A Great Game Read Online Free Page A

attain the glory of the championship. Once paid, the athlete was labelled socially disreputable, morally deviant and, as we shall see, even disloyal to the nation. The belief was simply that, once professionalized, athletics were no longer “sport” at all, but simply the worst kind of illicit moneygrubbing.
    Today, such a stark dichotomy may strike the reader as almost unbelievable. It is, however, exactly how hard-line amateur advocates saw the world. Indeed, a significant element of society was determined to destroy the career—on and off the ice—of any young athlete who accepted money to play sports.
    This article highlights the social discrimination to which the professional athlete was subjected a century ago. Such attitudes were already becoming controversial.
    An account of the plight of young John P. “Jack” Carmichael, which appeared in the Toronto News on February 2, 1901 (with his name misspelled), illustrates perfectly the disgrace in which some held paid athletes. Carmichael’s previous hockey friends refused to be on the sameice surface with the “now notorious professional” and a prospective employer denied him “a lucrative position.” His crime? He is reputed to have accepted a small fee for playing a game “gentlemen” played only for sport and fun.
    In the eyes of the amateur sporting authorities of the day, to be professional warranted a lifetime ban. One would be barred not just from the sport in question, but from any sanctioned athletic activity and all associated social circles. And a professional was not merely someone who accepted pay for play; it included anyone who ever played with or against a professional. So serious was the charge of professionalism that, contrary to British legal traditions, the accused was required to prove his innocence.
    The reality is that the argument over professionalism in sport was one of the great moral debates of the era throughout the Anglo-American world. The paying of athletes in those days has been compared with the use of performance-enhancing drugs today. The key difference is that the latter is almost universally condemned—at least where such drugs are intentionally employed. Conversely, the question of professionalism a century ago created deep social divisions.
    Why amateur advocates believed these things so passionately—indeed, fanatically—is now rather hard to explain. Suffice it to say that “respectable” sports in Great Britain had long been the preserve of “gentlemen” who neither needed nor sought remuneration. There were clear class distinctions when it came to sporting activities. “Gentlemen” were, of course, amateurs. “Professionals” were, for all intents and purposes, “undesirables.” 23
    Amateurism had its roots in the noncommercial society of the aristocracy. The nobility had established elite recreations as an offshoot of military training. In an evolving United Kingdom, the ascendant bourgeoisie gradually assumed aspects of this athletic culture. It also developed the exclusive sports clubs, with a proscription on pay gradually replacing explicit class criteria. 24
    Amateurism also dovetailed with the dominant Christian thinking of the period. The idea that “play” could be “work” seemed nonsensical to the values of both industrious Protestantism and otherworldly Catholicism. Play was for boys; work was for men. Athletics could not be seenas an occupation. Rather, its social utility was viewed as restricted to the development of the young. 25
    The most robust manifestation of such ideas in the Victorian era was the concept of “muscular Christianity.” While the idea could be traced back to the apostle Paul, it was the contemporary writings of such authors as Thomas Hughes in England and Ralph Connor in Canada that re-energized the thinking. Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days , published in 1857,