The games we play

At university I was taught that the suburban middle-class lived in conditions of miserable anomie, unknown to their neighbours and themselves.

In 1975 we joined Woodford Wells Lawn Tennis, Hockey, Cricket and Squash Club in its centenary year, only to find the opposite was true. Woodford Wellsians not only played each other, but reader, they married each other as well. Why have Twickenham if not for rugger? Why have Wimbledon if not for tennis? Why have Wembley if not for football?  Why have Woodford Wells if not for Lawn Tennis, Hockey, Cricket, Squash and (these days), Pickleball?  By 1910, Surbiton enjoyed eight football clubs, seven cricket clubs, two hockey clubs, two golf clubs and various rowing, bowls and tennis clubs besides. On the other side of the river, Hackney Marshes had 300 acres and 120 football pitches, while Shoreditch had about two. On the other side of the line, boxing at Kelvin Hall was a sight to see with its reserve “army of brokers, touts, pimps, card-sharks, pickpockets and prostitutes”. It takes all sorts — and Kelvin Hall clearly did. 

Joseph Strutt’s The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801) was probably the first serious attempt at a history of national “sports” but it included “pastimes” not generally identified these days as sports. Betting on the horses fired the newspaper revolution from the 1850s and 1860s, but fox hunting had already lured writers into more literary forms of celebration.  Charles Apperley writing as “Nimrod” followed by Robert Surtees and Henry Dixon put hunt journalism in the saddle. Cricket’s earliest writers busied themselves with score cards until John Nyren’s wistful Cricketers of My Time in 1833 — an essential way of talking about the Englishness of cricket that endures. 

Pierce Egan’s Book of Sport (1832) as “the mirror of life” has some claim to be our first modern sports history. Before that, Egan had taken prize fighting to new heights with his Boxiana (1812,1818), followed by William Hazlitt’s perfect essay, The Fight, in 1821. One hundred and fifty years of fight writing in between, Norman Mailer’s equally perfect ‘The Fight’, was published in 1975. 

Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle (1822-1886) lasted long enough to see in the appearance of a mass circulation press heavily dependent on sport, made possible by linotype in the 19^th century and Single Lens Reflex cameras in the 20th. Thorsten Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) was the first significant sociology of sport, and Arthur Hopcraft’s The Football Man (1968) is the best, written not by a professor but a jobbing Manchester journalist. Journos founded sports history, but it was not until the 1970s that it began to be taken seriously by academics. 

There had been one or two academic sport histories before Richard Holt’s absolute classic Sport and the British in 1989, none of them comprehensive and all written against the grain. Tory historians barely recognized the subject, apart from a sideways glace at racing and hunting. Left liberal historians were just as bad. In the early 1970s, at York, when Jim Walvin was working on his pioneering work The People’s Game, I remember department radicals tutting. What was he up to? Why would anybody want to write about footballers when they could write about revolutionaries? Marxists in particular couldn’t cope with the idea of the proletariat running around having fun. Shouldn’t they be coughing their lungs out somewhere dark?

The great feature of Holt’s Sport and the British was that he saw sport, especially the idea of sport according to fair play and set rules, as a vital part of the national constitution — rough or respectable, high or low, town or country, rich or poor, amateur or professional, north or south or across the seas. By 1910, sport was a key agent of Union not only in the way it signified being British, but the many and various identities that embodied. Cricket for the English, north and south, with imperial “tests” against the English abroad; “fitba” for the Scots, as much a part of working-class masculinity as steel and smokes; rugby for the Welsh, more tests and wonderfully fast flowing and modern; Gaelic Football for Dublin and the south, Association for Belfast and the north, whence came our greatest player George Best, although in another north, Bobby Charlton lays claim too. Some sort of gentlemanliness set the common standard for all, or nearly all, of them.

At the same time, sporting identities always depended on resources: shining racehorses for the rich; baggy shorts for the poor. Not many coalminers’ daughters owned thoroughbreds or raced Formula One, but they could all run, and Dorothy Hyman, of Cudworth, Barnsley, won Olympic silver and bronze 100 and 200 metres. I once found myself sitting right next to her and her squad in the middle of the track at a northern counties inter-club meeting. She could have been one of us because she was one of us. 

There’s a slight problem here with the Holt classic in that even in the new 2025 second edition, nearly all his sporting heroes have a penis. Our greatest Olympian runner, Kelly Holmes, who matched Seb Coe’s double gold by winning both the blue riband 800 and 1500 metres in a single Games, Athens in 2004, only gets one sentence. Beryl Burton (1937-1996), who took seven cycling world titles, only gets a paragraph and doesn’t make the Index. Beryl worked on a North Yorkshire rhubarb farm. In 1967, she beat the men’s world record for the 12-hour time trial. The stuff of legend: she offered the defending male champion a liquorice allsort on the home straight. 

Nevertheless, if the new Sport and the British was the England football team, male or female, it would be hard to beat. Amateurism retains the captaincy, and getting it right remains the (essentially defensive) game plan.  Over six hundred pages, 1235 footnotes, countless lines of enquiry, multiple judgements, names, dates and details, the new edition has more on disability, ethnicity and gender, more on the inter-war years, on grass roots, on state schools, work teams, municipal parks and Methodists. ‘Hooliganism’ played a key role in the first edition, but get well rested here, along with smaller roles for the break-up of working-class communities, the rise of elite schooling, and apologias for writing the book in the first place. Sociology gets less of a shake, possibly because violence does.

Following Wittgenstein’s dictum that a game is a “concept with blurred edges”, Holt swerves hard definitions of what is and isn’t a sport, comes at you neither on the right or the left, and keeps everything moving forward into an ever-receding modernity. In a single sentence, he can play the long ball from Merchant Taylors’ School to Barcelona Football Club, from the racing pages of The Times to the racing pages of The Daily Worker (whose tipster “Cato was better). 

A sport historian once told me that a racehorse was nothing but a betting machine. Although this misses everything there is to miss about a day at the races, the point was well made. Completely indifferent to everything else sport embodies except the result, online betting machines and sovereign wealth funds take billions out of sporting institutions originally created to build social capital, not extract it. We know from the historians that sport doesn’t have to be like this. The Victorians, who were the first to be dedicated to free markets, nevertheless built schools as major state undertakings rather than businesses where mass sport was positioned as an adolescent moral revolution for the public good. Some of this tradition still lingers.

“Sport” clearly means many things and no history can be totally coherent. But without close attention to the deep physical act — running free, teaming up, hitting clean, getting past, jumping — we can’t really understand what it means.  Sport’s special relationship to the British shows how liberty was embodied in the simple freedom to run and to jump, to kick and to hit and to sometimes break the law. Holt features Jack Hulme’s 1950s Fryston Colliery photograph of “Jumping Boy” — a seven-year-old in shorts clearing a bit of stick straddling a seven-brick tall high-jump. In his joy, we see all there was and is to see.