The Sports Factor

American academic Allen Guttmann wrote the seminal text From Ritual to Record, encapsulating the historical progress of sport. He visited Australia last year and delivered a keynote lecture on the topic.

(This program was originally broadcast on 20/07/07)

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Mick O'Regan: Hello everyone, and welcome to the Sports Factor here on ABC Radio National summer.

I'm Mick O'Regan and this week on the program we'll explore the origins, development and characteristics of modern sport.

In June last year in the national capital, people with an academic interest in all things sporting gathered at the biennial conference of the Australian Society for Sports History.

Held at the University of Canberra, the conference, titled Sporting Traditions XVI, explored what the organisers termed the tripartite theme of 'conceiving, locating and narrating sports history'.

The wide-ranging conference covered myriad issues and the keynote address was delivered by Professor Allen Guttmann from Amherst College in Boston, Massachusetts.

Professor Guttmann is a pioneer in the academic discipline of sports history. In a career spanning more than three decades he has written seminal texts on the Olympic movement, the role of women in sport and the relationship between spectators and the games they follow.

However his overarching interest concerns the rise of what we now know as modern sports: the traditions from which they emerged, their specificity and the way in which they can be analysed from both historical and economic perspectives.

His 1978 book From Ritual to Record is widely regarded as the key text in sports history.

In today's Sports Factor program, we'll hear an edited version of the address Professor Guttmann delivered to the conference, in which he teases out the ways in which modern sports have emerged from their pre-modern roots.

To begin with, he looks at what differentiates the sports we play and love today, from those of our ancestors.

Allen Guttmann: Modern sports are sui generis, they are strikingly interestingly different from the sports of previous ages. The book From Ritual to Record has that title in order to underline the contrast between sports as religious observance in traditional society, to sports in our amazingly rationalised, quantified, record-obsessed modern world.

Well I don't want to dwell on this, but let me summarise very quickly this difference between now and then, between the present and the pre-modern past. It seems to me that there are seven characteristics which more or less describe the difference between now and then. These characteristics are quite familiar to any social scientist who has read Max Weber, and I assume that just about every social scientist has. My apologies to any of you who may have read this book, From Ritual to Record, because these are radical simplifications.

The first of the characteristics that I've isolated is secularism. Modern sports are not related to any transcendent realm of the sacred. Sports in pre-modern societies were not always associated with religious practice, but to a striking degree, they very often were. The most obvious example which is I'm sure familiar to you already, is the ancient Olympic Games, sacred to the God, Zeus. Nearly as important, the Pythian Games are sacred to Apollo. The point that needs to be stressed is, this association was not ancillary, but absolutely central for the sacred games of ancient Greece. When the athletes competed, they felt the competition in itself was a form of worship, to run, to jump, to throw, to wrestle, was religious action, was worship.

There is really nothing like that in our world. I know we have organisations like the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, I know that American coaches and probably coaches in other countries as well, will stand there in the locker room and conduct prayer sessions, but that is radically different from a sports event which is in itself, ipso facto, considered a religious observance.

There are many, many other examples which I could give you: Japanese Shinji Sumo, for instance, a form of wrestling performed at temple sites, performed for shrine festivals, as an act of religious observance. The ancient Aztecs and Mayans of Meso America, had a ball game which was always played on temple grounds. The losers, at least the captain of the losers, was sacrificed to the Gods. Characteristic too, equality; modern sports require, at least in theory, that everyone, including the elderly and the handicapped, be admitted to the game on the basis of his or her athletic ability. In addition, the rules have to be the same for all the contestants.

Pre-modern sports frequently excluded people on the basis of social class, or religion, or ethnicity, or gender. The ancient Olympics for instance, were limited to ethnic Greeks, men, who were free, not slaves. The rules for pre-modern sports often varied within the game, with social status. For instance, in the Japanese sports of kudo, or an earlier version of what is today known as kudo, members of the imperial family shot at targets that were larger than the targets used by others, and they were allowed to stand closer. The nobility, well not as close as the imperial family, the targets not as large, but the rules are changed in accordance to social status. That's not the way we in the modern world understand equality.

Weight categories, if you think about them for a moment, of the sort that we have in boxing, wrestling, judo and other combat sports, are an effort to approach equality for the contestants. So you don't have a 300 pound wrestler wrestling against a 150 pound wrestler. There are vast ranges of weight in the Japanese sport itself, but in most ways that's not a typically modern sport.

Third characteristic: specialisation. Many modern team sports, like rugby, soccer, Australian Rules football, American football, evolved from earlier, less specialised sports, baseball and cricket are similar, and having evolved from, well actually from English children's games into highly differentiated modern sports. Baseball and cricket are especially interesting because there are specialised roles and playing positions, something more salient in baseball perhaps than in cricket; in American football even more specialised in terms of playing positions. As you may know there are 11 defensive positions, 11 offensive positions plus special teams with other specialised positions, all of this is amazingly different from the folk football from which all of these football codes evolved.

Maybe a little football was played by one village against another, usually at Easter or Christmas, because of some religious associations. But in this game of folk football, you had young and old, male and female, clerics and lay people, town cats and dogs it seems, everyone involved in this mass of undifferentiated playing positions; people struggling to get the ball from one village church to another over fields, across streams, over fences, it was about as different from modern specialised team competition as one could imagine.

There's another sense in which modern sports are specialised. At the elite level, individual athletes rely on ancillary teams of supportive specialists. My favourite example is the Olympic swimmer Inge De Bruyn, who arrived in Sydney for her competition with two coaches, two masseuses, two physiologists, a nutritionist, a sports psychologist, and a personal trainer.

Mick O'Regan: Thank heavens she won!

Professor Allen Guttmann, from Amherst College in Massachusetts, putting into perspective the needs of the modern sports person.

One of the other major changes to emerge in modern sport, especially at the elite level, is the enormous administrative and bureaucratic dimensions they now boast.

Events like the Olympic Games of the Football World Cup are run by executives who control billions of dollars and exercise extraordinary social and even political power.

Professor Guttmann continued his lecture by turning his attention to this aspect of modern sport.

Allen Guttmann: Another aspect of modern sports that differentiates them from pre-modern sports: bureaucratisation. There are local, regional, national, and international bureaucracies now that administer sports at every level of competition from children's games, Little League baseballers is one of the best examples, from children's games to the most elite of professional teams. You can't imagine a modern sport that is not controlled by some sort of bureaucratic administration. The most obvious example is of course the International Olympic Committee, but FIFA is a good second.

Lacking this kind of administrative structure, pre-modern sports usually took place under the aegis of local, political or religious authorities. Rationalisation is another of these differentiating characteristics. Modern sports are a beautiful example of what Max Weber meant by 'instrumental rationality'. Sports contests take place in built-to-purpose facilities, where scientifically-trained athletes compete with standardised equipment on the basis of constantly-revised rules and regulations that are looked upon as a means to an end. Rationalisation also leads to abstraction.

One of my favourite examples of this is the equestrian evolution from medieval and renaissance vaultige [vaulting], to modern gymnastics. The vault in modern gymnastics takes place on an abstraction of a horse. One way to put it in a sentence is to say this: that the equestrian vaulters whinnying, restlessly moving mount, becomes the modern gymnast's immobile, standardised horse. I think it's amusing that this evolution went through stages. In the early 19th century, the horse was made of wood; it had its four legs like the modern gymnast's horse, but it also had a neck and a head and a tail. And bit by bit, abstraction proceeded and now we have this built-to-order, standardised gymnast's mount.

Another example that has fascinated me is the way that hurdling has become abstract, the way the equipment has become abstract. Hurdling began when children jumped over hedges, but of course the hurdles in a modern track event are standardised, lightly-constructed, portable rectangles that don't look anything like a leafy hedge.

Still another example, which has occupied me for quite a while: the archery target. Archery targets were originally mimetic, they looked like humans, or animals. Bit by bit they became rationalised and more and more abstract, until we now have the concentric circles with rings, each of which has its own number of points to add to the archer's score. Something which fascinated me for quite a while was the fact that the Japanese developed this kind of perfectly abstract target in the 13th century, and it wasn't until the 18th century that this target was developed in England. In other words, the Japanese had this notion of abstract target 500 years before the English, although the English are usually credited with the invention of modern sports.

Sixth characteristic: in modern sports, as in our daily lives, we live in a world of numbers. Rather than saying that man in his perfect form is the measure of all things, we make man and woman the subject of endless measurements. The ancient Greeks measured neither the times that runners ran, nor the distances that throwers threw. You might say they had no way to measure the times, they didn't have watches, they didn't have clocks, they didn't have any kind of chronometer to do the kind of measurements that we do today. I might turn that around and say they didn't have the instruments because they weren't interested in the times. They were perfectly capable, technologically, of measuring distances.

They didn't have clocks, but they did have tapes, they did have sticks, they did have ropes, they did have ways to measure distance. But they didn't. They didn't measure the distances. They didn't see the point in it. They were unconcerned with the numbers that are so important in modern sports. As you know, we measure constantly, we measure everything. In 1972 the Germans when they hosted the Olympics in Munich, carried this mania for quantification to absolutely absurd limits. They timed the swimming races to the thousandth of a second.

Stopwatches were invented around 1730 in order to time races, to time horse races, but stopwatches then measured to the second, later to the fifth of a second, later to the tenth, hundredth; Munich, they measured electronically to the thousandth of a second, and it was absurd because in at least one race, the silver medallist was faster than the gold medallist. How come? It's simple, if you do the numbers. The tolerance for the Olympic swimming pool was to a half a centimetre. Well that's too gross a distance if you're going to measure to the thousandth of a second. So you got this paradoxical result where in at least one race, the gold medal went to the slower swimmer. When this became known the Olympic authorities decided that a hundredth of a second was OK. But still, a hundredth of a second is a fairly fine measurement.

The seventh and last characteristic that differentiates modern sports from pre-modern sports, is the obsession with records. The word 'record' in this sense, of an unsurpassed quantified achievement, came into English in the 1880s. The first dictionaries to give this meaning of 'record' are from the 1880s. It's a very, very recent concept. And if you think about it, it's impossible to imagine sports records without quantification because the sports record is, by definition, an unsurpassed but potentially surpassable, quantified achievement.

These seven characteristics that distinguish modern sports from the sports of pre-modern times, are not simply a random collection of arbitrary attributes, they fit together like the pieces of a puzzle. The mania for records is based on this obsession with numbers. It's based upon quantification. Quantification grows out of rationalisation, it's a form of rationalisation. These characteristics fit together. For each of these generalisations about the stark contrast between the present and the past, there are exceptions.

For example, the achievements of ancient Roman charioteers were quantified. The Romans did list the number of victories won by various charioteers, the number of times they came in second, the number of times they came in first after trailing for part of the chariot race. But they didn't carry things as far as we do. Nobody in ancient Rome came up with the idea of winning percentages. It amuses me to think of how difficult that might have been, to get the winning percentage by dividing MDVII by CCCXIII. It apparently didn't occur to them, and I think I can see why.

Mick O'Regan: Now there's a thought to conjure with: the likes of Bruce McAveney and Peter Wilkins trying to broadcast race results in Roman numerals.

The final topic to which Professor Allen Guttmann turned his attention, concerns the economic analyses that now engulf contemporary sport.

And well they should; as we know, sport is big business, competing in the crowded entertainment market for the billions of dollars to be earned from broadcast rights and merchandising, to say nothing of the punters pushing through the turnstiles every weekend.

Allen Guttmann: Economic historians, economists generally, have had a field day with modern sports, a theoretical field day. Economists love to describe the oddity of a sports league as a kind of cartel in which each club or firm or franchise, must co-operate as well as compete. In the world of business, firms compete and drive each other out of business; that's impossible, or at least that's dysfunctional in a sports league. We don't want a baseball league in which the New York Yankees drive the Boston Red Sox out of existence. As someone who lives in Massachusetts, I guess I can contemplate the reverse where the Boston Red Sox finally do in those diabolical New York Yankees!

But that's contrary to the theory of a sports league. Sports competition has to attract its consumers, and one way to attract the consumers is to have close games, which are generally felt to be more exciting than games in which one team runs up the score. And so there is the need to maintain a certain competitive balance, which of course makes no sense at all in the world of business. We don't talk about General Motors and Toyota and the search for a competitive balance to keep the consumers interested. Sports leagues are odd forms of business competition.

The ways in which the leagues try to keep a competitive balance are fascinating and economists have certainly done a lot to explore them. In the United States we have, as you probably know, draft picks, so that the weakest team in a league will have the first choice for incoming players. It's become extraordinarily complicated and I think almost exuberantly irrational, if I can quote from the previous head of our Federal Reserve Board. My best example of this irrationality is the recent acquisition of a Japanese player by the Boston Red Socks who bid $50-million for the right to offer this player a contract. That is, to enter negotiations, Boston played $50 million. The negotiations were successful and the player was hired for $50 million. Very odd.

In European sports, rather than this draft pick solution to competitive equality, which is actually quite inefficient, they have relegation and promotion, so that the weaker teams will drop out of that level of competition and the stronger teams will be promoted into the next higher class.

Economists also ask a number of specific questions about sports. One that has exercised quite a number of economists is the question, Is it economically rational for a city to construct a $100 million venue with taxpayer dollars? Something which is very, very common in the United States. Are the jobs gained by the multiplier effect what the boosters predicted? They aren't. Does this make any kind of economic sense? Well most economists say No, it doesn't. What about the opportunity costs of investment in sports, rather than investment in other forms of entertainment, theme parks, for instance, or investment in education? There seems to be a consensus among economists, except those hired by the city, there seems to be a consensus that the economic costs greatly outweigh the economic benefits of a big league franchise. But this hasn't stopped cities from competing with each other to lure teams by offering to build $100 million, $200 million stadia.

Another economic problem studied by economists, is the relative importance of the sale of TV broadcast rights, versus sponsorship sales. The International Olympic Committee became heavily dependent on money from the sale of broadcast rights to the degree that the leaders of the International Olympic Committee actively sought some other source of funds, other income stream, and the answer for them, was provided by the late Horst Dassler, of Adidas, who formed a company to recruit sponsors, like Coca Cola, and Visa, and General Motors, sponsors that were willing to pay $10 million, $20 million, $30 million for the right to claim that their product was an Olympic product. And the International Olympic Committee now has substantial funds from this source as well as from the sale of TV rights. Economists have done a lot to analyse these two sources of income and how they relate for the Olympic Committee, for FIFA, for other international sports federations.

Another question raised by economists: Are the star athletes worth what they are paid for? What they paid in terms of performance? This is a deal of inquiry which was very active in the 1970s in the United States, because it turned out that black athletes, especially in baseball, where we have the ultimate in quantification, black athletes earned more on average than white athletes, and yet economists like Roger Noll, and Gerald Scully, argued that black athletes were exploited because they were paid less in terms of performance.

Regression formulae were constructed by Noll and others that came to the conclusion that blacks earned as much as whites per unit of performance after they had been in the league for 20 years. It took 20 years for the lines to cross. The joke is that very few baseball players last 20 years. So that the conclusion was that black athletes were underpaid and exploited. Subsequent studies by other economists have led to the conclusion that today, it's no longer true. That form of racism, that form of exploitation, has now been eliminated. There are other forms, but that form is gone.

When I began to work in the field of sports studies, the debate was between theoretically, between Marxists and neo-Marxists, neo-Marxists who argued that modern sports were in and of themselves, exploitive and undemocratic and ought to be eliminated; we should return to the world of simple play, as one German neo-Marxist put it: 'Sports are the capitalistically distorted form of play'. The debate between the Marxists and the neo-Marxists, died down, and instead today we have interesting debates between Eric Dunning and the so-called Leicester School of Figurational Sociologists, and their critics. The Figurationists are inspired by, one might almost say, disciples of Norbert Elias. Other have criticised Elias and his theory of the civilising process and the debate's gone on for at least 20 years now. Eric Dunning is one of my favourite people in sports studies, refuses to let any criticism go unanswered, which makes for interesting reading.

Mick O'Regan: US sports historian Professor Allen Guttmann, from Amherst College in Boston, speaking at the Conference of the Australian Sports History Association in Canberra.

And that's it for this week's program.

Thanks to Stuart Hall for technical production at the conference.

Thanks also to the Sports Factor production team of Andrew Davies, Jim Ussher and Costa Zouliou.

I'll look forward to your company again next week on the Sports Factor here on ABC Radio National summer.

Guests

Allen Guttmann
Professor of English at Amherst College in Boston.

Presenter

Mick O'Regan

Producer

Andrew Davies