Amateur and Professional Sports

Chess has existed for well over 1000 years. Tennis has been around for at least 600 years, golf for at least 500. In western Europe, all three of these sports were originally exclusive pastimes of the aristocracy. Playing golf has continued to be primarily the preserve of what Veblen called the leisure class, a status symbol affordable only by a small portion of the population. Tennis, by comparison, has become somewhat less exclusive, and chess is now a mass phenomenon.

 

All three of these sports, as well as other Medieval aristocratic pastimes such as tournaments (jousting) and horse racing, are individual sports. The most popular team sports of the present day did not become popular until the 19th century: baseball, rugby, what Americans call football, what the rest of the world calls football and Americans call soccer, basketball, handball and so forth.

These team sports grew simultaneously in two categories: amateur sports for the upper class, as sports had been, and, something new, professional sports which were much more open to the entire society, and which, indeed, were often looked down upon by the aristocrats and the rich middle class wishing to join the upper classes. And large-scale amateur sports persist to this day in the US in the form of school sports, including college sports.

And perhaps it is better to call them "amateur" sports, in quotation marks, because, right from the start, university football and baseball and basketball teams cheated, and included players who were not really university students. 

Back in the mid-19th century in the US, attendance at universities was still mostly confined to relatively wealthy white men. It was a status symbol of the upper classes, as sports traditionally had been. However, as team sports grew explosively in popularity, and they began to generate huge amounts of revenue from ticket sales, and as college sports began to gain fans who had never been to college, the code of exclusivity was regularly broken, and the pool of players expanded far beyond the upper classes, in order to find the very best players. 

And from the mid-19th century until today, most people have known that the claim that most of a college's athletes are actually students, is untrue. 

In the rest of the world, many sports -- above all soccer, by far the most popular sport in the world -- developed in an entirely different way, with none of this pretense of amateurism. The revenues are openly shared with the athletes, not just in the "major leagues" as is the case in the US, but in all leagues. 

Baseball still has its minor leagues, although these have been mostly replaced by college baseball. Each major league team owns or is closely and exclusively associated with teams in several minor leagues, which form a pool of young talent for the major leagues to pick from. 

Most of the soccer teams outside of the US are independent entities. Typically, a country will have many soccer leagues, and a team can move up to a higher, more prosperous league by leading the league below it, while the team which did worst in the higher league moves to the lower league.

It's a much more sensible way of doing things. The American system is much more like a battle royal, with millions of children competing for a few thousand positions in which their financial compensation may begin to reflect the revenue they generate for others. There are only a very few, very impoverished and unsuccessful independent minor leagues in American football and basketball. Quite a few American athletes have figured out that they will be better treated in other countries, where basketball and baseball leagues and leagues in still other sports are modeled upon the soccer model.

And so, ironically, in the US, which supposedly was founded upon a rejection of things like aristocracy -- although that's a pretense about as transparent as that in which college athletes are supposed to be students -- amateur sports has become a very cruel exploitation of young poor people. 

Perhaps even more ironically, one of the few other parts of the world who indulged in a lie about amateur sports was -- the former Soviet bloc. Were they doing this in order to compete with their great rival and enemy, the US? I don't know.

Dream Log: Stuck in the Mall, and Year-Round Major League Baseball

I had a 2-part dream: in the first part I was in a mall and couldn't find an exit except for one which led out into pitch-black unlit night; and in the second part I was on a major league baseball roster, but I wasn't playing baseball, and the major-league baseball season was all year long.

I've frequently had dreams like the first part, where I'm stuck inside a mall or some other large building and can't find my way out.

Last night, as usual in these dreams, I kept going around and around the whole huge building, and somehow kept coming around to the same exit, which in some of these dreams just leads to more buildings, and in this dream, where the exit was in Sears, led outside, but it was too dark outside to see, and I wasn't going to go stumbling around in the dark, hoping to eventually come across some sort of light. So I went off looking for another exit.

I had a sweater on over my shirt, and I was too warm, so I took off the sweater and folded it and put it on a stack of sweaters in a store. And then I kept on marching around and around the huge mall, feeling as if I would never find my way out. In last night's dream, a big crowd of other people was having exactly the same problem. We were getting more and more upset, because no-one who worked at the mall would help us.

But apparently I eventually made it outside, because suddenly my brother and I were outside, walking on a sidewalk on a busy city street, coming over the top of a hill. Below us a bridge crossed the road. I told my brother that we could go to the left, crossing the bridge, and head to an area with lots of art galleries, or --

and before I could say anything else my brother was already turning to the right, heading to the stadium where the San Francisco Giants played major league baseball.

And before I knew it, my brother and I had both been hired and were on the Giants' roster.

In the dream, as in real life, it had been guite a few years since I had payed close attention to major league baseball. I didn't know whether or not the Giants were having a good season. I got ahold of a newspaper and looked at the sports section, and it turned out that the Giants had played 6 games the day before, and had won 5 of them, and that this had been the final day of the season, and the Giants had managed to pull themselves up out of last place. Then I saw that it was February. I had been used to baseball season starting in April and ending in October, but now, it seemed, the baseball season ended in February, and the next one started later on in February. There were about as many games per season as before, though, so the players got about as much time off per year as before, they just didn't get it all at once.

Then came some changes which I didn't understand at all: now, not all of the wins and losses were decided by actually playing baseball. Some of the players on the roster, although they wore the same baseball uniforms as the regular players, did not play baseball, but instead performed some sort of work at computer terminals, and depending on how well or poorly they did, the team would get more wins or losses. We computer "players" could add as many as 30 or more wins or losses to the team's total in a single day. My brother and I had been hired to be two of these computer "players."

However, I had absolutely no idea how this job worked, and no-one would tell me anything about it. I couldn't find my brother to ask him about it, the actual baseball players acted as if they had nothing but disdain for me and my job (which I could actually understand), and the other computer "players" whom I could find seemed to have their own nerdy club of which I was not a member (and which didn't look like a club I'd want to join either).

And then I woke up.

1841. And Latin. And Ohio.

The Ohio State University was not founded until 1870, and was originally conceived as an "A&M" school, concentrating on agricultural and mechanical studies. I have not been able to determine when courses in Classics were first offered at the university, nor when a Department of Classics was established. Ohio State's law school was founded in 1891, so by that time, at the latest, Ohio State legal students surely must either have been offered some instruction in Latin, or expected to have gained some proficiency in the language elsewhere, before receiving their law degrees. The university had a baseball team by 1881.

I have learned not to trust my memory: as time goes by, things I've seen grow larger or smaller or more impressive or less impressive, in my memory, than they really were when I saw them. Countless examples have taught me how my memory distorts things. 25 years ago my interest in and knowledge of Latin was much less than it is now. So the fact that around 1990 I was wandering through the stacks of the Main Ohio State library and came across what seemed to me to be an absolutely huge collection of volumes of ancient Greek and Latin, does not mean that the same collection would look huge to me today, because along with the passage of 25 years comes the fact that in 1990 I was much less able to make a coherent assessment of a collection of Classical texts: I had much less knowledge to apply to what I saw. However, there is no doubt whatsoever that the layer of dust I saw resting upon row after row of Loeb's Classical Library and the Oxford Classical Texts, was the thickest layer of dust I have ever seen, anywhere.

There simply could not have been a more eloquent single image of an academic discipline which was much less studied at a particular university than it had once been.

All the same, one should keep in mind that although by 1990 I had learned to spot a row of green or red Loeb's or black (under the dust covers) Oxford Classics at a glance, I was not yet familiar with the orange Greek and light-blue Latin volumes from Teubner. So that it is just possible that next to those rows of Loeb's and Oxford Classics which looked so mighty to me at the time, covered with that immense amount of dust which made me so very sad -- Ah say Ah say it is just possible that right next to those dust-covered volumes were immense amounts of Teubner volumes rubbed clean of dust from constatnt and eager use.

Just possible, but, it seems to me, not bloody likely. For one thing, although I cannot be at all certain, I believe that the volumes I saw were shelved by author, rather than Loeb being segregated from Oxford and both of them from whatever other publisher.

Another possibility occurs to me: that huge layer of dust may not have meant that a once-popular field of study had fallen from favor. It may have meant that those Loeb and Oxford (and other?) volumes had never been in great demand by the student body of Ohio State. Perhaps the bulk of those volumes had been the gift of some philanthropist who was smitten with the Classics and had no idea that he or she was about to cast pearls before swine.

Both Ohio University and Miami University, Ohio, are considerably older than Ohio State.

When Miami University opened in 1824, its curriculum consisted of Greek, Latin, algebra, geography, and Roman history; the only degree offered was a Bachelor of Arts.

Now THAT'S more LIKE it!

That, unfortunately, is also everything which I have been able to learn regarding the use and cultivation of the Latin language up until 1841, in the territory which in 1803 became Ohio, the 17th United State.

1841. And Latin. And Constantin von Tischendorf

Unlike railroads, the Khyber Pass, the Ottoman Empire and baseball, I've had no difficulty whatsoever in linking Constantin von Tischendorf to the Latin language in 1841. It was as easy as could be, of course.

To be precise, in 1841 he was still just Constantin -- or Konstantin, or Constantinus -- Tischendorf. The "von," or "of," or "de," was awarded to him in 1869 by the Russian Tsar. I don't know how the "of" of an aristocratic title is written in Russian. But most Russian aristocrats, and many German ones too, were perfectly comfortable with the French "de," which makes me a little less self-conscious about my ignorance of the Russian term. Today he's usually Constantin to those reading or writing in French, Konstantin in German and Constantinus in Latin; in his own time he was perfectly comfortable with all 3 spellings, one of many examples of why I oppose those who insist that there is such a thing as "correct" spelling.

But you're saying, "Yeah, yeah, Steve, whatevs, but who was this Tischendorf, and why was it 'of course' easy to link him to Latin?" And because you ask that, I can see that you're no New Testament scholar. He's the most prominent figure in the history of the field. He made the single most spectacular discovery, of all time so far, of 1 Biblical manuscript, the Codex Sinaiticus, which he found in several pieces and put back together during 3 visits to St Catherine's Monastery under Mt Sinai in 1844, 1853 and 1859.

(I think that Grenfell and Hunt's discovery of the manuscripts at Oxyrhynchus is more spectacular, but it's a discovery of many manuscripts, not just 1, and of many kinds, not just Biblical.)

Besides this world-famous discovery he also discovered several other manuscripts less well-known to the general public, but nearly comparable to Sinaiticus in the eyes of Biblical scholars.

He was a thoroughly professional academic Biblical scholar, fluent in Greek and Hebrew. And it just so happens that in Western civilization, almost all scholars who are fluent in Greek are fluent in Latin as well. It's a matter of course that ancient Greek texts are published in the West with prefaces and footnotes in Latin. And generally expected that those prefaces and notes will be more easily-understood by most readers than those Greek texts. In Tischendorf's case, there's no need to wonder whether he might have been a rare exception to the rule of mastery of Latin, because, like a typical mid-19th-century scholar in many a field, he wrote and published a great deal in Latin, perhaps more, if you count it all up page-by-page, than in his native German. Tischendorf published quite a lot before he turned 26 in 1841. Here's his 1837 dissertation, Doctrina Pauli apostoli de vi mortis Christi satisfactoria.

(It's ironic that among the ancient people who wrote and spoke Greek, knowledge of Latin was NOT assumed. The Latin-speaking Romans had a great admiration for Greek literature. Young Roman gentlemen were often sent to Athens to complete their educations. But the Greeks tended to underestimate the literary achievements made in Latin, and often they looked down their noses at Latin and refused to learn any of it at all, even after the Romans conquered the Greek-speaking regions, giving great practical benefit to a knowledge of Latin.)

All of the territory Tischendorf covered in Egypt, where he made all of his great manuscript discoveries, was a part of the Ottoman Empire at the time. It seems quite possible that he may have ridden the Cairo-to-Alexandria railway line, which opened in 1856. Given his quite busy professional life after the first discovery of parts of the Codex Sinaiticus in 1844, it seems that he only would have avoided riding European trains at some time during his life (1815-1874) if he had deliberately gone quite far out of his way to do so. It seems a very safe assumption that Tischendorf rode the rails at some point. Perhaps if I could find his diaries, it could go from an assumption to a certainty.

It seems unlikely, however, even though he traveled a bit around Germany and Switzerland before 1841, that he rode a train as early as 1841, simply because there weren't very many railways in that region yet.

As far as Tischendorf ever having been in the Khyber Pass -- I do not yet know enough to rule it out, but I believe that his travels beyond Europe were mostly or entirely confined to Egypt.

I have not yet found any evidence that Tischendorf ever heard of baseball, nor that during his lifetime any baseball players ever heard of him. But you never know. (I'm picturing some various tenuous possibility such as Mark Twain meeting Tischendorf during his travels in Germany and mentioning baseball. That's a pretty tenuous possibility, I think.)

1841. And Latin. And Baseball

Baseball was around by 1841, and, as many of you undoubtedly already know, Abner Doubleday didn't invent it. You may not be aware, however, that Doubleday never claimed to have invented it. I was not aware that he had never made any such claim, and I was getting set to denounce him as a lying self-promoter, but when doing research for this post I discovered that Abner Doubleday, who lived from 1819 to 1893 and was a US Army man from the time he entered West Point in 1838 until he retired with the rank of lieutenant colonel in 1873, never mentioned baseball once in his letters, diaries or his two books, Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie, published in 1876, and Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, published in 1882. The only time Doubleday can be shown to have mentioned baseball at all was in 1871 when he filed a request for baseball equipment for the men under his command.

It seems that no claim that Doubleday invented baseball can be found until the 20th century, years after his death. There are some signs that Doubleday was a cantankerous braggart at times, but absolutely no proof that he bragged about inventing baseball. Whoever made that up, it seems very unlikely that it was he.

James Naismith (a Canadian btw) invented basketball in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1891, but no one invented baseball. It evolved over the course of centuries. Baseball and softball have many undeniable similarities to rounders. The earliest reliable report of a baseball game being played comes (like Naismith) from Canada in 1838. Overzealous American patriotism and a feeling that baseball was "America's game" probably account for why some felt the need to make up the story of Doubleday inventing the game in Cooperstown, New York, in 1839. I don't think baseball was invented in Canada in 1838, I think it was played in the US and Canada before 1838, and quite possibly in other countries as well.

I know: some of you are saying, "Hey, Steve, this is all really fascinating and so forth, but were there any poems written in Latin about baseball in or before 1841?"

I don't know. I thought for sure I'd be able to find a slew -- a veritable slew -- of translations of "Casey at the Bat" into Latin, but that poem wasn't even written in English until 1888, and to my great surprise, the only translations of it I've been able to find are one into French, "Casey au bâton" by Paul Laurendeau (anOTHer Canadian!) and 2 into Hebrew: "Hator Shel Casey Lachbot" by Menachem Less and "Casey BaMachbayt" by Jason H Elbaum. I have yet to find anything written about baseball in Latin, original or translated from another language, verse or prose. Total failure on that front.

I've also found nothing at all about baseball being played in the Ottoman Empire. Surely that's just personal failure on my part, not a lack of anything to be found.

As far as baseball somewhere near the Khyber Pass: surely it will come as no surprise that an Afghani national baseball team has been formed since the arrival of US military personnel in that country in 2002. In 2013 they lost a game to their neighbor across the Pass, Pakistan, by a score of 34-0, which shouldn't come as a total surprise when you consider that the skills required in baseball and in cricket are similar in many ways, and that Pakistan won the Cricket World Cup in 1992 and was a close runner-up to Australia in 1999, while Afghanistan has had had only 1 appearance each in a World Cup and a World Twenty20. In fact, although cricket has been played in Afghanistan since the 19th century, Afghanistan's national cricket team is only a few years older than its national baseball team.

As far as baseball and railroads are concerned, connections are many and should be fairly obvious. Union Pacific claims that "By 1876, game times were being scheduled to coincide with train schedules," and the claim doesn't seem farfetched. Finding a connection between baseball and railroads as early as 1841 is proving more difficult.

As to whether baseball came to Mexico as early as the Mexican American War of 1846 to 1848, let alone 1841, that is controversial, although a confluence of baseball and railroads in Mexico as early as that war can be ruled out. Plans for Mexican rail lines began in 1837; however, the first line, between Mexico City and Veracruz, did not open until 1873.