download - IOA

idge Rules" became, with hardly an alteration, the laws of the Football
Association founded in 1863. So it was too with track and field
athletics. The events 'throwing the discus' and the 'Marathon' may
have been the result of a fit of archaeological enthusiasm at Olympia
and elsewhere among German scholars, but racing on foot was an old
pastime in England, pole-vaulting flourished in Cumberland and Lancashire,
hurdling and steeplechasing were modelled directly on practices
of the English hunting field by the undergraduates of Exeter College
in 1851, and it was the enthusiasm of Oxford men which led to the
formation of the Amateur Athletic Association there in 1880. Lawn
tennis seems to have been played first in the gardens of Edgbaston, a
wealthy suburb of Birmingham. It was patented by Major Wingfield
in 1871 and quickly thereafter spread to all parts of the world.
The last quarter of the century saw English games exported far
and wide. In some countries they did not have a ready sale. Cricket
which was taken to the United States in the 1860's by a visiting team
did not prove popular, nor did it in Denmark where it was introduced
by the engineers who built the railway from Roskilde to Compenhagen.
But football and lawn tennis found a ready market almost everywhere.
Even ski-ing and mountaineering in the Alps originally owed more to
the English than to the natives of the countries where those sports have
now developed. The English have not forgotten their achievement in
formalising, organising and popularising their domestic sports. They
even feel that their debts have not been and can never be fully repaid
and they convince themselves that if they are now defeated in sport
by their former customers and pupils, that can in no way detract the
English achievement of making it possible for this to happen. It is
common in boys' schools in England for the school cricket team to play
a 'Fathers ΧI'. It is usually a happy occasion because the fathers obtain
as much satisfaction from being defeated by their sons as they do if
they win. In England then the basic pattern of modern sport was laid
down in the 19th Century and inevitably it reflected the structure of
society of that age. We shall see too that in some respects it still reflects
that structure, even in the new Elizabethan age.
In order to see more clearly the place that sport has occupied
and still occupies, in our education and, more important, to see what
varieties of sport have been used it is now necessary to attempt some
analysis and clarification. Several analyses have been made of recent
years. Professor Huizinga, late professor of history in Leyden University,
in his book "Homo Ludens" examined the play element in culture.
Much that he had to say was relevant to sport and I shall return to his
work later, but sport and play are not synonymous nor are they co-
103