Almanac Book Review: ‘Games People Played: A Global History Of Sport’ by Wray Vamplew

Wray Vamplew, Games People Played: A Global History Of Sport, Reaktion Books, London, 2021, HB, 454 pp., £20.00.

 

Sport is something which is important to many of us; we play, watch, talk, write and read about it. As two of Australia’s leading comics have observed, ‘Too much sport is never enough’. Historians and other academics traditionally ignored sport, not seeing it as a serious area of scholarly pursuit – other issues were seemingly more important. This began to change in the 1970s as scholars across a number of disciplines decided to study sport; whether it be history, economics, law, sociology, psychology, industrial relations, philosophy and various branches of medical science and chemistry, with the advent of drug cheats. Wray Vamplew, an economic historian by trade, was one of these early pioneers. A Yorkshireman, he immigrated to Australia, took up Australian citizenship, returned to the ‘Old Dart’ and has devoted his career to the study of sport.

 

His Games People Played: A Global History Of Sport constitutes the fruits of half a century of research. It makes an unparalleled contribution to our understanding of sport and the role it has played in the history of the world. It is a tour de force which will be a standard work in sports history for many years to come. It combines an unbelievable breadth of topics and issues with a fine eye for detail and the oddball. Vamplew clearly works his way through issues in an engaging manner, utilising a nice ironic tone. Each and every one of these chapters would serve as a starting point for those interested in obtaining information and/or conducting research on the various issues he has examined.

 

Vamplew starts with the statement that ‘Sport is an immensely important part of any serious attempt to reconstruct a nation’s collective life’ (p. 7). He goes on to say

 

Sports history’s major contribution to the study of sport itself is the dimension of time. It can be considered the sports memory of a nation; without sports history there is sporting amnesia…History can provide the evidence to see events and incidents in their proper context and help to explain them by giving an awareness of underlying forces. If we want to know where sport is heading, it is useful to know where it has been (pp. 13-14).

 

Sports history, however, performs a more important function, for Vamplew, than this. He writes, ‘Sport is a significant part of the economic, social and political activity of nations, and historians and sociologists should want to discover the links between sport and the wider community’ (p. 23). To not incorporate knowledge of sport is to turn our backs on developing an understanding of ourselves.

 

Vamplew’s major objective in Games People Played is to debunk myths associated with sport. For example, in his ‘Introduction’ he says

…there is a general premise by those involved in promoting sport that sport is mainly a force for good. I have been a notable sceptic on this. I don’t think sport is good for neighbourliness; it often sets one community against another, one nation against another. Nor do I think sport is good for health; swimmers drown, joggers have heart attacks and all sportspeople suffer injuries (p. 10).

 

And in a section on ‘The Public Image Of Sport’ he says

 

I do not accept that sport breeds character, good or bad. I think it more likely that it accentuates existing character traits. Sport does not convert criminals into upright citizens; it may even encourage their drug-taking and make them run faster away from the law! If you cheat in life you cheat in sport. And if you are honest, you will not. Most people are complex individuals existing on a spectrum ranging from good to bad, and sport reflects this (p. 384).

 

Throughout Games People Played Vamplew debunks the notion that there was some ‘Golden Age’ of sport in the blessed past. Previous times always had their discontents defined by class, racial and gender snobbery. Vamplew continually draws attention to the ways in which social forces, often reflected in the snobbery and conceit of elites, ‘determined’ the ways in which sport was governed, organised and performed. It is only in recent decades that persons with dark coloured skins in white dominated societies have been able to roll back exclusion, segregation and discrimination. Similar statements could be made about attitudes and approaches to women’s sport, with usually white males placing restrictions on how women can engage with sport. In a chapter where he examines those who ‘control’ sport, Vamplew says ‘Rules matter because they can tell us about the attitudes and prejudices of those who set them; we can learn what they thought of violence, equality, gambling, winning and losing, and even race and gender’ (p. 314).

 

Vamplew adopts a wide definition of sport. For the purposes of Games People Played he says it ‘is what people at the time considered it to be’ (p. 8). He says that his book ‘is not a comprehensive encyclopedia of sports but an analytical history of sport in various societies at varying times’ (p. 9). While Games People Played provides an account of sport across the globe, it has a Western bias which focuses on Great Britain, Europe, America and Australia, with many of his examples drawn from these respective nations. Vamplew, of course, acknowledges this and hopes that future research will redress this imbalance.

 

Games People Played is divided into seven sections. They are the role of sports history; sport through the ages; history and evolution of nine different categories of sport (combat; hunting, shooting and fishing; equestrian; foot power to wheel power; bat and ball; football codes; water; winter and American sports where the myth of them taking over the world is debunked); social and cultural aspects; sport, politics and power; the business of sport; and the public image of sport.

 

Vamplew’s usual approach in examining various issues is to ‘establish’ it in an historical context and examine how the sport/issue evolved with the passage of time. He highlights the role that gambling played in the early development of sport and its continuing, if not growing importance. He points out that betting companies want to keep sport (clean of fixes) and unpredictable; if it is known results are fixed, there won’t be an incentive to bet! He also highlights how hoteliers and pub owners promoted sport in providing both participants and spectators with reasons to drink. Technological change and broader economic and social changes have driven innovations in sport.

 

Vamplew includes numerous references to sport in Australia. At one point he says, ‘Any nation that recruited sportsmen’s regiments in the First World War, that has turned out in thousands to pay homage at the funerals of sporting heroes, and that has declared public holidays for race meetings must have seen sport as a major ingredient in its culture’ (p. 69). Later on, he said, ‘sport has been how Australia – a relative nonentity in world politics – has attempted to find a place on the international stage’ (p. 280).

 

Wray Vamplew’s Games People Played: A Global History Of Sport is a splendid work which makes a major contribution to not only sport but to our understanding of ourselves and the world. It is a book which should be of interest to anyone with an interest in sport. If there was only one book on sport that you could or ‘needed’ to read it would be Wray Vamplew’s Games People Played: A Global History Of Sport.

 

 

More from Braham Dabscheck can be read Here.

 

 

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