 British School Sports Tradition
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Golf and Women
During the early 20th century, golf was among the few sports considered acceptable for women.
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Together with such pastimes as lawn tennis, archery, and trapshooting, some of these clubs began also to provide facilities for a game new to America. It was far more important than yachting, coaching, or polo. It was not for very long to remain, as Harper's Weekly termed it in 1895, "pre-eminently a game of good society." It was soon to give rise to a tremendous growth in country clubs which were to become the special prerogative of the great middle class in cities and towns throughout the country. This sport, of course, was golf.
It did not really take hold in this country, despite its hoary antiquity in Scotland and occasional attempts to introduce it on this side of the Atlantic ever since colonial days, until after 1888. The organization in that year of the St. Andrews Club, near New York, may well be taken as the first important date in golfs history in the United States. Other courses were built -- whatever number of holes was most convenient -- after St. Andrews had showed the way.
Soon a great number of the country clubs about Boston, New York, and Philadelphia had their links. By 1892 golf was spreading westward. It took Chicago by storm and moved on to St. Louis, Milwaukee, Denver, and the Pacific Coast. In 1894 the United States Golf Association was formed. Before 1900 many sports had developed from local adaptations of traditional foIk games into organized activities with uniform rules, special playing kit, cups and trophies, team colors and caps. The most influential setting for the modernization of sports was provided by the British public schools.
In the 19th century, football and cricket - the two major British sports - were unrestrained affairs, played in different ways in different schools, not much more than savage battles in which older boys could assert their dominance over younger ones. Their transformatian into modem sports resulted largely from the reforming influence of the new industrial middle classes who sent their sons to the public schools to be educated with the gentry; they turned games into a form of discipline.
Organized school sports became compulsory instruments of socialization and moral education for the elite young men destined to become leaders of the Empire. Rules limited aggression and ensured "fair play". The games-playing cult, designed to produce disciplined, self-reliant and socially responsible "muscular Christians", had, as its central therne, Mens sana in earpare sana (A healthy mind in a healthy body). Games were also seen as channels of sexual sublimation, sufficiently ascetic and exhausting to eliminate "indecent" expressions of sexuality.
 Matches between schools became social events watched by huge crowds. The athletic public schoolboy was revered as a hero at school and exalted in the press. During the first decade of the 20th century the fiercely amateur cult of athleticism became an obsession in the public schools. But the idea of moral excellence and character training associated with sports did little to inhibit the aggressive display of physical power.
Sports in public schools were never truly virtuous and "civilized" activities. The desire to win was always part of the amateur sporting tradition of the British. The sports cults of the public schools celebrated competitiveness and expressions of brute male power. Violent competitive sport provided a dominant image of sport in Britain and throughout the world.
Organized sport proliferated in universities and independent sports clubs formed by ex-public schoolboys. By 1900 national associations, responsible for codifying rules and administering competitions, existed for football, rugby, ericket, yachting, skating, boxing, rowing, lawn tennis, croquet, hockey, gymnastics, lacrosse (originally a North American game) and badminton.
The democracy still considered tennis a rather feminine game, a chance to sport white flannels and gay-colored blazers rather than exercise. It simply did not know what to make of the absurd spectacle of enthusiastic gentlemen in scarlet coats furiously digging up the turf in frenzied -- and wholly serious -- efforts to drive a little white ball into a little round hole some hundreds of yards away. Nor were the red coats of these pioneer golfers the only article of costume that seemed singularly inappropriate on the rolling fairways of the new courses.
They wore elaborate leg-wrappings to protect themselves from the gorse indigenous to Scottish hills but quite foreign to this country, and they pulled down over their foreheads visored caps in the best Sherlock Holmes tradition. Women had not yet taken up the game, although it was already being urged upon them as an admirable compromise between "the tediousness of croquet and the hurlyburly of lawn tennis," but together with wondering little boys who had been pressed into service as caddies, they often accompanied their lords and masters about the links.
Britain, the world' s major sporting nation, exported its sports (and usualiy their rules) as an element of its cultural imperialism. But while football went to Europe and Latin America in its Association form, in Australia and North America it developed indigenous forms, based on Gaelic football.
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1900 - 1914
