A Great Game Read Online Free Page B

was hugely popular for decades.
    The simple story portrayed the friendship between two youngsters, Tom and Arthur, and their development as God-fearing, decent young men who were as diligent with their nightly prayers as they were as fair-playing, determined teammates on the cricket pitch or rugby field. As true “gentlemen,” the notion of playing any game for rewards other than health, fitness and friendship would have appalled them.
    Hockey on Ottawa’s Rideau Canal, Christmas 1901.
    It was believed that such athletic activity, by instilling the values of toughness and teamwork in young men, would engender a dedication to wider civic responsibilities. As in aristocratic times, this would includeboth the fitness and the willingness to participate in military service. Robert Baden-Powell’s scouting movement famously began as an exercise in such training, building up the manhood of young boys through the teaching of noncombat skills that could be applied to battlefield situations. Lord Baden-Powell had been influenced by the writings of Canadian author and naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton, himself a firm believer in muscular Christianity.
    Amateurism in Canada had experienced some unique frontier twists. Although the country never had an aristocratic “leisure class,” its first amateur codes did contain the old-world restrictions against labourers. To these it added barriers based on race and ethnicity. Often cited is the 1873 rule of the Montreal Pedestrian Club, one of the country’s earliest definitions of an amateur: “One who has never competed in any open competition or for public money, or for admission money, or with professionals for a prize, public money or admission money, nor has ever, at any period of his life taught or assisted in the pursuit of athletic exercises as a means of livelihood, or is a labourer or an Indian.” 26
    As in Britain, Canadian amateurism by the end of the nineteenth century had come to be defined by the absence of pay rather than the absence of social standing. What remained incontrovertible, however, was that amateurism by its nature was rooted in an agenda of social exclusion. The “amateur” was never himself defined; he was only what he was “not.” The amateur was not the “professional”—that is, not one who possessed professional characteristics or engaged in professional behaviours. Exclusion was thus the essence of all amateur definitions.
    In its defence—although such rationalizations are difficult—this aversion to professionalism also had a basis in historical experience. “Professional” sports had their origin in the culture of the working-class tavern and the travelling show, realities that had likewise been brought from the Mother Country. Sports as business had thus long been associated with things like bare-knuckle fisticuffs, cockfighting and “hippodroming.” The last were barnstorming tours of the countryside exhibiting “supposedly authentic athletic contests engaged in solely as a means of making money and drawing a large gate.” 27 Usually such “contests” involved horses, but also team sports and fighters, and are considered to be the precursor to professional wrestling.
    This early “pro” athletic culture was not pretty. Promoters and their clients did often engage in cheating, rigging, intimidation, violence, hooliganism, gambling and even less savoury activities. Most shockingly, they did not hesitate to desecrate the Sabbath, an affront that was particularly unacceptable to those who lived in and believed in “Toronto the Good.” To the social establishment—the bourgeois leaders who were establishing the various forms of modern, organized, “scientific” sport—all such behaviour was ultimately attributable to the very nature of “professionalism” itself.
    Of course, amateur definitions were in practice