Êóðñîâàÿ ðàáîòà: Sport and recreation in the United States
Êóðñîâàÿ ðàáîòà: Sport and recreation in the United States
Contents:
Introduction 3
1.
SPORT AND ITS DEVELOPMENT IN THE USA 4
1.1.
Historical background, names of
national sports, borrowed games 4
1.2.
Problems and prospects of American
sport 6
2.
THE VARIETY OF AMERICAN SPORTS 9
2.1.
Professional sport 9
2.1.1. The
business of sport 9
2.1.2. Major
sports
10
2.1.2.1.
Baseball and business
10
2.1.2.2.
Basketball
12
2.1.2.3.
Football: an American spectacle
13
2.1.2.4.
Bowling
15
2.1.3. Problems
in professional sport 16
2.1.4. Olympic
Games and the names of American heroes 17
2.2.
Leisure sports
17
2.2.1. Badminton
17
2.2.2. Bowling
20
2.3.
Sports for the disabled
21
2.4.
Women in sports
22
2.4.1. Women
and traditional sports and games
23
2.4.2. Women’s
sport in the 19th century
24
2.4.3. Challenging
gendered boundaries
25
2.4.4. The age
of modern sports
26
3.
RECREATION IN THE USA 29
3.1.
Sports at colleges
30
3.1.1. College
and sport
30
3.1.2. Sport
and money
31
3.1.3. Women's
Collegiate Sport
32
3.1.4. Intramural
and club sports 32
3.2.
Animals in sport 32
3.3.
Unusual sports 33
3.4.
Camps 33
CONCLUSION 35
LITERATURE 36
INTRODUCTION
Nowadays a lot of
people are getting more and more ambitious and now the always hurry somewhere,
they are eager to do everything and are afraid of losing any minute that can
bring them happiness, joy, glory or just money. But if they want to get that
all, they’d better have wonderful mood all the time, perfect health, steel
nerves and strong will. At present sport is the very thing that can help any
person either keep fit or reach all his aims.
In my course paper
I’m going to investigate almost all kinds of sport that can be popular famous
in the USA, both professional and amateur ones.
There
probably are countries where the people are as crazy about sports as they are
in America, but I doubt that there is any place where the meaning and design of
the country is so evident in its games. In many odd ways, America is its
sports. The free market is an analog of on-the-field competition, apparently
wild and woolly yet contained by rules, dependent on the individual's
initiative within a corporate (team) structure, at once open and governed.
Sport plays a major role in American society as it
accounts for the most popular form of recreation. Many Americans are involved
in sports - either as a participant or as a spectator. Amateur sports
distinguish between recreational and competitive sports. Favorite recreational
activities include hiking, walking, boating, hunting, and fishing. All of these
are liked for the recreational value as well as for exercise. But there are
also many other sports activities in America which attract millions of
participants for personal enjoyment, the love of competition and for the
benefits of fitness and health. In addition, sport teaches social values like
teamwork, sportsmanship, self-discipline, and persistence that are highly regarded
in U.S. society.
So the main tasks of my course paper are to learn
how sport influences on health and culture of the Americans, to find out all
problems and prosperities of American sport and to figure out how many people
of various classes, ages, nationalities and races, which live in the USA, are
involved in playing games.
The first chapter of this course paper contains the
information that shows us the stages of gradual development of American sport,
beginning from Puritans’ times till our days. Different kinds of problems and
prosperities that very often can appear in sport are also discussed here. In
the second chapter any can find the information about great variety of sports
that are played and watched on TV through the whole USA. Here I also give some
data about participating women and the disabled in contests and competitions.
The third chapter tells us about sport as about the main sourse for recreation.
So the whole course paper is dedicated to the sport
in the USA, its development and influence on American life.
1.
SPORT AND ITS DEVELOPMENT IN THE USA
1.1.
Historical background, names of national sports, borrowed
games
Whatever
else sports may mean or be, their present-day prosperity represents a
repudiation of the hostility toward games and enjoyment codified in the law
books of the first settlers. The colonies' early rulers, north and south, were
dedicated to rooting out play and enforcing the discipline of hard work as a
moral value in itself and as a frontier necessity. The Puritans' war against
sports may be traced to their equation of work with prayer and their belief
that divine election was accompanied by an easy rejection of idleness; as members
of England's rising middle class, the Puritans also had a social bias against
the traditional amusements of the aristocracy. Today's fascination with the
moral significance of winning, with the accompanying neglect of the play
element in sports, may be an atavistic survival of this Puritan
outlook—although the win-at-any-cost ethic is no less in evidence in countries
with no Puritan heritage. Then again, the sheer number of seventeenth century
laws against sports must also mean that games were very popular in colonial
.America.
Throughout
the colonies the old English sports like wrestling and footraces seem to have
been present, although cockfighting and horse racing were not permitted in New
England. Sledding and ice skating were also popular where the climate
permitted; ice skating remained one form of physical exercise allowed women
when the mores of the Victorian era later began to exclude them from sport.
The
nineteenth-century class revolution that changed the rank of gentleman from one
of ascription to achievement had a pernicious effect on participation in
sports. An eighteenth-century gentleman (or lady) could hardly have lost his
status by anything short of a major crime, but the kind of gentility that was
the goal of social climbing in the second quarter of the nineteenth century
was as easily lost as gained, particularly by women. The determination of the
new middle classes to separate themselves from the vulgar meant avoiding
anything that had the appearance of physical work, which was enough to rule out
strenuous play.
It
is not true that there was no American participation in sports during the 1840s
and 1850s; these were the years when a primitive form of baseball was evolving.
However, these decades were more notable for the rise of spectator sports—early
evidence of tastes that would eventually be satisfied by the television sports
broadcasts of today. The most popular spectator sport was horse racing, and
whole sections, sometimes the whole country, followed rivalries between famous
stable owners.
Sailing
regattas were another way social leaders could exhibit themselves before the
masses in a pastime whose expense insured its exclusivity. There were
professional races staged by gamblers for cash purses, but most were sponsored
by elite rowing and sailing clubs. The first America's Cup race in 1851, and
the intense interest it aroused, gave the rich an opportunity to hold
themselves up as defenders of national pride in an arena none but they could
afford to enter.
As
the nineteenth century progressed, sports seemed to evolve along two diverging
paths. On the one hand, sports suitable for general participation tended to be
monopolized by elite groups who excluded the working class and immigrants. On
the other hand, sports with an in-eradicable working class (and hence professional)
character tended to be taken over by commercial interests and run as
money-making enterprises. Track exemplifies the first tendency, baseball the second.
Professional
track and field, or "pedestrianism," was one of the most popular
sports of the nineteenth century, both as recreation and spectacle. Before the
Civil War races tended to be promoted by gamblers and often pitted English
champions against American favorites; the races were commonly held at horse
race tracks or on city streets. In 1844 some thirty thousand spectators watched
the American runner John Gilder-sleeve beat the Englishman John Barlow in a ten
mile run for $1,000 at a Hoboken race track. Forty thousand watched the
rematch, which Barlow won with a time of 54:21.
After
the Civil War track was particularly popular as an opportunity for wagering,
with the competitors often handicapped with weights or staggered starts to
ensure parity. Amusement parks sponsored weekend track meets on an elimination
basis with the winners receiving cash awards or readily pawnable trophies. Marathons
and long distance races were also popular.
Probably
the most important sponsors of track and field sports in the nineteenth century
were the ethnic organizations with their annual "picnics"—mass
athletic meets allowing amateurs and professionals to compete separately and
against each other. The Caledonian Games of New York City were the earliest;
during the 1880s there were also Irish and German picnics. Picnics were also
hosted by military regiments, labor unions, colleges, and wealthy athletic
associations like the New York Athletic Club and the Schuylkill Navy Club of
Philadelphia.
In
the 1870s the "gentlemen" began to complain about having to compete
against lower class professionals at track meets. The solution to this genteel
dilemma was the doctrine of amateurism, which made it possible for the
well-born to win more than an occasional race and, incidentally, made athletics
respectable since social contact with workmen was infra dig. In 1888 today's
ruling amateur sports organization, the Amateur Athletic Union, was formed,
which by strictly enforcing the rules of amateurism effectively banished
working-class participation from track and field. Not until the 1970s would
these rules be relaxed enough to allow athletes without private means of
support to compete.
The
professional champions of the "pedestrian" era set records that still
astound. In 1885 a professional runner set a mile record of 4:12.4, a mark no
amateur could match until 1915. The most amazing professional track record was
set by the outstanding pedestrian Richard Perry Williams, who ran a carefully
authenticated 9 second 100 yard dash on June 2, 1906. It took nearly seventy
years for an amateur to equal that achievement.
As
track evolved into an upper-class preserve, baseball grew from similar
beginnings into the earliest, and still the most complete, form of popular
sports culture [3,p.207-209].
In
1911, the American writer Ambrose Bierce defined Monday as “in Christian
countries, the day after the baseball game”. Times have changed and countries,
too. In the U.S. of today, football is the most popular spectator sport.
Baseball is now in second place among the sports people most like to watch. In
Japan, it is the most popular. Both baseball and football are, of course,
American developments of sports played in England. But baseball does not come
from cricket, as many people think. Baseball comes from baseball. As early as
1700, an English churchman in Kent complained of baseball being played on Sundays.
And illustrations of the time make it clear that this baseball was the baseball
now called “the American game”. Baseball is still very popular in the USA as an
informal, neighborhood sport. More than one American remembers the time when
she or he hit a baseball through a neighbor’s window.
Baseball
and football have the reputation of being “typically American” team sports.
This is ironic because the two most popular participant sports in the world
today are indeed American in origin-basketball and volleyball. The first basketball
game was played in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1891. It was invented at a
YMCA there as a game that would fill the empty period between the football season
(autumn) and the baseball season (spring and summer). Volleyball was also first
played in Massachusetts, and also at a YMCA, this one in Holyoke, in 1895.
During the First and Second World Wars, American soldiers took volleyball with
them overseas and helped to make it popular. Today, of course, both basketball
and volleyball are played everywhere by men and women of all ages. They are especially
popular as school sports [1, p.138-139].
1.2.
Problems and prospects of American sport
The single largest problem in the conduct of
American sports is the obsession with winning that is found at almost all
levels of competition. Already at age twelve or thirteen youngsters are often
exposed to grueling training regiments. Sometimes dirty tactics are even
introduced at this age by coaches who are too eager to win. In some cases
parents who appear to be living out fantasies of success in sports through
their children contribute to the tremendous pressure of sporting competition at
an early age. Baseball for children ages 9-12, called Little League baseball,
and its football counterpart have often been criticized for their premature
stress on winning at all cost. Football, with its violent contact, would appear
to be a particularly dangerous game for youngsters whose bone structure has not
fully developed. Competition at an early age is not bad in itself as long as a
healthy spirit of fun and recreation is maintained.
Another trend in contemporary American sports partly
related to the obsession with winning is over specialization. While this over
specialization helps to produce the remarkable feats of modem gymnasts,
basketball players, and others, it nevertheless discourages some from trying
out a wide variety of sports.
A particularly American phenomenon connected with
sport is what might be called the cult of the coach. All sorts of legends and
romantic tales have grown up around certain well-known coaches, and sometimes
their coaching philosophy has entered folk wisdom. It may be that this cult of
the coach is made possible partly by the fact that Americans are accustomed to
having strong managers in the world of business. In any event, sports in the US
are typically closely controlled and managed by their coaches, perhaps more so
than in other parts of the world. This is reflected in the numerous timeouts
and other stoppages of play characteristic of American football, basketball,
and baseball. The increase in the number of timeouts that has come about in
recent years in professional sport is of course also designed to allow more
time for advertisements. At the amateur level, too many interruptions for
coaching instruction may even have the result of discouraging individual
initiative, something many Americans prize above all.
If American sport has certain problems, it also has
many positive features. Perhaps the greatest achievement of American sport is
that over the years it has attracted more and more people of all types and
backgrounds. Participation by minorities and women is constantly increasing.
There are certain sports, such as football and basketball, where black athletes
now dominate. As in the rest of society, all problems associated with race
relations are far from having been solved. For example, minorities are greatly
under represented in the management of American sport. And, many private
clubs, particularly golf clubs, continue to discriminate against minorities.
Nevertheless, other areas of society would do well to match the example of
sport in making opportunities for minority participation available.
Another positive feature of modern sport and physical
culture in the US is that people are constantly inventing new sports and games
and reshaping old ones to suit their needs and desires. At the same time, as
people become better educated about physical fitness, they are more willing to
try new recreational physical activity later in life. Progress in technology
has also helped the spread of certain sports. Artificial snow-making devices
are used at virtually all ski resorts throughout the country and have made
possible skiing as far south as Georgia. Air conditioning and refrigeration
have made it possible to construct skating rinks in all parts of the country so
that figure skating and hockey are now found in Florida and California, where
there are now both amateur and professional hockey teams.
How will sport in the US develop in the future?
There should be increased opportunity for diverse groups of people to
participate in an ever wider range of sporting activities. Sports such as golf
and tennis, which have not been known for widespread minority participation,
will probably experience a gradual increase in the number of blacks and other
minorities. Sport has traditionally been one of the most visible paths of
advancement for minorities and newly arrived immigrants in the US. Perhaps,
however, in the future expectations about prospects for raising one's standard
of living through spoil will become more realistic as people begin to
understand that professional athletes comprise only a tiny fraction of the
population.
On the other hand, watching professional sports will
become more and more an activity for the social elite as costs and ticket
prices increase. Although professional sport in the US has defied ups and downs
in the economy, eventually it may be forced to take on a more modest profile.
If that ever happens, teams may adopt new structures, such as community rather
than corporate (business) ownership. In the short run, however, it seems that
professional sport will only become more and more expensive.
Eventually the American spirit of innovation may
reach the schools and infuse their physical education programs with the
imagination they are sometimes lacking. The phenomenon of women playing on
otherwise all male teams has existed for some time and could become more common
in future. For the most part, however, women's sport will continue to grow on
its own. Because they are such dynamic social phenomena, sport and physical
culture in the US will not simply continue to reflect trends in the wider
society but will sometimes lead the way on the path toward change [5, p.2-5].
From
this chapter we’ve learned that sports in North America go back to the Native
Americans, who played forms of lacrosse and field hockey. During colonial
times, early Dutch settlers bowled on New York City's Bowling Green, still a
small park in southern Manhattan. However, organized sports competitions and
local participatory sports on a substantial scale go back only to the late 19th
century. Schools and colleges began to encourage athletics as part of a
balanced program emphasizing physical as well as mental vigor, and churches
began to loosen strictures against leisure and physical pleasures. As work
became more mechanized, more clerical, and less physical during the late 19th
century, Americans became concerned with diet and exercise. With sedentary
urban activities replacing rural life, Americans used sports and outdoor
relaxation to balance lives that had become hurried and confined. Biking,
tennis, and golf became popular for those who could afford them, while sandlot
baseball and an early version of basketball became popular city activities. At
the end of the 20th century, Americans were taking part in individual sports of
all kinds—jogging, bicycling, swimming, skiing, rock climbing, playing tennis,
as well as more unusual sports such as bungee jumping, hang gliding, and wind
surfing.
During
the whole history of the USA sport there was developing more and more.It
attracted and even now attracts great numbers of the Americans of different
ages, sexes and nationalities.As we can see, sport helps to prevent American
teenagers from different pernicious habits and actions, to involve them in
social work.Thanks to sport many people don’t suffer from various illneses and
deseases. But althouth all that sounds so pleasant and encouraging, American
sport has its disadvantages. Almoust all Americans believe that the impossible
is possible. So they always try to reach the top by all means and very often it
leads to irretrievable consequences that may change the life not only of one
person but the whole country.
2.
HE VARIETY OF AMERICAN SPORTS
2.1.
Professional sport
2.1.1. The business of Sport
Professional sports in the US comprise one of the
largest business enterprises in the country. Hundreds of millions of dollars
are spent every year on everything from tickets to television contracts and
players' salaries. The most popular team sports are football, basketball, and
baseball. In recent years hockey has been increasing in popularity and some
believe that if the National Hockey League (NHL) can rid itself of unnecessary
fighting it will begin to challenge the other three in terms of spectator
interest. The other great world team sport, soccer, has had a difficult time in
gaining a foothold. After a brief burst of success in the 1970s, professional
soccer in the US has assumed a minor status in relation to the other major
sports.
Golf and tennis are the most popular individual
professional sports. Businesses that aspire to national and international
recognition are willing to spend tens of millions of dollars per year on
sponsoring golf and tennis in order to have their names associated with these
sports. It should be pointed out that only a few players at the top are able to
achieve real wealth and fame and that many of the lesser players struggle hard
to make ends meet.
Boxing is a sport that has become increasingly
controversial over the years as its dangers have become more and more apparent.
It is particularly disturbing to see one of the sport's greatest personalities,
former heavy weight champion Muhammad Ali, struggle with the brain damage he
has suffered from taking too many blows to the head. Nevertheless, the attraction
of the sport appears to be irresistible to some, and efforts to make boxing
safer or even to eliminate it altogether, have proven fruitless.
Although the sports mentioned above receive the most
attention from the news media, other sports such as car racing and horse racing
are tremendously popular in the US. Motor sports are a whole world of their
own. They include racing on oval tracks, both by stock cars, that is, cars
driven on highways, and special Indy cars (named for the famous Indianapolis Speedway),
sports car competitions, and quarter mile sprints called drag races. In
addition, there is all sorts of racing for motor cycles over dirt tracks, paved
tracks, and obstacle courses with jumps. Just as in other sports, fans have
their favorite drivers in motor sports who sometimes take on the status of folk
heroes. The race car driver Richard Petty, who has recently retired is a good
example of this.
Most people are not aware that the sport with the
largest number of spectators in the US is horse racing. This is largely because
it is possible to gamble on horse races and there are so many different racing
fixtures throughout the country. Other sports which are based on betting are
harness racing, greyhound dog racing, and jai alai. Jai alai, pronounced
"hi li," is a fast moving game from the Basque country of Spain that
involves throwing a ball with a special basket called a cesta against a wall.
One particularly American, and also Canadian, form
of sport is the rodeo. Calf roping, bronco riding, and bull riding are just
some of the best known rodeo events. As you might expect, rodeos are most
popular in the western states and the western provinces of Canada. The Calgary
Stampede, held every year in the Canadian city of Calgary, Alberta, is the
world's most famous rodeo.
There are also several sports that are out of the
main stream but nevertheless have numerous followers. These include roller
derby, in which roller skaters try to push each other off of a track, and
professional wrestling, which features pre-rehearsed moves and a lot of
primitive play acting. Many feel that these two are not really legitimate
sports and call them, together with events such as racing cars through the mud,
"junk sports."[2, p.305-307]
2.1.2. Major sports
2.1.2.1.
Baseball
The roots of the national pastime, or
"game" (never the national "sport"), may certainly be
traced to the English children's game of rounders —which was also known as
early as 1744 by the name of "baseball," despite A. G. Spalding's effort
in 1908 to concoct a myth of purely American origins. Under the name of
"town ball" the game was popular throughout the colonies, and
absorbed enough of students' time for it to be banned at Princeton in 1787.
There was a Rochester Baseball Club in 1820s, and the elder Oliver Wendell
Holmes said that he had played the game at Harvard in 1829.
Until the Civil War there were really two distinctly
different variants of the game. Throughout New England there was the
"Boston" game, while the rest of the country played the "New
York" game. The critical difference was that the Boston game permitted a
base runner to be retired by throwing the ball at him, a practice called
"soaking" the runner.
The first baseball clubs of the 1840s and early
1850s were gentlemanly in membership and decorum. Games between
status-conscious clubs like the New York Knickerbockers and Brooklyn Excelsiors
were friendly preludes to formal dinners with musical entertainment furnished
by the host club. These social teams were soon displaced by workingmen's clubs,
with memberships drawn from labor organizations, from city government services
(the police or the sanitation departments), or sponsored by political machines
as part of their election strategy. The most successful and longest-lived teams
tended to be ones with political support. Political parties could provide
government sinecures for the players, allocations for building enclosed
stadiums, and permission to play Sunday ball. The popularity of Sunday ball
(and the ownership of many teams in the American Association bv brewers) made
the game a prime target for militant Protestant reformers. The battle over
Sunday baseball was one of the most lively survivals of the Sabbatarian
movement into the latter part of the century.
The less violent character of the New York game (no
"soaking") made it more appropriate for play in urban centers between
teams that had neighborly reasons for restraining their killer instincts. In
1858 the National Association of Baseball Clubs was formed with a nucleus of
sixteen New York area teams. In 1868 Cincinnati organized the first
semi-professional team; it was there also that the first unashamedly
professional team was born in 1869, today's Cincinnati Reds.
Full-fledged professional teams first appeared in
the Midwest, founded by local boosters eager to publicize their city and to
demonstrate its vitality. The Cincinnati Red Stockings of 1869 were financed by
the sale of stock in the team corporation; likewise the Chicago White Sox in
1870. In 1870 the National Association of Amateur Baseball Players tried to
expel the Cincinnati and Chicago professionals, and soon afterwards, in March
1871, the professional clubs met and established the National Association of Professional
Baseball Players [6, p.2-4].
Organized baseball as we know it today dates from a
secret meeting of the owners of the investor-owned teams in 1876. The National
Association had been torn by discord between corporately owned teams like the
White Sox and the Reds, and poorer teams that were essentially player-run
cooperatives. The owners of the richer teams were determined to rationalize the
business and to combat the public perception of professional ballplayers as
willing accomplices of gamblers in betting coups (known then as "hippodroming").
Led by baseball's first robber baron, William Hulbert of the Chicago White Sox,
the owners decided to declare war on the player-owned cooperative clubs. The
owners specifically restricted membership in their new National League to clubs
that had clarified the role of players as employees. This league, which was the
nucleus of today's major leagues, began with clubs in Philadelphia, Hartford,
Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Louisville, St. Louis, and New York. It had to
struggle against rival leagues for the next thirty-nine years, vanquishing some
(the Players' League and the Federal League) and merging with others (the
American Association in 1891 and the Western, later American, League in 1903).
The first few years of the new league were
precarious ones, with cutthroat competition between the National League and its
rivals. On September 29, 1879, the National League owners met and decided on
the strategy that eventually was their salvation, the reserve clause, a
contract provision that gave a player's club the right to "reserve"
his services for the next season. In effect it transformed a yearly contract
into a lifetime indenture. Until 1883 only the top five players on each team
were protected by the reserve clause, but these were precisely the players
whose salaries were the greatest burden to the owners. As the clubs reserved
more and more players, finally covering the entire roster, the players found
that their salaries were declining and their working conditions worsening, and
so in 1885 John Montgomery Ward, a standout shortstop for the Giants and later
a lawyer, organized the Brotherhood of Professional Baseball Players.
Still not satisfied, the owners drew up a player
classification system in 1888 to stabilize and reduce salaries according to a
standardized evaluation of a player's relative ability (something like today's
free agent compensation pool). Ward was in Egypt on baseball's famous
round-the-world tour when he found out about this. He immediately abandoned the
tour and, together with most of the other National League stars, declared war
on the owners by organizing their own "Players' League." Ward managed
to enlist the support of almost all the star players and most of the sporting
press, and he and the ball players spent the winter of 1889-90 promoting the
new league in union halls, saloons, and wherever fans could be found.
The 1890 season was really a war between the
National League, led by A. G. Spalding, and Ward's Players' League. At the end
of the season the Players' League had surpassed the National League in
attendance, but the total attendance had been spread too thin for anybody to
make much money. The players also made some grievous mistakes. They spurned an
appeal to join the American Federation of Labor and they refused to play Sunday
ball, which was clearly suicidal. Worst of all, they placed too much power in
the hands of their financial backers, relying on the investors to be fair to
their ballplayer partners.
At the end of the season all the Players' League
teams had shown a profit, while most of the National League teams were on the
verge of bankruptcy. It seemed as though the players had won. But when the
National League offered to meet with representatives of the American
Association (a rival league organized on the usual investor-controlled basis)
and a committee representing the Players' League capitalists, the money men met
and sold the players out. They merged the three leagues in a way that left the
investors firmly in control. This merger resulted (after dropping some weaker
teams) in a twelve-team alignment: Baltimore, Washington, Cleveland, and
Louisville (all of which eventually folded); Boston, Brooklyn, Chicago,
Cincinnati, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis. In 1892, with
the National League's monopoly once again secure, the most hated features of
the reserve clause were reinstated and salaries again were slashed. The players
had lost all control over their game, and they would not regain it until the
reserve clause was finally thrown out in 1975. This clause, although grossly
unfair to the players, undoubtedly contributed to the growing popularity of the
game by ensuring the stability of the team rosters and by casting the players
in roles with which blue collar fans could identify.
The 1890s also saw another development that probably
helped ensure the popularity of baseball. That was the enforcement of Jim Crow,
which turned every major league baseball game into a ritual demonstration that
America was a white man's country. During the 1890s blacks had to organize
their own teams, and eventually a two-league system emerged, with a Negro
National League in 1920, and a Negro Eastern League in 1921, both of which
collapsed during the early Depression. A second Negro National League appeared
in the late 1930s, and a Negro American League in 1936. Both leagues died in
1952 when black stars in large numbers began to be signed to major and minor
league contracts after Jackie Robinson's pioneering year with the Brooklyn
Dodgers in 1947.
The National League's 1903 merger with the Western
(American) League created a structure of two eight-team leagues and a World
Series (also dating from 1903). This arrangement remained intact until 1953,
when the Boston Braves moved to Milwaukee.
The years after World War I saw baseball mature into
America's premier sports culture with a full array of mythic underpinnings: an
immaculate conception (the Cooperstown legend of Abner Doubleday's invention of
the game), a myth of the fall (the fixed 1919 World Series), an Odysseus (Òó
Cobb), an Achilles (Babe Ruth), a Zeus (Judge Landis), an aristocracy (the
Yankees), and a rabble (the Dodgers). More than any other American sport,
baseball lends itself to legend. The statistical records give each game a
mythic dimension as the hits, runs, errors, and strikeouts are melded into the
record books. The mythic power of the game, however, also takes its toll, as
even on the lowest level parents and coaches try to ride the miniature exploits
of their midget performers into the realm of sports fantasy [3, p.209-210].
2.1.2.2.
Basketball
The evolution of basketball exhibits a more
complicated mixture of elite uplift and ethnic aspiration. Basketball started
as part of the nineteenth-century crusade to Americanize (or Christianize) the
immigrants; it was quickly taken over by those targets for genteel uplift as a
way ethnics could express their national pride and compete with other
immigrants.
Basketball was invented in 1891 at the YMCA's
leadership training institute in Springfield, Massachusetts. One of the
physical instructors at the institute, James Naismith, developed rules for what
he called "A New Sport": tossing a soccer ball into a backboardless
peach basket. Naismith evidently intended that the ball be moved only by
passing, but players soon discovered other ways to advance the ball without
carrying it. At first they juggled the ball overhead (volleyball style) as they
ran, but when juggling was outlawed the superior technique of dribbling was
developed by players in the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association Leagues.
Other early improvements included the removal of the bottom from the peach
basket, fastening the basket to a backboard, and for a time surrounding the
court with wire fencing to keep the ball in play (hence the term
"cagers" for basketball players).
The "New Sport" became particularly
popular at YMCAs and settlement houses in immigrant neighborhoods in the large
cities. In New York the University Settlement House fielded championship teams,
and by the 1930s there were Jewish Recreational Council Tri-State
Championships, Lithuanian National Championships, Polish Roman Catholic
Championships, a National Federation of Russian Orthodox Clubs, Catholic Youth
Organization leagues, B'nai B'rith leagues, and countless other ethnically
based leagues and teams.
The first professional teams were also ethnic, and
had names like the Detroit Pulaskis, the Brooklyn Visitations (Irish), the
Newark Turnverein, the Original Celtics (largely Jewish and based in New York
City), the Harlem Renaissance, the Hebrew All-Stars, and the Buffalo Germans.
The ethnic professional teams were succeeded by industrial teams sponsored by
factories as part of employee relations programs. This was particularly common
among the rubber companies in the Akron, Ohio, area. Industrial teams were the
nucleus of the National Basketball League (NBL) when it was organized in 1937.
In 1946 the Basketball Association of America (BAA) was organized by the owners
of large arenas in major cities; only arena owners were permitted to enter
teams. The NBL and the BAA competed until 1949, when the National Basketball
Association (NBA) was formed by combining teams from the two leagues) [3,
p.212-213].
The evolution of basketball technique and strategy
occurred as innovative players overcame the resistance of a conservative
coaching establishment. During basketball's first forty years coaches taught
the two-handed set shot that turned basketball into an intricate pattern of
weaves and passes designed to produce two and three man picks (human walls
between the shooter and the defender) to give a player a chance to attempt this
easily blocked shot. In 1937 Hank Luisetti of Stanford University scandalized
the coaching fraternity by breaking all scoring records with a one-handed jump
shot. Orthodox coaches labeled Luisetti a freak, an exception to the rule, but
the more farsighted of them realized that the jump shot was impossible to
defend against and that the old patterned play game was obsolete.
Another example of a plausible theory refuted by
practice was the coaches' belief that big men were too clumsy to play
basketball, despite the obvious advantage of their height. Professional
basketball today displays several marked characteristics; the most obvious is
the appearance of bigger and bigger men at all positions who possess, in
addition to extraordinary size and strength, the quickness and ball handling
agility that once seemed the special province of "smaller" players
(i.e., shorter than six feet six inches) [11, p.97-98].
2.1.2.3.
Football
Football is unarguably today's preeminent spectator
sport; televised professional football is arguably the preeminent spectacle of
any kind in today's American culture. In some parts of the country high school
football is the only religion with no dissenters, and in some areas the state
university football team is the community's common bond and proudest boast.
Football is for most Americans their tribal game,
and it has always appealed to their herd instinct. The game can be traced back
to the annual autumn free-for-all battles between the new freshmen and
sophomores at Harvard in the 1820s. A combination of the free-for-all, soccer,
and rugby survived at Harvard until 1874, when the school played two football
games against McGill University of Canada. In the first game Harvard's own
peculiar rules were used; the second game followed the rules of McGill's fairly
orthodox version of British rugby. The Harvard students decided that the
Canadian game was more enjoyable, so they voted to play according to those
rules thereafter.
It was at Yale that the game of rugby developed into
a game closely resembling today's football. The man behind this evolution was
Walter Camp, who played football at Yale from 1875 until 1882, when he began
training the team, eventually becoming head coach. During the Camp era Yale
established a winning record the likes of which has never been seen again. From
1872 until 1909 Yale won 324 games, lost 17, and tied 18, and from 1890 to 1893
Yale outscored its opponents 1265 to 0! Walter Camp changed rugby into football
when he replaced the scrum with a pass from the line of scrimmage. Camp was
also responsible for the down-yardage system; he introduced American style
below-the-waist tackling, and initiated the annual selection of an All-American
team.
Almost from the outset American college football was
a supremely effective means for binding students, alumni, and community into a
cohesive whole. The intensity of alumni and community identification with the
football team fostered a win-at-any cost ethic and placed tremendous pressure
on coaches to field winning teams. All this made a sham of amateurism and of
the pretense that football was a normal part of student life like panty-raiding,
fraternity hazing, or cheating on exams.
The ferocious drive to win, the primitive state of
the rules, and the rudimentary quality of protective equipment led to an
unconscionable number of serious injuries at the turn of the century, although
the exaggerated and colorful reporting of the period makes unreliable the often
quoted statistics on the number of gouged eyes, fractured skulls, and broken
limbs. The public's perception of football as a brutal upper-class reversion to
barbarianism by robber-barons-to-be was, however, strong enough for Theodore
Roosevelt to convene his famous White House Conference on football in 1905,
which was attended by representatives of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Legend
to the contrary, Roosevelt had no intention of abolishing college football; in
any case he certainly had no legal nor actual power to do so. Had it come down
to a test of strength between football and the president it would have been
interesting to see who would have prevailed—or would prevail today.
In 1910 the rules were amended, supposedly to reduce
violence, but really to provide a better spectacle for spectators by evening
the balance between offense and defense and "opening up" the game.
The flying wedge was outlawed, the pass rules were liberalized, and the number
of chances a team was given to make ten yards before surrendering the ball was
increased from three to four. These were the rules that Knute Rockne used at
Notre Dame to build the greatest football dynasty since the old Yale teams of
the nineteenth century, managing also to transform the epithet "fighting
Irish" from an ethnic slur to a badge of pride.
The first professional football players were really
semi pros, who played more for fun than the pocket money they got by splitting
the ticket take. Before 1920 the most famous professional was the Olympic
champion Jim Thorpe; Gus Dorais and Knute Rockne of Notre Dame were also pros
of that era. In 1920 the American Football Association (AFA) was founded; two
years later it was succeeded by the National Football League (NFL), comprised
for the most part of teams from small towns in Ohio. It was the great Illinois
tailback Red Grange whose publicity changed the professional game from the poor
stepchild of the college game into a growth industry on its way to becoming the
multimillion dollar business of the 1960s. In 1930 the superiority of the
professional game was demonstrated when the New York Giants beat Notre Dame in
a charity exhibition game. In 1936 the college "draft" system was
established, the final step in persuading the public to reverse its perception
of college football's relationship to the program, and to see the universities
as minor leagues preparing players for the pro ranks.
Professional football's symbiosis with television
began in 1952 when the NFL established its blackout rule for home games. In
1960 Pete Rozelle became the commissioner of the NFL, and under his astute
leadership the game achieved a level of popularity that made it America's
favorite spectator sport. In 1966 the NFL merged with its new rival, the
American Football League (AFL), allowing Rozelle to designate the championship
game between the two formerly separate leagues as the "Super Bowl,"
which immediately became America's premier sports spectacle[3, p.214-215].
2.1.2.4.
Bowling
There was not always a clear distinction between
amateur and professional bowlers, especially since amateurs are allowed to
collect prize money. Most acknowledged professionals were instructors, but
there were a few who toured the country, giving exhibitions or playing matches
for money.
Three professionals were pretty well known to the
public. Andy Varipapa, a colorful trick shot artist, spent thirty years
entertaining crowds throughout North America. He also won two consecutive BPAA
All-Star tournaments, in 1946 and 1947.
Floretta McCutcheon was the sport's leading woman
ambassador from 1927 through 1939, giving thousands of clinics, lessons, and
exhibitions.
Best known of all was Ned Day, who not only toured
but also did a very popular series of movie shorts during the 1940s. Millions
of people saw the films in theaters and, later, in television reruns. Day
retired in 1958, the very year the Professional Bowlers Association (PBA) was
founded. Under the leadership of Eddie Elias, the PBA set out to establish a
regular tour of sponsored tournaments similar to the Professional Golf Association
tour.
For several years, there were only three or four
tournaments on the PBA tour, but the number grew rapidly during the 1960s,
mainly because of television. To fit tournaments into TV time slots, Elias
created the "stepladder" format that's still used in almost all PBA
events.
Competitors first roll a series of qualifying games,
with the top five finishers advancing into the stepladder round. The fifth- and
fourth-place qualifiers bowl a match, with the winner advancing to bowl against
the third-place qualifier. And so it goes up the stepladder, until the survivor
meets the first-place qualifier in the final match.
The Professional Women's Bowling Association was
founded in 1960 to establish a similar tour. It wasn't particularly successful,
so a group of players left to form the Ladies' Professional Bowlers Association
in 1974. The two merged again in 1978, forming the Women's Professional Bowlers
Association, which became the Ladies Professional Bowlers Tour in 1981.
As in golf, the women's tour isn't nearly as
lucrative as the men's, largely because of the lack of television coverage. The
PBA tour boasts about 40 tournaments, many of which award $40,000 or more for
first place. The LPBT tour offers only about 15 tournaments and first place
money is usually less than $20,000.
There
are four major men's tournaments, the BPAA U. S. Open, the PBA National
Championship, the Tournament of Champions, and the ABC Masters. Women have
three majors, the BPAA U. S. Women's Open, the Sam's Town Invitational, and the
WIBC Queens. A fourth major tournament, the WPBA National Championship, was
discontinued after 1980[16, www.hickoksports.com/history...].
2.1.3. Problems
in professional sport
One of the most frequent complaints leveled against
professional sports these days is that the news about them often concerns
various disputes between players and management, court cases, and other legal
proceedings more than it does what takes place in the games athletes play» and
spectators watch. Part of this comes from the fact that people have been slow
to recognize that professional sport really is a business and that people make
their living engaging it. In addition, the world of professional sport, as the
rest of society, is more complex than it was in the past.
Another familiar complaint, not without some
justification, is that professional athletes in the most popular sports such as
baseball, basketball, and football are paid more money than they could possibly
be worth. For example, as of this writing the average major league baseball
player's salary is just under the incredible sum of one million dollars per
year! No wonder people complain. Yet, when a star player demands more money
from his or her team, it is often the fans and the press who take the side of
the athlete.
One of the most unfortunate results of the currently
inflated price of tickets to professional sports events such as baseball is
that they are now accessible only to the most well off. This is a sad break
with the past tradition of having a sizable number of inexpensive tickets
available to all segments of society. Over time sport in the US has become more
open to all classes and ethnic groups. Recent moves by professional sports
management to cater more and more to an elite clientele
through such means as special luxury viewing areas (called sky boxes) at
stadiums and arenas are an unwelcome departure from the mostly democratic development
of American sport.
Only the most naive observers and spectators of
American professional sport now believe that it exists in a realm that is
separate from other social concerns. Sport is also related to politics. It has become
a practice for politicians to associate themselves with championship teams. For
example, the president usually phones congratulations to the winners of
baseball's World Series; presidents have hosted the National Basketball
Association (NBA) champions at the White House.
The attraction of major league professional sport is
so great that there are keen competitions among cities for franchises. It is
widely accepted by politicians, the public, and the press that having a major
league team in their city or region is good not only for the local economy but
also for the prestige of the area and even the morale of the population.
Professional franchises often exploit this desire of localities to have a major
league team by demanding and receiving extremely favorable terms for the use of
public stadiums. When teams do not get what they want from local government,
they often begin to play one city off against another and sometimes move to an
area that offers a better deal.
Sport also has an international political dimension.
After the Soviet Union joined the Olympic movement in 1952, the US and the USSR
engaged in a long, hard-fought battle, especially at the Olympic Games, for
overall supremacy in sport [2, p.307-308].
2.1.4.
Olympic Games and the names of American heroes
The United States has traditionally been a very
successful player in international sports events. The Olympic Games are the
highlight of international competition. The United States has had the pleasure
to host Olympic winter or summer Games on seven occasions. The Centennial Games
of the Olympic Movement took place in Atlanta in 1996. The Games were one of
the largest in history so far, featuring almost 11.000 competitors. The U.S.
Olympic Team has always performed very well and again finished first in the
final medal standings in 1996 and in 2000. The next Olympic Winter Games will
be hosted by Salt Lake City in 2002. Hosted by Athens the next Olympic Summer
Games will take place in Greece in August 2004. Following the national trials
the United States Olympic Committee nominates members of the Olympic team. The
United States also participates in the Pan-American Games, the second largest
sports event following the Olympic Games. They are held every four years preceding
the Olympic Games. The Pan Am Games consists of all Summer Olympic sports, plus
some non-Olympic sports. American athletes also compete in world championships
and other international sports events. Cyclist Lance Armstrong won the
prestigious Tour de France in 1999, 2000, and 2001. Pete Sampras and Andre
Agassi have counted among the top tennis players in the world for many years.
Tiger Woods dominates the international golf scene. Track athletes Michael
Johnson, Maurice Greene, and Marion Jones are the fastest sprinters in the
world. These and many more American sports heroes rank among the country's
best-known celebrities. The modern Olympics also have female competitors from
1900 onward, though women at first participated in considerably fewer events.
[14, www.usinfo.pl/aboutusa/ ...].
2.2.
Leisure sports
2.2.1. Badminton
Badminton is a game played with rackets on a court
divided by a net. It is distinguished from other racket sports, all of which
use a ball of some size, by two intriguing features: the use of a shuttlecock
and the fact that the shuttlecock must not touch the ground during a rally. The
flight characteristics of the shuttlecock and the pace created by constant
volleying combine to make badminton one of the most exciting sports to play and
to watch.
Badminton has a long and fascinating history. With
roots in China over two thousand years ago, it was purely recreational until a
competitive version was developed in India and England in the mid- and
late-nineteenth century. Since that time, the game has gained tremendous
popularity in many countries. It is a major sport in most countries of northern
Europe and Southeast Asia and is considered virtually the national sport in
Indonesia and several other countries. Denmark, England, Sweden, and West
Germany lead the European nations in their interest. The game spread in the
1870s to Canada and the United States, where national organizations similar to
those of other countries were formed in the 1930s. The International Badminton
Federation was formed in 1934 with nine member countries and grew to the more
than 85 nations currently affiliated in the 1980s [4, p.1].
In 1878, two New Yorkers—Bayard Clarke and E.
Langdon Wilks—returned from overseas trips to India and England, respectively,
having been exposed to badminton on their travels. With a friend, Oakley
Rhinelander, they formed the Badminton Club of the City of New York, the oldest
badminton club in the world in continuous existence. Badminton was primarily a
society game for New York's upper crust until 1915, when intercity competitions
with Boston's Badminton Club, formed in 1908, created a serious rivalry that continued
through the 1920s.
By 1930, the game was spreading across the country
and had become a serious, demanding sport for women and men alike. Clubs
mushroomed on the Eastern seaboard, in the Midwest, and on the Pacific Coast.
The Hollywood movie colony took to the game eagerly, under the encouragement of
a touring professional, George "Jess" Willard, who played exhibitions
in movie houses across the country to packed houses and thereby did much to
bring the game to the American people. Willard was followed on the national
circuit by Ken Davidson, a Scotsman whose badminton comedy routines entertained
millions in exhibitions in the 1930's and 1940's, and by Davidson's early
partner, Hugh Forgie, a Canadian whose badminton-on-ice shows became world
famous in the 1950's and 1960's. These three men combined great badminton
talent with superb showmanship to spread the game in the United States and
worldwide.
Through the leadership of some of Boston's leading
players, the American Badminton Asssociation was formed in 1936, and the first
national championships were held in 1937 in Chicago. One of the most famous
names in world badminton appeared at the 1939 championships held in New York.
An 18-year-old Pasadenan, David G. Freeman, upset the defending champion Walter
Kramer in the men's singles final to begin a winning streak that would last his
10-year badminton career. In 1949 he won the U.S. Championship, the All-England
Championship, and all his matches in the first Thomas Cup competitions. He then
retired to continue his career as neurosurgeon, and he is still considered
perhaps the finest player the game has seen.
Following World War II, the first national junior
championships were held in 1947, and the development of badminton in schools
and colleges led to the first national collegiate championships in 1970. The
United States men's team made the Thomas Cup final rounds throughout the 1950s,
and the women's team held the Über
Cup from 1957 until 1966; but the rapid development of the game across the
world soon left the United States behind. Badminton continued to grow in the
United States but at a much slower pace than during the pre-war years. Golf, tennis,
and the major professional sports came to the fore, while the popular misconception
of badminton as only a leisurely recreation proved difficult to overcome. With
the addition of badminton to the Olympic Games as of 1992, it seems only a
matter of time before the game will once again become a sport of great national
popularity and recognition.
The governing body for badminton in the United
States is the United States Badminton Association (USBA). Through its regional
and state associations and member clubs, the USBA administers competitive
badminton play and promotes the development of badminton in this country. The
Board of Directors of the USBA establishes national policies for badminton, and
the USBA office is responsible for the day-to-day administration of national
badminton activity.
The USBA was founded as the American Badminton
Association in 1936, and the current name was adopted in 1978. The
general purposes of the USBA are these:
1.
Promotion and development of badminton
play and competition in the United States, without monetary gain.
2.
Establishment and upholding of the Laws
of Badminton, as adopted by the International Badminton Federation.
3.
Arrangement and oversight of the various
United States National and Open Championship tournaments.
4.
Sanctioning of other tournaments at the
local, state, and regional level.
5.
Selection and management of players and
teams representing the United States in international competitions, including
the Olympic Games and the Pan American Games.
6.
Representation of the United States and
of the USBA's interests in activities and decisions of the International
Badminton Federation and the United States Olympic Committee [4, p.87-89].
Badminton can be played indoors or outdoors, under
artificial or natural lighting. Because of the wind, however, all tournament
play is indoors. There may be one player on a side (the singles game) or two
players on a side (the doubles game). The shuttlecock does not bounce; it is
played in the air, making for an exceptionally fast game requiring quick reflexes
and superb conditioning. There is a wide variety of strokes in the game ranging
from powerfully hit smashes (over 150 mph!) to very delicately played
dropshots.
Badminton is great fun because it is easy to
learn—the racket is light and the shuttlecock can be hit back and forth
(rallies) even when the players possess a minimum of skill. Within a week or
two after the beginning of a class, rallies and scoring can take place. There
are very few sports in which it is possible to get the feeling of having become
an "instant player." However, do not assume that perfection of
strokes and tournament caliber of play is by any means less difficult in
badminton than in other sports.
A typical rally in badminton singles consists of a
serve and repeated high deep shots hit to the baseline (clears), interspersed
with dropshots. If and when a short clear or other type of "set-up"
is forced, a smash wins the point. More often than not, an error (shuttle hit
out-of-bounds or into the net) occurs rather than a positive playing finish to
the rally. A player with increasing skill should commit fewer errors and make
more outright winning plays to gain points. A player who is patient and commits
few or no outright errors often wins despite not being as naturally talented as
the opponent, by simply waiting for the opponent to err.
In doubles, there are fewer clears and more low
serves, drives, and net play. (All of these terms are described in the
following text.) Again, the smash often terminates the point. As in singles,
patience and the lack of unforced errors are most desirable. Team play and
strategy in doubles are very important, and often two players who have
perfected their doubles system (rotating up and back on offense and defense)
and choice of shots can prevail over two superior stroke players lacking in
sound doubles teamwork and strategy.
As leisure time increases, badminton will no doubt
play a more important role in the fitness and recreational programs so vital to
the American citizen. It can be played by men, women, and children of all ages
with a minimum of expense and effort. The game itself is stimulating mentally
and physically, and it combines the values of individual and team sports. The
fact that it can be learned easily makes it enjoyable from the outset. Basic
techniques are easy to learn, yet much practice and concentration are required
to perfect the skills needed for becoming an excellent badminton player [4,
p.1-2].
2.2.2. Bowling
Bowling was a very popular sport in New York City in
the middle of the nineteenth century. A newspaper said there were more than 400
alleys in the city in 1850. It then declined for a time. One reason may have
been that the larger pins made it too easy. The prevalence of gambling was
another factor. Bowling, like billiards, was considered semi-respectable, at
best.
When nine clubs from New York City and Brooklyn
formed the National Bowling Association (NBA) in 1875, one of its purposes was
to standardize rules. Just as important, though, the clubs wanted to eliminate
gambling among their members.
The NBA didn't last long, but the rules its member
clubs established are still the basic rules of bowling. A similar New
York-based organization, the American Amateur Bowling Union, established in
1890, was also short-lived.
Meanwhile, German immigrants helped to popularize
the sport in the Midwest, especially in Chicago, Cincinnati, Detroit, St.
Louis, and Milwaukee. With inter-club and inter-league bowling on the increase,
equipment and rules had to be standardized nationally.
As a result, the American Bowling Congress (ABC) was
founded as a genuine national federation of clubs at Beethoven Hall in New York
City on September 9, 1895. In 1901, 41 teams from 17 cities in 9 states
competed in the ABC's first National Bowling Championships in Chicago. There
were also 155 singles and 78 doubles competitors.
Under the leadership of the ABC, bowling quickly
became both popular and respectable. Gambling was virtually eliminated--partly
because of prize money offered not only by member leagues, but also in
ABC-sanctioned regional and national competition.
With the sport cleaned up, women were attracted to
bowling in large numbers. The Women's National Bowling Association, founded in
1916, conducted its first national championship the following year. The
association was renamed the Women's International Bowling Congress (WIBC) in
1971.
Approximately 60 million people in the U. S. go
bowling at least once a year. More important, about 7 million of them compete
in league play sanctioned by the ABC and/or WIBC.
A steady stream of young bowlers has been a major
reason for the sport's continuing popularity throughout this century. Bowlers
of high school age and younger originally came under the jurisdiction of the
American Junior Bowling Congress, an ABC affiliate. That organization was
replaced in 1982 by the autonomous Young American Bowling Alliance (YABA),
which sanctions league and tournament play of bowlers through college age.
Although collegiate bowling is rarely mentioned in
the media, many conferences offer team competition and championship
tournaments. National championships have been conducted since 1959 by the
Association of College Unions (ACU) and since 1962 by the National Association
of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA).
Bowling
was an exhibition sport at the 1988 Olympic Games in South Korea [9, p.23-24].
2.3.
Sport for the disabled
Disabled Sports USA was founded in 1967 by disabled
Vietnam veterans. It was then called the National Amputee Skiers Association.
In 1972 the National Amputee Skiers Association (NASA) was broadening its
mission. No longer solely serving skiers, NASA needed a new name. They chose to
call themselves the National Inconvenienced Sportsmen's Association. In 1976,
NISA became the National Handicapped Sports and Recreation Association. The
NHSRA name stuck until 1992 when the organization was renamed to National Handicapped
Sports. In October 1994, after polling the organization's 80+ chapters and
affiliates, the National Board of Directors approved the most recent name
change to Disabled Sports USA.
According to Executive Director Kirk Bauer,
"Disabled Sports USA" was selected for the following reasons:
1.
The word "disabled" brought
the organization in line with current language used by the federal government. "Disabled"
has become more universally accepted than "handicapped."
2.
Disabled Sports USA has become an
organization of global importance. Disabled Sports USA fields teams to compete
in the World Championships for track and field, cycling, volleyball, and
swimming. It is now necessary to use "USA" rather than
"National" to reflect this change in scope.
3.
Almost all of the US Olympic
Committee-member National Governing Bodies for able-body sports have
"US" or "USA" within their name (such as USA Basketball, US
Skiing, and USA Volleyball). Disabled Sports USA is a Disabled Sports Organization
member of the U. S. Olympic Committee.
DS/USA now offers nationwide sports rehabilitation
programs to anyone with a permanent disability. Activities include winter
skiing, water sports, summer and winter competitions, fitness and special
sports events. Participants include those with visual impairments, amputations,
spinal cord injury, dwarfism, multiple sclerosis, head injury, cerebral palsy,
and other neuromuscular and orthopedic conditions.
Disabled Sports USA is a nation-wide network of
community-based chapters offering a variety of recreation programs. Each
chapter sets its own agenda and activities. These may include one or more of
the following: snow skiing; water sports (such as water skiing, sailing,
kayaking, and rafting); cycling; climbing; horseback riding; golf; and social
activities.
Rehabilitation professionals and even the Federal
Government recognize the importance of sports and recreation in the successful
rehabilitation of individuals with disabilities. When first faced with the
reality of a disability, many experience a loss of confidence, depression, and
believe their lives have ended. They are often alienated from family and
friends because there are no shared positive experiences. Sports and recreation
offers the opportunity to achieve success in a very short time period; to use
this success to build self-confidence and focus on possibilities instead of
dwelling on what can no longer be done. The ability to participate in a sport,
such as cycling; skiing; and sailing, to name a few, provides the opportunity
to reunite with family and friends in a shared activity.
As
an extension of the rehabilitation process, Disabled Sports USA offers
competitive programs in summer and winter sports. Competition improves sports
skills. It allows individuals to experience the excitement of competition and
the thrill of victory, as well as the agony of defeat. These experiences help
prepare individuals after rehabilitation to face the adversity of a disability
in their lives and to learn to bounce back in the face of challenge and change.
As
a member of the United States Olympic Committee, DS/USA sanctions and conducts
competitions and training camps to prepare and select athletes to represent the
United States at the Summer and Winter Paralympic Games. The Paralympic Games
are the Olympic equivalent competitions for individuals with disabilities and
are recognized by the International Olympic Committee. For those who want to
achieve their highest potential, opportunities are available for national and
international competitions in alpine and Nordic skiing, track and field, volleyball,
swimming, cycling, powerlifting, and other sports. The highest achieving athletes
in each sport can qualify for the Paralympics [12, www.dsusa.org/about...].
2.4.
Women in sports
Women's
sport in the United States, which has a population of 268 million, reaches far
beyond its borders and has had an enormous influence on women's sport around
the world. Two sports that originated in the United States, basketball and
volleyball, are now among the world's most popular sports. In addition, the
United States has become a major training center for athletes from many nations
and Title IX, the 1972 U.S. legislation that has been credited with encouraging
much of the growth in women's sports in the United States, has also helped to influence
thinking about women's sports elsewhere in the world. U.S. companies are also
major producers of sports equipment and clothing. Women's experiences in the
sporting life of the United States defy neat historical generalizations. In
part this is because women never constituted a single group, and their
behaviors and attitudes never conformed to a single general pattern. Women's
roles also varied across time, connected as they were to the broader
ideological and economic contexts. Sometimes women were active participants (in
the modern sense) in a sport, while at other times they were behind-the-scenes
producers or promoters.
Occasionally
as well, women were consumers of sports, or spectators, and there were times
when perceptions of women's physical and moral "natures, affected sporting
values, codes of conduct, rules, and even whether an activity was a sport or
not. Indeed, the perceptions of women as the "weaker sex" helps to account
for both the designation of bowling as an "amusement" when women engaged
in it in the nineteenth century and the development of the divided court in
basketball. Even today fans and the press persist in requiring basketball to be
preceded by "women's." Women play women's basketball, while men
simply play basketball [13, www.womenssportsfoundation.org ].
2.4.1. Women
and traditional sports and games
Women
were far more visible in American sporting life across time than the portraits
of them in many histories would suggest, and for no period is this statement
more true than in the years before the mid-18th century. About 1600, before
Europeans colonized the land that would become the United States, the earliest
American sportswomen were Native Americans whose style of life must be characterized
as a traditional one in which sports and other displays of physical prowess
were embedded in the rhythms and relations of ordinary life. Religious
ceremonies, for example, called on women, and men, to dance for hours at a
time, while rites of passage from maidenhood to womanhood included physical
displays and tests. Ball games occurred in the context of women's daily tasks,
and the outcomes could affect one's place in the family or the village. Even
equipment and items for wagering, which women often controlled, came from the
material stores of wood, corn, shells, and animal hides that were used and
valued in everyday life.
The
migration of colonists from Europe, especially Britain, and then Africa began
shortly after 1600, and these people, too, fashioned a traditional, organic
style of life in which sports were interspersed with ordinary tasks and
rituals. Initially, women were few among the colonists, and not surprisingly,
there were few opportunities for sports other than hunting and tavern games.
After mid-century, however, the gender ratio gradually evened out, and a
critical mass of women were present to assume their traditional roles as
workers in the fields and homes and as producers of community gatherings,
fairs, and family events. Some women owned the equipment with which settlers
played games, especially card games. In rural areas where harvest festivals
came to be fairly common, women prepared the food that the grain-cutters would
consume during the post-harvest celebration. Then, too, villages and the emerging
towns became the settings for diverse social practices. On warm summer days in
New England, husbands and wives fished and sailed on the numerous waterways.
Towns like Boston, Providence, and Hartford offered an even broader variety of
sports and recreations, ranging from dances to races to fist fights. By the
early eighteenth century emerging cities were sites for public, commercial, and
physical displays, including tightrope dancing by women and men.
By
the middle of the eighteenth century, the sporting experiences of women of European
and African ancestries, as well as recent immigrants, were far more varied than
they had been earlier. Enslaved African and African American women found some
solace in their brief respites from work on Sundays, in the evenings, or in the
days of celebrating made possible by the observance of holidays when they
danced, played simple games, and ran races. Agricultural fairs, initiated by
white farmers, planters, and traders, also included contests, especially foot
races, for black women who competed for articles of clothing. White farm women
also made possible and engaged in an array of games, contests, and dancing at
their rural festivals and family events such as weddings and funerals. Occasionally
as well, women in farming communities raced horses, even against men, and they
were willing to wager on their skills.
Middle-
and upper-class women, especially those who either lived in or visited towns
and cities, had access to the broadest range of sports and other recreations.
In the South, white women who lived on plantations raced horses and went fox
hunting. As did their northern contemporaries, they also attended balls, played
cards, and attended the increasing array of physical culture exhibitions, which
included race walking, tumbling and acrobatic displays, and equestrian shows
[13, www.womenssportsfoundation.org ].
2.4.2. Women’s sport in the 19th
century
The
pursuit of active sports by women was not to persist, however. During the second
half of the eighteenth century, a series of complex changes gradually altered
gender roles and relations. Enlightenment ideology and the emergent capitalist
economy combined to redefine women's place, to move them into the home and away
from public activity, and to emphasize biological differences (from men) as
grounds for keeping them there. In effect, the famous "doctrine of
separate spheres" drew from the same movements that resulted in a new
nation and a Declaration of Independence that proclaimed "all men are
created equal." The phrase was not tongue-in-cheek; even before 1800,
women were seen as morally superior but physically inferior to men. The
characterization lasted for more than a century and a half.
The
immediate impact of these changes was the movement of many, though by no means
all, women off the tracks and fields and into the stands, or out of public view
entirely, unless accompanied by men. The trend was especially pronounced in
towns and cities among middle- and upper-class people whose lives were
increasingly shaped by commercial and industrial tasks and rhythms and who came
to believe that women's central role was to bear and nurture children and
families. Slave and free women who continued to live and work on farms and plantations,
as well as the increasing number who joined in the westward migration, did not
experience the full weight of these changes in roles and lifestyles. Indeed,
the experiences of such women in 1850 more closely resembled those of their
predecessors in 1750 and even 1650 than they did their urban contemporaries.
They remained visible producers and consumers of traditional sports and other
displays of physical prowess.
During
the first half of the nineteenth century, perceptions and real experiences suggested
to some people that the health of middle- and upper-class women in urbanizing
areas was declining. Educators, doctors, and writers of popular magazine
articles responded with analyses and prescriptions for improving women's
health, including calls for renewed physical exertion via exercises and games.
The logic of the health literature was simple and straightforward: if women
were to fulfill their roles as caretakers of families and national virtue, they
needed to maintain their physical and mental health. People such as Catharine
Beecher, Mary Lyons, and Diocletian Lewis thus argued for the physical
education of women, started schools, and laid out regimens of calisthenics,
domestic exercises (e.g., sweeping), and traditional activities such as walking
and riding. The movement to return women to physically active pursuits had
begun, albeit in their private, domestic sphere.
This
would not, however, occur overnight. The urban areas that were home to many of
the women targeted by the likes of Beecher and Lewis, as well as the economic
activities that powered such areas, had reduced the social power of traditional
sports and engendered an emerging new form, modern sports. Constructed by men
for men, games such as baseball were becoming popular in eastern urban centers
at mid-century. Other activities such as skating, croquet, and rowing were also
modernizing acquiring rules, specialized playing spaces, and an organizational
base in clubs. Only gradually did women gain access to such forms. In the 1850s
they did so primarily as spectators and moral guardians. Especially at baseball
games, male promoters hoped that women would bring their perceived moral superiority
to bear on the crowds and ensure social order [13, www.womenssportsfoundation.org
].
2.4.3. Challenging gendered
boundaries
Not
all the middle- and upper-class women were content to remain on the periphery
of the action, sporting or otherwise. As of 1848, a feminist movement had
formalized at Seneca Falls, New York, and especially in the North, other
movements such as abolitionism both encouraged women to be social agents and
demonstrated that their reappearance in the public domain endangered neither
their health nor that of the nation. Moreover, the dynamic events of
mid-century, including the War between the States (1861-65) challenged the gender
boundaries and expectations that had confined women to the domestic sphere for
more than three generations.
Challenge
is the appropriate word here, for middle- and upper-class urban women both
found and made opportunities in public society during and after the Civil War
that drew from their long-defined practices in their domestic sphere. Nursing
and teaching were precisely such activities, but they were also ones that
required additional training as well as sound constitutions. Not surprisingly,
then, some women demanded and received access to colleges, where they did as
their brothers did: they began to participate in some of the emerging modern
sports whose social power was increasing in the aftermath of the Civil War and
the technological and communication changes of the 1860s and 1870s. At private
colleges such as Vassar in New York and Smith and Wellesley in Massachusetts,
women students formed clubs to play baseball and, quickly, tennis, croquet, and
archery. College administrators and faculty responded, initially to the influx
of women and their own fears about the negative impact of intellectual work on
women students, with requirements for medical examinations, exercise and
gymnastics regimens, and the gradual absorption of women's sport clubs.
Outside
of the colleges, post-war middle- and upper-class women were also moving to
take advantage of the increasing array of modern sports. Local gymnasiums,
armories turned into playing areas, and a host of clubs that formed as men and
women sought new forms of community provided urban and townswomen with
opportunities for a range of sports, from skating and rowing to trap shooting
and tennis. Such activities continued to stretch the bounds of activity
acceptable for and to women. They also quieted some of the fears held
especially by the male-dominated medical profession about the negative effects
that physical movement in sports might have on women's biology and reproductive
functions.
An
even more significant challenge to the nearly century-old ideology that placed
women in the home and in subservience to men came in the form of a machine, the
bicycle. Invented in Europe in the early 19th century, early versions of the
bicycle had appeared in various forms and had become the object of short-lived
fads through the 1860s. Then came the invention of the "ordinary"
(one large and one small wheel) and, subsequently, the "safety"
cycle, and the latter especially appealed to women. Bicycle riding, and even
some racing, became popular, and the practice afforded women with a means of
physical mobility and freedom that they had not known for generations, since
the days when horse ownership was common and expected, even by women. Significantly,
as well, the bicycle catalyzed dress reform. Bloomers and knickerbockers went
on, and corsets came off. The day of the "new woman" was about to
dawn [13, www.womenssportsfoundation.org ].
2.4.4. The
age of modern sports
Historians
have labeled the period from the 1890s to World War I as the Progressive era, largely
because "progress" was the goal of contemporaries, especially members
of the urban middle class. Achievement did not always match rhetoric, but many
women did see their positions and the quality of their lives enhanced. Some
urban working women, for instance, earned more pay and improved conditions, and
perhaps not surprisingly, some of the industries that employed women organized,
first, calisthenics or physical culture classes and then team sports to promote
personal health and worker efficiency. Such programs became more widespread
after the turn of the century and by the 1920s individual companies and
regional industries had multiple teams in sports such as basketball, bowling,
tennis, baseball, volleyball, and eventually softball. Among the results were
good advertising for the companies and competitive opportunities and even, on occasion,
additional income for the athletes.
Another
group of women whose lives came to incorporate opportunities for competitive
sports were the upper-class women. In the 1870s and 1880s such women had joined
clubs, social clubs, country clubs, and then sport-specific clubs, just as had
their brothers and husbands. They also engaged in sports in colleges and,
importantly, on their vacations or extended stays in Europe. By 1900 seven of
these women competed in their first Olympics, in Paris, and despite the
enduring opposition of the prime mover behind the modern Olympic Games, Baron
Pierre de Coubertin, women
consistently competed in the Games thereafter, albeit in small numbers and in
socially acceptable sports such as tennis, archery, and even figure skating by
1924.
The
Progressive era history of middle-class women's sporting experiences is more
complicated. Especially before the turn of the century, they did experience
considerable latitude in forming sport clubs and organizing competitions and appeared
to gain a degree of physical and personal freedom to sport similar to that
enjoyed by their working and upper-class sisters. Indeed, they initially
popularized the newly created sports of basketball and volleyball, and it was
the rapid spread of such sports, as well as field hockey, cycling, and tennis,
that encouraged their teachers and recreation supervisors to form associations
and write rules. In men's experiences, it was precisely such associations that
were critical to the promotion and expansion of modern sports.
However,
many of the women who came to control sports for girls and adults, especially
in institutions such as schools and colleges, had accepted the warnings of the
medical profession that unfettered athletic competition would harm female
participants, physically and psychologically, and detract from or even diminish
their femininity. Consequently, in the 1890s, women physical educators began to
limit sport contests, initially by changing the rules of some games, such as
basketball, and eventually by altering the very nature of contests. By 1920
school and college sports were often played not in contests between teams
representing their institutions, but in play days or sport days, in which the
convened teams were broken up and the players assigned to mixed school teams.
By
the 1920s the conservative approach of women physical educators was quite
distinct from, indeed, out of sync with, the attitudes and expectations of many
other people. The United States was experiencing its first mature burst of
popular consumerism, which was buoyed by a fun ethic and a relatively expansive
economy. Clubs and teams for women proliferated, in part as more institutions,
from urban governments to churches to saloons, sponsored teams or provided
facilities. Improvements and declining prices of sporting goods, as well as the
increasing popularity of sports spectating and sports as entertainment also
spurred the organization of leagues, both amateur and semi-pro. Beyond the pale
of physical educators, the latter provided underground opportunities for
middle-class athletes.
After
1929 the Great Depression disrupted this sporting boom, but it did not end it
entirely. In fact, the popularity of industrial sport likely peaked in the
1930s, and sports such as softball and bowling became extremely popular among
women. Women's Olympic competition also gained more popular support, in part
because of great performances by athletes such as Mildred "Babe"
Didrikson and in part because support continued to diminish for the mythology
of the negative physical and biological consequences of athletics for women.
Significantly as well, women continued to enter nontraditional roles, a trend
that became more pronounced as World War II began. After 1941 more and more
women took jobs that had once belonged to the men who went abroad to fight.
Even professional baseball opened its doors to women via the ÀÍ-American Girls
Baseball League financed by Philip Wrigley of chewing gum and Chicago Cubs
fame.
The
All-American Girls Baseball League began play in 1943 in mid-size cities in the
Great Lakes region. The athletes were not, to be sure, the first professional
women athletes in the United States. In the modern era that honor likely belongs
to female distance walkers in the 1870s and 1880s and rodeo competitors in the
twentieth century. Nor were they the only women professional athletes of the
decade. After 1949 the Ladies Professional Golf Association organized, offering
$15,000 in purse money spread over nine tournaments. Five years later, women
golfers could earn $225,000 a year on the LPGA tour.
In
the 1940s as well, an even more significant movement developed in African
American colleges. Track and field teams were training at places such as Tuskegee
Institute and Tennessee State, and these colleges would produce the athletes
that would integrate U.S. women's Olympic teams and revolutionize the contests
and the records. By the early 1960s African-American athletes such as Wilma
Rudolph ran record-pace after record-pace, opening
doors for other black women and paving the way for Jackie Joyner-Kersee and
Florence Griffith Joyner, among numerous others. Other sports such as bowling
and tennis also integrated in the post-World War II years [13, www.womenssportsfoundation.org
].
The success of women's tennis, however, did little
to help the fortunes of women's professional team sports.
Women's professional team sports achieved popularity
for the first time in the 1990s, particularly in basketball and football
(soccer). This popularity has been asymmetric, being strongest in the U.S.,
certain European countries and former Communist states. Thus women's soccer is
dominated by the U.S., China, and Norway, who have historically fielded weak
men's national teams. Despite this increase in popularity, women's professional
sports leagues continue to struggle financially. The WNBA is operated at a loss
by the NBA, in the hopes of creating a market that will eventually be
profitable. A similar approach is used to promote female boxing, as women
fighters are often undercards on prominent male boxing events, in the hopes of
attracting an audience.
Today,
women participate competitively in virtually every major sport, though the
level of participation decreases in contests of brute strength or
"contact" sports. Few schools have women's programs in American
football, boxing or wrestling. This practical recognition of gender differences
in physiology has not impeded the development of a higher profile for female
athletes in other historically male sports, such as golf, marathoning, and ice
hockey [17, www.usa.usembassy.de/sports_women.htm]
To
sum up all the given information, it should be said that the Americans even can
be called partisans of a number of colourful sports that are unlike those in
other countries. The most popular sports are American football, baseball, basketball,
bowling and etc. Most games are shown on television, and the camerawork is so
skilful that the thrilling events can be followed even if you know nothing
about the game.A lot of people are keen on sports, both professional and amauter.Nowadays
there are a lot of possibilities for different people to participate in sports:
for healthy people and for disabled ones, for men and women, children and
grown-ups. Every person can choose a definite kind of sport according to his
taste. At present a great number of various clubs, centres and leagues are
founded to help people with their choice.If to speak about women in sport, it
should be said that women's sports include amateur and professional
competitions in virtually all sports. Female participation in sports rose
dramatically in the twentieth century, especially in the latter part,
reflecting changes in modern societies that emphasized gender parity. Although
the level of participation and performance still varies greatly by country and
by sport, women's sports have broad acceptance throughout the world, and in a
few instances, such as tennis and figure skating, rival or exceed their male
counterparts in popularity.There are also several organizations in the USA
which give a possibility for disabled people to look at their lives in another
way or show them that their lives are not over yet.
3.
RECREATION IN THE USA
Why has recreational sport in America become so
popular and why does it occupy so much of the attention and the time of its
adherents? Certainly the first reason has to do with the availability of free
time people have from work. The increase in leisure time by comparison with
earlier in the century makes possible all time and energy spent by Americans
playing and watching sport. Yet, the question remains why has this time been
devoted to sport rather than to other activities such as music or the arts?
First of all, involvement in fitness and recreational activities reflects the
concern of many Americans, primarily middle class people, with health and
longevity. The intense, highly visible involvement of a certain segment of the
population in recreational sport and exercise sometimes obscures the fact that
on the whole Americans are not much fitter than they ever were.
There are other reasons as well for Americans'
interest in sport and fitness. The modern stress on appearances, what are
called "good looks", is sufficient motivation for many to keep up
their level of exercise. The mass media, including especially advertising, feed
the American preoccupation with youth and the appearance of youthfulness.
Consequently, recreational sports have become part of big business, especially
for companies that manufacture the many products related to sport. In addition
to its specific equipment, whether it be tennis rackets or bowling balls, every
sporting activity has its own special wardrobe, complete with headbands, wristbands,
indeed, something for every major part of the body. Footwear- for sport is a
whole industry of its own, especially now that people wear running shoes, basketball
shoes, and tennis shoes everywhere they go, including work, school, the
university, and church.
The challenges involved in sporting competition and
in acquiring high levels of physical fitness also have an inherent attraction
of their own that is tremendously compelling. There are many cases of
ostensibly amateur athletes who spend every bit as much time training as do
professionals. Recreational athletes who participate in events such as
triathlons consisting of running, bicycling, and swimming often work part time
or arrange their work schedules so as to be able to train for several hours a
day [7, p.211].
Although the overall percentage of the population
engaged in recreational sport is not markedly greater than before, those who are
involved seem to be devoting more and more of their
leisure time to various sporting activities. In addition to public facilities
for such sports as tennis, golf, basketball, Softball, swimming, etc. and
private tennis and golf clubs, all sorts of fitness and health clubs continue
to spring up all over the country. Many of these clubs have "high tech"
machines for virtually every possible form of exercise and fitness training as
well as space for aerobics, now one of the most popular forms of physical
exercise in the US. There has also been a growth in the number of specialized
clubs dealing with the martial arts. The competition from the many new fitness
clubs has forced traditional organizations, such as tennis and golf clubs and
YWCA's and YMCA's to diversify both the equipment and the activities they offer
in order to satisfy members who want the convenience of a comprehensive
recreational facility.
There are some groups and clubs, such as runners and
bicyclists, who do not necessarily need special facilities in which to train.
Naturally, many Americans also pursue such activities as jogging, swimming, and
bicycling, skiing, and skating on their own without any organizational
involvement. Other popular sports for the individualist are surfing and wind
surfing. For those who like the thrill and the freedom of floating in air there
is also gliding, hang gliding, and sport parachuting.
Although sailing and yachting continue to be largely
the domain of well-to-do private individuals, there are a few places where the
public can rent small sail boats. Much more common though is the rental of
rowboats and canoes at local, state, and national parks. Horseback riding is
also available to the public in many places. Equestrian sports such as dressage
and jumping still remain the province of those who can afford the great
expenses associated with these sports. And, needless to say, polo is also a
sport for the few; although it is possible polo will become more widely known
as a spectator sport.
Racket sports have become extremely popular in
recent years. Always a favorite, tennis experienced a boom in the 1970s and
1980s that has now leveled off somewhat. Even so, tennis remains very prominent
among recreational pursuits. A game called racket ball has really
caught on with the public, and both indoors and outdoors racket ball courts
have sprung up all over the country. Squash was, originally found mainly in the
northeast part of the US but is now slowly gaining a foothold in other parts of
the country [2, p.293-294].
3.1.
Sports at colleges
3.1.1. College and sport
Youth is synonymous with energy — mental and
physical. Organized and informal sports provide teens with an opportunity to
expend some of that energy and, more importantly, to learn the value of fair
play, to achieve goals, and to just have fun.
In 2003, 58 percent of boys and 51 percent of girls
in high school played on a sports team. The most popular sports for boys are
American football, basketball, track and field, baseball, and soccer
(international football). For girls, the most popular are basketball, track and
field, volleyball, softball, and soccer. As a result of a U.S. law that
encourages women to take part in athletics, girls' participation in high school
athletics has increased by 800 percent over the past 30 years. Other organized
high school sports often include gymnastics, wrestling, swimming, tennis, and
golf. Away from school, teenagers participate year-round in community-sponsored
sports leagues. In addition, particularly in the summer, they engage in
informal "pick up" games of one sport or another in the streets and
parks of their neighborhoods.
In 2001, a higher percentage of high school seniors
reported participating in athletic teams (39 percent) and music/performing arts
activities (25 percent) than academic clubs (15 percent), student
council/government (11 percent), and newspaper/yearbook (10 percent). Females
were more likely to participate in newspaper/yearbook, music/performing arts,
academic clubs, student council or government, and other school clubs or
activities than males. Males, however, were more likely to participate in athletics.
Sports also play an important role in the everyday
social scene at American colleges and universities. University sports programs
are offered at the intercollegiate (organized competition) and the intramural
(club-like, less competitive) levels. Many universities offer sports
scholarships at the intercollegiate level to students who are both academically
qualified and skilled in a particular sport. Athletic scholarships are awarded
for everything from archery to wrestling, with an eye on gender equality to
achieve a balance between men’s and women’s scholarships.
Playing
for a college team on scholarship is one way students help pay for the cost of
earning an undergraduate degree. About $1 billion in athletic scholarships are
awarded through the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) each year.
Over 126,000 student-athletes receive either a partial or a full athletic
scholarship. These scholarships are awarded and administered directly by each
academic institution, not the NCAA. Award amounts vary from a few thousand
dollars to nearly $30,000 for one academic year and do not necessarily cover
the full cost of tuition and living expenses. Scholarships are offered on a
percentage basis, and universities have strict limits on the total amount they
can award each year [18, www.usa.usembassy.de/sports-youth.htm].
3.1.2.
Sport
and money
Intercollegiate sports and money have always been a hotly
debated topic. Rules prevent any college athlete from accepting money. Whenever
some basketball player is found to have accepted “a gift”, the sports pages are
full of the scandal. As a result, some college teams whose members have
violated the rules are forbidden to take part in competitions. Several
universities like the highly respected University of Chicago do not take part
in any intercollegiate sports whatsoever. Many other restrict sports to those
played among their own students, so-called intramural sports and activities.
Those who defend college sports point out that there are no
separate institutions or “universities” for sports in the U.S. as there are in
other countries. They also note that many sports programs pay their own way,
that is, what they earn from tickets and so on for football or basketball or
baseball games often supports less popular sports and intramural games at the
university. At some universities, a large portion of the income from sports,
say from TV rights, goes back to the university and is used also for academic
purposes. Generally, however, sports and academics are separated from one
another. You cannot judge whether a university is excellent or poor from
whether its teams win or lose.
In the United States, however, there are attitudes towards
the mixing of commercialism, money, and sports, or professionals and amateurs
which often differ from those of other nations. The U.S. was, for example, one
of only 13 countries to vote in 1989 against allowing professional basketball
players to compete in the Olympics. Similarly, American professionals in
football, baseball, and basketball are not allowed to wear jerseys and uniforms
with advertising, brand names, etc. on them. The National Football League does
not allow any team to be owned by a corporation or company.
Most Americans think that government should be kept
separate from sports, both amateur and professional. They are especially
concerned when their tax money is involved. The citizens of Denver, Colorado,
for example, decided that they did not want the 1976 Winter Olympics there, no
matter what the city government and businessmen thought. They voted “no” and
the Olympics had to be held elsewhere. The residents of Los Angeles, on the
other hand, voted to allow the (Summer) Olympics in 1984 to be held in their
city, but they declared that not one dollar of city funds could be spent on
them. Because the federal government doesn’t give any money either, all of the
support had to come from private sources. As it turned out, the L.A. Olympics
actually made a profit, some $100 million, which was distributed to national
organizations in the U.S. and abroad [10, p.196-197].
3.1.3. Women's
Collegiate Sport
The past two decades have witnessed a large growth
in women's sports in American universities and colleges. This is a natural
process related to increased participation of women in all areas of labor and
public life. Women play virtually all sports that men do with the exception of
American football and baseball. (Softball is a popular' women's sport. In the
US, field hockey is a sport that is played primarily by women.) The growth of
women's sport has also been enhanced by the erosion of old-fashioned
misconceptions about women's ability to play physically demanding sports. The
old notion sometimes expressed that women were 'the weaker sex" appears
increasingly absurd in light of evidence that at the outer limits of endurance
women may well last longer than men.
One of the spurs to the increase in women's
collegiate sport is the presence of federal legislation, informally called
Title IX. For the most part, however, athletic departments around the country
try to maintain a balance of opportunities for men and women [2, p.292].
3.1.4.
Intramural
and club sports
In addition to intercollegiate athletics colleges
and universities have large programs for intramural sports. Among men touch or
flag football is very popular. Intramural teams often represent various student
organizations, such as men's fraternities, women's sororities15 or
dormitories. There are also teams on which faculty members play. Although
intramural competitions are theoretically recreational in nature, they are
usually very spirited and are taken very seriously by participants.
Club sports involve teams that are informal and have
no official or varsity status but nevertheless take part in intercollegiate
competition with teams from other institutions. Club teams sometimes serve
spoils that are little known or practiced in certain regions, such as hockey in
Florida. Some clubs strive to become varsity sports, whereas others, such as
many men's and women's rugby clubs, prefer to retain the greater informality
possible with club status. It should be pointed out here that varsity athletic
teams are usually very tightly managed by their coaches and require as many as
two to four hours of practice per day. Students who want a less demanding schedule
may therefore gravitate to intramural or club teams [2, p.293].
3.2.
Animals
in sport
Fishing and hunting are extremely popular in all parts of
the country and have been since the days when they were necessary activities
among the early settlers. As a consequence, they have never been thought of as
upper-class sports in the U.S. And it is easy to forget how much of the country
is open land, how much of it is still wild and filled with wildlife. New
Jersey, for example, has enough wild deer so that the hunting season there is
used to keep the herds smaller. Wild turkeys have also returned to the East and
Midwest in great numbers. In the states of the Midwest, of course, there is
much more wild game, and hunting there is even more popular.
Hunting licenses are issued by the individual states, and
hunting is strictly controlled. Some hunters don’t actually hunt, of course.
They use it as a good excuse to get outdoors in the autumn or to take a few
days or longer away from the job and family. Indoor poker games are rumored to
be a favorite activity of many hunters who head for cabins in the woods.
There are many more fishermen (around 50 million in 1990)
than hunters (17 millions), and many more lakes and rivers than bears.
Minnesota advertises itself on its license plates as the ‘land of 10.000
lakes.” This, of course, is not quite true: there are more. Michigan not only
has a long coastline from the Great Lakes, it also has what official
descriptions simply call, without counting, “thousands of lakes.”[1, p.142]
3.3.
Unusual sports
There are several sports and sports activities in the U.S.,
all having their strong supporters, which many people think are a bit strange
or at least unusual. For example, Americans will race just about anything that
has wheels. Not just cars, but also “funny cars” with aircraft and jet engines,
large trucks with special motors, tractors, pickup trucks with gigantic tires,
and even motorcycles with automobile engines. Truck racing, it seems, has made
it big in Europe. In 1990, The European paper wrote that in only six years
since it found its way across the Atlantic, truck racing was attracting “crowds
to rival those of the Formula One grand prix motor racing circus.” Other sports
are popular because they don’t involve motors. The first “people-powered”
aircraft to cross the English Channel was pedaled by an American. And the first
hot-air balloon to make it across the Atlantic had a crew from Albuquerque, New
Mexico.
There are also several sports in the U.S. which were once
thought of as being “different”, but have now gained international popularity.
Among these, for instance, is skate-boarding. Another example is wind-surfing
which very quickly spreads in popularity from the beaches of California and
Hawaii. Hang-gliding became really popular after those same people in
California started jumping off cliffs above the ocean. Those who like more than
wind and luck attached a small lawnmower engine to a hang-glider and soon
“ultra-light-weight” planes were buzzing around [1, p.143].
3.4.
Camps
US Sports Camps (USSC), headquartered in San Rafael,
California (just north of San Francisco), is America's Largest Sports Camp
Network and the licensed operator of The NIKE Sports Camps. It was started in
1975 with the same mission that defines it today: to shape a lifelong enjoyment
of athletics through high quality sports education and skill enhancement.
By associating with the country's best coaches to
direct our camps and by providing them with valuable administrative and
marketing support, USSC has become the largest and most successful sports camp
operator in America. During the summer of 2007 more than 52,000 campers
attended US Sports Camps at 400 locations nationwide.
US Sports Camps include youth and adult programs in
the following sport categories: NIKE tennis, NIKE golf, NIKE volleyball, NIKE
lacrosse, NIKE basketball, NIKE softball, NIKE running, NIKE field
hockey, NIKE swim, NIKE soccer, NIKE baseball, Nike water polo, NIKE
multi-sport, as well as the NBC Basketball Camps, Vogelsinger Soccer Academy,
Contact Football Camps, Snow Valley Basketball Camps, International Hockey
Schools, McCracken Basketball Camps, Peak Performance Swim Camps, and
Professional Sports Camps.
From this chapter it should be concluded that over the past
quarter century recreational sport has become an incrisingly large part of
American life.The Americans like to spare their lasure time doing sports and
that’s why they are ready to spend great sums of money to keep fit and be in
good form or just to have a fun and joy.Each person chooses sport that suits
him best: it can be a traditional kind of sport such as basketball or just something
that even can shock the public, for example wrestling. Nowadays in the USA
there are a lot of different programs in schools and colleges that allow
students to get involved into public life. When there are summer holidays in
The United States, students are offered a variety of sports camps where they
are able to develop their physical abilities and just make a number of
friends.Some kinds of recreation such as fishing or hunting don’t need much
money and many American men are always ready to spend their spare time doing
that. Moreover the natute of the USA has resourses for that.
CONCLUSION
Now I think we have found the ansver to the question why so
many sports are popular in the Uneted States.
One reason may be that the variety and
size of America and the different climates found in it have provided Americans
with a large choice of (summer and winter) sports. In addition, public sports
facilities have always been available in great number for participants, even in
sports such as golf, tennis, or skating. The fact that the average high school,
too, offers its students a great variety of sports, often including rowing,
tennis, wrestling, and golf, may have contributed to the wide and varied
interest and participation of Americans in sports. This, in turn, may explain
why Americans have traditionally done well internationally in many of these
sports.
Another reason might be that Americans like competitions,
by teams or as individuals, of any type. It’s the challenge, some say. Some
people point out that American schools and colleges follow the tradition of all
English-speaking societies in using sports activities as a way of teaching
“social values.” Among these are teamwork, sportsmanship (when they win,
American players are expected to say, “well, we were just lucky”), and
persistence (not quitting “when the going gets rough”). As a result, being
intelligent and being good in sports are seen as things that can go together
and, as an ideal, should. While there are colleges where sports seem to be
dominant, there are many others which have excellent academic reputations and
are also good in sports.
Others simply conclude that Americans simply like sports
activities and always have. They like to play a friendly play of softball at
family picnics, and “touch football” (not tackling!) games can get started on
beaches and in parks whenever a few young people come together. “Shooting
baskets” with friends is a favorite way to pass the time, either in a friend’s
driveway (the basket is over the garage door) or on some city or neighborhood
court. And on a beautiful autumn afternoon- the sun shining in a clear blue
sky, the maple trees turning scarlet and the oaks a golden yellow- it is fun to
go with friends to a football game. And go they do.
So large numbers of Americans watch and participate
in sports activities, which are a deeply ingrained part of American life.
Americans use sports to express interest in health and fitness and to occupy
their leisure time. Sports also allow Americans to connect and identify with
mass culture. Americans pour billions of dollars into sports and their related
enterprises, affecting the economy, family habits, school life, and clothing
styles. Americans of all classes, races, sexes, and ages participate in sports
activities—from toddlers in infant swimming groups and teenagers participating
in school athletics to middle-aged adults bowling or golfing and older persons
practicing t’ai chi.
I think all necessary topics have been discussed in
my course paper and that means that this kind of work is fulfilled.
LITERATURE:
1.
Stevenson, K. American life and
institutions/ K. Stevenson – Douglas, 1998. - 175 p.
2.
Tokareva, N. What is it like in the
USA? /N. Tokareva, V. Peppard – Moscow: “Âûñøàÿ øêîëà”, 2000. – 333 p.
3.
Luther S. Luedtke Making America: the
society and culture of the United States/ Luther S. Luedtke – Stuttgart: Ernst
Klett, 1998. - 393 p.
4.
Bloss, M. Badminton- USA/ M. Bloss,
R.S. Hales - 1990
5.
Why we play the game/ R. Rosenblatt
//U.S. Society & values; electronic journal of the U.S. department of
state. – 2003.- Vol. 8, ¹ 2.- P. 2-7
6.
Stewart, M. Baseball: a history of the
national pastime/ M. Stewart – New-York [a. o.]: Franklin Watts, 1998 -198 p.
7.
America A to Z: people, places, customs
and culture/ The Reader’s Digest, 1997 -256 p.
8.
Clach, G. Portrait of the USA/ G. Clach
– Washington: US. Department of State, 1997. – 96 p.
9.
Archibald, J. Bowling for boys and
girls/J. Archibald – Chicago, N.York: Follet Publ. Comp., 1963 -457 p.
10.
Íåñòåð÷óê,
Ã.Â. ÑØÀ è àìåðèêàíöû/ Ã.Â. Íåñòåð÷óê, Â.Ì. Èâàíîâà – Ìèíñê: “Âûøýéøàÿ øêîëà”,
2004. – 263 ñ.
11.
Stewart, M. Basketball: a history of the
hoops/ M. Stewart – New-York [a. o.]: Franklin Watts, 1998 - 207 p.
12.
www.dsusa.org/about-overview.html
13.
www.womenssportsfoundation.org
14.
www.usinfo.pl/aboutusa/sports/events.htm
15.
www.hickoksports.com/history/bowlinginAmerica.shtm
16.
www.usa.usembassy.de/sports_women.htm
17.
www.usa.usembassy.de/sports-youth.htm