5/100: A Stickler for The Rules
This article looks at Day 4 in a series of 100 visits detailing what happens at my local library
I’m on the third floor of the library today, which is dedicated to Arts and Music. Among all the jazz encyclopedias and Picasso tribute books, I found this — I think it’s been misplaced. Maybe that’s why it jumped out at me.
Games People Played, written by Wray Vamplew, is (surprisingly) the first global history of sports. The book details how games have developed across centuries and continents, and observes the social and political implications they’ve bred.
As a teenager, I claimed to despise sports. I had a rigid view of what they were comprised of: competition, violence, and sweat. None of these appealed to me then, nor do they now, but I’ve learned that with sports come many valuable elements as well: learning how to play / win / lose with grace, being part of a community, and the correlation between a healthy body and a sound mind.
This is all fairly conventional wisdom. Leafing through Vamplew’s work this morning shed light on some of the less conspicuous insights of the sports-sphere, and below are some of my highlights.
Sports Idioms
a surprising number of fun expressions come from sports
Up to scratch: from pugilism, the predecessor of boxing: a player would lose the round if he failed to be ready for combat by not having his foot on a line scratched in the center of the ring.
Throwing in the towel: also from pugilism: all players would have a second — just as in a duel — who had the authority to forfeit the match by throwing a towel into the ring on the fighter’s behalf.
Stickler for the rules: from wrestling: referees in traditional wrestling carried thin sticks that they attempted to push under the shoulders of a pinned wrestler to assess whether he had been fully pressed to the floor in a legitimate fall.
Crestfallen: from cockfighting: refers to the state of the losing bird after being savaged / mangled (very dark and sad.)
Fast and loose: from archery: applied to our love lives these days, playing fast and loose described not knowing when to hold fast or to shoot one’s arrow.
These facts don’t do much to curb my skepticism vis-a-vis sports and aggression. However, going through the history it becomes clear that while combat sports certainly play a role in the development of games, they aren’t necessarily the team MVPs.
The book offers a history of the different sports played over the course of history and across the globe:
- The first Olympic Games was held in the Peloponnese (190 miles from Mount Olympus) in 776 BCE and staged one event — a short foot race.
- By 468 BCE, the Olympic Games included 3 running races, boxing, wrestling, chariot racing, horse racing, a pentathlon, and pankration — a mix of boxing + wrestling where the only prohibited moves were biting, gouging, and attacking the genitals
- Ancient Rome had only two spectator sporting events: gladiatorial combat and chariot racing
- Mesoamerican (Olmen, Maya, Toltec, Zapotec, Aztec) sports were far less violent, consisting of team relay races, a name-unknown rubber-ball and stick game where the point was to score goals, and pelota mixteca, a sport not unlike tennis in that a ball is passed back and forth, using big padded gloves en lieu of rackets
- Many ancient Asian sports died out but were revived in the 18th and 19th centuries to promote nationalism. These included: chariot racing, archery, dragon boat racing, kite-flying, cuju (soccer), wrestling, wushu (mixed martial arts)
- The 2022 Asian Games were the first event to add e-sports to the competition roster, including drone racing, chase tag, and quidditch.
Fun facts aside, it’s a read that offers valuable insight as to how sports echo the trends that currently play out in society at large, and also in my attitude toward libraries; all three are highly susceptible to the influences of nostalgia.
Sports — like so many other aspects of life — appear to have a golden age, and it’s usually beyond memory for most of us. We tend to gloss over the fact that golden ages are often periods marked by class, gender and racial discrimination, opting instead to emphasize the romantic recollections over the objective reality. In a play to grow its fanbase, the sports media caters to the nostalgia market by perpetuating legends, and obscuring history in the process.
Vamplew puts it like this: longing for an idealized past has more to do with perceived problems of the present than with the [glory of the] real past.
In other words, the good old days are a myth — what makes them good is that they are separate from the problems we face in real-time reality. Whether it’s a game, a politician, or a room filled with books, when something isn’t staring us in the face, it’s a lot easier to perceive it as perfect.
Thanks for reading to the end! If you’re enjoying this series, you might also like:
