@DoubleDD
It is fascinating, but if one reads history thoughtfully, not totally surprising.
At least since the time of Rome, private oligarchies and their agent representative governments have understood the power of sport to entertain, captivate, unify and distract their peoples from their own capacities to influence the business of government and business.
In short, the leaders of ancient Rome understood that the spectacle of sport was conducive to competing with religion and theater in conditioning the people to identify with the group and so believe they had a strong common interest and benefit in sacrificing for that common interest.
The early middle ages came to be dominated by the rituals of the church and discouraged great stadium building and to some extent the mass secular arts of theater and music outside in the amphitheaters, because they associated sport with paganism and dissent into barbarism that befell Rome.
The institution of the Olympics of Greece were lost to Rome and the Middle Ages. The institutionalized Roman spectacle sports were lost to the Middle Ages and up to the 19th Century.
We have the architects of the joint British and American Empire of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries to thank (or blame) for the reascendance of the secular, mass spectacle sport.
They clearly understood that their emerging global empires were going to be riddled with conflict because of the greatly diverse cultures they were trying to lord over and the increasing speed of communication and increase in killing power of weapons.
They sought to introduce institutionalized sport to build esprit d' corp in their own peoples to make them more willing to fight wars of empire and to tolerate non-democratic administration of conquered lands.
Sports indoctrinates values of cooperation with "your" side and conquest of your opponent. It also indoctrinates the idea of on-going, institutionalized competition--what might be called tolerance of permanent limited war.
The architects of British and American empire--the form of hegemonic empire that we now live with--saw that track and field, soccer, American football, and American basketball all had this potential for binding the masses they would be leaders of into team members willing to fight for the empires. I suspect that in America they saw the same in baseball, but realized that baseball was already its own business, and they needed to subsidized competing games like football and basketball through public schools and universities, to get control of the whole cultural and empire function of sport. And they understood that sport was a pleasing entertainent that distracted their peoples from the inequities among them resulting from empire building.
Sport gave us all something to talk about and distract ourselves with, whenever they had to do things that we might not like, or that we might find not in our own best interests.
They apparently thought it worked for the Romans for quite a long while, why not give it a go,eh, chaps?
Some British diplomats even said in the late 19th Century, but especially after WWI, England can play the role of Greece advising Rome. And America can play the role of conquering Rome. And our peoples and the peoples we conquer can be kept fit, entertained and distracted from the often unfair, often vicious business of empire.
Institutionalized sport, in short, is crucial to the administration of empire both at home and in the conquered lands in many ways.
What I will always wonder is: did James Naismith ever grasp this? He was a well educated young man from one of the academic seats of the empire building ethos--McGill University of Canada, which was the equivalent of being from Harvard, Yale, or Princeton in USA, or Oxford, Cambridge in England under Great Britain.
Whatever.
Its the greatest game ever invented.
Whatever uses it may, or may not, have been put to.
Rock Chalk!
