The legendary story/myth about the origin of Rugby football—whereby a young man named William Webb Ellis “took the ball in his arms [i.e. caught it] and ran,” showing “a fine disregard,” while playing Rugby School’s already distinctive version of football (not to be confused with association football, which was codified much later) in 1823—has little evidence to support it. Pundits have dismissed the story as unlikely since it was first given the School’s seal of approval following an official investigation by the Old Rugbeian Society in 1895. However, the story has entered into legend, and the trophy for the Rugby Union World Cup bears the name of “Webb Ellis” in his honour (as does Ellis Park in Johannesburg, a major international rugby union stadium), and a plaque at the School commemorates the “achievement”.

Various kinds of football have a long tradition in England and football games had probably taken place at Rugby School for 200 years before three boys published the first set of written rules (in 1845). At the time, a set of rules would be agreed between two teams before a match. Teams which competed against each other regularly would tend to agree to play similar rules.

Rugby football has strong claims to the world’s first and oldest football club: the Guy’s Hospital Football Club, formed in London in 1843, by old boys from Rugby School. (Although there is still a rugby club attached to Guy’s Hospital, so few records of the original club survive that it is impossible to determine if there is any continuity.) Around the Anglosphere, a number of other clubs were formed to play games based on the Rugby School rules. One of these, Dublin University Football Club, founded in 1854, is probably the world’s oldest surviving football club in any code. Other old rugby clubs include: Edinburgh Academical Football Club (1857/58], the oldest documented club in the UK); Blackheath Rugby Club (allegedly founded in 1858, although some sources suggest that the club did not start playing rugby football until 1862); and Liverpool St Helens Football Club (1858).

The Blackheath club also features in the history of association football (soccer): as Blackheath Football Club, it became a founder member of the Football Association (FA) in 1863. However, Blackheath withdrew from the FA just over a month after the initial meeting, when it became clear that the FA would not agree to rules which allowed running with the ball in hand (a fundamental part of rugby) and hacking (legal tripping). Other rugby clubs followed this lead and did not join the FA. Interestingly the clubs that did not join the FA and continued to play Rugby Football dropped the tripping rule and outlawed it.

By 1870 about 75 clubs played variations of the Rugby School game in Britain. Clubs playing varieties of the Rugby School game also existed in Ireland, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. However, they had no generally accepted set of rules: the clubs continued to agree rules before the start of each game. On January 26, 1871, 22 clubs founded the Rugby Football Union (RFU), leading to the standardisation of the rules for all rugby clubs in England. Soon most countries with a sizeable rugby community had formed their own national unions.

Games based on rugby football became immensely popular in North America. However, by the 1880s these games had rapidly diverged from the laws of rugby used in most countries, and they became instead the basis of both Canadian football and American football. Nevertheless, the origins of the North American codes of football left lingering traces: the Canadian Football League’s predecessor originally bore the name of the Canadian Rugby Football Union from its founding in 1884. Canadian football, was frequently known as “rugby” until the middle of the 20th century. On the setting up of the modern CFL in the late 1950s, it assumed control of the Grey Cup from an organisation that still called itself the Canadian Rugby Union (now Football Canada, the country’s amateur umbrella organisation for Canadian football). Only in 1929 was the Canadian national rugby union formed — the predecessor of Rugby Canada.

In 1886, the International Rugby Board (IRB) became the world governing body and law-making body for rugby. The RFU recognised it as such in 1890.

The 1890s saw a clash of cultures between working men’s rugby clubs of northern England and the southern clubs of gentlemen, a dispute revolving around the nature of professionalism within the game. On August 29, 1895, 21 clubs split from the RFU and met at the George Hotel in Huddersfield in Yorkshire to form the Northern Rugby Football Union, commonly called the Northern Union.

For clarity and convenience it became necessary to differentiate the two codes of rugby. The code played by those teams who remained in national organisations which made up the IRB became known as Rugby Union. The code played by those teams that played “open” rugby and allowed professionals became known as Rugby League.

NRFU rules gradually diverged from those of Rugby Union, although the name Rugby League did not become official until the Northern Rugby League was formed in 1901. The name Rugby Football League dates from 1922.

A similar schism opened up in Australia and in other rugby-playing countries. Initially Rugby League in Australia operated under the same rules as Rugby Union. But after a tour by a professional New Zealand team in 1907 of Australia and Great Britain, and an Australian Rugby League tour of Great Britain the next year, Rugby League teams in the southern hemisphere adopted Rugby League rules.

In 1948 a meeting in Bordeaux set up the Rugby League International Federation (RLIF) to oversee Rugby League world wide. From this meeting the first “Rugby World Cup” was played in France in 1954.

On August 26, 1995 the IRB declared Rugby Union an “open” game and removed all restrictions on payments or benefits to those connected with the game.

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Before widespread school district consolidation, most United States high schools were far smaller than their present day counterparts and during the first decades of the 20th century basketball quickly became the ideal interscholastic sport due to its modest equipment and personnel requirements. In the days before widespread television coverage of professional and college sports, the popularity of high school basketball was unrivaled in many parts of America.

Today virtually every high school in the United States fields a basketball team in varsity competition, and its popularity remains high, both in rural areas where they carry the identification of the entire community, as well as at some larger schools known for their basketball teams where many players go on to participate at higher levels of competition after graduation. In the 2003–04 season, 1,002,797 boys and girls represented their schools in interscholastic basketball competition, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations. The states of Illinois, Indiana and Kentucky are particularly well known for their residents’ devotion to high school basketball; the critically acclaimed film Hoosiers shows high school basketball’s depth of meaning to these rural communities. In fact, the term “March Madness” was first used to describe the Illinois high school basketball tournament.

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The development of the modern game centred on Montreal. On March 3, 1875 the first organized indoor game was played there, as recorded in the Montreal Gazette. In 1877, McGill University students, James Creighton, Henry Joseph, Richard F. Smith, W.F. Robertson, and W.L. Murray codified seven ice hockey rules, and the first ice hockey club, McGill University Hockey Club, was founded in 1880. The game became so popular that it was featured for the first time in Montreal’s annual Winter Carnival in 1883. In 1885, A.P. Low introduced the game to Ottawa. During the same year, a second club was formed at Oxford University and traditionally the first Varsity Match against Cambridge was thought to have been played in St. Moritz, Switzerland and won by the Dark Blues 6-0, though the first photographs and team lists date from 1895[1]. This continues to be the oldest hockey rivalry in history. In 1888, the new Governor General of Canada, Lord Stanley of Preston (whose sons and daughter became hockey enthusiasts), attended the Carnival and was so impressed with the hockey spectacle that he thought there should be a championship trophy for the best team. The Stanley Cup was first awarded in 1893 to the champion amateur team in Canada, Montreal AAA, and continues to be awarded today to the National Hockey League’s championship team. By this time there were almost a hundred teams in Montreal alone, and leagues throughout Canada. Also by 1893, Winnipeg hockey players incorporated cricket pads to better protect the goaltender’s legs. They also introduced the “scoop” shot, later known as the wrist shot.

1893 was also the date of the first ice hockey matches in the U.S. at Yale University and Johns Hopkins University. The U.S. Amateur Hockey League was founded in New York City in 1896, and the first professional team, the Portage Lakers was formed in 1903 in Houghton, Michigan (though there had been individual professionals in Canada before this).

The five sons of Lord Stanley were instrumental in bringing ice hockey to Europe, beating a court team (which included both the future Edward VII and George V) at Buckingham Palace in 1895. By 1903 a five-team league had been founded . The Internationale de Hockey sur Glace (now the International Ice Hockey Federation) was founded in 1908 and the first European championships were won by Great Britain in 1910.

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The Middle Ages saw a huge rise in popularity of annual Shrovetide football matches throughout Europe, particularly in England. The game played in England at this time may have arrived with the Roman occupation, but there is little evidence to indicate this. Reports of a game played in Brittany, Normandy and Picardy, known as Choule or Soule, suggest that some of these football games could have arrived in England as a result of the Norman Conquest.

These archaic forms of football would be played between neighbouring towns and villages, involving an unlimited number of players on opposing teams, who would clash in a heaving mass of people struggling to drag an inflated pig’s bladder by any means possible to markers at each end of a town (sometimes instead of markers, the teams would attempt to kick the bladder into the balcony of the opponents’ church). A legend that these games in England evolved from a more ancient and bloody ritual of kicking the “Dane’s head” is unlikely to be true. Shrovetide games survive in a number of English towns.

The first description of football in England was given by William FitzStephen (c. 1174-1183). He described the activities of London youths during the annual festival of Shrove Tuesday.

After lunch all the youth of the city go out into the fields to take part in a ball game. The students of each school have their own ball; the workers from each city craft are also carrying their balls. Older citizens, fathers, and wealthy citizens come on horseback to watch their juniors competing, and to relive their own youth vicariously: you can see their inner passions aroused as they watch the action and get caught up in the fun being had by the carefree adolescents.[1]

Most of the early references to the game speak simply of “ball play” or “playing at ball”. This reinforces the idea that the games played at the time did not necessarily involve a ball being kicked. The first clear reference to football was not recorded until 1409, when King Henry IV of England issued an edict to ban it. In 1424, King James I of Scotland also attempted to ban the playing of “fute-ball”. However, the first clear reference to a ball being used did not occur until 1486.[2]

The first reference to football in Ireland occurs in the Statute of Galway of 1527, which allowed the playing of football and archery but banned “hokie’ — the hurling of a little ball with sticks or staves” as well as other sports. (The earliest recorded football match in Ireland was one between Louth and Meath, at Slane, in 1712.)

Calcio Fiorentino

An illustration of the Calcio Fiorentino field and starting positions, from a 1688 book by Pietro di Lorenzo Bini.

In the 16th century, the city of Florence celebrated the period between Epiphany and Lent by playing a game known as “o Calcio storico” (“kickball in costume”) in the Piazza della Novere or the Piazza Santa Croce. The young aristocrats of the city would dress up in fine silk costumes and embroil themselves in a violent form of football. For example, calcio players could punch, shoulder charge, and kick opponents. Blows below the belt were allowed. The game is said to have originated as a military training exercise. The most famous match took place on February 17, 1530. While the troops of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor were besieging Florence, a game of calcio was organised as a show of defiance. In 1580, Count Giovanni de’ Bardi di Vernio wrote Discorso sopra ‘l giuoco del Calcio Fiorentino. This is sometimes credited as the earliest known published rules of any football game. The game was not played between January 1739 and May 1930, when it was revived to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the match mentioned above. Calcio is still played, mostly as a tourist attraction.

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Records of boxing activity disappeared after the fall of the Roman Empire. The sport would later resurface in England during the early 18th century in the form of bare-knuckle prizefighting. The first documented account of a bare-knuckle fight in England appeared in 1681 in the “London Protestant Mercury,” and the first English bare-knuckle champion was James Figg in 1719. This is also the time when the word “boxing” first came to be used.

Early bare-knuckle fighting was crude with no written rules. There were no weight divisions, round limits and no referee. Modern rules banning gouging, grappling, biting, headbutting, fish-hooking and blows below the belt were absent.

The first boxing rules, called the London Prize Ring rules, were introduced by heavyweight champion Jack Broughton in 1743 to protect fighters in the ring where deaths sometimes occurred. Under these rules, if a man went down and could not continue after a count of 30 seconds, the fight was over. Hitting a downed fighter and grasping below the waist were prohibited. Broughton also invented “mufflers” (padded gloves), which were used in training and exhibitions.

In 1838, the London Prize Ring rules were expanded in detail. Later revised in 1853, they stipulated the following:

• Fights occurred in a 24-foot-square ring surrounded by ropes.
• If a fighter was knocked down, he had to rise within 30 seconds of his own power to be allowed to continue.
• Biting, headbutting and hitting below the belt were declared fouls.

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The game of billiards dates back to the 15th century but snooker is a more recent invention. In the late 19th century billiards games were popular among British army officers stationed in India, and players used to experiment with variations on the game. Due to the fact that billiards was a two-player game, multi-player variations such as life pool (where different coloured balls were use as cue and/or object balls, depending on the situation or number of players) and pyramid pool (fifteen red balls racked in a triangle where each player received a point per ball potted) became popular. Black pool was a form of pyramid pool that took the black ball from a life pool set so a player could pot a red then the black for more points. The most commonly accepted story is that, at the officers’ mess in Jabalpur some time in 1875, a Colonel Sir Neville Chamberlain suggested adding coloured balls to black pool so that the variation featured fifteen reds, a yellow, green, pink and black (blue and brown were added some years later). The word ‘snooker’ was army slang for a first-year cadet. During a game a cadet missed a shot and Chamberlain said to him: “Why you’re a regular snooker!” After explaining the meaning to his fellow peers, Chamberlain added that they were perhaps all snookers at this game. The term was adopted for the new variation and has been in use ever since.^[1] British billiards champion John Roberts travelled to India in 1885, where he met Chamberlain. Chamberlain explained the new game to him, and Roberts subsequently introduced it to England.

Snooker championships date back to 1916. In 1927, Joe Davis helped establish the first professional world championship, and won its prize of £6.10s (£6.50, equivalent to about £200 or $348 today). He went on to win every subsequent world championship until 1946, when he retired from tournament play. The trophy he donated all those years ago is still awarded to the world champion.

A dispute between the professionals and the Billiards Association & Control Council (BA&CC, the game’s then-governing body) meant that there were only two entrants for the ‘official’ world championship – Horace Lindrum (Australia) beat Clark McConachy (New Zealand). However, the professionals organised their own ‘world championship’ (termed the Professional Match-Play Championship) between 1952 and 1957, and the winners of this version are generally accepted as the World Champion. Nevertheless, it is Lindrum’s name that is engraved on the familiar trophy.

Snooker suffered a decline in the 1950s and 1960s, so much so that no tournament was held from 1958 to 1963. In 1969, the BBC, in order to demonstrate their new colour broadcasts, launched a new snooker tournament, called Pot Black. The multi-coloured game, many of whose players were just as colourful, caught the public interest, and the programme’s success wildly exceeded expectations. Ted Lowe, the commentator famous for his whispering delivery, was the driving-force behind Pot Black, which survived until well into the 1980s.

In the early 1970s, the world championship received little TV coverage. However, in 1976 it was featured for the first time and very quickly became a mainstream professional sport. World rankings were introduced in 1977. Money poured into the game, and a new breed of player, typified by Steve Davis, young, serious and dedicated, started to emerge. The first maximum break of 147 in televised tournament was made by Davis against John Spencer in the Lada Classic, Oldham, in 1982. The first 147 at the World Championships (Crucible, Sheffield) was by the Canadian Cliff Thorburn. The top players became sterling millionaires. There was even a comic snooker song in the pop charts: Snooker Loopy by Chas and Dave, featuring contributions from a host of players including Steve Davis and Willie Thorne.

Perhaps the peak of this golden age was the World Championship of 1985, when 18.5 million people (one third of the population of the UK) watching BBC2 saw Dennis Taylor lift the cup after a mammoth struggle against Davis that finished with the potting of the last possible ball (with the exception of a re-spotted black), at 00:20 after a gruelling Sunday night. The 2006 final has since surpassed this with Graeme Dott beating Peter Ebdon at 00:53. To this day, polls rank the 1985 World Snooker Championship final amongst UK TV’s most memorable all-time moments. With seven wins in the modern era, Stephen Hendry is often considered the most successful player ever.

Snooker remains immensely popular in the United Kingdom, second only to football amongst television viewers. Indeed, it has recently been referred to as “the most mesmerising sport on television” by a BBC advert for their coverage of the 2006 World Championships.

References

1. ^ Billiards – The Official Rules & Records Book, US ISBN 1558211896

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Games between teams hitting an object with curved sticks have been played throughout the world since prehistoric times. The word “hockey” has been used since the 16th century, but its etymology is uncertain. It may derive from the Old French word hoquet, shepherd’s crook, but it may also derive from the Middle Dutch word hokkie which is the diminutive of hok, meaning literally shack or doghouse, but which in popular use meant goal. Many of these games were developed for fields, though where conditions allowed, they were also played on icy conditions , as shown in 16th-century Dutch paintings where a number of townsfolk play a hockey-like game on a frozen canal.

European immigrants brought various versions of hockey-like games to North America, such as the Scottish sport of shinty, and the closely-related Irish sport of hurling. Where necessary these seem to have been adapted for icy conditions; for example, a colonial Williamsburg newspaper records hockey being played in a snow storm in Virginia. Both English- and French-speaking Canadians played hockey on frozen rivers, lakes, and ponds using cheese cutters strapped to their boots, and early paintings show hockey being played in Nova Scotia. There are claims that ice hockey was invented in Windsor, Nova Scotia and named after an individual, as in ‘Colonel Hockey’s game’[2]. Proponents of this theory point out that the surname Hockey exists in the district surrounding Windsor, though this is an unlikely coincidence. Author Thomas Chandler Haliburton wrote of boys from King’s College School in Windsor playing “hurley on the ice” when he was a student there around 1800.[3]. These early games may have absorbed the physically aggressive aspects of what the Mi’kmaq Aboriginal First Nation in Nova Scotia called dehuntshigwa’es (lacrosse). The first game to use a puck rather than a ball took place in 1860 on Kingston Harbour, Ontario, involving mostly Crimean War veterans. In 1943, the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association declared Kingston the birthplace of hockey, based on a recorded 1886 game played between students of Queen’s University and the Royal Military College of Canada. Subsequent research has shown numerous earlier examples of the game of hockey. The Society for International Hockey Research contends that an earlier game of hockey on ice occurred in Halifax in 1859, based on a Boston Evening Gazette article published that year. Furthermore, in 1843 a British Army officer in Kingston wrote “Began to skate this year, improved quickly and had great fun at hockey on the ice”. More recently Sir John Franklin wrote in a letter in 1825 that “The game of hockey played on the ice was the morning sport” while on the Great Bear Lake during one of his Arctic expeditions. ^[1]

Ye Gude Olde Days, from Hockey: Canada’s Royal Winter Game, 1899.

Notes

1. ^ Hockey night in Kingston.

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Modern greyhound racing has its origins in coursing. The first recorded attempt at racing greyhounds on a straight track was made beside the Welsh Harp reservoir, Hendon in 1876, but this experiment did not develop. The sport emerged in its recognizable modern form, featuring circular or oval tracks, with the invention of the mechanical or artificial hare 1912 by Owen Patrick Smith. O.P. Smith had altruistic aims for the sport to stop the killing of the jack rabbits and see “greyhound race as we see horses”. The certificates system led way to parimutuel betting, as quarry and on-course gambling, in the United States during the 1920s. In 1926, armed with the Smith patents and a hand shake, it was introduced to Britain by an American, Charles Munn, in association with Major Lyne-Dixon, a key figure in coursing, and Brigadier-General Critchley. The deal went sour with Smith never hearing from Munn again. Like the American, International Greyhound Racing Association, the In.G.R.A. Munn and Critchley launched the Greyhound Racing Association, and held the first British meeting at Manchester’s Belle Vue. The sport was successful in cities and town throughout the U.K. – by the end of 1927, there were forty tracks operating. The sport was particularly attractive to predominantly male working-class audiences, for whom the urban locations of the tracks and the evening times of the meetings were accessible, and to patrons and owners from various social backgrounds. Betting has always been a key ingredient of greyhound racing, both through on-course bookmakers and the totalisator, first introduced in 1930. Like horse racing, it is popular to bet on the greyhound races as a form of parimutuel gambling.

In common with many other sports, greyhound racing enjoyed its highest attendances just after the Second World War—for example, there were 34 million paying spectators in 1946. The sport experienced a decline from the early 1960s, when the 1960 Betting and Gaming Act permitted off-course cash betting, although sponsorship, limited television coverage, and the later abolition of on-course betting tax have partially offset this decline.

Greyhound racing is undergoing a resurgence in popularity as more and more people discover it as both a sport and a form of gambling.

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Cross-country skiing originated in Fennoscandian countries in prehistoric times. It was still widely practiced in 19th century as a way of moving from place to place in winter. Elks, deers and other animals were hunted by skiing. Nowadays almost everyone in Finland and Norway have and regularly use skis.

Skiing may have also been practiced by Native Americans for similar lengths of time, although the Norwegian emigrants Snowshoe Thompson and Jackrabbit Johannsen are widely credited for introducing the sport to North America.

This form of skiing has been used by explorers by means of transport, and all Nordic armies have ski-trained infantry for winter operations. Skies gave important mobility to the Finnish army in Winter War that allowed the small groups of Finns to beat large armies of Russians. Similar tactics that utilizes skies has been used in many times by the Finns and Karelians in the past. Pre-modern skiing troops were armed with crossbows and ski poles which had a spearhead on the other end.

Traditionally, all of the equipment was made of natural materials: wooden skis and bamboo poles with leather hand straps. Footwear was usually sturdy leather boots with thick soles. Bindings evolved from simple straps made of twisted wood-based thread, to the so-called Kandahar binding with the fastening of both the boot’s front and back, to the ‘Rat Trap’ front-only binding, which is today known as the Nordic norm, and has evolved in various modern bindings.

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Earliest evidence suggests that boxing was prevalent in North Africa during 4000 BC and the Mediterranean in 1500 BC.

A Greek ruler named Thesus, who ruled around 900 B.C., was entertained by men who would be seated in front of each other and beat another with their fists until one of them was killed. In time, the fighters fought on their feet and wore gloves (not padded) and wrappings on their arms below the elbows, but were otherwise naked when competing. First accepted as an Olympic sport (the ancient Greeks called it Pygme/ Pygmachia) in 688 BC, participants in the ancient games trained on punching bags (called a korykos). Keeping their fingers free, fighters then wore leather straps (called himantes) on their hands, wrists, and sometimes lower arms, to protect them from injury.

In Ancient Rome, fighters were usually criminals and slaves. They hoped to become champions and gain their freedom. However, free men also fought. Eventually, fist fighting became so popular that even aristocrats started fighting, but that was banned by the ruler Augustus. In 500 A.D., the sport was banned by Theodoric the Great.

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