page_1022 < previous page page_1022 next page > Page 1022 By the eighteenth century communal projects like barn raisings and clearing land had become occasions for dancing and for racing and other informal athletic contests. In winter skating and sledding were common in northern climes. Crude copies of English-style fox hunts occupied southern planters and some upperclass northern groups. City people are likely to feel they need more exercise, and this may explain why sports became more popular as cities multiplied and expanded in the nineteenth century. The Reverend Sylvester Graham, inventor of the graham cracker, wrote and lectured widely on the benefits of diet, fresh air, and exercise in the 1830s. German immigrants introduced gymnastics to America in the decades before the Civil War, among them Francis Lieber, later a professor of history and political science, who ran a gymnastics and swimming school in Boston in the 1820s. How effective hortatory works like Graham's were in changing people's habits is not clear. A writer in Harper's Monthly described Americans as "a pale pasty-faced, narrow chested spindle-shanked dwarfed race." But scattered evidence suggests that many people became more conscious of the value of physical activity. Crowds of fifty thousand ice skaters jammed the lakes of Central Park in New York while it was still under construction. "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table," the senior Oliver Wendell Holmes, could regularly be seen rowing on the Charles River. Organized sport competitions were rare until midcentury. Young Abraham Lincoln's famous pinning of Jack Armstrong made him the wrestling champion of New Salem, Illinois, but did not lead to a statewide contest. By midcentury, however, team sports were beginning to appear. Except for basketball and lacrosse (the latter first played by American Indians), all the team sports were of European origin. Colleges organized rowing crews, and a rudimentary form of baseball evolved. Competition between teams followed, in rural areas at fairs and revival meetings, in cities on a regular basis. The games attracted crowds, which exposed more people to the fun and excitement of participation, tempted players and entrepreneurs to charge admission fees, and in turn led to professionalism. The Civil War contributed greatly to the interest in sports. When not engaged in battles or maneuvers, soldiers spent long boring periods in camp with little to do. A lot of their energy went into horseplay and rough-and-tumble, but they also organized foot races, wrestling contests, and team sports, especially baseball. After the war individual athletic activity and spectator sports advanced in concert. Tennis was imported from England in 1875, golf in the 1880s. For many years both were upper-class activities; people gathered to watch the better athletes, but the crowds were small, the players amateurs, the locations private. Yet these sports (and most others) became organized, nearly all in the 1880s, a time when most of the professions and scholarly disciplines were going through a similar process. A Canoe Association was formed in 1880 as was a group of bicyclists, the League of American Wheelmen. The next year a National Lawn Tennis Association sponsored a "championship" tournament at the posh Casino in Newport, Rhode Island. Norwegian-Americans in Red Wing, Minnesota, created a ski association in 1883. Hockey, a Canadian invention organized there in 1883, was introduced in America a decade later. Professionalization came to these sports only to the degree that some athletes became teachers, instruction being much in demand as the popularity of the sports increased. Around the turn of the century the tennis and golf associations ran local, regional, and national tournaments. Being easy to play but difficult to master, golf produced large numbers of professional teachers as golf clubs expanded in number and size. The first national open championship, in which amateurs and professionals competed, was held in 1894. But like tennis, golf remained primarily a sport of the elite well into the twentieth century. Most players of ordinary means who learned the game did so by serving as caddies. The first golf "national hero," Francis Ouimet, winner of the 1913 open, got his start in this way. Ouimet remained an amateur, as did the most remarkable of all golfers, Robert "Bobby" Jones, whose grand slam sweep of the American and British open and amateur championships in 1930 has never been equaled. But most outstanding golfers have been profession- Â < previous page page_1022 next page >