Bad sports, from the ancient Greeks to the present

Sports history, writes Wray Vamplew, is sometimes ‘sentimental, reactionary and built on the implicit assumption that the sporting past was a better place in which to play games. It wasn’t.’ His own account — the fruit ofa career’s work — is so shapeless that it often reads like the encyclopaedia that he claims he didn’t want to write. The emeritus professor of sports history at the University of Stirling hasn’t managed to assemble his own narrative. But if there is one to be extracted from Games People Played, it’s this: contrary to popular opinion, we may be living in sport’s golden age.

Perhaps the best bits of the book are about ancient sports. We learn that the Greeks had no concept of amateurism or fair play. There is also an entertaining analysis of the finances of Roman gladiators, who were rented out for fights by their managers. Few bouts were to the death, as managers liked to get their revenue-generators back alive, and so patrons tended to save money by granting losing fighters mercy. A select few gladiators racked up more than 50 fights.

Presumably Vamplew here is borrowing somebody else’s research, but we don’t know, because the book has no footnotes. It’s clearly aimed at the commercial as well as the academic market, though his pedantically bureaucratic prose will stymie that hope. He also falls into the trap that he himself warns against — of focusing excessively on western sports. Still, there is a good bit on Mayan rubber-ball games of over 3,000 years ago, which, given the custom of human sacrifice, often ended in death penalties, ‘sometimes for the captain of the losing side, sometimes for the entire losing squad, sometimes for the captain of the winning side, and on rare occasions for the entire winning team’.