Sports & Spectators

The Rise of Spectator Sports

The evolution of spectator sports plays a significant role in understanding the power of angertainment. The success of spectator sports as a media product provided a business template for Angertainment, Inc.

Real spectator sports typically are unscripted so the audience doesn’t know how the contest will end. Spectators may have expectations, but those expectations may be upended. “Thats why they play the game,” some commentator will say.

Note: Professional wrestling occupies a special niche in this market. It is a pseudo-spectator sport with scripted action and improvised dialogue with special relevance to the angertainment industry.*

With spectator sports, audiences have a natural tendency to take sides—to decide to express their support for one side or the other. The contestants may be teams or individuals.

The tendency to support one side of the contest or the other may be based on the performance itself. The underdog, coming up big against a well-known adversary provides one sort of script. Two titans clashing; which one will prevail? An aging veteran playing into the twilight of a career—can she prevail one more time?

More frequently in team sports, the supporters will divide themselves by team allegiance. An audience members loyalty to one team or another may be so powerful as to be part of an individual’s self-identity. It may be passed down through generations along with season tickets. It may inspire powerful emotional connections.

Spectator sports have, over the last half century, also demonstrated another extraordinary power: Making money. Spectator sports have become a huge economic force enriching individuals, team owners, auxiliaries, and hangers-on. How did all of this come about? Here we go again, back to the Greeks.

Sports from Greece to Rome

Athletic competition undoubtedly dates back to the earliest days of humankind. Neanderthals may have competed in footraces. Children engaged in sport-like games such as tag. Men wrestled and competed in other ways; who could throw something the furthest or lift the greatest weight.

The historic record shows that the first recorded Olympics took place in Greece in 776 BCE. The running of the first marathon must have had to wait until after 470 BCE and the Battle of Marathon, but certainly there were races, wrestling, and competitions involving flinging things great distances.

These earliest competitions focused on honor and glory of the competitors. The historic records do not say that great throngs of people came to witness the competitions.

The Romans were first to put thousands of people in an arena to witness athletic competitions. Purpose-built arenas like the Roman Colosseum provided a venue for chariot racing and gladiatorial trials of arms. In some instances, blood may have heightened the drama, but clearly there was a sports-like component to the spectacles the Romans staged.

Similarly, we can find proto spectator sports in other parts of the world. There certainly must have been races, bouts, and contests of strength, informal or formal, to claim bragging rights. The record shows that there were “games” in which the inhabitants of one village faced off with the inhabitants of another. We can find records of ancient precursors to soccer and basketball. As the art of war evolved, so too did competitions in feats of arms; jousting, fencing, archery, and the like.

When these kinds of competitions occurred, there must have been spectators. But the business of attracting spectators had not yet fully developed.

In theatre, the spectator was integral. Similarly bear baiting and similar spectacles relied on “drawing a crowd.” Likely, they also encouraged gambling; wagers on who would win or last the longest, or survive. In the greater part though, the closest cousins to todays spectator sports were primarily for the competitors. Yes, there were observers. Gamblers were certainly present on the sidelines. There might have been a raised dais and seats for the lords, ladies, and other notables, but as entertainment for the masses, sporting events had not yet hit their stride.

Spectators Become Important

Real spectator sports—events designed to attract people who would buy tickets, gamble, or part with money in some other way—have early roots in fisticuffs. Bare-knuckle fights. Reports of boxing matches appeared in English newspapers in the late 17th century. England crowned its first bare-knuckle champion, James Figg, in 1719.

Fights were advertised. Newspapers promoted them and reported the results. Champions emerged. Villains as well. And rivalries, real or artificial, were discussed, stoked, and encouraged as part of the experience. All of the essential components of todays spectator sports were present in the boxing arena.

Gambling evolved to become an integral part of spectator sports as well. Pugilists fought for a “purse” that was filled by promoters of the events, but the greater part of the action occurred on the sidelines. In this way, spectator sports were a natural extension of cockfighting, dog fighting, and similar activities. However, with prize fighters, the competitors could talk, trade verbal jabs as well as real blows, and provide another dimension to the entertainment. Western civilization was evolving; developing an entertainment industry. The coarse elements of bear baiting existed side by side with theatre through the early 19th century. Prizefighting raised the entertainment value, substituting men for the fighting animals. While the threat of death was reduced, the audiences engagement with the competitors was greater.

From an entertainment perspective, spectator sports offered a major advantage over the theatre. On stage and in the arena, the central characters played roles. In theatrical presentations, however, the outcome in theatre was predetermined by the dramatist. Theatre performances came to the same predetermined conclusion time after time.

Spectator sports provided many of the same elements: protagonists, antagonists, conflict. However, with sporting events, the outcome was (at least in theory) always in doubt. Champions and challengers, heroic figures and villains, strutted and fretted their time upon the stage. Then, with the added excitement of wagering, spectators could become totally invested in the excitement of the competition.

The ground was prepared in England in the 19th century. All the pieces were in place for a giant branch of the entertainment industry to emerge.

England in 1800

It would be incorrect to say that spectator sports did not have ancient antecedents. Hippodromes in Greece and arenas such as the Colosseum in Rome hosted sporting events such as chariot races. Racing must have been one of the first, most primal sports, echoing our animal fight-or-flight instinct. Whether it was humans racing each other, riders on horseback, or some other form of locomotion, racing provided challenges, excitement, simplicity, and the elegance of an easy-to-determine victor. For most racing, the rules are painfully simple. Get off to a fair start. Follow the course. First across the finish line wins.

The drama could be increased. Hurdles and jumps could be added. Handicaps applied. Additionally, participants and spectators could become further invested in the result by gambling.

Horse racing was a popular pastime in England dating back to the Tudor era circa 1500. The first permanent English race course, Epsom Downs, was established in 1780. And as England, the dominant world power in the 19th Century, rounded into the 19th century, the era of spectator sports truly arrived.

Spectator sports evolved with the industrial revolution. The population in cities and towns swelled with manufacturing workers; a pool of potential ticket buyers and spectators; people with money who might become interested in the entertainment that sporting events might provide. As the middle and upper classes gained wealth, the idea of creating purpose-built facilities for sporting events became feasible. England became the first hotbed for spectators who wanted to cheer for the success of their teams.

Lords Cricket Ground traces its history to May, 1787. The first buildings to support the playing field after it was relocated, were built in 1814. The Pavilion that still stands on the grounds was completed in 1890. Lords is home of the world’s oldest sports museum.

The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, home of the Wimbledon tennis tournament, was founded in 1868. Croquet was the primary focus of the club at its inception, but lawn tennis, introduced in 1875, soon became the primary focus of the club. The club hosted its first championship in 1877.

By the turn of the 20th Century, England was well-covered with race tracks, sporting grounds, and football pitches—all featuring accommodations for spectators. That interest spread throughout the British Empire, and to the former colonies in North America as well.

The Saratoga Race Course in Saratoga Springs opened in 1863. Franklin Field in Philadelphia was opened in 1895; Harvard Stadium in 1903. Fenway Park dates back to 1912.

By the middle of the 20th Century, the United States was covered with stadiums, arenas, playing fields, courts, and courses. College sports had grown into a huge industry attracting millions of fans, and the very best of the college athletes went on to perform in professional baseball, football, basketball, and hockey leagues. Tennis, boxing, horse racing, and the quadrennial Olympic games attracted millions of fans.

But, as popular and ubiquitous as spectator sports had grown, it was still in its relative infancy, taking tiny baby steps. Over the next half century, as though injected with powerful steroids, the spectator sports industry would turn into a monster.

Spectator Sports and Television

Money, money, money! Thats what it’s all about.

From the very dawn of the age of television, the decade of the 1950s, spectator sports provided an important programming element. Baseball, football, and basketball games had all been televised by 1950. The Gillette Cavalcade of Sports aired boxing from Madison Square Garden in New York on Friday nights from 1946 through 1960. The pseudo-sport of professional wrestling gained an eager following via television.

Disclaimer: My father, Edward R. Kennedy, worked at the Columbus Citizen newspaper in the late 1940s where he also became involved in early television production. In later years, he said he encouraged the local TV station to televise professional wrestling and took credit for helping decide which wrestlers should win.

Spectator sports and television were made for each other. Sporting events provided hours and hours of content. No scripts were needed, no actors needed to learn lines and rehearse. Sports provided programming that was, at least in those early years, relatively inexpensive to license and easy to produce.

The payoff for the sports and the individual athletes themselves was wide exposure. The largest sporting venues in the world topped out at around 100,000 spectators. Sports on television reached millions. Television spectators, the people who introduced the term “couch potato” to the American lexicon, meant that the television industry could command better prices for advertising.

The athletes themselves benefited as well. Sports provided a path to celebrity and even in the early days, athletes found ways to cash in. They starred in commercials, endorsed products, made personal appearances, and sometimes became actors or sports commentators themselves.

Spectator sports was becoming a big business. But the best was yet to come.

The 21st Century has brought an exponential increase to the financial value of spectator sports. Every element of spectator sporting events is being monetized. Television channels invest enormous sums for the rights to broadcast games. Leagues and teams, both professional and (sort of) amateur, divide up the proceeds. The media companies earn money from their investment by selling commercial sponsorships; old fashioned commercials along with screen crawls, plugs, mentions, and product placements like the brand name logos on football coaches sideline headphones.

Stadiums are emblazoned with sponsors names; every football bowl game seems to have a sponsor associated with it; and players earn vast sums with endorsements. Michael Jordan, considered the wealthiest athlete in the world, earned close to $90 million for playing basketball from 1984 until 2003. He has been paid more than 10 times that sum—over $1 billion—by the athletic gear manufacturer Nike. Numerous reports say that Jordan earns $150 million annually from Nike today—nearly twice as much as he earned for playing basketball.

The monetization of sports has transformed the world of athletes and agents. The old value system of sports has been altered. Teamwork, team loyalty, the virtues of hard work, and importance of fair play certainly still exist, especially in low-level amateur competitions. But as soon as athletes gain any notoriety, they are drawn into a new world where name recognition can be translated into financial rewards and everyone in the high-level ecosystem wants to figure out how to get paid as much as possible.

The world of pre-professional sports has been turned upside down with the arrival of NIL (Name Image Licensing) for American college athletes. In the new college sports world, a would-be college athlete can receive a commitment of $1 million in NIL money before enrolling in a university. The money game is filtering down to high school and perhaps earlier. Professional soccer academies begin snapping up talent when players are in their early teens.

Games have become media content, and they are altered, as necessary, to make them more television-friendly. Rules are changed to accommodate commercials. Contests are scheduled for the convenience of television broadcasters, often in conflict with the best interests of the athletes and team supporters who attend the games in person. Athletes are entertainers while playing their games or any time between games.

Not all of these kinds of sponsorships are mega deals. There are scraps as well; the Old State U. offensive line may earn a few hundred dollars apiece from a local burger joint plus free meals for mentions on social media, for example. Players may earn modest sums for signing gear at shows. A benchwarmer may earn something when a team signs an NIL deal with a video game manufacturer.

Spectator sports have become a constant presence in modern American life—available 24/7 on cable television channels and via streamers. This huge business is also integral to the growth and popularity of legalized sports betting. In some of the most controversial sponsorship arrangements, universities—through their official athletic fundraising arms—are partnering with online gambling businesses. The deal: encourage university alumni (and students who are old enough) to place their bets with the official university bookmaker.

Why is all of this important? How does the world of modern spectator sports intersect with politics and the angertainment industry?

It begins with one simple reality. A lot of money is being spent in the spectator sports industry. The people who are spending this money are not throwing it away. They are getting something back. In fact, they are getting something extremely valuable. They are getting people’s attention. And they get people’s attention by focusing on the most important part of modern sports: Winning or losing.

In 1906 the sportswriter Grantland Rice ended his poem Alumnus Football with the following lines.

For when the One Great Scorer comes
To mark against your name,
He writes—not that you won or lost—
But how you played the game.

Would anyone say such a foolish thing today? Probably not, and certainly if they were playing the angertainment game.

Supporters & Fans

In England, the people who root for the home team are generally known as supporters. In the United States, however, the typical word for someone who cares about a sports team is “fan.”

The word fan, used in relation to followers of a sports team, appears in the United States in 1889. The word fan is likely to have been coined as a shortened version of the word “fanatic.” (Lexicographers say the term might have been rooted in the word fancy: as in someone who “fancies” a person, sport, or team. Fanatic seems a lot more appropriate for modern breed of sports fan.)

By the middle of the 20th century, fan was a well-established term. Celebrities lived in a world of fan mail, fan clubs, and fan magazines. The followers of sports teams were the fans in the stands. Residents of big cities that hosted more than one professional baseball team divided themselves into loyal factions; New York Giants fans had no use for the Brooklyn Dodger faithful; and they all hated people who rooted for the Yankees.

That same kind of partitioning has occurred everywhere. Alumni of Auburn University and the University of Alabama lived at the heart of a great football rivalry. Over time, residents throughout the state—even if they were not alumni—became fans of one side or the other. These kinds of rivalries grew everywhere: Michigan and Ohio State, Duke and North Carolina; Yankees and Red Sox.

Rivalries are one of the great pleasures of sports. Reporters and commentators may talk about the “hated” rivals and conjure up animosity; but for the most part the competitors enjoy rivalry games as a heightened moment of competition. A rivalry game may even be a way to salvage a season. A team may lose every preceding game before upsetting a rival and end the season feeling like big winners. Even a tie game can feel like a victory, as when undefeated Harvard met an undefeated Yale team in 1969. The game ended in a 29-29 tie score when Harvard scored 16 points in the final 42 seconds. The headline in the Harvard Crimson newspaper the next day said “Harvard Beats Yale 29-29.”

Rivalries emphasize the binary nature of sports competition. Two individuals or two teams face each other with the expectation that there will be one of two outcomes. One will win and one will lose. There are sports such as soccer in which a tie (draw) is a frequent outcome. In that, soccer is an outlier. Spectators don’t like ties; and most sports, over the years, have developed tie-breakers, to eliminate or at least minimize the number games or matches that end in a draw. Most sports: one will win and one will lose.

Good and Bad Rivalries

Most sports rivalries, on the whole, fall into a basket that we can think of as good rivalries. The rivalry heightens the competition and interest in a game; the competition is primarily for “bragging rights” for another year, and at the end of the day, the teams supporters have amicable relationships with each other.

The Army-Navy football rivalry stands nearly in a class by itself as a good—even a great—rivalry. The competition is fierce, the student bodies attend the game en masse, the atmosphere is electric. It’s not a contest between future professional players; merely a spirited competition between very good players who, in the not too distant future, will be comrades in arms defending their country.

The most remarkable part of the Army-Navy rivalry comes at the end of the game. No matter the score, the teams gather in front of one student body and sing their alma mater. Then they go to the other teams student body section, and sing the other schools alma mater. It’s a ritual, a tradition; and it says a lot about how a rivalry can encompass a wonderful set of human virtues.

Spectator sports in general as consumed today, however, tend to push rivalries in a different direction. With other exacerbating factors such as alcohol and gambling, sports rivalries and spectator sports in general, can produce a very different, ugly aftermath.

Rivalries, even good rivalries, place the participants on opposite sides of a great divide. You, your champion, the team you support—are the protagonists in a drama. They are the “good guys.” The other side becomes, by definition, antagonists. They are your adversaries. They are “bad guys.”

In televised rivalries fueled by weeks of hype, wagering, and alcohol, a friendly competition for bragging rights can morph into gloating and taunting. On the losing side, disappointment can fester, become an open wound, and turn into an angry infection.

There are even some fans who, no matter what the outcome of the competition, choose to remain angry and want to cause destruction and disruption. Soccer has been beset with the problem of “hooliganism” since the very earliest days of the sport. Relatively small groups of male fans, sometimes known as firms or ultras—attend games fully prepared for brawls and riots. These fans (true fanatics) provoke fights before, during, and after matches. Their behavior leads to additional unruly conduct from other fans and can cause panics in the stands. As a result, dozens and even hundreds of people have been killed with many more spectators injured at soccer games.

An incident in 1985 sparked by English hooligans at a stadium in Brussels left 39 people dead. As a result, the European Union of Football Associations (UEFA) banned all English clubs from its important annual championship tournament for five years.

Fan violence in the wake of a championship—sometimes even after a win—occurs in the United States with some frequency. The threat of bodily harm at games is much lower in the U.S., but there are still high levels of animosity that lead to violence and vandalism.

In one example, an Alabama football fan named Harvey Updyke used a powerful herbicide to kill two 80-year-old live oak trees on the Auburn University campus because Auburn fans celebrated wins in their rivalry by “rolling them”—draping the trees with toilet paper. After serving a little more than two months in jail, Updyke gave an explanation for his actions in a radio interview. “I wanted Auburn people to hate me as much as I hate them.”

Spectator sports, fueled by rivalries, gambling, alcohol, social media, and incessant media coverage have put the fanatic back into the fan.