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: Big Kind Dutch Museum

Last night I dreamed I was in a big modern museum somewhere in the Netherlands. As I am in many of my dreams, so in this one I was alone, broke and surrounded by strangers. I don't speak Dutch very well at all. In many of these dreams, in addition to my other immediate problems, I don't speak the local language. But of course, Dutch people speak English very well.

This was a very modern museum, and it seemed to be dedicated to the "everything is art" approach. And so for example, there were large groups of children in the museum, and it seemed they were being treated in the anti-disciplinarian "let them find their own way" approach of some modern schools. In a large room, the size of a large gymnasium, a group of children, maybe 10 or 12 years old, were kicking a soccer ball around. I was in a hallway which led into that large room. The ball came down the hallway toward me. I don't know whether the children had seen me standing alone in the hallway and intentionally kicked the ball to me the first time. But after I kicked it back to them the first time, they definitely kicked it back to me on purpose. And so we kicked the ball back and forth for a while, they in the large room and I in the hallway. They seemed to generally approve of my performance. However, I was not certain whether it was obvious that I was American, and whether they were taking into account, when judging the way I ran the ball down and kicked it, that I can from one of the very few places on Earth where most of the people, or at least most of them my age, hardly ever play soccer.

After the children took their ball and moved on, I sat alone on a staircase near the top of a large atrium, and wondered where the word "soccer" came from.

Then suddenly I noticed that I had lost both my shoes and my socks, and it was wintry outside. I had definitely had my shoes and socks just a moment earlier, when I was kicking the soccer ball, and now, suddenly, somehow, they were gone. I felt very embarrassed about this. But at the same time I had a feeling that I was not going to be treated harshly just when I most needed help, because I was in the Netherlands. (I don't know whether this was a realistic estimation of the Netherlands.) In any case, eventually I found a lost and found which had a variety of clothing items in a large cardboard box. A pair of shoes which could have been mine were in the box. I took those shoes and two unmatched socks from the lost and found. The museum guard in charge of the lost of found seemed to notice that I was taking socks which didn't match, and presumably weren't mine, but he seemed less concerned about that than about the fact that a person was here who needed socks. It was twilight, getting dark, and I assumed that the museum was about to close. But then two possibilities occurred to me: one, that maybe the museum didn't close; and two, that even if it was closing, they'd let me stay there. Just because it was clear I needed somewhere to stay.

I didn't talk to anyone all throughout the dream, and yet somehow I was fairly certain about what they were thinking, and what they thought of me. And it seemed that, by and large, they didn't want to go out of their way to make my troubles worse.