History of sports in the United States

On the large slave plantations, the popular male sports were wrestling, boxing, racing, hunting, and fishing. The most popular recreations for women were dancing and singing. David Wiggins says the masters typically tolerated the slaves' pastimes as long as they were ready to work when called upon.[5] The slave children improvised their games. Girls, for example, favored "ring dances," accompanied by songs and riddles.[6]

The Kentucky Derby forms part of the triple crown and its disputed seance 1875.

Seabiscuit winning the Santa Anita Handicap in 1940

Horse racing remained the leading sport in the 1780-1860 era, especially in the South.[7] It involved owners, trainers and spectators from all social classes and both races. However, religious evangelists were troubled by the gambling dimension, and democratic elements complained that it was too aristocratic, since only the rich could own very expensive competitive horses. The Civil War devastated the wealth needed to support the sport in the South. Thoroughbred racing revived in the North in the 1870s. Elite jockey clubs operated the most prestigious racetracks. They soon faced competition from profit-oriented proprietary racetracks especially in resort towns such as Saratoga Springs New York. Gambling was legal at the track, but an even larger amount was wagered off-track by unlicensed bookies, often backed by criminal syndicates. Moral opposition led by evangelical Protestants and social reformers led nearly all states to close their tracks by 1910. Much of the spectator attention shifted to automobile racing, where technology was central rather than gambling. Some tracks had both automobile and horse racing. One example was the Pennsboro Speedway, which opened for horse racing in 1887, and added automobile racing in 1926. It was the original home of the Hillbilly 100 from 1967 to 1998; the track became obsolete and closed in 2002.[8]

Horse racing made its comeback in the 1920s, as state governments legalized on-track betting which provided a welcome new flow of state revenues from a voluntary activity without imposing compulsory taxes on all citizens. By the 1950s, more people attended horse races than any other sport. Since the late 20th century, horse racing has struggled against competition from other sports and casinos.[9]

Baseball evolved in New York City in the early part of the 19th Century, with the first organized league, the National Association of Base Ball Players, emerging in 1857. It would eventually be the first team sport in the United States to be professionalized with the 1869 founding of the original Cincinnati Red Stockings (from whom the modern-day Cincinnati Reds took their name).

Cricket was imported from Britain to the United States, and accounts vary as to its popularity in early America. John Thorn, official historian of the MLB, says that in the 1850's, both cricket and baseball were considered the "national pastimes".[10] Regardless, it declined in popularity after the Civil War, with baseball replacing it as the national bat-and-ball game. This decline occurred for a number of reasons; cricket was considered too long to play, requiring a few days to play, and it was resisted on nativist grounds as being of British origin, with baseball being considered a more suitable American-origin replacement.[11]

Cobb violently crashing into St. Louis Browns catcher Paul Krichell in 1912 to make him drop the ball.

Organized sports played a major role in defining new models of manliness by the mid-19th century. Boxing was professionalized, and emphasized the physical and confrontational aspects of masculinity.[12] Bare-knuckle fighting without gloves represented "the manly art" in 19th century America.[13] Historian Steven Elliott Tripp has explored the reaction of fans to Ty Cobb, the most dominant American baseball star of the early 20th century. He was “a player fans loved to hate,” so much so that he became the pioneer sports celebrity.[14] It was the male fans who responded enthusiastically to how Cobb demonstrated in action a new level of modern masculinity. Cobb did that by his performance as a specialist in his art, a man with iron nerve, undaunted, fighting to advance his team and his career by crushing his weaker, less-masculine opponents. Cobb demonstrated raw emotion and encouraged his audience to participate in the manly struggle underway in the stadium by shouting their taunts and jeers at the opposing team.[15]

In the early 20th century, elite male and female athletes were being coached by men. Women coaches at the collegiate level developed an alternative to the highly competitive masculine model of sport in the 1920s. They created "play days" for women during which participation, cooperation, and social interaction were more the focus than victory and defeat. The motto was: ‘Play With Us, Not Against Us.’ This mode of sport also represented an effort by female administrators to obtain more control over women's athletic activity with a feminist perspective.[16]

At the sixty or so historically black colleges, such as Howard University in Washington and Fisk University in Nashville, students and alumni developed a strong interest in athletics during the 1920s and 1930s. Sports were expanding rapidly at state universities, but very few black stars were recruited there. Race newspapers hailed athletic success as a demonstration of racial progress. Black schools hired coaches, recruited and featured stellar athletes, and set up their own leagues.[17][18]

1961 President John F. Kennedy throws out the first ball in opening day.

A baseball color line existed from 1887 until Jackie Robinson broke the barrier and became the first black player in modern professional baseball in 1947; even before 1887, black baseball players in organized baseball were rare. Black players generally played in Negro league baseball, in leagues of varying stability and caliber. Black players in professional American football were somewhat more common, as the sport was predominantly white but integrated (including blacks, Hispanics, native Americans—among them Olympic superstar Jim Thorpe and others from his alma mater Carlisle Indian School—and Asians) from its beginnings; George Preston Marshall was able to enforce a 13-year color barrier on the National Football League from 1933 to 1946 and continued to refuse to sign black players to his own team, the Washington Redskins, until 1962. NFL integration in the late 1940s came as professional football was brought to California, where college and professional teams remained fully integrated; when the NFL placed its first team (the Los Angeles Rams) in the state in 1946, it was obligated to integrate, and did so by signing college superstar Kenny Washington and future acting star Woody Strode.

During the New Deal of 1933–39, public sports facilities were upgraded and expanded with large sums of relief money. The CWA, WPA, and CCC were large nationwide relief projects that typically favored collaboration with local government, which often provided the plans and the site, as well as the materials and the heavy equipment, while the federal government provided the labor. Building new recreational facilities in public parks fit the model, and tens of thousands of recreation and sports facilities were built in both rural and urban areas. These projects had the main goal of providing jobs for the unemployed, but they also played to a widespread demand at the time for bodily fitness and the need for recreation in a healthy society. Roosevelt was a strong supporter of the recreation and sports dimension of his programs. The WPA spent $941 million on recreational facilities. including 5,900 athletic fields and playgrounds, 770 swimming pools, 1,700 parks, and 8,300 recreational buildings. WPA spent an additional $229 million on sports and recreational staff workers.[19][20]

Eight Olympic Games have taken place in the United States. The United States has won 2,522 medals at the Summer Olympic Games, more than any other country, and 281 in the Winter Olympic Games, the second most behind Norway.[21]

• Major professional sports leagues in the United States and Canada
  • College athletics
  • National Federation of State High School Associations
• Baseball in the United States
  • Major League Baseball
• National Basketball Association
  • College basketball
• Cricket in the United States
• American football
  • College football
• National Hockey League
• Soccer in the United States
• Volleyball in the United States

• Daniel, Bruce. Puritans at Play: Leisure and Recreation in Colonial New England (1996) excerpt
• Eisen, George Eisen and David K. Wiggins, eds. Ethnicity and Sport in North American History and Culture (1995) excerpt, scholarly essays on Indians, Germans, Irish, Jews, blacks, Hispanics, Japanese, Italians
• Gerdy, John R. Sports: The All-American Addiction (2002) online
• Gorn, Elliott J. A Brief History of American Sports (2004)
• Jackson III, Harvey H. ed. The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Sports & Recreation (2011) online
• Jay, Kathryn. More Than Just a Game: Sports in American Life since 1945 (2004). online
• Daniel, Bruce. Puritans at Play: Leisure and Recreation in Colonial New England (1996) excerpt
• Struma, Nancy L. People of Prowess: Sport, Leisure, and Labor in Early Anglo-America (1996) excerpt
• Wiggins, David K. Out of the Shadows: A Biographical History of African American Athletes (2008); focus on 20 celebrities
• Zeigler, Earle F. ed. American sport and physical education History to 1975) (1975) online
• Zeigler, Earle F. ed. History and Status of American Physical Education And Educational Sport (2005) excerpt

• Goldstein, Warren. Playing for keeps: A history of early baseball (Cornell University Press, 2014).
• Hoffmann, Frank, Gerhard Falk, and Martin J. Manning. Football and American identity (Routledge, 2013).
• Riess, Steven. "The Cyclical History of Horse Racing: The USA's Oldest and (Sometimes) Most Popular Spectator Sport." International Journal of the History of Sport 31#1-2 (2014): 29–54.
• Ward, Geoffrey C., and Ken Burns. Baseball: An illustrated history (1996).

• Martin, Charles H. "The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow in Southern College Sports: The Case of the Atlantic Coast Conference." North Carolina Historical Review 76#3 (1999): 253–284. in JSTOR

• Pope, S.W. ed. The new American sport history: recent approaches and perspectives (U of Illinois Press, 1997
• Zeigler, Earle F. ed. History and Status of American Physical Education And Educational Sport (2005) excerpt

• Wiggins, David K. and Patrick B. Miller, eds. The Unlevel Playing Field: A Documentary History of the African American Experience in Sport (2005) excerpt