Sport National Origins

[Levin]

Following on from discussing Water Polo in the Olympic thread I was wondering where current internationally played sports come from. I would say codified but that's probably too strict, though to some degree codification must be considered because lots of sports have very old origins in different places.

So to begin.

United States of America
American Football
Baseball
Basketball
Volleyball

United Kingdom
Football
Rugby (just Union?)
Cricket
Water Polo
Golf

Denmark
Handball

India
Polo (?)

[Reed John]

Sport National Origins

Ice hockey was, more or less, invented in the UK, but Canada turned it into a real sport. For a while, it was unclear if bandy or hockey (which still mean the same thing in some countries) would be the more popular game, especially in Russia. But in order to dominate the Olympics, the Soviets focused on hockey.

[Walt Flanagans Dog]

Sport National Origins

Not only did Rugby League originate in the UK, it can trace its origins precisely to the George Hotel in Huddersfield in 1895.

[jwdd27]

Sport National Origins

(WFD got there first)

I go past the birthplace of Rugby League blue plaque every day on the way to work.

I presume Dressage as a sport would be French

[Levin]

Sport National Origins

I've never heard of Bandy. Looking it up it requires a massive piece of ice to play on. Surely that limits popularity?

Ah, I suspected that about League but felt that it might have been AUstralian.

[Walt Flanagans Dog]

Sport National Origins

Bandy is reasonably big in Sweden, they play the national finals at big football grounds and get decent crowds for them.

[Snake Plissken]

Sport National Origins

I always liked the reason you can skate behind the goal in hockey - the initial rules were adapted from rugby, where you could only pass backwards.

[Mumpo]

Sport National Origins

Snooker - India

[Wouter D]

Sport National Origins

The Netherlands - Korfbal

[Haddock]

Sport National Origins

Football was invented in China by Sepp Blatter

[Reed John]

Sport National Origins

Levin wrote: I've never heard of Bandy. Looking it up it requires a massive piece of ice to play on. Surely that limits popularity?

Pretty much requires a flooded football field, so yes.

[Reed John]

Sport National Origins

Broomball - Canada
Ultimate - USA

[tee rex]

Sport National Origins

Who invented swimming?

[Reed John]

Sport National Origins

Wikipedia says Britain had the first organized meetings as it had the first indoor pool Early on, what we call the breaststroke was the default option.

Ben Franklin was one of the only people in the colonies who could swim. He learned from a French book, the name of which I forget.

[Gerontophile]

Sport National Origins

I think baseball is English although it's disputed.

Based on a French game.

[Reed John]

Sport National Origins

No. Not really. There were lots of different bat and ball games around, in Europe and baseball emerged out of that, but the first rules were created here and then evolved here.

http://www.19cbaseball.com/rules.html

[Gerontophile]

Sport National Origins

They were codified in 1845 by an American of a NY club.

The earliest known reference is 1744 in Surrey. The thread title is sport origins.

[Reed John]

Sport National Origins

Gerontophile wrote: They were codified in 1845 by an American of a NY club.

The earliest known reference is 1744 in Surrey. The thread title is sport origins.

Yeah, but by that logic American football was invented at The Rugby School. Modern baseball is very different from the 1845 rules and even more different than what came before it.

[Gerontophile]

Sport National Origins

You can kick in rugby, you can't in Gridiron.

So, by your logic, modern baseball is not in fact baseball, if the 1845 rules baseball is not the same as the game known as baseball written about in 1744.

*But, I concede that if the thread is about when the rules were set, then it is American.

[Reed John]

Sport National Origins

Gerontophile wrote: You can kick in rugby, you can't in Gridiron.

So, by your logic, modern baseball is not in fact baseball, if the 1845 rules baseball is not the same as the game known as baseball written about in 1744.

*But, I concede that if the thread is about when the rules were set, then it is American.

Sorry, I didn't mean to stake out 1845 as the beginning of baseball. More like the beginning of the beginning of baseball. It was the starting point for a relatively rapid evolution into something unique. The fork in the road. That website covers the part of that evolution that happened in the 19th century, which was most of it, although it continued to evolve into the early 20th century into what we recognize now culminating with the birth of the "live-ball" era in 1920. And all of that happened in North America, mostly in the northeastern US. Mexico, Japan, and the Carribean got into a little later but didn't change it much.

What really distinguishes baseball from rounders or Welsh baseball is the way the pitcher-batter duel works, but that evolved gradually from the batter calling for a certain kind of pitch into what we have now.

In the history of sports, usually picking a point where one sport became two (or three or four or five) is usually all gray-area and vaguery, a bit like differentiating species, because it usually changed one small rule at a time, so there wasn't always an obvious moment when they had invented something new rather than playing a slightly modified version of something old. And in Australia and North America especially, there wasn't much opportunity or point in trying to reconcile their new rules with whatever they were playing in Europe, so over time it just split apart, not unlike the way the evolution of animals was unique in Australia.

American football is a great example of that.
The first big split between American football and rugby was Walter Camp's introduction of the line-of-scrimmage (although Rugby League later adopted something sort of like it). But even after that, there was a lot more kicking in American football than there is now. More like rugby or Gaelic football, with points scored by kicking through the goal from the run of play (drop kicks like that are still legal, but nobody does it.) At one stage, getting a touchdown wasn't worth any points. It just gave the team a free kick on goal. But over time, they gradually added points to the touchdown and reduced them from the "conversion" kick so that to this day, a touchdown is worth six points, but a team still has to "convert" a kick attempt for one point or get a two-point "conversion." They're "converting" the opportunity into points. So now, the extra-point is like a vestigial tail. Indeed, kicking could be taken out of American football completely and nobody (except kickers) would miss it.

The kicking was taken out of the game so gradually, by the time they reached a point when somebody might have said "Hey, we're not really kicking it much any more, maybe we should call this handegg instead of football," the horse had already left the barn and the name was stuck in the language.

Princeton and Rutgers claim to have played the first college football game in 1869, but that wasn't really anything like American football. It was using the "London Rules" and more like soccer or Gaelic football, but not really the same as either of those either, from what I can gather.

The next big shift in rules away from rugby was the forward pass. At first, an incomplete forward pass was a 15 yard penalty, so attempts were rare. But that eventually changed because they needed to open up the game lest too many people get killed and the university presidents ban it. So football that can be said to really look like modern American football more than rugby (or a street brawl) wasn't in place until around 1910. And it's changed a lot since then. Even games from the 80s are noticeably different from contemporary games in lots of ways other than the uniforms and haircuts. By contrast, baseball looks a lot like it did 30 years ago except for the uniforms and the astroturf and the haircuts.

There aren't many sports where you can say so and so invented it on this day in this place. Basketball fits that description with James Naismith, but basketball fifty years ago looks radically different than the modern game, let alone the peach-basket thing he invented.

[Sam]

Sport National Origins

Very interesting post, Reed.

Anyway - pato originated in Argentina. And mercifully appears never to have become popular anywhere else (or, for that matter, here to any great degree).

[ad hoc]

Sport National Origins

I'm pretty sure most competitive versions of skiing (jumping, downhill, slalom, cross country, biathlon, etc) originated in Norway

[tee rex]

Sport National Origins

As featured in a quiz by me, which - gulp! - was nearly a decade ago on old OTF.

(edit - to Sam)

[Exiled off Main Street]

Sport National Origins

Gerontophile wrote: You can kick in rugby, you can't in Gridiron.

Don't tell Doug Flutie unless you mean kicking for touch ?

[longeared]

Sport National Origins

Haddock wrote: Football was invented in China by Sepp Blatter

I thought it was invented by Sky Television in 1992. Did it exist in other countries before that?