Balls
On February 16, 2004, those spectators crammed into Vancouver’s hockey stadium, “The Garage,” witnessed one of the most violent incidents to ever blight the sport of ice hockey when power forward Todd Bertuzzi stunned opponent Steve Moore with a roundhouse sucker-punch then drove him headfirst into the ice. When Moore left that ice ten minutes later, it was on a stretcher and for the last time: his three fractured vertebrae terminated his career as brutally as Moore himself had concussed Bertuzzi’s captain, Markus Näslund, weeks earlier with a shoulder-charge. The incident focused attention, yet again, on violence in the Canadian and U.S. National Hockey League, or NHL—the only professional sporting league to have rules permitting fighting (combatants are not ejected, but simply required to drop sticks and gloves and slug it out bare-knuckled). Loud calls from school boards and medical bodies to ban brawling in the league followed, to no avail. Just three years later, Philadelphia Flyers “enforcer” (a semi-official team position whose duties include physically attacking opponents) Todd Fedoruk was laid flat by his New York Rangers counterpart, Colton Orr. Fedoruk, whose skull had already been reconstructed that season with titanium plates, was likewise stretchered off (though unlike Moore he was later able to return). Nothing had changed, nor has it since.
There is a simple reason for the NHL’s foot-dragging on the issue of violence, though: the fans. As the league well knows, many spectators attend hockey games specifically for the fights. A 2003 study published in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology proved this by demonstrating that the number of fights per NHL game is the best predictor of ticket sales—far outstripping even the number of goals or wins. While the connection is notable in Canada, it is particularly marked for games played in the United States.1
Another thrilling spectacle of American sporting violence is the National Football League, or NFL. Here, though, the violence arises not from on-field fights but from the brutal nature of the sport itself. Game stats tell the story—by the third-to-last week in the 2008 season, 1 in 15 NHL players had been forced out through injury. In any given year these injuries might include: fractured skulls and other bones, concussions, snapped collarbones, torn rotator cuffs, shoulder dislocations, fused vertebrae, and shredded tendons and ligaments. Most of these injuries come from high-energy collisions with other players: one physicist calculated that a pair of 245-pound NFL linemen crashing into each other at 18 miles per hour would generate enough force to shift a 30-ton mass by an inch.2 Tests on one Detroit linebacker, similarly, showed he was frequently hit by blows measuring 5,780 Gs (astronauts, by contrast, experience about 10 Gs during blast-off). The long-term effects of this abuse are why three-quarters of former NFL players report permanent disabilities from their playing careers.3 Some don’t even make it to old age—118 American university football players died playing the game in the 21 years from 1977 to 1998.4 The cause of these heavy hits and their resulting injuries isn’t hard to find: it’s the increasing size of the players. One anthropologist, for example, calculated that the average height and weight of university football players increased by 2.6 inches and 35 pounds between 1899 and 1970. Since then the trend has gone stratospheric—the average player weight increased by another 24 pounds between 1985 and 2008, and the league now includes more than 500 linemen who top out at over 300 pounds.
It is gladiatorial contests such as hockey and football that give modern sport its reputation for rising violence. At a superficial level, this seems to confirm the idea that brutal athletic contests are both the reservoir of modern-male aggression and the reason it is disappearing from other areas of masculine life. Yet is it really true that sport wasn’t as aggressive in the ancient past? As it happens, a direct comparison is possible, since football and hockey happen to be two of the oldest sports played on Earth. Some form of these two games (sometimes both) has been played almost everywhere for thousands of years (John Davis, the first English explorer to search for the Northwest Passage through the Arctic ice, was amazed on his 1586 expedition to be challenged to a game of football by the Inuit tribesmen he encountered). If modern sport really does act to civilize by soaking up excess male aggression, it should follow that football and hockey in ancient times were less violent and strenuous than their modern counterparts.
The bad news, though (for proponents of the theory, at any rate), is that ancient and prehistoric footballers and puckmen actually played their games long, hard, and incredibly brutally.
Hockey in Europe, for example, seems to have been a violent game from its very inception. One of the earliest types of hockey played there was Irish hurling, a stick-and-ball sport still played today. The very first recorded hurling match, between the Fir Bolg and Tuatha Dé Danann tribes in 1272 BCE, saw stick-blows rained upon the losing Tuatha Dé Danann “till their bones were broken and bruised and they fell outstretched on the turf.”5 To consummate their victory, the Fir Bolg players promptly slew the Tuatha Dé Danann team. Observations by the English man of letters John Dunton in seventeenth-century Dublin show that Irish hurling hadn’t grown much gentler in the intervening three thousand years—he reported that players rarely left the field without “the broken heads or shins in which they glory so much.”6 Other forms of stick games, such as the Icelandic game of knattleikr, seem to have been even more murderous. One Viking saga records a knattleikr game in which “before dusk, six of the Strand players lay dead, though none on the Botn side.” Egil’s Saga, similarly, describes the young Egil’s axe-killing of an opponent on the knattleikr pitch in revenge for rough treatment during play—seven others died in the subsequent pitch invasion.7 Incredibly, given this level of aggression, some knattleikr games reportedly lasted fourteen days.
Sods and clods
Quite apart from the deadly Old Icelandic game of knattleikr, Viking sport, it seems, was not for the faint-hearted. Horses, for example, provided excellent recreation for ancient Scandinavian sportsmen—but not in races, in fights. In the popular sport of horse fighting, Viking men goaded their stallions into attacking an opponent’s steed, usually as a prelude to the humans’ direct exchange of blows. In one famous horse fight, a Viking named Odd had his ribs broken by the deliberately misaimed prodding of the staff of his enemy, Grettir. Brawling seems to have also accompanied the uniquely Viking sport of “turf throwing.” This was something like a snowball fight, only with clods of earth thrown so hard that they often knocked their targets off their feet, unconscious. In one case, recorded in Eyrbyggja’s Saga, the downing of one man with a well-placed clod resulted in a gang brawl between his teammates and the men of Eyrr, most of whom ended up joining him, injured, on the ground. Turf throwing probably holds the title of the most brutal catching sport in all history, at least until the invention of high-school dodgeball. 
Ancient hockey-like games in the New World were, apparently, no less violent. One Choctaw/Creek Indian lacrosse game witnessed by American settlers in the early 1790s, for instance, resulted in over five hundred deaths, mostly in the post-match fighting.8 These casualty figures might seem unbelievably high, were it not for the fact that Native American lacrosse games often (according to colonial-era American painter George Catlin) involved five hundred players a side and were played on a field almost two miles in length. Baron de Lahontan, the seventeenth-century French commander of Fort St. Joseph in the Huron tribe’s country, similarly remarked that lacrosse there was “so violent that they [the Hurons] tear their skins and break their legs very often.”9 Other sources state that blows from lacrosse sticks and hard stone or wooden balls left large blood clots and hematomas that had to be lanced by medicine men using a special deer-horn sucking cup. Such injuries seem only too understandable, given that almost every foul in modern hockey and lacrosse—tackling, wrestling, tripping, charging, and striking—was permitted in Native American lacrosse. Some tribes, for instance, specialized in tackling by the hair. The Cayuga, similarly, liked to lift opponents off the ground with their sticks and dump them (a move that partly explains the frequency of shattered collarbones noted by early European observers). Cherokee players favored straight-out choking of their opponents, though this brutal strategy was, admittedly, often pursued simply to make opponents disgorge balls they had hidden in their mouths (a legitimate move in Native American lacrosse). Fighting, as in modern ice hockey, was explicitly encouraged by rules such as the one allowing strikes with the stick, providing it was held two-handed. Native American lacrosse was still a violent sport as late as 1845, when a game involving the Choctaw Tallulah Indians resulted in three deaths (caused by deliberately stampeding horses onto the field) and injuries so severe some players were unable to leave the ground until they had recovered nine days later.
Returning to Europe, football in the medieval West may well have been played by much smaller players than today’s NFL players, but its violence would clearly have sent our hulking linebackers scurrying for the safety of the injury list. Called various names across Europe—la soule in France, Shrovetide football in Middle England, camping in Norfolk and East Anglia, and cnappan in Wales—the game resembled modern football in that it was commonly played with an inflatable ball (though often, in this case, an inflatable pig’s bladder sewn into a bull’s scrotum; it was also sometimes sheathed in tin to stop losing teams knifing it). That, though, is where the resemblance ends. Medieval football involved teams of several hundred, since it called for one village’s menfolk to drive the ball through an opposing village’s territory into the town square or church, which served as goal. Play was a riotous affair, with fists, cudgels, and even horses employed freely. Chronicles of the time testify to the violence of the sport. One sixteenth-century scholar, Sir Thomas Elyot, described “foote balle” as a game “wherin is nothinge but beastly furie and exstreme violence; wherof procedeth hurte, and consequently rancour and malice do remaine with them that be wounded.”10 An anonymous sixteenth-century tract in Old Scots, similarly, claimed that bruises, broken bones, blows, and crippling in old age were among “the bewties of fute ball.”11 Such injuries seem, once more, eminently understandable given the only rules in medieval football were apparently those prohibiting murder and the use of weapons.
Not, it seems, that they succeeded in eliminating either.
In 1280 ce, and again in 1312 ce, for instance, two players died in collisions with opponents wearing sheathed knives (one of the killers being a football-playing priest). But medieval soccer could be lethal even without such weaponry. A Middlesex coroner’s inquest in 1581 ce, to illustrate, recorded the case of Nicholas Martyn and Richard Turvey, who both simultaneously “struck Roger Ludford…under the breast, giving him a mortal blow and concussion of which he died within a quarter of an hour.”12 In 1303 CE an Oxford University student, similarly, found his brother dead after a football game played in the High Street with some Irish students; this time the cause of death was not reported. This lethal violence was not confined to the distant past, either: author William Dutt reports that a match held on Diss Common between Norfolk and Suffolk in the mid-eighteenth century resulted in nine deaths. Perhaps the ultimate proof of the rambunctious but popular violence of medieval football, though, was how often English monarchs and government officials sought, unsuccessfully, to ban it: thirty times between 1314 CE and 1667 CE.
Obviously, modern hockey and football would have struck these ancient players as being about as risky as hopscotch. This is clearly difficult enough for “sport as civilizing reservoir of aggression” believers, but the theory’s problems are, I’m afraid, just beginning. A more extensive look at ancient sports, both historic and prehistoric, reveals most were so explicitly violent they’d have made even a modern illegal-dog-fight organizer blush.
Man bites dog
Modern sports like horse and greyhound racing are often labeled freak shows of exploitative violence toward animals, but they couldn’t hold a candle to medieval and Victorian-era English pit sports. These basically involved anything violent that could be done to any creature in an earthen pit dug into some tavern basement or village green. Sometimes, indeed, the pit could even be dispensed with, as when the village folk of Stamford beat a bull to death in a field for sport in 1836. More normally, however, a badger might be thrown into the pit to be torn apart by fighting dogs; bears with their paws cut off might be treated the same. Fighting cocks fitted with metal spurs might eviscerate each other for the enjoyment of the crowd, while dogs specially bred for viciousness and tenacity (the original pit bulls) would similarly maul each other to death.
An even more popular pit sport involving dogs was “ratting,” in which a terrier was thrown into a pit filled with rats and had to kill as many as he could within a given time. A record was set in 1848 by Tiny—a terrier himself so close to a rat in size that he wore a woman’s bracelet for a collar—who dispatched three hundred rodents in just fifty-four minutes.
Such canine blood sports continued merrily until 1866, when an outcry erupted over a fight between a bulldog called Physic and a human dwarf named Brummy, held in the town of Hanley. Though Brummy won, the cruelty of the encounter was the last straw for outraged public opinion, as this report from the Daily Telegraph of the time shows:
By the time Round 10 was concluded the bulldog’s head was swelled much beyond its accustomed size; it had lost two teeth and one of its eyes was entirely shut up; while as for the dwarf, his fists, as well as his arms, were reeking [with blood]…in Round 11 the bulldog came on fresh and foaming…but…the dwarf dealt him a tremendous blow under the chin, and with such effect that the dog was dashed against the wall, where, despite all its master could do to revive it, it continued to lie.13
Hanley miners, incidentally, were reportedly so furious at the extinction of their favorite sport that they were still threatening the paper’s reporter, James Greenwood, with physical violence thirty years later.
Many ancient athletic events were, for one thing, intimately connected to war. Some, indeed, were war—such as the tournaments of the later European Middle Ages. The name conjures images of gallant knights splintering softwood lances harmlessly against one another’s armor in chivalrous charges (though the death of Henry II, King of France, in 1559 CE from a splintered lance in the eye shows jousting could be lethal). Yet jousting was actually a later, pale imitation of the real twelfth and thirteenth-century tourneys, which were brutal, bruising affairs of masses of armored men hammering each other, sometimes to death. In these melees, tourney entrants formed opposing teams, charged each other using war lances, flinging themselves on unhorsed knights with daggers, and hacked at opponents with broadswords, axes, and maces. Given the numbers involved, melees were often hard to distinguish from real war. Baldwin of Hainault, for example, took three thousand foot soldiers to one tournament for protection from his enemy, the Duke of Brabant.14 Casualties similarly confused the issue—when sixty knights died in the melee at a 1240 CE tournament in the German town of Neuss, spectators could have been forgiven for wondering how the event differed from real combat.15
Even those ancient sports that weren’t actual war often served as training for it. Many Greeks, for example, believed that their athletic culture was the reason they had triumphed over the vast armies of the Persian kings Darius and Xerxes. As ever, of course, the most extreme examples come from the Spartan Greeks. The two main sporting events of the Spartan state were strange, violent rituals aimed at toughening their boys for life as citizen-soldiers. The first, the agon karterias (“endurance contest”), was a public whipping match in which graduating boys competed to see who could withstand a brutal (and sometimes fatal) flogging at the altar of the goddess Artemis Orthia—the winner earned the title of bomonikes (“altar winner”). The second, the Platanistas competition, was a vicious gang fight in which two opposing mobs of boys were isolated on an artificial island in a plane-tree grove and made to brawl until one team was forced off. The Greek writer and geographer Pausanias wrote that participants “fight with their hands and by jumping up to kick. They bite and gouge out eyes. They fight man to man this way, but they also attack as a group violently and push one another into the water.”16 Since Spartan soldiers did things like this even to their own countrymen, it is no surprise other peoples considered them dangerous madmen best avoided.
Some ancient sports, such as dueling, by contrast, had their origins in one-on-one violence. The medieval Vikings, in this case, provide the most egregious examples. One was the Swedish “sport” of bältesspänning (knife-wrestling). This event, which only died out in rural Sweden in the eighteenth century, featured two contestants, tied to each other by a single large belt, writhing and stabbing at one another with daggers. Combatants’ wives also apparently attended, usually clutching large sheets with which to bind their husband’s bleeding wounds. The only safety measure seems to have been the competitors’ occasional agreement to wrap their blades with strips of cloth to shorten their tip-length.17 Bältesspänning’s dueling origins are self-evident, and so, too, are those of glima (belt-wrestling), which is now the national sport of modern Iceland. Glima also uses belts, though in this case each opponent wears one around his stomach and two around his thighs, which his opponent grips and uses to throw him. While modern glima doesn’t use knives, its ancient version used something just as lethal: a waist-high, tapered rock onto which wrestlers tried to throw their opponent so as to break their back.18 Apparently such matches were used to resolve (obviously permanently) personal disputes.
Other ancient sports, in contrast, owed their violent nature to their origin in religious ritual. One clear example is the rubber-ball game of ancient Central American civilizations such as the Olmecs, Aztecs, and Maya. This game, which bears a passing similarity to modern basketball, is worth describing in detail not just because it shows how intertwined prehistoric sport and religion were; it also illustrates, when compared to its modern counterpart, just how feeble present-day sports really have become.
The rubber-ball game that Cortés and his conquistadors saw in sixteenth-century Central America was played from as far south as Honduras to as far north as Arizona. Matches were held on stone courts roughly the same area as modern basketball courts, and even featured stone hoops through which players could shoot game-winning goals. Since these hoops were only fractionally bigger than the ball, however, only one in every two hundred or so shots probably scored. The Meso-American ball game was not only more difficult than basketball, however; it was also far more dangerous. Native Americans played the game with solid rubber balls that could weigh up to twenty pounds (fifteen times the weight of a modern regulation basketball) and generated enormous speed and force on the stone court. So hard did these balls strike that they could only be safely hit using a player’s thigh, hip, or buttocks. A strike anywhere else often killed the player, as noted by the Spanish monk and historian Diego Durán:
Some of these men were taken out dead…[because] the ball on the rebound hit them in the mouth or the stomach or the intestines, so that they fell to the floor instantly. Some died of that blow on the spot.19
Even when players hit the ball correctly (which they did with an accuracy and dexterity that amazed the Spaniards) the resulting injuries were often horrific:
With this bouncing…they suffered terrible injuries on their knees and thighs so that the haunches of those who made use of these tricks were frequently so bruised…[they] had to be opened with a small blade, whereupon the blood which had clotted there because of the blows of the ball squeezed out.
Aztec, Mayan, and Olmec ball-game players did, admittedly, wear some protective gear, but this simply proves how phenomenally athletic they were in comparison to modern basketballers. The leather hip-guards, and even the heavy “handstone” gloves they sometimes wore, are uncontroversial, but the ancient sixty-pound stone girdles that are occasionally unearthed at ball-court sites have been dismissed as too heavy for any human to wear. Yet this is probably unjust. Cortés himself, after all, was so impressed by the muscularity of the Central American ball-players that he took a team of them back to Spain in 1528 to play before the court of Charles V. A painting of the event by Christoph Weiditz confirms Cortés’s impression: the painter shows the stout bodies of the native ball players rippling with muscle. I personally think they’d have noticed the weight of those stone girdles about as much as they would sweatbands.
Perhaps most terrifying, however, was the prospect players faced of being sacrificed. All Central American civilizations regarded their ball games as more than just sport; each match was a reenactment of the mythical battle between the gods and the underworld. Archaeological evidence shows that these reenactments often ended in the sacrifice of one or more players. One stone mural adorning a ball court at El Tajin shows a player having his heart ripped out by priests. A stone column at one Mexican archaeological site, Aparicio, shows another being decapitated. The famous ball court at Chichen Itza, the largest in the world at 540 by 220 feet, not only has murals depicting balls containing human skulls, it also features a massive skull rack—a somewhat grisly wall of fame. Incredibly, it is not clear whether those sacrificed in these games were the winners or the losers (offering one’s body in sacrifice was considered an honor in Mayan society).
The civilization theory of sport thus seems about as dead as any unfortunate Huron lacrosse player, Welsh medieval cnappan footballer, or Aztec sacrificial ball-gamer. Modern sport is less violent, intense, and aggressive than in days of old (and very old), not more. But why? It’s tempting—in fact, inescapable—to put it down to increasing wussiness among modern sportsmen, despite their boasts and our willingness to believe them. But something else is going on here, too. What stands out about ancient sports is how entwined with other ends they were, be those ends military, religious, or conflict-resolution related. The famous sociologist of sport Norbert Elias claims, in fact, that this distance from original aims is what defines modern, “real” sport.20 Present-day athleticism elevates that which used to be a minor part of sport—the contest—to its whole raison d’être. Hunting, for example, used to be about the pleasure of personally killing (and, usually, eating) an animal, while modern fox hunting (in those places of the world where it is still legal) is about simply chasing one—the killing being delegated to the hunters’ hounds. Aztec ball games used to be about scoring goals to obtain the favor of the gods; modern basketball is just about how many you can score. This being the case, we’re entitled to ask how well we compete compared with ancient sportsmen.
How well, in other words, do we perform in the contest?
Early twentieth-century anthropologists would have thought it ridiculous to even ask. They figured the question had already been answered: at the 1904 Olympic Games in St. Louis, Missouri. By happy coincidence, those Olympics coincided with the St. Louis World Fair, which featured a massive anthropological exhibit of real, live “savages” from all across the world—Japanese Ainu, Philippine Igorots, Eskimos, South American “Giant Patagonian” tribesmen, African Pygmies, and many, many others—who had been specially shipped to the city for the event. The man in charge of this breathtaking folly, disgraced former Smithsonian Institute anthropologist Dr. W. J. McGee, hit upon an incredible idea: why not combine the two and determine once and for all the true sporting capabilities of “primitive” athletes? Thus was born “Anthropology Days,” two days of athletic events testing the tribesmen’s sporting prowess in Olympic events such as high jump, 100-yard dash, shot put, and javelin. The results, as the official history of the World Fair records, were dismal:
The world had heard of the marvelous qualities of the Indian as a runner…[the] remarkable athletic feats of the Filipinos, and of the great agility and muscular strength of the giant Patagonians. All these traditions were dashed…the representatives of the savage and uncivilized tribes proved themselves inferior athletes, and greatly overrated…An African Pygmy [in the 100-yard dash] made a record that can be beaten by a 12-year-old American school boy. The giant Patagonians’…best [shot put] performance was so ridiculously poor that it astonished all who witnessed it.21
These poor performances, though, clearly had more to do with unfamiliarity, lack of practice, and often a simple refusal to take the events seriously (the Pygmies made great sport in the dash by climbing all over the man with the starting gun). Unbiased observers thought the non-Western athletes had been unfairly judged. One such was Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the French founder of the modern Olympic movement. To his eternal credit, de Coubertin was appalled by the St. Louis spectacle, calling it “an outrageous charade.” He thought the athleticism of uncivilized peoples was, in reality, every bit the equal of civilized peoples, predicting that “black men, red men, and yellow men [would one day] learn to run, jump, and throw, and leave the white men behind them.”22
This statement, though both brave and insightful, didn’t go far enough. For, as the evidence of archaeology and colonial historians once more shows, the athletic abilities of prehistoric and tribal sportsmen often far outstripped that of their modern, “civilized” brethren.
Those fossilized footsteps proving prehistoric Australian Aboriginal men could probably outrun modern Olympian sprinters, for example, have already been noted. Unequivocal fossil evidence like this, though, is very rare. In its absence our only real alternative lies in historical records, yet these, too, can be problematic. The ancient Greeks, whose Olympian obsession with athletics has left us records of 794 winners from their 1,221 years of games (786 BCE to 435 CE) might be expected to help, but they had neither the time-keeping technology nor the interest to record sprinting speeds (Greek sprinters seem to have cared only about whom they beat on the day, not their speed compared to a record). Measurable reports really only began in the colonial era, when literate Europeans came into contact with tribal peoples. One famous account from the nineteenth-century Western Australian frontier, for instance, describes an Australian Aboriginal man who outran a pursuing police horse at Forty Mile Beach. Since an average horse gallops at 25 to 30 miles per hour, this report is both impressive and plausible, given the Willandra Lakes footprint evidence . What’s more, several other reports describe ancient and tribal men performing similar feats. Spanish conquistadors in the seventeenth century, for instance, complained of fugitive Native Americans who left their mounted pursuers in their dust.23 Later, Mexican ranchers took to hiring local Indian runners to run down escaped horses.
The one-legged man is king
The ability of prehistoric Australian Aboriginal men to shame modern Olympic sprinters has already been noted . Those same fossilized footprints also show, though, that disabled Aboriginal athletes would have humiliated modern Paralympians, too.
Archaeologist Stephen Webb reports that when his team found the fossilized trackways they were puzzled by those of the individual labelled “T4,” which featured 22 right footprints but no left prints. They also included several circular impressions that looked like the imprints of the end of a blunt stick. The footprints were spaced so far apart that it was thought they couldn’t possibly belong to a hopping man, who would have had to have been traveling at over 13 miles per hour to make them. The group settled on the explanation that T4’s other foot had been in a canoe he had been pushing through the shallow lake with his stick—until they spoke to several traditional Pintubi people from outback Australia. Not only are the Pintubi accomplished trackers, it so happened that they themselves had grown up with a famed one-legged hunter. They were thus able to show Webb how T4 had achieved his phenomenal hopping speed: by building up momentum with the aid of his stick, then casting it off and hopping unassisted. Admittedly, modern Paralympians achieve much higher speeds than T4 did, but only with the high-tech assistance of spring blades and other aids. They also don’t hop. A better indication of T4’s feat is to compare his speed to the modern Guinness Book of Records’ 1-mile hop record-holder’s speed of 1.3 miles per hour.
One possible objection to the superiority of prehistoric athletes is that Jesse Owens, the modern (1930s) track star, did exactly the same thing, racing and beating horses over one hundred yards several times. Owens later admitted, however, that he won by choosing skittish horses that were startled by the gun, giving him a crucial head start. A more serious objection is the mighty performance of marathon runner Huw Lobb, who in 2004 definitely did outrun a horse in the annual “Man vs. Horse” race in Llanwrtyd Wells, in Wales, for the first time in the event’s twenty-five-year history. That race, though, was over twenty-two miles—and therein lies the rub. For it is a peculiar fact that we humans, so feeble in almost every other respect compared to our animal cousins, are stellar endurance athletes. Not only did ancient athletes often run down horses over longer distances (such as the Olympic champion Lasthenes, who did so in a twenty-two-mile race from Coroneia to Thebes in the fifth century BCE), prehistoric hunters frequently performed similar feats simply as part of their daily lives.
Biomechanical tests have confirmed that the remarkable endurance of human runners stems from both our bipedalism and our superior heat-loss mechanism (sweating). Running upright means we can vary the rhythm of our breathing, whereas quadrupeds such as horses have to breathe according to a pattern dictated by the compression of their lungs from their front legs. Sweating heavily also allows us to escape the constraint that stops fast animals such as cheetahs running more than a half-mile at a time: lethal overheating. I had first-hand confirmation of this from an Australian Aboriginal friend in the remote Pilbara region. Brendan Bobby, an initiated man of the Kurrama mob, once told me, laughing, how he and his mates hunt kangaroos in the scorching desert heat—by running them down in a six-cylinder pickup truck: “That ’roo, if you scare him up on a hot day when he’s lying in the shade, he’ll run out a few hundred yards, then stop and hop right back to the shade! Too hot for him; if he goes too far he’ll die.” Unfortunately for the ’roo, his days are numbered anyway, with Brendan and his mates dishing out death by roadkill.
Colonial-era accounts confirm that Brendan’s ancestors have been taking advantage of this behavior for millennia, though using their own legs rather than Ford utility vehicles. Australian Aboriginal men in Western Australia practiced endurance hunting—running their prey down until it collapsed through exhaustion and, often, died without the need of a blow or spear. The bushmen of South Africa did (and still do) the same with antelopes, chasing them for up to twenty-five miles until they crumple. This is clearly fantastic training for athletic running, since another group of antelope chasers, the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico, are on record as some of the best athletes in the modern world. The phenomenal endurance of the Tarahumara, though often remarked on by conquistadors and early anthropologists, was only brought to the modern world’s attention in 1963. In that year a party of American endurance athletes had to be rescued by local Tarahumaran men after failing, through exhaustion, to complete their “river run” through the forbidding Barranca del Cobre canyon. One grateful but awed survivor described his Tarahumaran rescuers thus:
Each one of us [the Americans] carried a canteen, but nothing else. For five miles we climbed that trail, which seemed designed only for goats. At one point, as we toiled upwards, the Indians passed us, each carrying a 60-pound pack of our gear. Suddenly, I realized it was their third trip of the day.
How did the Tarahumara develop these phenomenal athletic abilities? One study estimates their athletes can perform over 17,000 calories of work effort in 24 hours, whereas the average Tour de France competitor expends just 8,000 to 10,000 (a calorie is not just a unit of energy that we take in through food, but also a unit of energy we can expend through work. Cycling uses about 1,000 calories per hour, and so does the Tarahumara’s running. The difference is that the Tarahumara often run right through the day and night.) Partly it’s geography. The Tarahumara live in hamlets so widely separated that communication between them requires running vast distances. But they also seem simply to enjoy running. Several early anthropologists describe the Tarahumaran sport of “kick-ball” racing, where teams of men run up to 190 miles through wild, craggy terrain in 24 to 48 hours (running by torchlight at night), all the while kicking a crude wooden ball before them.24 This sounds impressive, but not necessarily superior to the performance of modern ultramarathoners. The current world distance record for a 24-hour run, for example, is 188.6 miles, set by Yiannis Kouros, the “Running God,” in 1997. Yet this record was achieved on a flat, rubberized track, whereas Tarahumaran runs take place in rough country. There are also, what’s more, records of other Indian athletes exceeding this speed and distance. John Bourke, the nineteenth-century American soldier and ethnologist, was told of a Mojave runner who ran from Fort Mojave to the Mojave reservation and back—a distance of 200 miles—in less than 24 hours, again through harsh country.25 American historian William H. Prescott, similarly, wrote of Aztec titlantil (“courier runners”) who also covered 200 miles a day, through mountainous country, to bring messages to the emperor in the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan. Even further back in history, the mighty Sumerian king Shulgi is reputed to have run 218 miles from Nippur to Ur and back again in 24 hours (though this time in two 12-hour stints) circa 2075 BCE.26
Endurance-wise, it seems, ancient and tribal runners may well have left our modern athletes gasping in their wake.
Jumping, too, was an athletic activity in which prehistoric and tribal men probably raised the bar to heights we modern men are unable to reach. In BRAWN we discovered that our near cousin, the bonobo chimpanzee, can jump three times the height an average human male can. Archaeological evidence of early human leaping ability, though, is practically nonexistent. There are, admittedly, some Greek records of phenomenal long-jump performances (like that of Phayllos, who cleared the jumping pit and broke his leg with a leap of 55 feet in the fifth century BCE; the modern record is 29.36 feet), but confusion about measurements (it isn’t clear if this was a single, or multiple, jump event) makes these impossible to confirm. Some medieval knights, similarly, could vault as high as 5'3" to mount their steeds while wearing 88 pounds of armor, but this, too, is difficult to translate into a useful comparison. In fact, the earliest incontrovertible evidence of tribal men’s superior jumping abilities comes from colonial era photographs of the Tutsi peoples of Rwanda. The German anthropologist Adolf Friedrich, Duke of Mecklenburg, was astonished to discover, in the course of his 1907 anthropological survey of Rwanda, that the majority of the tribal men he met there were able to jump heights over 6'4" and frequently did so. This was due to Tutsi tradition of gusimbuka-urukiramende, an initiation ritual in which young men had to jump their own height to progress to manhood. Many, however, did far better than that, apparently jumping heights up to 8'3". As proof, Friedrich sent back to Europe a series of photographs showing Tutsi men jumping over him and a companion. There they provoked general astonishment and despairing questions from at least one prominent German physician, who asked, “What then will be left of our records?”
His concerns, it turns out, were well founded. Even today, the world highjump record remains at the relatively feeble 8' set by Cuban high jumper Javier Sotomayor in 1993. Even worse, Sotomayor’s jump was made using the modern Fosbury flop—a technique invented by athlete Dick Fosbury in which the jumper launches himself back-first over the bar—which adds approximately 10 percent to the jump’s height. If Mecklenburg’s Tutsi jumpers had used that, they may well have jumped an unreachable (by modern standards) 9'1".27
Spear throwing, too, appears to be a sport in which tribal men, predictably, exceled, though again reliable measurements are hard to verify. The current world record for javelin is the 107.7 yards thrown by Jan Železný of the Czech Republic in 1996. Anthropologist J. Edge-Partington, on the other hand, reported that Australian Aboriginal men of the Dalleburra tribe in the early nineteenth century could throw their hardwood spears, without the aid of a spear-thrower (which increases range through leverage), 120 yards or more. The British author, Lieutenant Colonel F. A. M. Webster—himself a national-championship-winning javelin thrower—similarly reported in the early 1900s that Turkana men of East Africa regularly out-threw him by yards in competitions using their traditional spears (though he always triumphed with a regulation javelin). The evidence from the ancient Olympics, though, is once again uncertain. Depending on the translation, we have records of Greek javelin throws measuring either 110 to 164 yards. While even the lower measurement beats today’s record, there are two complications. First, Greek javelins were probably lighter than modern Olympic javelins, and thus easier to throw. Second, Greek athletes used a special leather thong, the amentum, which increased range by 10 to 25 percent by imparting spin and giving extra leverage. Sadly, we can’t therefore say for sure just how good the ancient Greek Olympian javelin throwers were. The situation is exactly the same with ancient Olympian discus throwers, where the varying weights of Greek stone and brass diskoi (some weighed four times as much as modern discuses) make performances impossible to compare.
One projectile contest about which we can be certain, however, is archery. Modern Olympic archers use high-tech, carbon-fiber recurve bows with sights and stabilizing weights, yet their shots are still shorter, slower, and less accurate than those of ancient archers. To take the gold in the individual men’s archery event at the 2008 Olympics, Ukrainian Viktor Ruban shot 12 arrows at the rate of one every 40 seconds at a target 77 yards away, landing just 5 in the 2-inch bullseye (7 others landed in the 4-inch outer bullseye). Ancient Mongol archers, however, despite their “primitive” wood-and-horn bows, often bettered this from greater distances, at faster speeds and on horseback to boot. Even leaving aside the ability of Genghis Khan’s nephew, Yesüngge, to hit a target from 586 yards away, a Mongol historical text, The Blue Sutra, records that several of Genghis Khan’s warriors hit a tiny red flag at 164 yards in a competition before an enemy khan. One, in fact, set himself a real challenge and brought down a flying duck with a single arrow through its neck. Mongol archers could loose 12 aimed arrows a minute (one every 5 seconds, compared to the modern standard of one every 40 seconds) and usually did so from horseback, timing their shots to fire between steps, when their horses’ hooves were off the ground. The official history of another nomadic Asian people, the Khitan, similarly states that Khitan soldiers held competitions to cut a 1-inch thick willow branch with a single arrow at full gallop. Other ancient archers also outstripped modern Olympic archers’ performances. Henry VIII, for example, in a contest with the French king at the “Field of Cloth of Gold” tournament in 1520 ce, sent several arrows into his target’s bullseye from 240 yards away. A Spanish chronicler in 1606 likewise testified that Carib Indian archers of the Antilles Islands could consistently hit an English half-crown coin at 100 paces.
It isn’t just in the Western world that modern archers fall short, either. In 1987 a fifth-degree black belt in the art of ky
d
(Japanese archery), Ashikawa Yuichi, was humiliated in his attempt to recreate the traditional Japanese bow sport of tshiya, “clearing arrows.” This sport, which began in medieval Japan in 1606, required competitors to shoot arrows down the 130-yard corridor of Kyoto’s Rengeō-in Temple, hitting the far wall without touching the side walls, floor, or roof on the way. Successful efforts were called “clearing arrows,” and archers competed to see how many each could score out of 100 or 1,000 attempts. Yuichi, despite his high level of skill and months of additional training, managed just 9 tshiya from 100 attempts.28 Though probably the best any modern Japanese archer could do, this was ridiculous in light of the record set by fifteen-year-old Kokura Gishichi in 1830: 94 tshiya in the 100-arrow event and 978 in the 1,000 arrow. To add insult to injury, Yuichi’s slow and careful shooting would have been scorned by early tshiya competitors. In 1686 CE Wasa Daihachiro, for example, shot 8,133 clearing arrows out of a total 13,053 over the course of 24 hours—a rate of 1 arrow every 6 seconds.29
Other sporting contests in which ancient competitors shame their modern counterparts are those involving animals. The U.S. Professional Bull Riders tour, for instance, where top riders fight to stay atop ferocious, bucking bulls for eight seconds, proudly calls itself “the toughest sport on earth.” Yet a study by the Canadian Professional Rodeo Sport Medicine Team found that serious injuries, in Canadian professional bull-riding events at least, were rare—occurring in just 1.5 percent of rides.30 Now consider an equivalent ancient sport: the “bull-leaping” ritual of the Minoan civilization on the island of Crete from 2700 to 1450 BCE. Frescoes unearthed there depict aristocratic youths grasping charging bulls by the horns and somersaulting over their backs (some paintings, alternatively, show them diving over the bull’s horns to perform handstands on its back). We don’t have to rely on imagination for a picture of how dangerous this was: some frescoes also show unsuccessful leapers entangled, possibly fatally, in the beast’s horns. We have no figures, of course, but it seems a safe bet the injury rate exceeded 1.5 percent. Polo, similarly, is often considered a particularly tough modern equestrian sport. Yet compared to its ancient Afghan counterpart, Buzkashi (“goat grabbing”), it seems positively sissy. Buzkashi matches, which are still played today, involve hundreds of mounted competitors (each carrying a whip for attacking opponents) battling one another for possession of a calf’s carcass—which usually disintegrates during play. The action is brutal, with players charging, whipping, and unseating one another in their attempt to drag the carcass clear. Games rage for days and range for miles. Injuries include fractured skulls, concussions, broken limbs, cracked ribs, punctured lungs, and severe bruising—and even the occasional fatality. It’s a safe bet action like that would send most modern polo players scurrying back to their clubhouse for a restorative pink gin or three.
Medieval cheerleaders?
Medieval fairs may have lacked many of the accompaniments of modern sports events: mascots, stadium seating, and jumbo-vision screens. They did, however, have cheerleaders—in a manner of speaking. Fair organizers often injected sex appeal into proceedings with a half-time prostitute race. Between the archery contests, jousting, and gander pulling (a horrific sport in which a greased goose’s head was ripped from its body), organizers often scheduled a race of the town’s “fallen” women, either among themselves or against their supposedly more virtuous sisters. History doesn’t record what drew these athletic jezebels to enter such competitions, but the motivation of the mostly male spectators seems clear: one ogling onlooker records appreciatively that the women ran “with skirt tuckt very high.”31
It seems puzzling, given this apparent feebleness in the contest compared to our ancient brethren, that any modern competitor should be tagged “super.” Yet the trend toward record medal hauls, such as Michael Phelps’s eight gold at the 2008 Olympics, has led some commentators to label ours the “age of the superathlete.” These, supposedly, are those superior competitors who win multiple events in the one Olympics, such as Jesse Owens in 1936, Mark Spitz in 1972, and Carl Lewis in 1984. Yet even here modern competitors fall short of ancestral male sportsmen. Not one modern superathlete, for example, has repeated his feat consistently over successive Olympics (though Lewis, to be fair, came close with fewer wins in 1988 and 1992). None of them, what’s more, has won all their events on the one day (even Michael Phelps’s maximum was two events on the one day). Yet ancient Greek Olympians did this so frequently that authorities kept a special list of triastes (“those who won three events on the one day”). Leonidas of Rhodes won this title at four successive Olympics in the twelve years between 164 and 152 BCE, taking out the stadion (“220-yard sprint”), the diaulos (“440-yard sprint”) and the hoplitodromos (“440-yard race run in heavy armour, helmet, and shield”) at each one. Carl Lewis, by comparison, was only able to win one event, the long jump, in every one of his four Olympic appearances. Hermogenes of Xanthos nearly equaled Leonidas’s feat, winning eight victories in the stadion, diaulos, and hoplitodromos in three Olympic appearances, and Astylos of Syracuse was just behind him, with seven. The stamina needed to win these three demanding races on one day must have been incredible. The ability to then back up and perform the same feat in Olympics after Olympics was nothing short of superhuman.
Some Greek Olympians, moreover, had even longer careers than Leonidas—and ones far longer than those of their modern counterparts. The champion Spartan wrestler Hipposthenes, for example, scored victories in six consecutive Olympic wrestling competitions in the twenty-four years between 632 and 608 BCE. The hulking Milo of Kroton (he was reputed to eat more than twenty-two pounds of meat and twenty-two pounds of bread at every meal) did the same one hundred years later. (Only one modern wrestler, Adolf Lindfors in 1920, has ever won gold at an Olympics when over the age of forty, and even Lindfors only won at a single Olympics.) What makes this longevity even more incredible is that Greek wrestling was a brutal sport only marginally less lethal than boxing and the Pankration . Greek athletes also sometimes competed at much higher intensity than modern athletes—running, throwing, or fighting two or three times a week. Their modern counterparts typically compete in just a handful of events per year. The champion boxer Theogenes of Thasos, to quote one example, fought fourteen-hundred bouts over twenty-two years. Muhammad Ali, by comparison, fought just sixty-one in his twenty-one-year career. (Theogenes, what’s more, apparently never lost a bout; “The Greatest,” by contrast, dropped five.) Crowning laurels for stamina, however, must go to the fifth century CE chariot racer Porphyrius. Not only was Porphyrius known to occasionally race fifty times in one day, he continued racing for forty years until his retirement in his sixties. Porphyrius, similarly, won almost every race he entered—he even frequently performed the diversium: winning a race, then swapping chariots with his defeated rival and winning again. Again, what makes Porphyrius’s career so remarkable is the danger he faced: chariot races were notorious for their naufragium (“shipwreck”) crashes. The Greek poet Pindar, for example, describes one race in which forty-one chariots started but just one finished.
Performance-wise, it seems, our superathletes no more deserve the title than they do (some argue) the multimillion-dollar endorsements that follow. Yet others insist that it is precisely these rewards that make a male superathlete—the money, the lifestyle, the women, and the fanatical worship from millions of fans. Surely no ancient athlete could compete in this cult of the super sportsman? Call it schadenfreude, but the good news for all envious couch potatoes is that modern superathletes don’t, in fact, compare favorably. Whether financially, sexually, or in terms of public adoration, ancient sportsmen often make their modern counterparts look like impoverished minor league wannabes hustling change for a big date.
Golfer Tiger Woods, to start at the top, is thought to have set a new standard for modern superathletes, earning, as he did, U.S. $112 million in 2007.32 One of the ways he was able to do this was through his U.S. $2.5 million appearance fees. This is certainly steep, but it might surprise the struggling tour promoters who had to fork it over to know that they actually got off lightly. In ancient Greek games (of which there were many besides the Olympics, since every important Greek city staged its own), appearance fees were sometimes double that (in relative terms). One inscription, for instance, records that a top athlete at one city’s games received 30,000 drachma just for turning up—the equivalent of a soldier’s wage for 100 years. Given that the average modern American soldier’s annual wage is approximately U.S. $45,000, this makes for a relative value of U.S. $4.5 million. Then there were the prizes, which could be substantial indeed (giving the lie, incidentally, to the modern Olympics’ hypocritical pretensions of amateurism). At the Panathenaic games, for example, even winners of the lowest events received 100 amphorae “nine-gallon clay jars” of olive oil, the combined value of which was equivalent to the wage of a skilled worker for 3 years—roughly U.S. $225,000 in modern money. Winners also received free food for life at their home city’s expense, probably worth about U.S. $245,000 today.33 It was through rewards like these that Greek and Roman athletes were able to become some of the wealthiest men in the ancient world. The star second-century charioteer Diocles, for example, competed for purses worth up to an astronomical 60,000 sesterces at a time—equivalent to 60 times a soldier’s annual pay, or U.S. $2.7 million today. Given that he raced 4,257 times—and won on 1,462 of those occasions—it is no surprise Diocles accumulated a fortune of 35,823,120 sesterces, or U.S. $1.62 billion over his 20-year career. Admittedly, Tiger Woods might go on to equal this feat, yet we have to remember that Diocles was not even the Roman world’s most successful charioteer; he’s just the only one for whom we have figures. One dreads to think what the winnings of Porphyrius—who raced twice as long, much more frequently, and invariably won—would have been.
Another frequent boast of modern superathletes (the more ungentlemanly ones, at any rate) is the number of women they’ve slept with. Wilt Chamberlain, NBA basketball center for the Lakers and Harlem Globetrotters, to quote the most outrageous, famously claimed twenty thousand conquests. Though Chamberlain probably was exaggerating, it’s undeniably true that male athletic success is seriously sexy for women. One anthropologist who lived with the Mehinaku Indians of Brazil, whose men hold frequent public wrestling competitions, in the 1960s and 1970s wrote that village women coyly “made themselves available” for champions who triumphed in the wrestling square.34 Yet have modern superathletes really reached a high-water mark in sexual conquests? It’s difficult to make exact comparisons, but we do have some evidence that ancient athletes were no slouches in the romance department. Gladiators, for example, seem to have carried enormous sex appeal for Roman maids and matrons, if the following graffito descriptions from walls at Pompeii are anything to go by:
Crescens, the net fighter, is master of the girls [and] lord of the maidens, giving them their nightly medicine.
Celadus, the Thracian, is the girls’ hero who makes them all sigh.35
Even the poet Martial wrote of a phenomenally successful gladiator called Hermes, who was “the care and suffering of women.”36 Nor were the conquests of these ring heroes invariably lower-class groupies. Literary and archaeological evidence shows that gladiators often commanded the affections of very high-class Roman women. The satirist Juvenal wrote pointedly of a senator’s wife, Hippia, who forsook her family and social position to shack up with a gladiator, Sergius, whose “face was really disfigured:…[with] an enormous lump right on his nose, and the nasty condition of a constantly [dribbling] eye.”37 It was the steel, Juvenal complained, that they were in love with. Rumors abounded that powerful Roman men—even the Emperor Commodus—were actually the illegitimate sons of gladiators. An archaeological find from Pompeii, what’s more, may confirm that this wasn’t just talk—the skeleton of a very high-class woman ( judging from her gold and emerald jewelry) was found entwined in a gladiator’s arms in the barracks there. Dallying with senators’ wives and emperors’ mothers would, to put it in perspective, be like first ladies Michelle Obama and Laura Bush shacking up with two tag-team wrestlers from the WWF. So while we can’t say for certain just how many women ancient athletes had assignations with, they clearly sometimes went right to the top when they did.
The adulation of millions of fans is also considered a mark of the modern superathlete. Yet some ancient athletes were actually worshipped, not just hero-worshipped. Theogenes, to give one example, had a statue erected for him and became a god in his native city of Thasos. Citizens prayed to him to preserve crops, prevent disease, and rid the city of plague. A later inscription on a shrine shows his cult was still going strong five hundred years later and had spread far beyond his home city.38 Porphyrius the charioteer would probably have been made a god, too, if the empire had not become Christian by his time. As it was he received every honor short of it, having no fewer than seven statues of gold, silver, and bronze erected to glorify him, the first two before he had even grown a beard. This was unheard of, since such statues had to be approved by the emperor and weren’t normally authorized until the charioteer had retired. Michael Jordan, by comparison, had to wait until 2009—six years after his retirement—for induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame.
These two ancient athletes also show that another supposed mark of modern superathletes—bad behavior—has all been done before. Dennis Rodman may have ignited the airwaves in the early twenty-first century with cross-dressing, suicide attempts, and domestic violence incidents, but Theogenes and Porphyrius were serious bad boys. The Greek historian Plutarch, for instance, states that Theogenes was prone to challenging every guest at his banquets to fistfights. He was also once fined two talents (U.S. $250,000) for abruptly withdrawing from an event at the Olympics—a serious offense. This massive fine, and the fact that Theogenes was able to pay it, again emphasizes how wealthy Greek athletes were. Even Theogenes’ behavior, though, paled beside Porphyrius’s outrages. The famous charioteer once led a rioting mob on a burning and murdering rampage through the Jewish quarter of the city of Antioch, resulting in a mini massacre, and later, in 532 CE, played a part in the infamous Nika “victory” riots in Constantinople in which thirty thousand people died (see below). Next to that, even the 2007 dog-fighting conviction of NFL football player Michael Vick seems mild. In just about every respect, then, our athletic performance would probably relegate us modern males to the prehistoric benches. But isn’t it nonetheless true that we are, at least, the best sports in history? Haven’t modern athletes set new highs in terms of fair play and sportsmanship—defined by one sports ethicist as the ability to “take loss or defeat without complaint or victory without gloating and…[treat]…opponents with fairness, generosity and courtesy”? 39 Has any modern sporting team captain, though, ever seen one of his players killed but then still agreed that the murderer was, indeed, the game’s MVP? Yet that’s exactly what a troop of Scottish knights at a jousting tournament in 1341 ce did. Given the honor of naming the tournament prize winner, they chose the knight who had killed their countryman, William Ramsey, with a lance through the head.40 One could argue, of course, that European knights are a poor comparison, since their code of chivalry partly gave rise to the modern ethos of fair play. Yet other, non-Western, athletes historically showed sportsmanship that frequently amazed colonial-era Europeans. Swiss anthropologist Curt Nimuendajú was astonished to witness the aftermath of a 1940s Timbira Indian “log-race,” a grueling relay event in which teams of men struggled to run a ten-mile course carrying a two-hundred-pound wooden log, describing it thus:
Fans
The new millennium has often been described as an era of unprecedented spectator violence, particularly soccer hooliganism. As of 2008, for example, 185 Argentinean soccer fans have died from violence and hooliganism in soccer stadiums, with even more killed in related off-field attacks. Though tragic, this carnage is still just a shadow of ancient spectator violence. Roman sports crowds were not only so brutal they would have scared even English soccer hooligans, they also showed greater fanaticism than the most diehard of modern fans. This was partly because ancient crowds at some events were, incredibly, even larger than modern mobs. The hippodrome at Constantinople, for instance, seated 250,000 spectators for the chariot races. The biggest sporting event in the twentieth century, by comparison, the 1950 FIFA World Cup in Brazil, saw just 199,500 fans squeeze into the Estadio do Maracana to see Uruguay defeat Brazil.
These Roman fans were so committed that they sometimes followed their sporting idols into death, as in the case of the distraught supporter of the “Reds” chariot team, who suicided by jumping onto the funeral pyre of his favorite driver. Ancient fans could also have shown modern hooligans a thing or two about rioting. European soccer fans might overturn cars and smash windows at every UEFA Cup final, but rampaging fans in Constantinople actually burned the entire hippodrome down on four separate occasions between 491 CE and 532 CE. Nor did Roman fans lack organized hooligan gangs equivalent to the infamous “crews” of English soccer. Supporters of the “Blue” and “Green” factions at Constantinople, for example, wore flamboyant, billowing robes that would have put any English thug’s uniform to shame, and styled their facial hair so bizarrely it would have made modern skinheads look conservative. It was these gangs that almost toppled the Emperor Justinian in the week-long Nika riots of 532 CE—more than thirty thousand people were butchered before the government managed to put the rowdies down.
And now we come to the feature that remains incomprehensible…The victor and the others who have desperately exerted themselves to the bitter end receive not a word of praise, nor are the losers and outstripped runners subject to the least censure…Not a trace of jealousy or animosity is visible between the teams…Who turns out to be the victor makes as little difference as who has eaten most at a banquet.41
Another European observer of around the same era likewise noted that although young wrestlers and stick fighters of the African Nuba tribe spent months in harsh training, come fight day so little attention was paid to the champions that “there are essentially no victors and defeated.”42 Anthropologist Raymond Firth, similarly, commented on the remarkably sporting behavior of winning teams in the Polynesian Tikopian contest of stick throwing, writing: “It is the custom for the winners to gather a large number of green coconuts which are distributed among the losers. Both sides then sit down together to drink, eat and refresh themselves.”43
It is sometimes said, on the other hand, that what really marks modern competitive sport is its lack of sportsmanship. According to this theory, the commercial pressure to provide a spectacle, combined with our accelerating obsession with winning and records, has led to a retreat from the glorious sportsmanship we inherited from the ancient Greek Olympians. Once again, however, we’re really just the wannabe bad boys of the sports world. The ancient Greeks, to begin with, would have laughed at the notion, first voiced by the National Sportsmanship Brotherhood of America in 1926, that what matters is not “that you won or lost—but how you played the game.”44 Greek Olympians were so hypercompetitive they didn’t even record second or third places—all that mattered was who won. The poet Pindar, for instance, scorned second-place getters at the games, writing that theirs would be “a hateful homecoming [in] disgrace and secrecy…they slink along back alleyways, shunning enemy eyes and nursing pain, the bite of defeat.”45 Greek athletes were so preoccupied with winning that they were also quite prepared to die in the pursuit of victory, as evidenced by an inscription found at Olympia honoring a boxer, Agathos Daimon, who “died, boxing in the Stadium, having prayed to Zeus for either the crown or death.”46 Other ancient athletes went to further extremes, killing other people to win, as in the case of the Aztec priest-king Axayacatl, who had his men murder another city’s ruler, Xochimilco, when the latter got the advantage in a one-on-one match of the rubber-ball game that resembles basketball.47 Trobriand Islands men, according to the great anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, were even less chivalrous (if not quite as deadly)—not only did they force their women to enter a hopelessly uneven tug-of-war contest with them, and then, when the women inevitably lost, rub it in with a sneering and howling display; they also flung themselves upon their defeated womenfolk and had public and repeated sex with them.48
The high (or possibly low) point of bad sportsmanship, though, must be cheating. The succession of Olympic doping scandals in the 1990s and beyond have led some to claim that modern sport has entered an age of cheats. Yet even the most cursory study of ancient sport shows it was ever thus. True, Greek Olympians didn’t have the fantastic medicine chest of drugs we do, but it wasn’t from want of trying. Not only were Greek athletes suckers for any fad diet that might give them an advantage—figs, soft cheese, poppy seeds, mushrooms, pigs fed on berries, and so on—they also happily downed whatever supposed performance enhancers their technology did allow them (one favorite being gloios (“gum”), the mixed sweat, olive oil, and sand scraped off winning athletes’ bodies).49 Other ancient athletes also indulged. Native American lacrosse players, for example, smeared themselves with liquid mixed from wolves’ tracks and crawfish burrows.50 They also tried to secretly douse their opponents’ legs with the juice of a rabbit’s stewed left leg to lame them (the idea coming from the rabbit’s curious habit of leaving just three tracks in the snow).
If such concoctions failed to help, however, ancient sportsmen were only too ready to cheat outright. One European observer stated dryly that Samoan games of stick throwing were only honest because every single participant cheated, thereby canceling out his neighbor’s underhanded efforts. Greek Olympic athletes proved just as willing, bribery being their favored method. One Athenian pentathlete, Calippus, bribed every one of his competitors in 332 CE, duly winning the five-leg pentathlon. Demonicus of Elis, similarly, bribed the father of another competitor in the boys’ wrestling to let his (Demonicus’s) son win. We know this because both individuals were caught by the hellenodikai (“judges of the Greeks”) who forced them, by way of a fine, to pay for several statues (called zanes) of Zeus bearing the inscription: “An Olympic Victory is to be won not by money but by swiftness of foot or strength of body.” So many athletes were caught bribing that the hellanodikai were able to line the walkway to the Olympic stadium with these zanes in an attempt to shame other would-be cheaters. The evidence, though, shows that not all were so shamed. One lad who agreed to throw his wrestling match at the Isthmian games for 3,000 drachmas, for example, was so incensed that the victor refused to pay that he dragged him before the judges at the local temple and swore an oath on Poseidon that his opponent had bribed him fair and square.51 A little less forward, though far more malevolent, were those athletes who resorted to black magic to win. Around one thousand five hundred tabula defixio (“curse tablets”) have been found in ancient Greek and Roman arenas bearing appeals to devils and demons to intervene in the contest. At the hippodrome in Carthage, for instance, a concealed lead tablet was found carefully smoothed and nailed to the arena floor, inscribed with the words, “I beseech you O! demon and demand of you that you torture and kill the horses of the Greens and the Whites and that you cause the drivers Clarus, Felix, and Primulus to have fatal accidents.”52 True, these sound quaint to our ears, but given that chariot-race deaths were frequent, and that the people invoking the curses believed them utterly, it’s clear that ancient athletes were ready to take cheating to levels at which even Tonya Harding’s husband would have balked.
Why are modern contests so pale an imitation of ancestral sport? Why do we, apparently, run slower, jump lower, and shoot and throw more feebly than our tribal and prehistoric forebears did? Is it because we are, in some way, physically lesser than they were? Many sports historians, for example, originally believed that the Rwandan Tutsis were only able to jump so high because of their towering height compared to Europeans. Yet Tutsi men, it turns out, aren’t taller than modern Europeans; generally they’re shorter.53 True, at an average height of 5'7", they did tower over Europeans of the early 1900s, when those sports historians were writing, but Europeans and Americans have since grown to an average 5'8"—and yet our high-jump record still lags behind the Tutsi jumpers’, meaning it can’t be a simple matter of height disadvantage.
Once again, I believe, the explanation is ontogenetic. Tutsi boys practiced gusimbuka-urukiramende all the time, since it was the only way they could pass initiation and enter full manhood. Modern high-jumpers, in contrast, though no doubt highly motivated, don’t face the prospect of not being allowed to drive, vote, or drink if they fail to clear the bar. Tutsi men, just like those ancient Greek rowers, also passed tough childhoods as shepherds, in which they frequently had to run, jump, dodge, and even fight off lions. I’m also willing to stick my neck out and say that ontogeny probably explains the superiority of ancient archers, too. An average Olympic archer today, for example, trains forty hours a week on the range54—though certainly demonstrating commitment, this is nothing compared to Genghis Khan’s Mongols. Not only did Mongol archers probably train eighty hours a week, they also did so from early childhood, as Franciscan friar John Carpini, who visited the Khan’s court in 1247 ce, confirmed:
The men do not make anything at all, with the exception of arrows…they hunt and practice archery, for they are all, big and little, excellent archers, and their children begin as soon as they are two or three years old to ride and…are given bows to suit their stature and are taught to shoot.55
Later sources show that ancient Turkish archers practiced gripping and drawing heavy bows for years before they were even allowed to fire them. When finally judged ready, they then trained by firing 1,000 arrows a day. It was probably because of this strenuous training that Turkish archers were able to use much heavier bows than modern archers—some Ottoman Turkish bows, preserved in museums, take over 220 pounds of force to draw, or four times that of modern Olympic bows.56
Training
It might be thought that the super performances of our ancestral athletes demanded super preparation. Yet their match-day preparation often seems to have been at best useless and at worst positively harmful. Most athletes, indeed, probably succeeded despite rather than because of it. Ancient Chinese martial arts masters, for example, undoubtedly had logic on their side when they smashed their shins into logs repeatedly to toughen them, but the number of fractures and muscle hemorrhages must have also been enormous. Greek Olympic athletes, similarly, showed some sense in their tetrad system of training, which alternated endurance running, weightlifting, ball exercises, and sand running in a four-day cycle of hard and soft exercise. Yet the recommendation of some Greek authors that aspiring athletes wrestle with animals, including bulls and lions, seems more questionable. Cherokee ball-game players, on the other hand, mauled themselves in preparation for each match. By the time they had finished their pre-game “scratching” ordeal, in which each player was gashed bloodily three hundred times with a claw-like blade, they must have looked like they’d tangled with a horde of massive carnivores. Nor did Native American athletes go in for any nonsense about carb-loading: sound preparation for an Iroquois lacrosse match involved swallowing a disgusting emetic to make each player vomit. Still, there was some consolation to be had from this wild and woolly amateurism. The famous Greek doctor Hippocrates, for instance, had a simple remedy for an athlete’s aching muscles: he should “get drunk on wine once or twice.”
One word, I think, sums up the various causes of ancient athletic superiority: engagement. Ancient athletes were so much better at sport because they were so much more deeply engaged with it. Often they lived it. That’s also the reason, I believe, that ancient sport was frequently more dangerous and violent—usually so much more was at stake than it is today. An ancient Greek pankratiast couldn’t settle for second-place honors; there were none. He had to fight on, if need be to the death. An Aztec ball-gamer couldn’t play soft; to do so would be to dishonor the gods. This is the real truth of the “sport as a civilizing influence” theory: it has things backward. Modern sport is not the repository of aggression that has allowed other aspects of life to become more civilized: sport itself has been tamed and pacified as part of the civilizing process. This is largely the result, as Norbert Elias said, of the divorcing of sport from its original aims in ritual, war, hunting, and dueling. The flipside of this, however, is that modern sport is played with less passion, lower intensity, and vastly reduced drama. One reason for the high death rate in Roman chariot races, for example, was the charioteers’ habit of wrapping their reins around their waist. Since getting entangled in wreckage and dragged by frightened horses was a major killer of drivers, this was a serious statement of intention to “go down with the ship.” This is why charioteers attracted fanatical crowds the size of which LeBron James could only dream, why they made money beyond the fantasies of mere modern super-golfers, and why they earned the awe of kings and nobles: they literally put their lives on the line every time they raced.
What modern sportsman, in this era of the “blood rule” and hair-trigger litigation, would dare do the same?
In any case, the situation for Homo masculinus modernus is clearly getting serious. If sport isn’t our game then where do we modern males excel? What achievements can we use to salve our pride, impress our women, and ensure the propagation of our half of the species? Given our physical failings, might we, like Cyrano de Bergerac, make good such deficiencies through the power of our honeyed words? The eloquent poet of Rostand’s play did, after all, win Roxane’s heart, despite his oversized schnoz. There is even some scientific support for the notion: several studies have found women rate verbal creativity more highly than looks or even wealth in the sexual-attractiveness stakes.
That being the case, perhaps we can breathe easier. We are, after all, more literate, better educated, and more creative than any men in history…aren’t we?
To take one example, some literary theorists claim that modern hip-hop and rap represents the height of male poetic wordplay, superior to even classical poets such as Homer and Virgil. Rappers, they insist, improvise complex and witty lyrical barbs, on the spot, in the course of their live “battle raps”—a far cry from the years Virgil took to write Rome’s national poem, the Aeneid. To pursue a “beef,” or fight, with a rival, rappers must also write and release “diss [disrespecting] tracks” within days to respond to their enemy. What’s more they are also some of the best-paid entertainers in history: Curtis Jackson, aka 50 Cent, raked in U.S. $150 million in 2008 alone, placing him on top of Forbes’s “Hip-Hop Cash Kings” list.
So far, so reassuring, but how do these claims fare under proper scientific study? Do modern rappers really blow ancient bards away with their incredible feats of memory, improvisation, creativity, and wordplay? Courtesy of the next chapter, BARDS, ladies and gentlemen, we are pleased to announce a once-in-a-lifetime chance to find out. Sit back in ringside comfort then as, for one night only, the insults fly, grown men cry, and poetic reputations are deflated, berated, eliminated, and fustigated in this, the ultimate rappers’ beef: Homer vs. 50 Cent.
It should be a hell of a show.