“The majority of the most cherished views about sport,” the sports historian Wray Vamplew writes in this compendious book, “are simply not true.” Take lawn tennis. A posh sport, right? Wrong. After it was patented in 1874 — admittedly by a Major Walter Clopton Wingfield, under the highfalutin name of Sphairistikè — everyone wanted to play. By the mid-20th century clubs were even based at — whisper it — factories.
The myths keep tumbling. Gladiators did not usually fight to the death; their bouts were stylised and formulaic — like WWE fights. Scotland is not the home of golf; it was probably imported from the Netherlands. The marathon’s 26.22-mile distance has nothing to do with Pheidippides, or Queen Alexandra’s desire to watch from Windsor Castle.
It was simply that the 1908 Olympic organisers had to use a different entrance to White City stadium for the finish — which, as Vamplew puts it, “necessitated some extra yardage”.
Or how about the very cherished idea that the British invented sport? Wrong again. Out of 22 sports examined by historians, only six or seven had uniquely British origins — frustratingly Vamplew does not say which, though it is true that sport was spread by the British Empire and its “bachelor subculture”. As for the popular belief that sport was a public-school invention, training up young men for empire building, Vamplew is sceptical. There is no evidence for it, and he wonders if in reality “there were more Flashmans than Tom Browns”.
The line-up of the book is fairly traditional. There’s lots of football, cricket, golf and tennis, and water, winter, equestrian, blood and some motor sports are all covered. American sports (appropriately) get their own chapter. You won’t find rock climbing, ultimate Frisbee or BMX, though. Or esports — except the news that they will feature as medal events at the 2022 Asian Games, so lucky ticketholders will get to watch other people playing video games.
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Themed chapters cover “associativity”, nationalism, professionalism, drugs, charity and (fairly cursorily) the environment. This material can feel like chewing through a giant bag of muesli; I’ve picked out some nuts and raisins here, but they sit in a 456-page oaty mass. We are given the founding dates of ice hockey associations. There are sentences such as: “Recourse to equipment was essential to sports participation.”
The book does have an underlying mission, though, which is to argue for sport to be taken seriously as an object of study. And it shows how deeply sport is embedded in culture. Take the idioms we use, even when we don’t know their origins. If we play “fast and loose” we’re like an archer who wants to both hold his arrow “fast” (or still) and set it loose. If we’re “crestfallen” we’re like a losing, submissive cock in a cockfight. If we don’t “come up to scratch”we’re like a pugilist who fails to put his foot on a line scratched in the middle of the ring, to signal readiness. (Although the fighter’s second could always decide, on their behalf, that they were not up to it by “throwing in the towel”.)
Sometimes Vamplew made me yearn for the past. In early baseball the batter could be caught out one-hand-one-bounce. In early cricket the batsman could charge at fielders or hit the ball twice to stop a catch, and you were only run out if a fielder popped the ball into a “popping hole”.
Pugilism in the American West, though, is probably best forgotten. Fighters could choose to fight by the rules or “rough and tumble” — in which gouging out an eye with specially hardened and sharpened fingernails was “the ultimate objective”, but deliberate castration was “not infrequent”.
The Mayan rubber ball game does not sound enticing either. It ended with death penalties — “sometimes for the captain of the losing side, sometimes for the entire losing squad, sometimes for the captain of the winning side, and on rare occasions for the entire winning team”.
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Vamplew is fond of a recherché fact. How about that two thirds of all curling stones are quarried on the Scottish island of Ailsa Craig? Or that Captain Matthew Webb, famously the first person to swim the Channel, was also given a medal for diving off a Cunard liner in the middle of the Atlantic to rescue a sailor, and died in the rapids below the Niagara Falls?
Characters such as Webb almost write themselves as quiz questions. Or take Terry Biddlecombe, the 1960s jump jockey. He broke a shoulder blade six times, a wrist five times, his collarbone, elbow, forearm and ankle once each, and suffered 100 episodes of concussion. Or the 1880s and 1890s multiple Wimbledon winner Charlotte Dod. Playing in a risqué short skirt — it fell to her calf — she lost only five singles matches in her entire career. She also won the British golf championship, before taking up international curling, hockey and archery, and becoming the first female tobogganist to tackle the Cresta Run.
There is one particularly timely chapter. Vamplew pricks the Olympics, and its concocted myth of amateurism, particularly hard. It turns out that many of the early competitors were professionals — and the whole sporting system of trophies, medals and ribbons came not from classical Greece but from trade fairs. (The new system was apparently “resisted by working-class amateurs, who preferred to win clocks, tea sets and other goods that could be sold or pawned.”) I will be remembering those trade fairs as I watch the various triumphs of Tokyo.
Games People Played has its faults, but it does underline that truism of applied history: to understand the present you need to know the past — in sport as in anything else. Cicero said that “to be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child”. The study of games, Vamplew demonstrates, is very much for grown-ups.
Games People Played: A Global History of Sport by Wray Vamplew
Reaktion £20 pp456
