Sports spectatorship has been a source of puzzlement
and scorn for centuries. As early as the second century
C.E., Lucian of Samosata constructed an imaginary dialogue between Solon and Anacharsis, a visitor to
Athens whom Solon was conducting around the
Lyceum, the famous gymnasium. Parts of the dialogue
run as follows:
Why do your young men behave like this, Solon?
Some of them grappling and tripping each other,
some throttling, struggling, inter-twining in the
mud like so many pigs wallowing. . . . I don’t know
what comes over them. . . . I want to know what is
the good of it all. To me it looks more like madness
than anything else.
Anacharsis was probably referring here to the
pankration, described by Finley and Pleket as “ a combination of wrestling and judo with a bit of boxing
thrown in.” Solon justified it by reference to the popularity of the Games and the honor and glory brought by
victory. Anarcharsis became even more bewildered:
Why, Solon, that’s where the humiliation comes in.
They are treated like this not in something like privacy but with all these spectators to watch the affronts they endure, who, I am to believe, count
them happy when they see them dripping with
blood or being throttled. . . . However, though I
can’t help pitying the competitors, I’m still more
astonished at the spectators. You tell me the chief
people from all over Greece attend. How can they
leave their serious concerns and waste time on
such things? How they can like it passes my comprehension—to look on people being struck and
knocked about, dashed to the ground and
pounded by one another (quoted in Finley and
Pleket 1976, 128–129).
His questions remain relevant.Why do some people
apparently derive enjoyment from watching two men
pummeling each other in a boxing ring? What sorts of
satisfactions are obtained by the mainly male crowds
who flock to see 22 people kicking a soccer ball about?
Why should it be of interest to watch, either directly or
on television, to see who can run fastest, jump highest
or longest, or propel a hammer or javelin the farthest
distance?
History
Many people view the “sports” of ancient Greece as a
pinnacle of civilized sporting achievement. By contrast,
the “sports” of ancient Rome are commonly viewed as
a regression into barbarism, and certainly they were
undoubtedly cruel. The brutality of the gladiatorial
combats, the mock battles and the massacres, and the
blood lust of the crowds who flocked to see them are
well known.
Ancient Greek sport, however, would equally repel
modern people, the surviving evidence suggests. The
hellanodikai, the managers of the Olympics, employed
two classes of assistants: the mastigophoroi or whip
bearers, and the rabdouchoi or truncheon bearers. Their
task was to keep both competitors and spectators under
control, which suggests that the crowds were unruly.
Equally questionable is the assumption, perhaps especially common among adherents to the present-day
ideology of “Olympism,” of a direct line of descent between ancient and modern sports. The Dutch historian/philosopher, Huizinga, has shown that England in
the 18th and 19th centuries, not Greece, formed “the
cradle and focus of modern sporting life. In fact, many
modern sports are descended from the folk games of
medieval England. In England, as in the rest of medieval Europe, there were four main equivalents of
modern sports: tournaments, hunts, archery contests,
and folk games.
From the standpoint of spectator behavior, tournaments and folk games are the most interesting. Records
of tournaments date from the 12th century and suggest
a very violent type of “sport.”“The typical tournament
was a mêlée composed of parties of knights fighting simultaneously, capturing each other, seeking glory and
ransoms. Significantly, between the 12th and 16th centuries, the tournaments were transformed increasingly
into pageants involving “mock” rather than “real” violence. They became centrally concerned with spectacle
and display, and as this process unfolded, the role of
spectators, especially upper-class females, grew in importance. As a leading authority has expressed it: “The presence of upper-class women at tournaments plainly
signals transformation in function. The perfection of
military prowess became ancillary and the tournament
became a theatrical production in which fitness to rule
was associated with fineness of sensibility” (Guttmann
1986, 41).
Nevertheless, spectatorship continued to be a hazardous affair; stands reportedly collapsed in London in
1331 and 1581, resulting in numerous injuries and, on
the latter occasion, loss of life—medieval precursors of
events such as the Hillsborough tragedy in 1989, when
95 fans at a soccer match in Sheffield, England, were
crushed to death.
Attendance at both tournaments and folk games
was minuscule compared with the 200,000 who, we are
told, regularly attended chariot races in the ancient
world, and clearly was due to the smaller size of urban
settlements in medieval Europe. The evidence also suggests a complete lack of the strict separation between
players and spectators that we are accustomed to today.
This was possible because these folk games were
played across country and through the streets of towns
rather than in a stadium on a specifically demarcated
playing field or “pitch.”
Folk games such as “knappan”—other local names
included “hurling,”“camp ball,”“trap ball,”“tip cat,” and
“dog and cat,” and somewhat more generally various
spellings of “football”—were the ancestors of such
modern games as soccer, rugby, American football,
hockey, baseball, and cricket.
The evidence suggests that they began to take on
their modern forms in two main overlapping phases,
one that began in the 18th century in which members
of the landed aristocracy and gentry were predominant
and another that began in the 19th century when the
ascendant urban middle classes joined the landed
classes. The first is principally interesting because the
main actors were members of the aristocracy and gentry, and they seem to have had few objections to performing in front of large crowds or playing together
with lower-status men—often their servants or retainers—who were paid for playing. The 18th century saw
the emergence of more regularized and civilized and,
in that sense, more “modern” forms of boxing, foxhunting, horse racing, and cricket.
The 19th century brought more regularized forms
of track-and-field athletics and water sports and, above
all, the development of more civilized ball games such
as soccer, rugby, hockey, and tennis. The status of the
middle-class groups who became increasingly dominant in sport and British society as the 19th century
progressed was less secure, one consequence of which
was the development of a socially exclusive amateur
ideology in which sports should be for players only.
Spectators came to be viewed as anathema.
These elite public-school amateurs evidently identified their own ethos with that of the English nation as
a whole. According to them, sports participation is
physically and morally beneficial—in building “character” and fostering “team spirit,” for example—but
spectatorship has no such desirable effects and can
even be morally harmful. However, these elite amateurs’ dislike of spectator sports was also due to the increase in spectatorship, mainly among the working
classes, and involved the congregation of large crowds
who behaved in an openly excited manner. This not
only ran counter to their sports ethos, with its stress on
the controlled expression of emotion, but was also perceived as a threat to public order.
In Britain, a long and unsuccessful rearguard action
was fought by the devotees of amateurism against professional, spectator-oriented forms of sport. In the
modern world, top-level sport has become increasingly
commercialized, professional, and oriented toward the
production of crowd-pleasing spectacles. It has become, that is, fundamentally capitalist in structure and
orientation. To understand how that has come about,
one must understand what it is that people get out of
watching sport.
Fans
One of the main reasons that people watch sport is
probably in search of excitement. Sports spectatorship
appears to be about the playful and pleasurable arousal
of emotion. Blended with emotion are the aesthetic
pleasures derived from witnessing the skillful and
graceful execution of a sports maneuver, and the satisfaction of discussing sports strategies.
Sports are also a form of nonscripted, largely nonverbal theater, and at the top level sports such as soccer,
rugby, and American football can have a balletlike
quality. Enhancing emotional arousal is spectacular
presentation and the emotional “contagion” that derives from being part of a large, expectant crowd. However, to experience excitement at a sports event one has
to care.
The people most committed to sport are commonly
called “fans,” an abbreviation of the term “fanatic.” For
the most committed fans, and perhaps for others besides, sport functions as a kind of surrogate religion;
note the reverential attitudes of many fans toward their
teams and their idolization of particular players. It may even be that sport has grown in social significance because it now performs some of the functions assigned
to religion in earlier societies. That is, it may in part be
catering to a type of need not being met elsewhere in
our increasingly secular and scientific societies.
—ERIC DUNNING