacific Northwest, and we dive into the sport that made the British love their bulldogs so much. Now let's get to some actual history here. I want to explore some specific links between sport and religion in early American history. I want to give you some examples of how sport and religion have often been inseparable in American history. And then I want to explore some early religious opposition to the games and sports people were playing. And so let's begin by talking about Native American sport. Actually, no, I take that back. Let's begin by talking about me. I am certain that you will find it fascinating to know that when I was a kid, I used to love to play with my sister's hula hoop. But instead of using the hula hoop the way it was advertised to be used, you know, swiveling it around your hips, my best friends and I we used to roll it down a sloped driveway and then try to throw things through it. Rocks, tennis balls, my sister's stuffed anim holes, and Barbie dolls. That was our hoop game. In fact, that's what we called it hoop game, and we played it for hours board suburban kids that we were well. I have since learned that some American Indian tribes played a similar game. For example, the Salish and the Pacific Northwest played a game in which a small wicker hoop was rolled and men forty feet away attempted to impale the rolling circle with a spear. The Salish Indians played this game to sharpen their hunting skills, so there was a utilitarian aspect to it. It prepared them to be better hunters and providers for their family, but there were prohibitions when they would play this game. The Salish never played their hoop game during the salmon spawning season, fearing that the invisible spirits of the salmon you know, passing through the village on their way up stream, might be injured, and decided never to return again. So right away, here are a couple important ideas. First play is universal. All cultures have games, play and sports. But as my version of the hoop game and the Salish version suggests, context is everything. The same game can mean different things to different people. And as I told you, my friends and I were just a bunch of goof offs passing the time. The Salish Indians where they were likely enjoying themselves when they played this game, but their game was both useful it improved their hunting skills, and it was embedded in spiritual belief. Same game, different meaning, same game, different purpose. Context matters. And to reemphasize my larger point here, we see that ideas about religion, the sacred. They were one of the contexts for that Salish hoop game. Here's another example of Native Americans sports, the classic example. I suppose stickball, which French explorers saw being played and they called it lacrosse lacrosse meaning the hooked stick man. What what a sight. Some of these stickball contests must have been. Native American lacrosse games could involve as few as twenty participants or as many as five hundred, and the goals they might be a few hundred feet apart, or evidence suggests as far as three miles in distance. The games they lasted for several hours or as long as three days, with the competitors pausing only when the sun went down. And these games, we know, we're very, very violent. Archaeologists have unearthed bashed Indian skulls that were damaged not in battle, they think, but by stickball violence. But once again, if we dig deeper, we can find spiritual meaning in all this. These games served a social purpose. Young men would play stickball to train themselves as warriors for for future battle, you know, for for for this reason. But like with the Salish hoop game, there was religious meaning to these contests. There were spiritual rituals and sacred beliefs that went hand in hand with this sport. The Cherokee were big stickball players, and the Cherokee believed that their athletes were not to engage in sexual intercourse a full month before a match for fear that they would lose their virility. They were not to eat rabbit before a match for fear of becoming timid. They were not to eat frog for fear that their bones would turn brittle. And shamans or holy men, they prepared and blessed the competitors with prayers and sacred chants pipe smoking in the Cherokee nation, these shamans they took a sharpened turkey bone and they would slash the skin of the competitors in order to bleed out their impurities and timidity, and then the games themselves. They were played for religious reasons, a way to honor their creator, or to ask favors of their creator, perhaps to ward off disease, or or asking for some much needed rainfall for the Cherokee. Sport and religion were inseparable, that their sports were religious displays, and we will see many, many examples of this idea in our course. But here's another important link between early sport and religion. Sports themselves were religious battle grounds. People argued over the appropriateness of sport for a religious people. And for this argument, I'm going to go to England because the arguments over sports over there are going to be brought to earlier America by English colonists. As we are going to see in this course, not only are many American sports English in origin, but so many of our attitudes about sports they come from England as well. So let's talk about English sports and games, and say the sixteen hundreds, the same century that Europeans began leaving Europe boarding tiny little wooden boats and heading west to the America's the sixteen hundreds was before the era of the Industrial Revolution. When so it was when almost all of England was rural, and English sports in this era were part of what we call English festive culture. Rural English festive culture. Most days out of the year, the English people they labored in their fields, right endlessly. But these occasional festivals were a break from that toil. And a festival might be an honor of a parish saint, so there's a religious link, or it could be a non religious celebration like may Day, or perhaps a wedding, but whatever the reason, these festivals were marked by hardy eating and drinking. Music was played. There was dancing and flirting and fornicating, and there were games and sports. There were foot races. There were games like quoits, in which a player tried to throw an iron ring over a peg, sort of like horseshoes. There was skittles and nine pins. These are both early forms of bowling. There were wrestling contests. There was the you gotta see it to believe it's sport of shin kicking, which is exactly what it sounds like. It is literally just two dudes kicking the other in the shin until only one is left standing. They actually still do this at rural country fairs in England. There was cudgeling, which is a fancy word for men beating each other with sticks. Sometimes wicker shields would be used for protection, but the goal was to use a long, heavy stick to knock your opponent down or to draw blood. Now, cudgeling mimicked sword fighting, and I do want to briefly emphasize this aspect of sport as well. Sports were often used to help prepare young men to be soldiers, to be warriors. You know, sports prepared men for battle. That's one of the reasons why the winner in a wrestling match, or a cudgeling contest, or a rock throwing contest was so valorized by the community. He was proving his worth as a warrior, as a defender of his community. It wasn't always the human beings who bled in these festivals and and carnivals. Animal blood sports were a special favorite among the English. Throwing stones at a rooster tied to a post was a very popular pastime. Whoever killed the rooster got to keep the carcass, presumably for eating. Cock fights in which spectators wagered on the outcome of two battling roosters. These were even more popular. And then there was bull baiting. The English had a sporting fetish that involved unleashing bulldogs and note the name bulldog onto a tethered bull, and the bulldogs would gang up and try to kill the bull by sinking their teeth into the bull's neck or it's or it's scrowed them twisting and thrashing, and people wagered on the bloody mayhem. How long would it take the dogs to kill the bull? How many dogs would die trying? They love their bulldogs in England, and that the bulldog was so admired for its tenacity it became one of the national symbols of Britain. But to get to this idea about rely just opposition, not everyone in England celebrated this rowdy, bloody and as they saw it, sinful sporting culture. And so before we come over to the America's in our next lecture, we need to discuss the way that sports became a cultural battle ground in Britain, because, as I said, this conflict is going to be transported across the Atlantic. Attitudes about sports were part of a larger culture war in England, a culture war embarked upon by the Puritans. Puritans were a group of religious radicals who basically believed that the English Church and English culture were not sufficiently pious. The Puritans argued that the English King, who is the head of the Church of England, he is not godly enough. They argue that the English people spent way too much time engaging in all this festive merrymaking and too little time in hard work and d contemplative prayer. And the Puritans found Sunday merriment especially distasteful. And as the Puritans gained more and more converts and more and more political power, they mounted campaigns to suppress all games and sports on the Sabbath in areas that the Puritans dominated, they banned sports in games, and it is for this reason that the Puritans were often referred to as spoil sports. So the Puritans opposed the sports of the English festive culture. But the Puritans encountered heavy opposition for these views, and not just from the commoners who like their drinking and merriment and blood sports. They encountered opposition from the King of England himself. One of the most interesting early documents about sports was authored by King James the First in sixteen eighteen. It was titled a Declaration of Sports, and it was a declaration that King James ordered be read from every church pulpit in the nation. And this Declaration of Sports was a counter attack on Puritan views about sports It was an early rationale or justification for sports. It describes why sports were not just good, but why they were necessary. King James argued that sports refreshed people who work all day every day. So takeaway sport and leisure activities as the Puritans want to do, and men will become less enthusiastic and ineffective workers. King James, and to be clear, I'm not talking about Lebron James. I'm talking about the actual King of England in the early sixteen hundreds. King James argued that sports helped prepare men for war, remember cudgeling, so to limit sports would be to weakend national defense. Very importantly, King James argued that sports dive orded men from the harmful activities of excessive alcohol, drinking and idle and discontented speechmaking, by which the King meant sedition, political plotting, treason. And I think this is very interesting. Here is an early argument that sports are an important form of social control. Sports help maintain the political status quo because they keep men out of seditious spaces. It's all very similar to the arguments for opening up youth centers in the United States in the sixties and seventies, nineteen sixties and seventies. You know, let's encourage midnight basketball in order to keep young people off of the streets and out of trouble. These are all arguments and justifications for sport that we will see again and again in this course, and to point to next time, this argument between the Puritans and the King of England. This is an argument that is going to be transferred to the American colonies where we will pick up our story next time. But I have one more very quick task today, and this is my bad. I haven't even told you what a sport is yet. If we're going to be talking about sports in this course, I think we need a working definition of what a sport is. And I'm going to end today just by offering up to the first definition is short and sweet to words, A sport is a physical contest. There is an aspect of physicality to it. So chess and checkers and scrabble are not sports by that definition. Is poker a sport? And it's on ESPN all the time? We could argue about this, but I say no, sports are physical, but they are also contests, meaning this, there are rules and there is a goal, There is a winner and a loser. So you're walking alongside a creek and you see two kids skipping rocks. That's ut, but it's not a sport. But then they tell you they are having a rock skipping contest. They want to see who can skip the rock, the furthest or the most number of times bingo rules. There will be a winner and a loser. Now it's a sport. Now it's something to get excited about. Once again, we could argue all day about this. Is stock car racing a sport? I say yes. Is cheerleading a sport? I say yes, but only when different cheerleading squads are competing for the scores of judges. Otherwise I say no. But just so you know, I will transgress my own definition of sport. In this course. We will explore pastimes like hiking and jogging and yoga in this course, and those endeavors are not usually contests. Though I hear that competitive yoga is now a thing, which doesn't make any sense to me, but whatever, But that's our working definition of sport a csical contest, though I could add a third word to that definition. Non utilitarian sports are non utilitarian physical contests and I merely add that word to separate sports from war. But since we were just in England, how about we end with this definition of sport. It's a definition that comes from England, where they like to say if you can smoke while doing it, it's not a sport. So think about that one and I will see you next time, I hope in the American colonies. That's all for now, next time. On the Untold History of Sports in America, presented by One Day University, the Puritans bring sport to the American Colonies.