Unit 16 sports and games
Introduction
I
n
the USA people take their sport extremely seriously as participants
and spectators, so sport is a huge industry in their country. Few
countries are more sports conscious than the US. Whether they are
fans or players, the millions of Americans who participate in sports
are usually passionate about their games. There is more to being a
baseball fan than buying season tickets to the home team’s games. A
real fan not only can recite each player’s batting average, but
also competes with other fans to prove who knows the answers to the
most obscure and trivial questions about the sport.
Many Americans' idea of relaxation is some form of energetic exercise, such as a vigorous game of tennis or racquetball. It's estimated that some 95 per cent of Americans take part in sports at least once a month, as participants or spectators. The most popular participant sports are swimming, cycling, jogging, hiking and callisthenics. The top spectator sports are baseball, American football and basketball, all of which originated in the US. Other popular sports include aerial sports, boxing, golf, handball, ice hockey, hunting, motor racing, racquetball, skiing and other winter sports, softball, tennis, tenpin bowling, athletics, watersports and wrestling. Many sports that are primarily amateur sports or played purely for fun in other countries are played professionally in the US, often for big money prizes (e.g. tenpin bowling and volleyball).
Exercise and amateur sport is often taken as part of the latest fashion craze, rather than for enjoyment or health. Americans pursue the latest fitness fads with a passion and are convinced that staying fit requires more than regular exercise and a balanced diet. For anyone who claims a real desire to stay healthy, fitness has become a science of quantification involving weighing, measuring, monitoring, graph charting, and computer printouts. These are the tools for knowing all about pulse and heart rates, calorie intake, fat cell per muscle cell ratios, and almost anything else that shows the results of a workout.
Opportunities for keeping fit and playing sports are numerous. Jogging is extremely popular throughout the country, perhaps because it is the cheapest and most accessible sport. Most cities and towns have official jogging circuits in parks and along beaches. Aerobic exercise and training with weigh-lifting machines are two activities which more and more men and women are pursuing. Books, videos, and fitness-conscious movie-stars have promoted the muscular, healthy body as the American beauty ideal. Most communities have recreational parks with tennis and basketball courts, a football or soccer field, and outdoor grills for picnics. These parks generally charge no fees for the use of these facilities. Some large corporations, hospitals, and churches have indoor gymnasiums and organize informal team sports. For those who can afford membership fees there are exclusive country clubs and health and fitness centers. Their members have access to all kinds of indoor and outdoor sports: swimming, volleyball, golf, racquetball, handball, tennis, and basketball. Most clubs provide professional coaching and training programs. The latest fashion is to have your own personal trainer, i.e. someone to coach and train you in your daily fitness regime. Many wealthy Americans have home gyms, and executives often have the use of a gym at their office.
Football, baseball and basketball, the most popular sports in America, originated in the United States and are largely unknown or only minor pastimes outside North America. The football season starts in early autumn and is followed by basketball, played in spring and summer. Besides these top three sports, ice hockey, boxing, golf, car racing, horse racing and tennis have been popular for decades and attract large audiences.
Professional sport is a large and profitable branch of show business. Professional teams are owned and run purely as businesses and are occasionally sold or even moved to another location when business is bad (the most famous example is the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team, which moved from New York to Los Angeles in 1957). Professional athletes are paid huge amounts, particularly in top sports such as baseball, basketball and American football, where the average player earns over $1 million a year and star players earn astronomical salaries.
The commercial aspects of American professional sports can make or break an athlete’s career. Young, talented athletes make it to the top because they are exceptionally talented, but not in every case because they are the best. Without agents who line up sponsors and publicity, a player has a very difficult time moving from amateur to professional sports. To get the endorsement of corporate advertising sponsors, talented young players have a much better chance for success if they are also attractive. Many top players earn more money a year in product endorsement fees than in prize money.
The major US TV networks each broadcast an average of around 500 hours of sports programs a year, and cable stations such as the Entertainment Sports Programming Network (ESPN) broadcast 24 hours a day. The TV networks compete vigorously for the TV rights to top sporting events. Many sports get half of their revenues from the networks (e.g., National Football League teams get about 65 per cent of their revenues from television). The guaranteed mass viewing means advertisers will pay networks a lot of money to sponsor the program with announcements for their products. Advertisers for beer, cars, and men’s products are glad of the opportunity to push their products to the predominantly male audience of the big professional sports. Professional sport is dominated by TV, which often determines the venue and timing of events and even influences the rules of some sports; many sports have “official time-outs” (in addition to normal time-outs), which are simply breaks to allow TV advertisements to be screened.
One of the unique show business aspects of American sport is the use of “cheerleaders”. These are usually scantily-dressed, athletic, young women (but also men) who dance and perform acrobatic feats to incite the crowd to support their team. Other stimuli are marching bands (before and during matches). American sports fans, many of whom paint their faces and dress up as “clowns”, are notably better behaved and less violent than their counterparts in many other countries.
School and
college sport is extremely important, as it's the training ground for
the nation's professionals. In most sports, playing for a college
team precedes becoming a professional player and without the
inter-collegiate sports system many professional sports would cease
to exist. College sports are organized by the National College
Athletic Association (
NCAA).
Rivalry between colleges and universities for top athletes is
intense, and most offer scholarships to promising athletes
irrespective of their academic abilities (a joke says that a football
player's IQ is usually measured in pounds and inches). High schools
and colleges employ professional coaches and usually have teams for
athletics, baseball, basketball, football, gymnastics, tennis and
wrestling. Many also have fencing, hockey, golf, soccer, swimming,
volleyball and various other teams. Teams and events are
institutionalized and contribute to college publicity and revenue.
Sports bring in money to colleges from ticket sales and television
rights, so colleges like to have winning teams. Football and
basketball are the most lucrative college sports because they attract
the most fans.
Increasing commercialization of college sports is part of a larger trend. American sports are becoming more competitive and more profit-oriented. As a result, playing to win is emphasized more than playing for fun. This is true from the professional level all the way down to the level of children’s Little League sports teams, where young players are encouraged by such slogans as “A quitter never wins, a winner never quits” and “Never be willing to be second best”.
American football
American football, which in the US is called simply football, is an almost exclusively American sport (Canadian football is similar), but it is gaining popularity in Europe. Professional football is played by teams in the National Football League (NFL), divided into the National Football Conference (NFC) and the American Football Conference (AFC), each of which comprises an Eastern, a Central and a Western division. Each division contains five or six teams, a total of 31.
Foreigners may initially find American football complicated, slow and boring. Nevertheless, once you learn the rules and strategy, you may join the millions of Americans who find it fascinating and exciting.
A football field is 100 yards (91.4m) long and 40 yards (36.6m) wide, plus a 10-yard (9.14m) end-zone at each end, painted with the home team's name. The field has parallel lines painted across it at 5-yard (4.57m) intervals and shorter lines every yard; 10-yard (9.14m) intervals are indicated by huge numbers. Like rugby, American football is played with an oval ball and the basic aims are the same, although that's where the similarity ends. A team can have 11 players on the field at any one time. Professional teams have entirely separate offensive and defensive teams, depending on whether they're in possession of the ball (and attacking) or without the ball (and defending). Because of the highly specialized nature of the game, a defender such as a right tackle may play for ten years and never touch the ball in play, except by accident. Players are huge, averaging around six feet six inches (1.98m) and weighing around 240 pounds (109kg), and look even bigger in battle dress, which includes copious amounts of padding and protective gear.
A
game lasts for one hour of playing time. This is divided into four
quarters of 15 minutes each, with a 12 minute break at half-time. If
the score is tied at the end of the fourth quarter, the game goes
into overtime, the winner being the first team to score.
The professional football season runs from August to December and culminates in the Super Bowl in January on “Super Bowl Sunday”, the championship play-off between the champions of the National and American Conferences. This game is watched by over 40 per cent of US households and throughout the world and to Americans is the “most important sporting event in the universe.”
Baseball
Baseball is the US's national sport and was first played in its modern form in 1839 at Cooperstown, New York. There are two major baseball leagues with a total of 30 teams: the American League, and the National League. Both are divided into East (five teams), Central (five or six teams) and West (four or five teams) divisions. The season runs from April to early October, with games (a total of 162 per team in each league) being played almost every day during this period, many at night under floodlights. In October, the top two teams in the American and National leagues compete against each other in the “playoffs” to decide who will contest the World Series, played over seven games.
In addition to the major league clubs, there are also numerous minor league clubs in small towns known as “farm” teams, so called because they supply the top clubs with players. College, high school and little league baseball (played by children from the age of seven to their teens) are also hugely popular.
Baseball is a peculiarly American sport, although it has been successfully exported to a few countries, including Canada, Japan and Taiwan. It usually takes a foreigner some time to understand it. Games usually last two or three hours and are normally played in the evening. In a baseball game there are two teams of nine players. Players must hit a ball with a bat and then run around four bases. A player who goes around all the bases scores a run for its team. The team that finishes with more runs wins the game. Baseball has a language all its own and many baseball terms have found their way into everyday speech, the most common of which is to “strike out”, i.e. to fail.
Basketball
Basketball was invented in the US in 1891 and was exported during World War I by American servicemen. The National Basketball Association (NBA) was formed in 1949 and has two leagues: the Eastern Conference with 15 teams (divided between the Atlantic and Central divisions) and the Western Conference with 15 teams (divided between the Midwest and Pacific divisions). Teams play over 80 games during the main season, running from September or October to April. The top teams are involved in the playoffs in late May and June, to determine the NBA playoff teams and world champions.
The skills demonstrated by professional basketball players (often black and seven feet tall) are worlds apart from the amateur game played in many countries. Games last for 48 minutes, which is a long time considering the speed of the game.
College basketball teams rival professional teams in popularity and skills, and it's a major spectator sport in its own right, with tickets for the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) basketball tournament sold out a year in advance. As with all professional sports, high school and college teams are the training grounds for would-be pros, although the rules of professional and collegiate basketball differ slightly. There's also a strong women's collegiate league. Unlike football and baseball, in addition to being a major professional sport, basketball is played for fun by many Americans, particularly in poor inner-city neighborhoods.