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By Root 1246 0

became really important only when central governments grew stronger (government is a monopoly on the use of force) and knights no longer had an opportunity to use their skills in a constant array of bashing. These tournaments, like the Crusades, were a contained way to release the extra energies of the body politic. Nowadays we say that exercise gives us energy. Which is it? Does exercise siphon off excess energy or make us vigorous and energetic? Today exercise is championed as a way of gaining extra strength, but it is also used to release stress and pressure. It also keeps people too busy for rebellion. Today, men and women in their youth and in their prime are culturally corralled into large rooms where they run in place. Rageless, we strain against machines.

It might not have turned out this way. Early Americans resisted sport. This country was founded by Protestants, and from its beginnings Protestantism was against physical sport and games. As the first century of Protestantism drew to a close, Calvinists and Lutherans attacked the frolicking and carnival that was a big part of the Catholic calendar. Catholics danced and feasted on holidays and played in the fields on Sundays. Protestants accused Catholics of idle foolishness, for taking people away from work and defaming the Sabbath. England went back and forth from Catholicism to Protestantism before it settled on its own rather Catholic version of the latter, so there were times when murderous tension surrounded these issues of sport. In England, pro-Catholic King James I issued the Book of Sports in 1618, and pro-Catholic Charles I revised and reissued it in 1633, both promoting the Sunday sports: “dancing, either of men or women, archery for men, leaping, vaulting, or any other such harmless recreation,” including “may games” and other sports. When Protestants gained the upper hand, they shut these down. Catholics petitioned the king, saying Protestants were keeping them from the communal sport that kept them happy and well. The kings wanted them to have it, in part so that they would not instead drink and riot. When Anglicanism, the Catholic-y version of Protestantism, won out, the pure Protestants, or Puritans, were pushed out of England and brought their enthusiastic refusals to the New World. They arrived here hotly anti-Catholic and antisports.

How did America then come to love sports so? It was as in ancient Sparta. In the American South, work had a connotation of slavery, and to distance themselves from it, the masters exerted themselves in play. By the end of the seventeenth century, traditions in the American South included great displays of sports followed by town feasts. Religion and law developed along with these behaviors and supported them. Gentlemen hosted the matches and the revels of abundance that followed, proclaiming that this aggressive leisure would prepare young men for war. The rise of modern exercise came at the turn of the century, and it grew out of that same concern: the strength of the nation’s soldiers. In the mid–to late nineteenth century, countries called up their young men, and governments were surprised at how scrawny these young draftees were. For England it was the first Boer War, of 1880–1881, and for France it was the Franco-Prussian War, of 1871. In the United States it was the Civil War. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., reported he was sure “such a set of black-coated, stiff-jointed, soft-muscled, paste-complexioned youth as we can boast in our Atlantic cities never before sprang from the loins of Anglo-Saxon lineage.” Ralph Waldo Emerson issued similar reports, and exhortations to exercise.3 In England, Anglicans developed the idea of “Muscular Christianity” to save Christianity from asceticism and effeminacy. There, Muscular Christianity was immensely popular, but in America, Protestant opposition to sports was too strong for it at first. The dominant voice of the Victorian middle class was opposed to leisure and play, particularly among Evangelicals. But sports won. Once they stopped fighting it, Puritan and Evangelical