EVERY reader of Washington Irving knows that the Dutch in the lower Hudson Valley played ninepins. They also enjoyed kolf, a game between teams not unlike modern field hockey, which was popular well into the eighteenth century, until a crimp was put in its popularity by a legislative enactment in 1760 prohibiting its being played on Sunday. The English introduced three sports—horse racing, cock-fighting, and animal baiting, the first now restored to favor, the last two prohibited, no doubt permanently.
In the first half of the nineteenth century sports were at an ebb. The horde of settlers from New England, revivalism, and new cults exercised a dampening influence; the feverish prosecution of expansion and internal improvement—canal digging and railroad building—seemed to leave no time or strength for play. But German and Irish immigrants, as they achieved a degree of economic well-being with accompanying leisure, gave vent to their love of sports and recreation. The Civil War was a decisive influence: men from different sections of the country were thrown together in camps and learned one another’s games, with the result that the years after the Civil War were the period of organization and development of sports.
Abner Doubleday invented modern baseball at Cooperstown in 1839 and rules were formulated in 1845, but the present ‘big leagues’ date from the last quarter of the century. Out of a rough-and-tumble sort of rugby played by Americans of English descent, Gerrit Smith Miller of Cazenovia evolved in 1860–2 a scheme of co-ordinated team play that became the basis of modern American football. Horse racing was popular at the early county fairs, but the first jockey club was organized no earlier than 1868. In the light-harness field, while Hambletonian began in 1852 the siring of more than 1,200 foals, including Dexter, ‘king of the turf,’ and the dams and sires of many other champions, the organization of associations and the establishment of large purses waited until the seventies and later. Other sports—lawn tennis (first played on Staten Island), polo, track athletics, basketball—were introduced and organized in the same period. Golf was introduced at Yonkers in 1888 and organized in 1894. The bicycle craze reached its peak in 1900.
Of New York City’s three big-league baseball clubs, the Yankees draw the largest share of 3,000,000 customers each season. The Black Yankees represent the city in the National Negro Baseball League. Amateur and semipro baseball is hampered by lack of space for diamonds, but softball is played on all playgrounds and on many vacant lots. Most prevalent form of the game is stickball, played by boys with a broomstick and a rubber ball on almost any side street.
Professional baseball is represented in upstate New York by a number of minor leagues, the individual teams serving as ‘farms’ for big-league clubs. Semiprofessional twilight leagues, organized for the season, draw crowds through their appeal to local rivalries as well as to interest in the game. The teams are often sponsored by local business men, and the players, who share the proceeds of the hat collections, have regular occupations during the day. Softball is gaining in popularity, especially as part of intramural sports programs of colleges and large industrial and commercial organizations.
Boxing and wrestling are almost entirely limited to professional circles and are sponsored by local sporting clubs. Basketball, outside of school and college games, is also professionally played throughout the State under local auspices; it is said to attract more spectators than any other sport. First-class horse racing is carried on in Goshen, Saratoga, Yonkers, and Long Island; in the metropolitan area there are four tracks—Belmont, Jamaica, Aqueduct, and Empire City. The State Racing Commission supplements the work of the Jockey Club in guarding against irregularities and injustices; it introduced the use of the camera eye to decide closely contested races. Betting evils have been lessened by the action of the legislature and track stewards; pari-mutuel betting was authorized by vote of the people in 1939 and was introduced in 1940. The national center of light-harness racing is Goshen, but the sport is also featured at the State fair and at most county fairs. Competition is keen; many owners drive their own trotters and pacers; and purses and side bets are often large.
Professional football has not yet invaded upstate New York to any large extent, where the sport is still monopolized by college teams, the amateur standing of which is not always above suspicion. The ‘big three’ of the upstate area are Cornell, Colgate, and Syracuse; the Army team, representing the U.S. Military Academy, enjoys national support; the smaller colleges carry on intense rivalries. Receipts from admissions to football games finance a large share of the college sports programs, which include baseball, track, tennis, hockey, soccer, lacrosse, and rowing; basketball is usually self-sustaining. The culmination of the national college rowing season is the Poughkeepsie regatta in June.
In the metropolitan area five college football teams draw 1,000,000 spectators each season; the Army-Navy or Army-Notre Dame game pulls 90,000 more. Professional football, however, has proved one of the city’s two wonder sports—the other is professional hockey. Boxing, hockey, and basketball—the big-time varieties—center at Madison Square Garden.
The two sports with the largest number of participants are tennis and golf. Every city and many a village and private organization have built tennis courts as part of their athletic facilities, and the number of municipal golf courses has been growing rapidly. More than 135 courses have reported to the Bureau of State Publicity as conditionally available to transients; the total number of courses in the State is much larger. Soccer is popular in New York City. Here, too, a number of exotic games are played by foreign groups: Italians lay out an alley for bocci wherever vacant ground is available; hurley is played fiercely by the local Irish at Innisfail Park; and in Van Cortlandt Park men from the West Indies play an adaptation of cricket.
Until recently winter sports have been limited to skating and coasting and to indoor games like bowling, volleyball, handball, and squash racquets played principally on local Y.M.C.A. courts. But in the past few years skiing has caught the popular fancy. Week-end snow trains and automobiles carry thousands to ski trails in the Taconics, the Hudson Highlands, the Catskills, the Adirondacks, and other sections of the State. Another newcomer is the Scottish game of curling, played on ice rinks; teams in Schenectady, Utica, and other upstate centers compete among themselves and with New England and Canadian teams.