1. The Dichotomy of Sports 1
HST 306 Paper 1
Jacob Garcia
February 16, 2014
The Dichotomy of Sports in America: Preserving the Order vs. Revolutionizing a Society
Ever since its advent, from neighborhood games to institutionalized competition, sports
in the United States have played significant roles in people‟s lives. Whether it be simply an
escape from a stressful workday or a platform to advocate a cause, sports continue to play an
important role in American culture. In Learning to Win: Sports, Education, and Social Change in
Twentieth-Century North Carolina, the author Pamela Grundy emphasizes the connections,
influences and reflections that sports have had on larger North Carolina society and, in extension,
the entire United States. She refutes the notion, similarly to Dave Zirin, that sports are “just a
game.” Instead, Grundy argues that sports in 20th
century North Carolina both reflected the
desire to preserve the existing order and influenced a desire for advancement and equality.
In the late 19th
century and throughout the 20th
century, American life was hierarchical:
privilege and power were closely intertwined, and, thus, white landowning males were in
complete control. African Americans and other minorities were treated as animals and savages.
Women had a confined set of domestic roles that were unthreatening to male superiority.
Essentially, people who were different from white males (whether it be race, class or gender)
were excluded from decision-making and from complete participation in the opportunity to enjoy
life. The idea of the “American Dream” was created to instill the notion that one can achieve
success and prosperity through hard work. This imagery contains a naïve optimism and
conformity to a set of inherently discriminatory rules.

2. The Dichotomy of Sports 2
Throughout American history, sports have been used to preserve and reflect this social
order.Sports were used by the ruling elite to promote masculinity and racial superiority.
Furthermore, the importance of strategy, discipline, cooperation and precision in the sporting
world were tools for the ruling elite to use sports as a means of preparing industrialists,
businessmen or military members. When African Americans, women and other oppressed
minorities began to strive for equal treatment, white males used sports as a means of racial
redemption. They reasoned that athletic superiority would indicate cognitive superiority and a
justification for enslaving everyone who fell outside their group.
Grundy provides countless examples of how sports reflected a desire to preserve an
existing order. In one instance, Grundy demonstrates how those in leadership positions
completely disregarded the dangers and violence of football in order to promote a generation of
true men: “Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. [Associate Justice of the Supreme Court] put the matter
more directly, claiming that football deaths were „a price well paid for the breeding of a race fit
for headship and command‟ ” (Grundy, 27). To demonstrate this connection between sports and
preservation of the existing order even further, Grundy relates how Theodore Roosevelt was the
“nation‟s most prominent exponent of this new vision of manhood” (Grundy, 27). Grundy goes
on to state, “Roosevelt drew on the newly popular philosophy of Social Darwinism, which cast
human history in terms of competition not between individuals but between entire races, and he
targeted his exhortations to develop virile virtues, including his advocacy of college football,
specifically at Anglo-Saxon men” (Grundy, 27).
This tactic of using sports to promote masculinity and discipline—essentials to success
and prominence in 20th
century America—not only led to further white advancement, but it also
resulted in the oppression of African Americans and women. In fact, African Americans were

3. The Dichotomy of Sports 3
initially hesitant to play football, as having success in such a violent and emotional sport would
simply be a showcase of “animal exuberance.”Essentially, “[white men] embraced a newly
assertive vision of manhood…a Darwinian struggle to reassert control,” while African
Americans were far more concerned with achieving respect and fair treatment (Grundy, 34). In
one instance, drunken white fans instigated a riot at the first football game ever played by
African Americans in Tennessee after one of the players failed to score a touchdown. The
headline of the 1897 New York Times ran, “Negroes Riot at Football” (37).
Lastly, using sports to preserve an unequal social order also resulted in a deterioration of
women‟s athletic competition. Despite a relatively quick upsurge in the popularity of women‟s
basketball in North Carolina, as athletics became more and more intertwined with manhood and
physicality, many initial supporters of women‟s sports turned into its staunchest opponents. As
many still viewed women as fragile, un-athletic and incapable of strenuous physical activity, a
new form of exercise was developed: physical education. Grundy states, “While school varsity
athletics developed growing links to the Darwinian tumult of market-oriented commerce,
physical educators sought to promote alternate ideals, emphasizing the values of harmony and
order…” (Grundy, 230). Thus, as males sought to use sports to foster manhood, female sports
suffered. While physical education is incredibly crucial to a child‟s physical and mental health in
present times, in the 20th
century it was the only form of athletics available to women.
Cooperation and femininity were now more valued in female athletics than competition or any
actual physical exertion, additional tools by which many white males used sports to support the
existing, unjust social order.
Yet to view sports as a whole as a net-negative and as unneeded to larger society would
discount its genuine importance. Just like other forms of artistic expression (such as music and

4. The Dichotomy of Sports 4
art), sportsinfluenced people to escape the monotony of everyday life. Sports did not depend
entirely on privilege and they gave people a chance to escape the oppression of the social order.
Grundy draws on many examples that demonstrate how sports served as a leisure-time activity to
escape the intense pressure of the business world. Her most striking example is her account of
industrial athletics: “For most wage laborers the autonomy and status they gained on industrial
teams stood in welcome contrast to the realities of factory production and helped blunt the
disdain with which textile workers were often regarded.” (120). Furthermore, Grundy narrates
the story of the successes of the Highland Park Mill team. With each victory over teams that
were composed of workers with more sanitary, well-paying jobs, the team began to approach life
with a great deal of confidence, “Such alternative measures of respect were enormously
important, allowing many North Carolinians to retain dignity and self-esteem even in
circumstances that often seemed degrading” (123). Granted, this resulted from an unjust existing
social order, but nevertheless sports helped textile workers gain respect and self-confidence, at
least on the playing field.
Yet Grundy goes even further with her overarching argument. Grundy not only asserts
that sports gave individuals confidence and self-assurance, but also that sports influenced
progressive actions for equality and advancement. This action was not just within the context of
sports, but within the context of larger society. For women and African Americans alike,
participating in athletics was a direct challenge to the Darwinian hierarchy that many white
males adopted. If individuals like Jackie Robinson, Jack Johnson, Muhammad Ali and Babe
Didrickson could demonstrate that they had the same abilities as white men, then they would
have even more of a reason to have the same rights. White males faced a dramatic culture

5. The Dichotomy of Sports 5
shockwhen they discovered these athletes had not just the same, but often better, abilities than
they did.
Furthermore, the popularity of athletics in American culture (compared to that of equally
important forms of artistic expression, like music and art) gave these individual athletes a
platform to advocate for a cause. Athletes like Tommie Smith and John Carlos, Muhammad Ali
and Jack Johnson, were not simply symbols for individual athletic achievement. Rather, they are
leaders, like Martin Luther King Jr. and Jane Addams, in a movement for equality and fair
treatment. In agreement with the idea that black and female athletes were representatives of a
larger movement, Grundy states, “The vision of Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who had
reached the pinnacle of their sport but still faced widespread discrimination in the country they
represented, gained its power from precisely this tension, as did Ali‟s oft-quoted phrase, „No
Viet Cong ever called me nigger‟ ” (291).
It is commonplace to hear someone complain about others taking sports too seriously.
The phrase “It‟s just a game” is commonly directed at avid sports fans. The truth is that it is not
“just a game.”Individual achievements, like those of Muhammad Ali and Babe Didrickson, along
with collective accomplishments, like the 1991 Michigan Wolverines basketball team (some may
know them as the Fab Five, as their starting lineup was comprised of five African American
Freshmen), do not simply stand for victories within the sport. Rather, they serve to influence a
desire for advancement and equality in the larger scope of American society.
At the same time, as Grundy so beautifully juxtaposes in Learning to Win,there are
dangers in too much or misguided sporting influence. Historically, sports have been used to
reflect a hierarchical social order, in which everyone who was not a white man did not have a

6. The Dichotomy of Sports 6
voice. Sports can be used as a peaceful weapon to combat this structure. However, the over-
glorification of sports is not without consequence. A nation consumed by sports can easily
producefictitious heroes who usurp power from parents and community leaders as role models. A
nation consumed by winning can easily begin to devalue academic accomplishments. A nation
consumed by power and force (aspects of many sports) can find both athletes and fans negatively
impacted: steroid use, brain trauma, domestic violence, gambling and substance abuse--all
potentially linked to sports when they are corrupted. We must recognize this dichotomy of sports
and conclude that sports will continue to shape, reflect and influence broader society. The task at
hand is to find a balance.