‘Allen Guttman Introductory Remarks Sports spectatorship is a complex phenomenon that varies, within certain bound- aries, from time to time and fromplace to place. It can be the solitary mediated ex- petience of a single person quietly watching his or her television screen, Ic can aso be the immediate collective experience of a hundred thousand shouting, scream- ing men and women—a sports crowd—packed into a domed stadium. Sports ‘crowds sometimes gather on the spur of the moment, as they did when an Ameri- can professor and his German students played a game of Sunday softball in a perk in Tubingen, but sports crowds are more typically found in set places at set times, according to a schedule published well in advance of the event. In this sense, in sira sports spectators resemble people who subscribe to a series of monthly con- certs or theatrical performances. A major difference is that in situ sports specta- ‘ors are usually sports fans, They see themselves as active participants, inspiring the home team with their cheers and demoralizing the visiting team with theit taunts. Sports crowds ate partisan and almost always have been, which is why they are fre- quently disorderly and sometimes violent. Ancient moralists said that sports fans were intoxicated or insane; modern Italian slang calls them #ifori—that is, those ‘who are stricken with typhoid fever. An exception to this dour generalization about partisanship comes immedi- ately to mind. Well-behaved Victorian and Edwardian sports spectators schooled themselves to express a nonpartisan admiration for athletic prowess. When Eton's cricketers took to the field against a team from Harrow or Winchester, a goodplay by one’s opponents deserved as much hearty applause asa good play by one’s own team. Historically, however, this code of behavior was an anomaly. Sociologically, it was class specific. The internalization of the ethos of nonpar- tisan good sportsmanship was never as complete among working-class sports fans as among spectators from the middle and upper classes. Gender also made a difference. In Victorian and Edwardian sports crowds, female specta- tors—who have almost always in every era been outnum- bered by male spectators—were usually less pactisan (and ‘much less prone co verbal or physical violence). Many con- temporary observers who commented with disdain on the unruly behavior of working-class fans noted with admira- tion the exemplary behavior of the ladies at Wimbledon or at Lord's. Some observers remarked on a less obvious phenomenon. Spectators who play the game they watch behave differently from those who have never tried theie hhand (or foot) at it. The nic of strategy appeal to the aficionado, and sensational action areracts those who don't know the difference between the third-strike dropped-ball rule and the leg-before-wicker rule The nonpartisan Victorian code of good sportsmanship hhas more or less vanished (along with the class-bound am- ateur ethos with which it was closely related), and in situ spectators tend ro behave today as they have through most of recorded history. As the anthropologist Christian Brom berger noced in his exemplary study of French and Italian soccer fans, “A passion for football cannot be nourished by the pleasure of pure contemplation.” Sports crowds iden- tify emotionally with athletes whom they feel to be their representatives. And they let the world know it, There are many other things that now need to be said about sports crowds, bur this chord—partisanship and disorder—will be the loudest 2 ALLEN GuTTMANN The Past Modern illusions about the dignity and decorum gi sports spectators should be dispelled along wih Joachim Winckelmann’s romantic notion that (4 was a manifestation of calmness and serenity. Speci hardly mentioned in the account of the funeral Patroclus in book 23 of the Mad, but Homer doce thar they were numerous and that they applauded ly and “thundered approval.” On a fragment from q century BC vase by Sophilos, we can see (and all hut Homer's heroes as they watch a chariot race. The tures leap to their fect, wave their arms, and shout selves hoarse." It is an oddly familiar sight. Olympian detachment and disinterested curioscy no more evident at Olympia than on the plains of 1 During the games, the isolated site was crowded with § tors from the entire Greek world, which extended cast to the far shores of the Black Sea and westward to the: iterranean coast of Spain. The site was (and still is) fear hot and dry in midsummer, when the sacred games <6 place at the time of the second or third full moon after d summer solstice. In the fourth century ac, the Leonidaiff was constructed to house wealthy or politically importa visitors to the games, but most of the spectators had to satisfied with sleeping in tents or with spending their nigh under the stars. As late as the first centucy AB, after Ro ‘man benefactions had provided some minimal comfort the philosopher Epictetus reminded his readers that lyst pic crowds had to be st “Do you not swelter? Are yok hot cramped and crowded? Do you not bathe badly? Are you not drenched whenever it rains? Do you not have yout fill of tumult and shouting?” ‘There is abundant evidence for this “tumult and shout) ing.” The nineteenth-century scholar Johann Heinrich’ Krause, who is still the best modern source on Greek spec tators, drawing not only on Epictetus but also on Pindar,nas, and many other dly of the conduct of the bableenthusiasm «! ‘with what a lively sense fate the athleces’ feats and en~ f the contests, how their spirits were ex {They wete impelled unconscious- to raise their voices, ‘ith the greatest joy, chose present ded- ‘now with the deepest in were the correlates of partisan- 11 historian Roberto Sides that the spectators behaved with the {f modern sports spectators ree that Greek crowds were c, the modern Italia human passion” of and H. W. Plekec ag and as excitable a8 at am axtisanship meant, the officials who were f che Olympic games, a 4c of keeping the ath- . The names of these (whip bearers) and. rab ly the crowd's reluctance £0 €- ychian games, sacred (0 Bef the management of Btants, who did thi Hftestrint. (Ac Delphi's P spectators were more Dionysian tha enness was such a problem that they Bifto carry wine into the stadium.) ger minimal decorum the Hellan seems to have vanis! in Hellenistic Alexandria, where Brin Dio Chrysostom condemned the outrageous ic is as though they had found a letely, and shameless- fey encer the stadium, gs; they forget themselves compl Bi do the fist thing that occu Rider the inuence of some maniacal drug: cis a fyou Roc warch the proceedings ina civilized fas who could describe che yells and uproat, db expresion in your faces, and you enter the stadium, the frenzy, the switches of color ah all the curses you give vert t0?” Dias repugnance matched that of modern journalists exc rating the “mindles” behavior of “Yootall hooligans.” “THe Geeks of the Had were content that the funeral games in honor of fallen warsiors terminated ip symbol- ejcadh thar i, in athletic defear—bur the Romans cal sete funeral games in which the dead were honored by “ditional deaths, The fist gladiaworial games, known in the phal as murera, were held in 246 86 by Mascus and Decaus Brutus in honor of their deceased father. The rr nr consisted of three duels (six gladiators) and were hel ert eet matket. One can assume that the number of specraors was faiy small and that chere was n° reference seespnely behavion In che cence chat followed thers seas an apparently ireversible tendency toward luc Ton, The number of gladiators continually increase emperor Tiajan, for instance is sad to have celebrated his Mlenories over the Dacian, at the end of the fist century wtp, with combats among ten thousand gladiators, an 6 travagance surpassed by the naval bate staged by Claudius nap 52 with nineteen thousand combarants The crowds thac gathered to experience this sanguine de- light were immense and the arenas needed to comtait them ise temporary arenas built of wood some= were huge. Beat ‘ims collapsed, Killing large numbers of spectarorsand er fifjing the ret, they were eventually replaced by mor mental stone structures erected throughoue the empire “The most famous of them was, of course, the Colosseum, a amphitheater be- more accurately referred to as the Flavian aoe was exeaed by the Flavian emperors Vespasian and His son Titus, This gigantic construction, finished in A> fo, sened fifty chousand, Despite their immensity, Roman renas provided comforts tinknown co Greck spors sPe° army hen we read thatthe arena at Pompeit provid tal che specraors with vel et sparsiones(aenings and Per Sports Crowdsfumed sprays), we are apc to think of the luxury boxes of the domed stadia of modern American cities ‘That the spectators preferred the gladiators co be free men rather than slaves or condemned criminals is clear from the remarks of Echion, a character in the Sasyricon of Petronius, who speaks excitedly of an imminent show with skilled fighters, “and... not a slave in che batch.”* Michael Grants explanation for this preference is simple: “Free fighters were more sought after than slaves, presum ably because they showed greater enthusiasm.” Georges Ville added that “the public preferred a fice gladiator to a slave and a knight or a senator to an ordinary citizen.”* Res- sentiment also played a role. Nothing pleased the plebeian spectators more than the humbling of the high and mighty. by the lowly. Itwas clearly a thrill o see one’s rulers exposed for once to risks and hazards comparable co those encoun- tered by ordinary mortals in their scruggle to survive. At the gladiatorial games, social hierarchy took spatial forms. In the amphitheaters at Arles, Nimes, and probably in those of Rome as well, different “tribes” were seated in differene cunei (wedges) of the stadium. Augustus had def: inte ideas about social rank and seating. Everyone, from senator to slave, had his assigned place. Armed guards re- ‘minded the spectators that external controls were ready to enforce order if internal restraint failed ‘The poor had their place, Although most spectators paid for their seats, the plebs frumentaria (that is, those on the dole) had free tickets.* Neither poverty nor servile status ‘was a bar to enthusiastic fandom. A funerary inscription for the slave Crescens informed posterity that he was keen on the Thracian style of gladiatorial combat.” The slave Da- vyus, owned by the poet Horace, appears in the Second Sat- ireas a fan who marvels “at the posters of athletes straining their muscles in combat.” The populus that crowded the arena collected works of are that recalled for them their experiences at the mumera, A common archeological find at Roman sites is an inexpen- sive clay lamp with gladiatorial motifs. Wealthy Ral bought bronze statuettes or commissioned murals and saics with images from the arena. In the Satyricon, im chio has his favorite gladiator pictured on silverware. Christians were not immune to the appeals of fang Augustine's disciple Alypius suffered a dramatic sai when he ventured into the amphitheater and was gf come: “For s0 soon as he saw that blood, he thera drunk down savageness; nor tured avvay, but fixed hig drinking in frenzy, unawares, and was delighted with guilty ight, and intoxicated with the bloody pastime," gustine’s metaphots—drunkenness, intoxication —e from his age to ours. The spectators reacted to the § blood as if they were drugged or in an alcoholic freney Alchough many must have appreciated the skils off ed fighter lived or died Overtime, the munera became| creasingly sensationalistic and perverse: Soon bloodthirsty combats and magnificent scenery filed to excite the dulled nerves of the mab, aristocratic or vulgar: only things absolucely exotic, unnatucal, nonsensical, tickled thei jaded senses” Among the exotic teats were femal gladiators. Two of chill are depicted on a stele from Halicarnassus in Asia Minor and circuses” (panem et circenses)—was, as expected, tirical about the (imaginary) spectacle of “women, breast Amazon-naked,” facing “wild boars at the games.” L ‘moralistic Romans were obviously excited by the sights o armed women. In the Satyricon, one of Trimalchio’ guests complains of a poor gladiatorial show and anticipates i better one with “a gicl who fights from a chariot.”® Whett ‘women fought, bare-breasted or nor, an erotic frisson must have rippled through the crow.Tyecewas very litle opposition to the gladiatoral games Bj parc of pagan moralists. Most educated Roman spec- Ec seemed untroubled by the deaths of men and beasts, He jilosopher-dramatist Seneca was among the hand- sf pagan writers who expressed the kind of horror that py awentieth-century critics feel at sports that are far less Bifenc chan the mumera, For Seneca, che arena was the ste fel and inhuman combats. His comment on the crowd. {devastatingly succinct: “Mane leonibus et ursis homi- rmeridie spectatoribus suis obiciuntur” (In the mom- hey throw men to the lions and the bears; at noon, fy throw them to the spectators). Seneca’s revulsion was eptional; most Romans shared Cicero's conviction that Imunera provided the spectators with an exemplary im- e of manly fortitude.” The poet Ovid was also upbeat flout bloodshed, urging women to display their physical faems in the stadium, “where the sands are sprinkled with frthe populace coming to the show—mad already. . .. One fenzy, one voice!” Christian moralists were also horrified hy the idolatry of the games. Fallen gladiators were jabbed bith hot irons by a slave dressed as the god Mercury (co be stain that death was not feigned). Another slave, in the rb of Dis Pater, dragged the corpse away, after which the {man's blood was offered to Jupiter Latiaris by the priest tho served that deity. Small wonder, then, that Christian Philosophers expressed fear for the spectators soul. Novi- tian exclaimed, “Idolatria... ludoruim omnium mater est!” Aldolacry is the mother of all these games!)* Considering the level of violence of gladiatorial combat and the spectators’ powder keg of religious, racial, ethnic, and class differences, one marvels that the Roman arena did riot explode into disorderly riot. At least once, it did. The name “Pompeii” evokes visions of volcanic catastrophe, but the wealthy town was also the scene of a disaster that the inhabitants brought on themselves, The historian Tacitus reports thar rumults erupted there during the manera, f= ter which the town was for a decade deprived ofits right to stage gladiatorial games. This singular episode of spectator, violence was, however, very unusual. There was, in fact, an “almost total absence of documented riots." Paradoxically, che relatively nonviolent chariot races pro- voked spectator violence that rose to levels unknown among the fans of the munera. Like modern football hooligans, the Byzantine Empire’ “circus factions" were organized groups of fanatically partisan fans. The factions-—the “Blues” and the “Greens”—were a menace (0 civil society and even to the Byzantine state. In Constantinople, the rioting factions set fire to the city’s wooden hippodromes so often—in 491, 498, 507, and 532—that the authorities finally rebuilt chem in stone.” Many times during the fifth and sixth centuries, spectator violence increased to the point where troops were repeatedly called on to restore order. In 507, for example, after a victory by the immensely popular charioteer Por- phyrius, che jubilant Greens ran wild and, in the course of the riot, burned Antioch’s synagogue, a quite typical in- stance of ancillary anti-Semitism." “The worst of these outbreaks occurred during the reign of Justinian. On January 13, 532, supporters of the Blues and Greens joined forces to prevent executions that were about to take place in Constantinople's hippodrome. On January 14, the emperor acceded co demands that he dis- miss John of Cappodocia and other unpopular officials. On January 18, the mob proclaimed a new emperor to whom a ‘number of panicky senators paid hasty homage. Forvunate- ly for Justinian, his most capable general, Belisarius, artived in time to quell the disturbance—at the cost of an estimat- ced thirty thousand lives.” In comparison with this blood- Sports Crowdsbath, the worst episodes of modern sports-related violence seem relatively innocuous. Confionced with the plain fact that the factions in the hippodrome were far more disorderly and destructive than the spectators in the arena, no one can plausibly contend that che violence of the spore determines the violence of the crowd, The size of the crowd must be a factor, but the dif. ference in capacity between the Colosseum and the Circus, Maximus was surely not great enough to explain the radi- cally different behavior of the spectators. There is no reason to believe that the number of soldiers posted to keep order varied significantly from one site to the other. The solu- ton to the puzzle may be that sports fans identify more in- tensely, bond more tightly, with teams chan with individu- als. Eric Hobsbawm, thinking of Benedict Arnold's famous definition of nationhood and referring specifically to soccer foorball, expressed this thought succinctly: “The imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people.”” Representational sport of the kind refetred to by Hobsbawm was understood by Pliny the Younger. In a letter, he condemned the “childish passion” of ignorant fans who cheered mindlessly for the Blues or the Greens but cared litle for “the speed of the horses or che drivers skill” In- deed, commented Pliny, “ifthe colors were to be exchanged. in mid-course during a race, (che fans] would transfer their favor and enthusiasm and rapidly desert the famous drivers and horses whose names they shout... . Such is the popu- larity and importance of a worthless shit.” Although medieval sports spectators were an unruly lot, their disorders never approached the level of tumult and rampage exhibited by Byzantine circus factions. The main reason for this lower level of violence was the much small- er scale of medieval sports. The grandest tournaments were diminutive affais compared with the races in the Circus, Maximus or in the hippodromes of Constantinople and Al- exandria, The two thousand persons attending the tourna- ALLEN GUTTMANN ment at Sandricourt near Pontoise in 1493 were a mere percent of the Roman crowd that cheered forthe Blues any the Greens.» In medieval times, most of the sports-related violent was perpetrated by the participants rather than by th onlookers. The explanation is simple. For the medie knight, the line between tournament and battlefield, ba tween mock and real warfare, was thin and easily ransa sgressed. “Games resembled war and war resembled games; writes the French scholar-diplomat Jean Jusserand. “The union of warfare and games was so close tha itis frequents ly difficule co decide ifa given activity ought to be classified under one cubric or the other.”® Frequently, onte merged into the other, Ata tournament held at Chalons in 1274, fot example, when Edward I of England was illegally seized by: the Comte de Chalons, whom he had challenged, a brawl broke out in which several people were killed.* When a group of squires held a tournament at Boston Fair in 1288; the fact that one side dressed as monks and the other cos- umed itself as canons of the church failed co prevent a riot, ‘The faie was sacked and part of the town burned.” It is im- possible to say exactly how much of the mayhem at Roch- ester, Chalons, Boston, and elsewhere can be attributed to the spectators rather than to the combatants because medi- eval chroniclers were seldom interested in the former. We can infer a good deal, however, from the fact that German towns were compelled to recruit hundseds of armed men to keep order while tournaments were in progress. Augs- burg was sai, in 1442, to have hired two thousand men to kkeep the peace." And we do have at least one instance of a rampage by a mostly brirgerlich crowd in fourteenth-centu- ty Basel. A bloody cumulc broke our after a number of citi- zens were trampled by mounted noblemen, Several knights were killed.” In time, as the “civilizing process” brilliantly analyzed by Norbert Elias rransformed medieval violence into the relatively pacific behavior of the Renaissance, as knightsme courtiers dressed in silk and satin, tour- 4 ese fom ludic warfare into elaborately alle cass within which armed combat played a very Ei. The perfection of military prowess became see- [ja the tournament became a theatrical produc Bich ness to rule was associated with fineness of Ui of che Renaissance tournament was the famous Pergbee that René d’Anjou staged at Tarascon in Phe knights who performed at this tournament were fas shepherds, and the mise-en-scéne included a cottage occupied by a “shepherdess.” Elaborate ies important as courtly deportment. Chivalric, Pipinally designed as an adornment to it."® René de- Pjeevent in his Thaitié de la Forme et Devis dung F compulsively detailed etiquette book regulati Fentrances, proper verbal formulas, and appropri- fALitcleis said of the clash of weapons. Jean Ver- dern authority on medieval leisure, comments fi¢};who adored sumptuous festivals, was essentially in ceremony and costume; he regulated the mi- bu he did not indicate how the jousts were to Jous"* When the Duke of Buckingham staged a Beornament at Westminster in 1501, the focus of at- as on the pageant cars, They were a phantasma- ves, giants, wild men, and allegorical animals icy were “inept.”* events, which were more folderol than sports Df privilege and power when the ruled were present fe admire, and be awed by thei rulers. The crowd #Sgaced, just as ie was in che Roman arena, bu it was ‘composed of men and women from every social class. When Antoine, the Bastard of Burgundy, accepted the challenge of Anthony Woodville, Lord Scales, che entire city of Lon- don seems to have been as excited as a modern metropolis hosting the Olympic Games or soccer football's World Cup Finals. When the tournament began, at Smithfield in the spring of 1467, a public holiday was proclaimed, and thou- sands made their way to the site. Below the king’s box were three tiers for knights and squires. Across from them was a stage for the Lord Mayor and his aldermen, Common- cers unable (o shove their way into the enclosute climbed nearby trees ¢o catch a glimpse of the jousts, which were disappointing, and the pageantry, which was marvelous-* ‘When a tournament was held in a treeless urban square, which was often the case in the fifteenth and sixteenth cen- tuties, city dwellers crowded into windows overlooking the site. The more adventurous among them clambered to the rooftops of adjacent buildings. The stands, windows, and roofs are carefully delineated in a print, dated 1570, which commemorates the 1559 tournament at which Henti I of France was fatally wounded.® At a tournament held in 1501 to celebrate the birth of Prince Arthur, son of Henry VII, there was a charge for admission, but Londoners cannot hhave been deterred by the expense. A contemporary chron- icler reported that the throng was so thick that there “was no thynge to the yee but oonly viseges and faces, without apperans of their bodies.” ‘The nascent bourgeoisie, excluded from active participa- tion in knightly tournaments, staged archery matches. As archery guilds spread from Artois, Brabant, Flanders, and Picardy to northern France and to all of Getman-speak- ing central Europe their annual meets the Schitzenfeste, evolved into major usban festivals combining a number of different sports with pageants, banquets, dances, drunken ness, buffoonery, and the pleasures of illicit sex” Ar the grand archery matches held in Augsburg in 1509 on the oc- casion of a visic by Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, the Sports Crowdsentertainments included footraces for male and female at- tendants and servants, ninepin contests, horse races, and a rournament for mounted knights. Footraces held in con- junetion with archery meets were widely accepted as ways for young women to display their athleticism for the male spectators’ admiration or mockery. Inevitably, the excitement of holiday, intensified by the consumption of alcohol, meant a good deal of rowdy be- havior. In German-speaking central Europe there was ust- ally a Pritschenkénig (king of the whip) who combined the roles of police chief and poet laureate. He was expected to keep order and to provide festive verses. He was not al- ways equal co the task. Quarrels that began at a meet in Konstanz, in 1458, culminated in a war against the nearby city of Zurich. There were, however, relatively few inci dents of this sort. Good-natured interaction seems co have been the rule rather than the exception. When roo many Nurnbergers crowded about the stand from which the win- nets were to receive their prizes, the affable donors sim- ply passed the prizes over their heads to the proud victors. Cheers then drowned out the laudatory remarks intended to accompany the awards.” Medieval peasants played a rough-and-tumble game from which, centuries later, all the modern “codes” of foot- ball evolved, Research into che crowds that gathered to watch a game of football is pointless because there were no crowds. When village met village to celebrate the vernal equinox wich a lively match, everyone got into the game— ‘men and women, adults and children, clergy and lity. Ev- eryone was a participant. As a contemporary comment- ced, “Neyther maye there be anye looker on at this game, but all must be actours.” And if someone came simply to watch, “being in the middest of the troupe, {he] is made a player."" Ie is common knowledge thar the spectators who attend an equestrian competition like dressage are not members of the same social se as the sports fans who prefer NASCAR, 18 ALLEN GUTTMANN races or snooker contests. In contrast, the sports spectacles of ancient Rome seem to have been equally attractive 1g men and women of every social class. There were doubs. less some differences. Greek-style athletics were probably more popular with the wealthy than with the plebeians, but there were no ancient sociologists to collect the data from which to connect the dots. At some point—during the Renaissance? in early modern times?—spotts spectators began to experience the ludic equivalent of the division of labor. The crowd that gathered to bet on the outcome of a cockfight in the slums of London was obviously different in its social composition from the Restoration courtiers who rode out of town with Charles IT to wager on the races ag Newmarket. Te was at this time chat divergence on the basis of s0- cial class became too obvious to overlook. Although Joseph Scrute asserted, early in the ninereenth century that “blood sports” attracted only “the lowest and most despicable part of the [English] people,”® there is ample evidence that, as late as Tudor times, cockfights, bearbaiting, and bullbait- ing were as popular among the elite as among the common folk, Henry VII was fond enough of cockfights to add a pit to Whitehall, and his daughter, Elizabeth I, prohibited the aters from opening on Thursdays because they interfered with “the game of bear-baiting, and like pastimes, which are maintained for her Majesty's pleasure.”» A century later, middle-class Englishmen like Samuel Pepys and John Ev- clyn felt differently. After observing a bearbaiting, on Au- gust 14, 1666, Pepys wrote that ic was “a very rude and nas- ty pleasure,” Evelyn's dislike of animal sports was equally evident. He wrote on June 16, 1670, he was “forc'd to ac- companie some friends to the Bear-garden . . . Where was Cocke fighting, Dogfighting, Beare and Bull baiting. it being a famous day forall these butcherly Sports, or rather barba- rous cruelties.”® As early as 1737, the Gentleman’ Magazine condemned “the rude Exercises of Cock-Throwing, Bull- baiting, Prize-Fighting, and the like Bear-garden DiversionsF fo mention the more genteel Encertainment of Cock fe)” The editors, sounding very much like a modera IE levis violence, went on to say that brutal sports Bi vthe Minds of Children and young People with Disposition and Ferity of Temper highly pleased was of Batbacity and Cruelty." Ic was still possible yar’ day co ind respectable men ata cockfight, but Eenents of middle-class opinion, strongly influenced Gangelcal religion, ran strongly against animal sports. The social composition of the “fancy” who crowded fund che prize ring was a bimodal mix of titled aristocrats fhe urban mob. The Tex Rickards and Don Kings who Bmnove ewencieth-century boxing matches have often ris- fom the same social cass as the men they pit against one Biher, buc eighteenth-cencury fights were likely to be ar- fed by noble patrons of lower-class pugiists. The Duke FeCumberland, for example, was known for his sponsor- fpof John Broughton, considered to be England's cham- Bn: When Broughton lost his title in 3750, his patton, ing backed him with an excess of confidence, was poor- by several thousand pounds.” furn-of-the-century observers often insisted that every- he joined the crovds that followed the fights, Pierce Egen, fe Gist great sportswriter, described the crowd of thirty housand gathered in 1824 for the ‘Tom Spring-John Lan- fin bout as “a union ofall ranks, from the brilliant of the ighest clas... down to the Dusty Bob graduation in so- Bicry; and even a shade ot two below that. Lots of the ur- ix HOUSE, THE Lowen house, and the flash house."* The FAmerican writer Washington Irving agreed: “What is the Fancy itself, but a chain of easy communication, extend- Bing down from the peer to the pick-pocket, through the Jncdium of which a man of rank may find he has shaken Thands at three removes, with the murderer on the gibbet.”* Ifehere was a chain, its middle links were missing. During the Regency, members of Parliament did appear at many Fights, just as a number of American celebrities appear at ringside for the monthly “fight of the century,” but mid- dle-dass men were nowhere to be seen, and the members of Parliament were greatly outnumbered by those whom Egan described as cockneys or as “yokels” whose faces “exhibited _gape-seed enough to have filled a corn-chandler’s shop." Fight crowds included a number of disreputable wom- en. The German traveler Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach encountered one of them, whom he described as “rather vociferous.” She proudly assured him “that two years ago she had fought another female in this place without stays and in nothing but a shift.” In one of Thomas Rowland- son's Finest prints, The Prize Fight (1787), a few eubby fe- males cavore among the generally nondescript spectator. On the whole, however, fight fans were and still are over- whelmingly male. ‘Were they violent? Far less often than might have been expected. Ifthey were like dogs baying for the taste of blood, which is how moralists have characterized them, cheir bark ‘was far worse than their bite. The typical transgression was a surge forward to disrupt a bout in which the favorite was about to be beaten. Pugilism flourished on che margins of respectable soci- ej, condemned by the eeformist middle classes, for whom the sight of a disorderly crowd was tantamount to an image ‘of anarchy. Cricket crowds were quite another matter. They embodied the imagined community. By the lace eighteenth century, cricket had become the archetypical English game, Nostalgia played a role. As England became increasingly ut- ban and industrial, ericket—a game with ineradicable pas- ‘oral connotations—became increasingly important as an assertion of reassuring continuity. The industrial workers of Manchester, whose misery Friedrich Engels document- cd, had litle in common with their employers, but it was a comfort to the comfortable to think that country squires still bowled for cricket teams that included cheir servants, the village wheelwright, and an assortment of other sural wworthies. Sports Crowds120 Our Village, Mary Russell Mitford's evocation of Eng- lish life in the early nineteenth ceneury, includes a famous account of a cricket match. “I doubt,” wrote Mitford, “if there be any scene in the world more animating or de- lightful chan a cricket match.” The spectators were "retired cricketers, vererans of the green, the careful mothers, the gids, and all the boys of ewo patishes. ten-years-old urchin, of a septuagenary woman in the par- ish, who did not feel an additional importance, a reflected consequence, in speaking of ‘our side."** John Nyron, the first great chronicler of the game, matched Micford’s fic- tionalized description with his own versions of the pastoral In his books, whole counties turn ou to watch their rep- resentatives, They never interfere with the play, not even when the ball is hit into their midst. “Like true English- men, they Mitford and Nyren romanticized. ‘There were frequent «There was not a sive an enemy fair play." disorders at eighteenth-century cricket matches. In 1744, nobles and gentlemen complained of untuly crowds at games at London's Artillery Ground, When Leicester met Coventry in 1787, there was “a pitched battle in the streets of Hinckley.” Five years lates, Westminster boys broke win- dows on their way to a game, and an irate citizen was tak- en to court for firing shots over their heads. ‘The answer to the threats of riot was to fence the grounds and charge admission.* By the middle of che next century, however, cricket crowds had become les fractious, They were patient, a nec- essary vireue when cricket matches lasted for days. They were partisan, which was inevitable when teams represent- ed towns or counties, but they were—for the most part— orderly and well behaved. Although the Marylebone Crick- et Club, the spore’s governing body, enlarged the stands at Lord's to hold as many as thirty thousand spectators, his- torians agree that crowd control was not a problem. “Vic- torian cricket crowds behaved very well indeed." Disorder was “generally verbal rather than physical."* Although sentimental historians have aimed that ex croweds were socially inclusive and that men and fom all ranks “jostled one another happily," the val ‘ors “civilized” behavior was largely a consequence of) exclusion. It was possible for anyone to pause on the ‘0 a pub in order to observe a few minutes of cricees was played on the town common, but county ericker international ests occurred in feaced grounds open jf to those affluent enough to pay subscription costs od trance fees. The ruffians whom one might have cautiog (That's not cricket”) were absent. The game, o, haughty leader of the Marylebone Cricket Club, was the worse for their absence.”# The decisive role of social class can be observed in df contrast between English and Australian cricket. Austral was, quite self-consciously, a much mote egalitatian so ety. The Melbourne Cricket Club wene agains the prain Australi egalitarian culture and attempted to block low cr-class spectators by charging a shilling for entrance to ti grounds, approximately one-sixth of a worker’ daily wage For admission to the first ces against England, in 1877, the lub charged a prohibitive four shillings. The elitises’ eff to keep the game to themselves was, however, doomed. cricket grew increasingly popular, as it came to be perceivedl 35a manifestation of Australian identity, working-class Aus walans played and watched. The “Iarrikins” (rough yo men) among the spectators began to invade the pitch andl cause delays in the game. On February 8, 1879, some wo thousand of them stormed the grounds of the Sydney Crick- et Club and attacked che visting English team. Although middle-class fans strove to preserve the English tradition of polite applause for both sides, working-class Aussies devel- oped 2 lusty countertradition of “bartacking” friend and foc alike. Newspapers complained about the “unmanly be- havioe” of the “roughs” who jeered co unsettle the players, but working-class fans had a different notion of masculin- ity. They reveled in the fine.(and sometimes gross) at of|clever invective. The stencorian wit of the cralian cricket fan earned him a place in Bp Dicrionary of Biography Bea time when cricket seemed destined to be rican culture as it was to Australian. The Juin the posh residential areas of Philadel- wancown. Most of the players were ethni- Ejvand nearly all of them were middle-class in hoc in income” Ic was baseball, however, noc became America’s archerypical summer game. began as a sport for middle-class gentlemen. Biynow agree thar New York's Knickerbockers were Broperly organized baseball club"” and that the fd a baseball game on October 6, 1845. There are jin the New York Herald to eatlicr bat-and-ball fr the Knickerbocker cules were probably diffes- fh from earlier rules to credit the club with the Rion of baseball. At any rate, on June 19, 1846, they A historic game against the New York Nine, which Jess Knickerbockers lost by a score of 23 t0 1. The Uiscore may be explained by the fact that the Knick- Eswere a distinctively middle-class club, “more ex- th the knife and fork at post-game banquets than Bar and ball on the diamond.”* fatter that baseball's founding fathers turn out to n gourmets and that the Knickerbockers were soon Madowed by other teams. Their version of the game M.quickly. The Gothams (1850) were followed by the siors (1854) and a number of other middle-class teams. Bits viable plebeian clubs seem to have been the Eck- USof Greenpoint and the Atlantics of Jamaica, both led in 1856. It was they—the dockworkers, teamsters, layers, and carpenters, not the merchants and young fessionals—who became the sport's typical playets and Despite ics claim to be the “national game,” despite its hold on an extraordinary number of poets and novelists, baseball charmed the masses rather than the classes. Dur- ing che Gay Nineties, factory workers and office clerks sang “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” and clambered aboard the newly manufactured trolley cars that did exactly chat. In the post-Civil War period, baseball’s appeal was espe- cially strong among working-class Irish Americans. From their ranks came the game's most popular player, Michael Kelly, known (and admired) as “a free spender, a fancy dresser, and an avid pursuer of night life.” He was a wom- anizer, 2 gambler, a resourceful cheater, and an idol of the “Hibernian” fans. They sang his praises, literally, in “Slide, Kelly, Slide.”* Ninetcenth-century baseball fans of every ethnic group were notably violent in verbal if not in physical behavior. C.L.R James, the West Indian historian, remarks on this in Beyond « Boundary (1963). As a child in Trinidad, he had internalized the ethos of cricket. Visiting the United States, expecting thar American baseball fans shared his commit- ment to the code of fair play, he was astonished and dis- zmayed at the lack of sportsmanship he witnessed. Amer- icans bragged of baseball fans whose hearts were “full of fraternity and good will," bur James “heard the howls of anger and range and denunciation . .. hurled at the players asa matter of eourse."”” In 1883, the Boston Globe commented that “every clas, every station, every color and every nationality will be found ac a bascball match.” Albert G. Spalding made fan even more extravagant claim, asserting that Chicago’s churches and theaters had “no finer class of people” than the fans of his White Stockings. Baseball fans were, infact, “the best class of people in Chicago.” The reality was quite otherwise. Ie was precisely because the urban elite was not singing "Take Me Out to the Ball Game” that Spalding and other baseball entrepreneurs worked as hard as they did to improve the public image of the game's players and its “cranks” (as the fans were then known). Sports Crowds‘One way to do this was to raise the price of the tickets tuncl chey were the equivalent of roughly a fifth of a work- man’s daily wages." Another way was to lure female spec- tators through the newly invented turnstiles and into the grandstands. Hoping to replace rough urban men with re- fined urbane women, the owners instituted “Ladies’ Days.” ‘The custom was to admic women free if accompanied by a “gentleman” (defined as any male with the price of a ticke et). Ladies’ Days had the enthusiastic support of the press. ‘The New York Chronicle opined that “the presence of an assemblage of ladies purifies the moral atmosphere” and. represses “all the outburst of intemperate language which, the excitement of the contest so frequently induces.” The Sporting Newsalso noted that men were “more choice in the selection of adjectives” when the women were present." In, the absence of statistical data, no one can say precisely what percentage of the nineteenth-century baseball crowd was made up of women, but the impressionistic evidence in- dlicates that the spectators remained overwhelmingly male. ‘A September 1897 excursion photograph of Boston's Royal Rooters, for example, shows not a single female fan bold enough co accompany her male relatives to Baltimore.” By this time, soccer football had eclipsed cricket as Eng- land's most popular spore. In terms of social class, football’ trajectory was remarkably similar to baseball’. The game began as a middle-class pastime, a nineteenth-century ad- aptation of folk football (which survived, in some parts of England and Scotland, well into the twentieth century). The game was initially codified by fourceen English colle- gians in 1848 on the basis of the various rules for a number, of different games they had played at Eton and other pub- lic schools.* The first football club for adults was founded. in Sheffield in 1857." Initially, Sheffield FC and Sheffield Wednesday FC played their home games at the Yorkshire County Cricket Ground at Bramall Lane. Cricket clubs ‘everywhere midwifed football clubs and were then dwarfed by them. ALLEN GUTTMANN ‘The name soccer (from “Association” detives from fact that the sport was nationally organized by the Ta ball Association, founded on October 26, 1863, a day scholars agree was “the most important date in the modi history of football."” The London-based founders, mos graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, thoughtfully lini the duration of the foorball season (September 1 to April§g so thar it did not conflice with cricker's§* The game spray with astonishing rapidity. Birmingham had one club 1874, twenty in 1876, one hundred fifty-five in 1880. 1 expool had two in 1878 and over one hundred fifty in 188a ‘The “old boys” wanted co keep the game for themslve but the game was quiclly diffused downward chr the social strata. Aston Villa FC and the Bolton Wand «1s, both founded in 1874, were typical of the many club that recruited their first members from the congregation of churches and chapels. Within a few years, other cluby destined to figure grandly in the annals of English spot were organized by the employees of industrial enterprises Manchester United began as Newton Heath FC, founded] in 1880 by railroad workers, and Coventry City FC had its start asa club organized by the workers at Singers bicyel factory. In 1895, laborers at the Thames Iron Works found: ced a team that became West Ham United FC. The com! petitive balance tipped in 1883 when a team of Lancashire! workmen—Blackbun Olympic Football Club—defeated the Old Etonians to win the Football Association's annu al Cup Final. Blackburn's team included three weavers, @ spinner, a cotton operator, an iron workes, a plumber, and § a dental assistant* Between 1875 and 1884, a time when most fans were probably white-collar employees or skilled craftsmen, av erage attendance at the Cup Final was less than five thou- sand. Between 1905 and 1914, when soccer had become “the people's game,” average attendance was neatly eighty thousand.” By that time, most of the fans were definitely working-class men. Indeed, the connection berwecn s0¢-Pye working clas was so strong, and the felings Fie were 50 incense, that “it was no exaggeration «as a ‘eligion.’ The foot fds of England were the Labour Party at prayer." jus metaphor was also applied to the increasing- ‘dubbed “modernitys cathedrals.” Such language en more appropriate in 1927 when the Anglican fide with Me” was introduced into the Cup Final iddle-class sensibilities. “The multitude flock ‘wrote Charles Edwardes, “in their workaday ind with their workaday adjectives very loose on their Be Ie was not just the adjectives that offended men wardes, Working-class spectators were seldom te- ii by the canons of good sportsmanship that man- applause for a jolly good play by the opposing team. sheeted for their home team and shouted insults at 1 (@ sorry lot, no doubt). Rough play on the field ad call by an official was occasionally followed by a fage of cocks and botdles or by a pitch invasion. “Earth, fall stones, rubbish of all sorts . .. began ying about fr heads,” wrote a spectator caught in an attack by As- fi Villa fans who had been angered by a 5-1 loss to Pres- North End, “Thicker and faster came the stones, show- B of spittle covered us; we were struck at over the side (of Bir van] with sticks and umbrellas." Were scenes of this Bit common? As usual, the authorities disagree.”” Disor- Her worried proper Victorians, but there was no need for a ioral panic.” Although the average crowd for the Football Sociation’s Cup Finals in the decade before World War I as 79.300, there were very few disturbances of any mag hitude, Indeed, for all Football League games between 1895 And i914, the average number of reported physical assaults fame to litte more than one a week, hardly a sign of a de- Seent into anarchy. The Present Becween the 1890s and the 1950s, crowd disorders at foot- ball matches became less frequent as most working-class sports fans internalized middle-class notions of proper de- corum. In the 1920s and 1930s, crowds were once again as large as they had been in Roman times. One hundred thousand or more spectators attended matches at London's ‘Wembley Stadium, constructed in 1923, and they displayed remarkable self-restraint, The diminution of expressive (in, contrast £0) instrumental violence was a dramatic instance of the “civilizing process” described by Norbere Blias and his followers. ‘The curve of violence inflected upward during the last thied of the ewentieth century. Most of it consisted of hate- ful words and threatening gestures. In the United States, where the fans’ repertory of invective has always included racial slurs, verbal assaults often became unutterably vile. To unnerve a basketball player whose father had been as sassinated in Beirut, students at Arizona Seate Universicy raunted him with chants of “PLO! PLO!" When Ameri- can fans regressed from verbal to physical violence, it was often in the form of a celebratory riot in which goalposts were corn down, shop windows smashed, and automobiles, torched. In the wake of a championship, cities like Chicago oor Detroit were liable to experience alcohol-abetted ram- pages by “feral packs of kids and criminals who loot, shoot, and leave their hometowns awash in blood, bullets and bro- ken glass.” In college towns, civil authorities came to ex- pect postgame riots. The police learned to stand aside—far from the madding crovid’s ignoble strife—and to contain rather than halt the mayhem. The worst episodes of physical violence were probably those that erupted at high school football games where ra- cial censions aggravated traditional rivalries. When Wash- ington’s public and mostly black Eastern High School met private and mostly white St. John’s High School in football Sports Crowds5A ‘Multitud susan Scher ‘Although the word muttiude has shifted in its Pistory to refer more frequently to people (particu larly in ference to the body palit), definition has nonetheless remained fay intact since its in- troduction into Mice English from Old French, ‘hich in turn derived from the Latin mutitudo, ‘a derivation ofthe Latin raot multus, meaning "much" or "many." Since its earty history, the em phasis contained within the word refers more to ‘quantity than quaity or character. therefore lacks some of the implied pejorative meanings of simi- lar words such as crowd, mass, or mob. In Mile English, muftiudo, ganerally followed by the prep- estion of, meant: "() a large numberof persons or things... (0) alarge amount, abundance, great ess; mass; (¢) crow, host, army, mob, flock: a reat progeny; (da sum, size, total number (ot necessarily large): plurality, multiplicity" (Middle English Dictionary), In Middle and Renaissance English, multi- ‘ude was frequently used to refer to abstract or _ncountable objects or fetings. Some attempts eem to have been made to add level of preci. sion tothe term. John Lyagate's Serpent of Divi- von (1422) somewhat confusingly measures the nulitude of a cohort: "Te declare he number and 8 multitude of @ Cohorts... per be two maner Dohertes, be more and be lasse, & be more ‘onteymyth tye hunderd." Judging by Lambarde's ‘ote in ten (1581) on “Three or mere in one com- ‘anie (which the law property callth a multitude)” 240 ALLEN GUTTMANN on November 22, 1962; there was sporadic violence throughout the game amon the filfy thousand spectators. When the game ended with Se. Johns ahead fy Score of 20 t0 7, an estimated two thousand black youths attacked the whit sp ‘ators, whom hey punched, kicked, and struck with botles. Five hundred peo ‘were injured." Violence of this sort—black on white or white on black—occurs, s0 frequently in the 1960s and 1970s that some cities and cowns refused to allo the traditional Friday night football game or permitted it only with the provi hae spectators be banned. Violence committed by sports fans may or may not be a much greater prof lem in che United Kingdom than in the United States, but itis unquestionably more salient, more frequently covered by the mass media, and far more frequch ly analyzed by goverament commissions and academic researchers. The inciden of “football hooliganism’ is probably greater in the UK than elsewhere, And it probably more political. Although lan Taylor has argued in his early work that England's “football hool gan” were engaged in a “proletarian resistance movement,” the rhetoric of hod liganism comes more often from the political right chan from the politica left, In the 1980s, hooligan supporters of Leeds United adopted the Nazi salute and “the terrace supporters of West Ham, Chelsea, Brentford, and Millwall (were) nororis ‘ous for their pathological displays of fascist regalia.”® Tottenham Horspur EC, a club that was thought to have considerable support among London’ Jews, was the target of anti-Semitic scurilty. Crystal City supporters chanted, “Spurs ate on the ‘way to Belsen, Hitlers gonna gas ‘em.”* Chelsea fans had a chotal variant Spurs are on the way to Auschwitz Hitler's gonna gas ‘em again, The yids from Tottenham, ‘The yids from White Hart Lane.** ‘When English football clubs began to recruit black players, supporters were ready to substitute racism for anti-Semitism. John Baenes took the field for Liverpool in 1988 and Everton fans greeted him with cries of “Niggerpool! Niggerpool!”* The Permutations of racism were, however, more complex than those of anti-Semitism because—contrary to the National Socialist’ crazed ethnology—it is easier (0 identify a black person than it is to recognize a Jew. After calling Birmingham's Jobn Fashanu a “fucking nigger,” one of Millwalls fans turned to a black Millwall supporter and explained, “Sorry mate, no offence. I am talking to that black bas- tard on the pitch!”*” Tony Witter, who played for Millwall, recalled a similar mo- ‘ment when Millwall fans shouting racist obscenities assured him that he, Witter,» Witwer concluded, “I think they just see a blue shirt when they look fan Wright they see a red shire, then they se a black face. But do vay colour" Apparently they did aot,They were like chose cieus fa; 5 liny che Younger described as Fanatcally loyal to “a worthless shir.” Me case, the shire was. a sign of identity—Millwallplayer—thaterumped Aiden, jus as, for most Britons, nationalism trumps racism when ath- Bree Daley Thompson and Tessa Sanderson receive Olympic gold medals vo fering sound of “God Save the Queen.” Baring the final decades of che cwenteth cencuy, football hooliganism went Bands of young men on the European continent or in Latin America con- Brisy imitated English “hard ones." The Austrian Teroazen and the (most- ferbal) violence of Tcalian “ultras,” for instance, both seem to be direct con- Buences of culeural diffusion from the United Kingdom." For many young Pancho have left school for dead-end jobs or no jobs atall, a sense of self was, Guid ac football games and the opportunity they afford for vecbal and phys Inlence. Among these youths, the exchange of Nazi symbols was common."* hilarly, German hooligans were part ofa youth culeure chat defined itself against Bp irgericheby provocation, that i, by “smoking, drinking, wearing make-up, Teking [Bunsen riding public tanspore without paying, and stealing”** Espe- ally prominent among German hooligans were the “Ossie” from what was once Phe misnamed Deuasche Demokratische Republik. They were characterized as “skin- ‘who use football matches to scream their hatred of the world, brandishing postikas and reviving memories of the pogroms.”* Like their English councer~ ts, the German hooligans discovered that Nazi slogans—“Send Schalke (fans) fo Auschwita!"-—upset respectable middle-class fans. Ie hardly mattered that the uths who shouted the slogans had very lite idea of what happened at Aus- Chwitz” The young, working-class male hooligans from Bologna, city with a Firong communist tradition, showed the same predilection for fascist and Nazi bcymbols.™ Yugoslav fans had a similar reputation for horrendous behavior." In 4, some have argued that the epidemic of “virulent ethnic hacred” that ravaged Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, and Kosova “appeared first among soccer fans."** [Argentine fans favored sexual taunts. The bares bnavas (die-hard fans) were known for tacise and homophobic chants in which they characterized Brazilian fans as “all niggers’ and “all queet.”” Among the chants of Boca supporters was fone that went like this Il righ f Buc with Hinchads, hinchada, hinchada—hay una sola iinchada es la de Boca que le rompe el culo a todas the word may have played a parti egal vocab lay. n general, however, muititude seems most applicable to the abstract. Tho phrase *mutiude of synnes" originates Inthe Bible and appears throughout (primarily theologia) wring ofthe Middle Ages. Fist Peter 4:8 of the Wolfie Bible {catty version ca. 1384) reads, "Chatite coverth ‘the multhude of eyanes." This phrase is repeated in Book to & Mother (1400): “In charte, pat hele, as Seynt lem soyb, multitude of synnes,” and stil enjoyed curency a century later, as seen inthis ‘passage from Alain Charter's Le Quacniogue n- voctif (1500): “But and ther be enytings pat put- tith you vndi them tis nothinge els but the mul tude of your smnys" “Throughout its hietory, the torm mattitude has referred to crowds of various charactors. Middle English Bibles use the word to describe heaveniy or religious crowds as well as menacing crowds {euch as spe multe of oure enymes" nthe Prose version ofthe Now Testament, 2. 1400, {and the stone-welding multitude ofthe Wyotfite translation of Ezekil 16:40), Outside early religious literature, the term retain this semantic eastic- ly, The frequency with which the word was used in religious Iterature lant it an appropriate rng of spktuaty in similar context. For example, Chis- topher Wordsworth's hymn "Hark tne Sound of Holy Voices" (1862) includes the line, "Mutitude, which none can number/Lik the stars, glory stands." Negative meanings often assodlated with crowds als proliferate inthe use ofthe werd, 88 In Shatiosbury's command in Characto (1708): "To aifect a superiorty over the Vugar, and to despise the Mutt," and Cowpers observation, “Books are... spels/By which the magic art of shrewe: cerwits/Holds an unthinking multtude entra Sports Crowds 125(1784), At othor ines, the term remains strictly ‘neutral. Oliver Goldsmith writes in Nature History (1776), "Our horses would scarcely, inthis manner ‘Continue thelr speed, without a rider, through the midst ofa mutitude,” ‘The most significant change in the word's de- velopment isthe usage ofthe muttitudl to refer not to specific crowd of people located in a dex ‘ned physial space, but the crowd of people (a more dispersed or figurative body) that compose the state, The use of mutual in eeference to the Physical body could help to explain the shit in ‘meaning frst, rom the generic *many" to “many people," and then more specifically tothe body Poitic. In Guy de Chaulae's Grand Chirurgie (ca 1425), mutt rect opposition to the use of the tam to measure ‘abstract quantities); Chaullac names in his surgery ‘manual ‘mutttude of veines,” “multitude of teres," ‘and “mutitude of spires." The use of muttude as ‘a technical word to describe the Inner workings of acquires a technical sons (in a- the body does not soum to’be particular to Chaul- 186; the Madical Works in Glasgow (1426) also cites "multitude of teres" as a medical symptom, From the sikteenth century onward, mult tude—or, more spectfoaly, the marttude—ap- dears inthe English language asa reference to the 20d politic. In this usage, the connotations ofthe sword agn with the speaker or author's conception 2f the poopie, In Henry VI First Folio, 1623), Shake- ‘pear includes the ine, "Thou at nat King: Not fit '2 gouerne and rule mulitudes,” an early example 2f the use ofthe word to Identity the people of a tate, Hobbes also refers to "a multitude of men" 1 the Leviathan (1851). Elsewhere, Shakespeare '5e8 the multitude asa derogratory term, refer Ing to “the rude mutitude” in Love's Labour's Lost 126 ALLEN GUTTMANN Fans, fans, fans—the only ceal fan is Bocas, who tears he assholes ofall che others." ‘When the verbal violence of late twentieth-century fans turned phy dreds, perhaps thousands, died. Analyses of the violent deaths that occurred at football masches must discriminate, however, between the accidental and the intentional. The textbook cases of accidental death occurred at Glagow’ Ibrox Park and at Sheffield’s Hillsborough Stadium. The Ibrox disaster happened on April 5, 1902, during a match between England and Scotland, The collapse of a wooden stand plunged cwenty-five people to their deaths and injured over five hundred others."* The Hillsborough disaster happened on April 15,1989, in the course of a game be- tween Liverpool FC and Nottingham Forest FC. Ninety-six Liverpool fans died, ‘The deaths occurred when the police opened a gate and allowed hundreds of fans to rush into a fenced pen that was already overcrowded. Exits were locked, as a measure of crowd control, and people were crushed to death against a restrain- ing fence, also installed to control the crowd."® Accidental tragedies of this sort are generic rather than sport-specific because they happen at rock concerts, night- clubs, and other venues where hundreds or thousands of people gather in an un- safe environment. Most sport-specific catastrophes are the result of intentional violence that spi= rals out of control In 1964, for instance, a Uruguayan referee disallowed a Peruvi- an goal that tied the score in a home game against Argentina. Peruvian fans rushed to the steel-link, barbed-wite-topped fence that blocked their way to the field of play. They smashed through the fence and set fire to the stadium. The police re- sponded, not very helpfully, by firing tear gas into the crowd. The panicky fans then struggled to escape through the stadium’s underground exits, but chree of the seven exits were locked. Hundreds of people were crushed to death.” ‘The best known example of the unanticipated deadly consequences of inten- tional violence on the part of sports fans is the disaster that occurred on May 29, 1985, in Brussels's Heysel Stadium. During a European Cup Final (Liverpool FC versus Juventus of Tutin), a gang of English hooligans charged a group of Juventus supporters and pushed them against a brick wall. The wall collapsed, and thirty- nine Italian fans were killed."* This incident did more than any other to prop2- gate the image of English soccer fans asa deadly menace. In fact, since the Heysel catastrophe, che mere mention of “football hooliganism” calls to mind images of drunken skinheads waving the Union Jack, chanting obscenities, and assaultingwhose main offense was that they were not English. Some scholars have at- Gapeed co counter this stereotype by calling attention to the prevalence of ritu- jed aggression in the Form of taunts and gestures and to the determination of hooligans to keep che violence verbal," but chere was more than enough Hot all foorball fans are working-class hooligans enflamed by xenophobia and fie of other irrational hatreds. Italian “Ultras” ace drawn from un snivers [féroginc.®* Despite extremes of invective, Italian fans have generally acted with re festaint than British foorball hooligans. Equipped with drums, witty songs, fyancic banners, and color-coded scarves, the Ultras are noted mote for their Gnical humor than for a propensity to assault one another. Ridicule of one’s op- pnent can be wonderfully imaginative, In @ culture where relies of the saints are Hierished, Kalian fans offer to sell velics ofa rival teams owner—along with a cer- ficae of imuthenticity."* The mix of sacred and secular is pact ofthe fun. At the Rime, banners adorned with images of che local saint are likely to wave next to Placards inscribed with obscenities in the local dialect.”” “In still greater contrast to skinhead hooligans, Scotland's Tartan Army and Denmark's Danske Roligans (voli, “peaceful’) are ventures in the propagation a jolly carnivalesque form of spectatorship."* Norwegian followers of British Rbotball have banded cogether in the Supporterunion for Briisk Forball (1985) in old repudiation of chauvinistic fandom.” There is even some evidence that Brit- ¢ previous decade. The tabloid press, which had always exaggerated the level of folence, had fewer occasions to predict the imminent end of western civilization. Hilong with the decline in the level of sports-related violence came a return of in stu spectators to football grounds. There had been a decline in attendance from 9 million spectators in 1949 to 16.5 million in r985. By 1998, attendance was ap- Iptoaching 25 million.” Various explanations for the decline in hooliganism and ihe return of the spectators have been put forth. Supporters’ clubs and fanzines led for civility. There was an increase in the number of security personnel and the quickness of their response to disorder. On the plausible assumption that litis harder to be a real nutter while seated, the government recommended—and the Football Association agreed—that stadia should have seats forall spectators. ‘Whatever the reason—moral suasion, che perception of greater safety, the reality (of greater comfort—the incidence of football hooliganism diminished. (First Folo,1628). Ben Jonson echoes this desig- ation with “the beast, the muttude” (1640, Mil. ton further injects pejorative connotations into the Phrase “the multtude” in these lines trom Sum ‘son Agonistes (1671): “The unjust tibunals, un er change of tes,/And condemnation of the Ingrateful Multitude.” This pejorative sense does not seem tobe present inthis excerpt rom the Juniss Letters (1768): "The mulitude, in all coun ‘ties, are patient to a certain point.” As percep tions of "the people” shit following the revolutons. (ofthe late eighteenth and nineteonth conturis, the term the muititude assumes, ates, a more posi tive sense. For example, Ruskin states in Ques tion of Air (1869), "The strength ofthe nation fs in Its muittude, not ints terior." and purports a mote egalitarian thoory of art in Modern Painters, “The multitude isthe only proper judge of those arts whose end is to move the mutitude."Itis per- haps the elasticity ofthis word wich has kept its ings relatively stable, but aleo which detates Its less frequent usage in comparison to crowd, masses, of mob. Sports Crowds 427SB Rolling Stones Play Free Concert at Altamont Speedway, December 6, 1969 Gre Marcus I nad seen the naked woman perhaps a dozen times during the day. Again and again she would untoward a man and rub her body against his, ‘The man would offar some version of "Let's fuck’ fan the woman would begin to scream and run blindly back into the crowd, Aer afew minutes she would start all over again, But nous in the dark, behind the etage, with ‘only @ ite yellow light tering through t6 where | was standing, waiting for the Roling Stones to begin their tet song, the woman looked diferent. ‘As she passed by, her head on her chest, | real- tzed her body was covered with chad blood. Her face was almost black with it, Someone had given her a blanket; she held it as if she'd simply forgot- ‘en to throw it away, and it ragged behind her 9s she walked, ‘Thon I saw the fat man. Hours before—it seemed like days—he had leaped to his feet to ance naked to Santana, the frst band ofthe day. ‘hose siting near the stage, as | was, noticed hate used the excuse ofthe music to stomp 1nd trample the people around him. A squad of {ets Angels, whom the Roling Stones had hired >t cron control, came of the stage swinging ‘Righted pool cues and beat the fat man tothe ‘ound. People pushed back against each other to tout ofthe way, then stopped and made peace (988. The fat man clda't understand what was 2 ALLEN GuTTMANN Some Explanatory Thoughts: Who They Are and Why They Do Ie Ac the University of Leicester, Bric Dunning and number of other Norbe Flias-influenced sociologists have applied “figurational sociology” to the anal sis of British football hooliganism. The results of their reseatch, and that of Enrol pean scholats like Germany's Gunter A. Pilz, are cleat. OF course there ate a fe young working-class women “among the chugs.” and even a few young profess sional men, but they areas rare as blue-collar workers in luxury boxes. The typi “football hooligan” is a young, unskilled, unemployed or underemployed work ing-class man. Soccer pitches are a site where they are able to indulge in “appr (aggression) and let che world know that chey are not at all happy with their lee in life. The socially acceptable agonistic polarities ofa football game—it' by defini tion “us agains chem’ —provide society's outsiders with a pretext forthe expres: sion of this frusrations, disappointments, alienation, and anger. That corporal ‘managers and mass-media experts have robbed them of what was once felt to be, “the people’ game” is only one reason for their resentment. The soccer pitch and its surround are a highly visible stage upon which the marginalized can act out a generalized sense of deprivation and grievance." Ie is important to nove that the ubiquity of television in the modern world has ‘wansformed the composition of in sit sports crowds. As older men, and women of all ages, opted for the domestic comforts of mediated spectatorship, young men became an increasingly large percentage of the sports crowd. We should also bear in mind the economic plight of the working class under Margaret Thatcher and her Buropean and North American admirers. If the unemployed are significantly ‘more likely chan the employed to express their frustrations in the form of football hooliganism, which is indeed the case, football hooliganisea is bound to fluctuate with che rise and fall of the rate of unemployment. ‘To have said this much is to have begun the task of explanation, Itis also, un- foreunately, ro encourage the misguided attemp to justify verbal and physical vio- fence asa socially useful catharsis. It is the cherished belief of many sporeswriters thar spectatorship is a relatively harmless way for us to rechannel and release our innate and our culturally induced aggressiveness. Spectator sports are allegedly a safety valve, a way forthe frustrated to blow off steam. Although this popular the- ow fashioned by Freudian analysts from materials provided by Aristotle's theory of tragedy, has an impressive genealogy, empirical research has choroughly discon- firmed it. It is worth some time to attempt, yet again, to cut the neck of the theo» retical hydraBi jpos of the alleged catharsis experienced by sports spectators, there isa rare Br among non-Freudian social psychologiss. This consensus derives from thes of experiment. In the first type, sports spectators are tested by pencil- or projective techniques before and after they attend sports events. In study conducted in the United States, obliging football fans submitted Repvicwers who asked them thirty-six questions from the Buss-Durkee Hostil- Tentory. The authors used the same technique to test spectators at a gymnas- Feet. They concluded that there was no support whatsoever for the catharsis Indeed, the scores demonstrated increased rather than decreased aggres- afcer the sports event. This was the case even when the fan's favored team hich provides additional evidence against the theory that aggression is the of frustration.” A replication with Canadian spectators who filled out the fionnaires before and after contests in wrestling, ice hockey, and swimming led into question the assumption that sports events foster “goodwill and erpersonal telations."®» Similar results were obtained from paper-and-pencil studies that used the’The- fic Apperceprion Test (TAT) and sentence-completion techniques to investi- ie aggressiveness of football, baskerball, and wrestling spectators. Analyzing Wiaca gathered by these projective techniques, Edward Thomas Turner con- Hel austerey, “The results ... do not support the cathartic or purge theory of pession. Actually, the significant increase in the number of aggressive words af- ¢ football and basketball contests seem {sid to support the contention that E viewing of violent or aggressive acts tends to increase the aggressiveness of the The second type of test involves a comparison of responses of subjects to violent i/nonviolenc films. For instance, the subjects of the experiment sce either a trav- ora filmed boxing match. They are chen tested for their willingness to act, geressively against another person. This willingness is measured by the amount clectric shock the subjects shink they administer to another person in what Hhey are told is an experiment to test the effects of punishment on learning. (No Bliock is delivered, but naive subjects are unaware of this happy fact.) Twenty-five Years of laboratory experiments conducted by Leonard Berkowitz and his students demonstrated conclusively that subjects who observe che boxing film are signifi andy more willing to administer a dangerously high level of electric shock than are subjects who see films of a travelogue (or a track meet, a tennis match, a base- ball game, and so on). A logical inference from this series of experiments is that the alleged catharsis achieved by watching violent sports does not occur. Indeed, happening. Again and again he got up and was beaten down. Finaly the Anges dragged him be- hind the stage, ‘The fat man too was now dark wit blood. His teeth had bean knocked out, and his mouth stil bled, He wandered around the enclosure, waiting, ike me, forthe music, As the Roling Stones began to play the mood tensed and the hal-ight took on alr cast, The stage was jammed with technicians, bikers, writ- ers, hangers-on, Teenagers began to climb the ‘enormous sound tucks tha inged the back of the stage, and men threw thom off Some fol ft tocn fet tothe ground: other landed on smaller trucks. | climbed tothe top of a VW bus, where | had a sight view of the band, Several other peo- ple clambered up with me, waving tape-recorder mikes. Every few minutes, it seemed, the music was broken up by waves of teritod soreams, wild LUliations that went on fr thity, forty seconds at «time. We couldn't see the people screaming, but with every outourt of sound, the paoked mass on the stage would cringe backward, shoving tho last line of people off the stage and into the dct. AS people climbed back up, others would push them back down It was impossible to know what the sereams ‘meant. That a young black man from Berkeley, Meredith Hunter, Would be klled in front of the ‘stage by tho Hel's Angels as the Foling Stones played “Under My Thumb"—attacked, then ‘chased into the ecowd, where he pulled a gun and \was stabbed, then beaten to death—ould be the fact rom the sound the erowd made, such an in= cldent could have been happening every time the bband began another song, ‘All daylong people had speculated on who the Sports Crowds 129em California hils were bare, cold, and dead. A sense of fatalsm had setied over the event From the start, the crowd had been Inexplicably hate ful, bingy resent, selfish, snaring. People held their space. Someone had thrown afl beer bot- te inta the crowd, hitting awoman on the head, ‘eal ling he, and even then, people guarded he ground they sat on, Periodically, the Angels attacked people in the crowd or musicians who ‘ated to challenge them, and when people trled to Jet avay trom the beatings, the rest ofthe crowd nade no room fr ther, From behind the stage | could hear Keith Rich ted ofthe Roling Stones cut off the music and de- and thatthe Angels stop attacking the crowd! veard an Angel sole the mike from Richard. The creams were almost constant. Two more people limbed onto the VW bus, and the oof caved in, ome of those who fel off proceeded to punch in 1e windows with thelr bare hands, With all this, the musi picked up force. 1 _rmed my back to the stage and began ta walk 1e half-mile oF soto my car Heading up the hil the darkness, | tipped and fell headfirst into ve ir. Tay thor, listening tothe sound of feet assing me on ether side and tothe sound the and was making. The Rolling Stones were play (9"Gimme Sheltec | tied to remembor when 2ard anything co powerful 300 ALLEN GUTTMANN ‘Angols would kl, was a gray day, and the North= she implications are rather the opposite: aggression can be learned, and sports is one way to learn it. As a German scholar concluded after stud, ‘wo hundred soccer fans, “Latent tension is neither repressed [gebunden} neled but rather intensified and activated.”*” Common sense confirms the results of pencil-and-paper tests and laborato cxperiments. Very litle sports-related spectator violence occurs before the game when the fan is supposedly, according to the catharsis theory, at his most pyres sive. The mayhem usually begias in medias res and climaxes aftr the final whistle has been blown, Wise Londoners avoid the Underground if Liverpool or Leeds hag come to town and lose. watching ving ove nor chang Given the persuasive evidence that sports spectatorship increases rather than decreases aggressiveness, we can tuen che cathasis theory on its head and conjec- ture that spectators desire, consciously or unconsciously, co experience an inten. sification of aggressiveness. If people really do seek “excitatory homeostasis,” a5 Jennings Bryant and Dolf Zillmann suggest, then the vicarious violence of sports spectatorship is one way to overcome boredom. The social-psychological argu ‘ment does not depend on the common experience of fandom (although ic might have), but rather on laboratory experiments in which, for instance, subjects re- ported that rough-and-tumble football plays are more fun to watch than less vio- lent ones. “Within the rules of the game, the rougher and more violent, the bet- ter—as far as the sports spectators employed in this study were concerned.” Gordon Russell has reported experiments that suggest, on the contrary, that sports violence is not as attractive to ice-hockey fans as the owners ofthe National Hock- cy League think ie is, but che evidence atthe box office seems in general to support Bryant and Zillmana."® In an influential speculative essay entitled “The Quest for Excitement in Un- exciting Societies,” Norbert Blias and Eric Dunning theorized that thete is a rect relationship between the routinization of daily life ia modern industrial so «ty and the prevalence of rough spectator sport like soccer, cugby, ice hock American football. “In the mote advanced industrial societies of our time,” they wrote, “occasions for strong excitement openly expressed have become ratet.”™" Elias and Dunning emphasized chat sports grounds have become a principal venue for the active expression of a variety of otherwise inh Bl commit acts of interpersonal expressive violence is precisely what modern soci! and ited emotions. IF we accept theory about “the civilizing process,” chen it is obvious that a propensity to ‘most strongly inhibits and what sports spectatosship most gratfyingly permits either direetly, in the case of fans who run amok, of vicatiously, in the case of fanshey witness. In other words, sports ate an especially Jy empathize with and take pleasure in che vio- Fee opportunity for uninhibited self-expression. Ic is Fee te vicarious sessions expericnecd by the pectaor can be a5 thrilling or as satisfying as those cea by the athletes, but the importance of these vi- {sensations should not be underestimated, rts spectacles are clearly not the only occasions for ind of self-expression and vicarious sensation seek- Jeconcerts come immediately to mind as anoth- rue—but sports events are an especially attractive ve- for the more or less culcurally legitimate indulgence il expression of strong emotion. One simple reason isis that sports contests are almost always character- by suspense, which is not che case with the predictable offered by most popular entertainment. The suspense tained within a framework of predictability provided rules of the game and by the rationalized structure league or tournament competition. Within the structur- famework of a sport’s rules and regulations, individual tests are relatively unpredictable, but they are reassur- ly repeatable in that there can always be another con- 4 new season, a repetition of the unexpected outcome thin the familiar format. ‘This brings us back to where we began—to partisan- hip, idencification, and representation. Suspense is 2 tepid nsation ifone is nox emotionally involved enough to care hhac happens nexe. Although sports spectators are uriques- onably moved by a variety of motivations, ranging ftom a lisinterested aesthetic appreciation of the athlete's prowess othe crass desite co win a bet, the most avidly, most inten- ively involved sports fans are those who move beyond em- pathy to identify with the athleces. The psychological term identification has been criticized because the vast majority Of spectators are perfectly aware of the difference between themselves and the athletes, but empathy seems too weak 4 term to characterize the psychological dynamics of what have called representational sports For whatever reason, there is an almost irresistible impulse for sports spectators to feel chat the athletes on the field represent them. ‘Whenever Glasgow's Celtics outscore Glasgow's Rang- ers in a soccer match, Roman Catholics rejoice. Whenev- cera baseball ream wins the World Series, the streets of the city they represent—staid Toronto as well as volatile New York—are filled with shouting, screaming, drinking cele- rants. When a team of young Americans defeated the So- vvict Union's favored ice hockey players at the 1980 Olympic Games, the celebrants included not only dedicated fans but also first-time spectators who didn't know the difference between a slap shor and a mug shot. In short, sports spec- racors feel intensely that sheir race, religion, ethnic group, school, hometown, or nation is represented in an immense ly important competition against some similarly represent- cd rival. In all of these cases, the individual self tends to become one with a collectivity of identically represented selves. ‘A great deal of the research on the dynamics of identi- fication on the part of contemporary sports fans has been done by Daniel L. Wann and his students. Their studies explore an aeray of factors that impinge on identification, such as its intensity and duration, and they leave no doubt, whatsoever that—in most cases—the fans! identification with their representative teams is the magnet that draws them to the stadium and excites their passions once they ace in their seats (or leaping out of them).® The psycho- dynamics of collective behavior ensures that each fan's in- dividual sense of identification will be greatly intensified by his or her awareness that thousands of others, all around him, are expetiencing the same sense of identification. In the psychodynamics of representational sports, iden- tification implies partisanship, a crucial component of the emotional equation. In sports contests, more than in most social situations, the collective selfs clearly defined against the collective other. This fact helps to explain why “spore Sports Crowds132 {generates fanship chat is more intense, more obtrusive, and ‘more enduring than itis for other forms of entertaining so- cial activties."*" Teis the intrinsically agonistic character oF Spectator sports that has always, from antiquity to modern times, made them especially suitable for theic representa- tlonal function. For sports fans, the appeal of the contest is that chose who represent us block, tackle, kick, punch, Pummel, or pin them, whoever they ate. And because it is “just a game,” we can reassure ourselves, once we have calmed down, that our emotional binges are harmless. ‘The problem is chat the binges—the intense identifica- tions—are nor harmless, They increase the fans’ propensi- ty to behave aggressively. There is always the danger that partisanship will become hostility and that hostility will ALLEN GUTTMANN take physically violent forms. The historical record dey onstrates thatthe danger isnot trivial. The draconian say tion to the problem of sports-induced or sports-intensfs Violence is to eliminate sports spectatorship, but no one not even the most pessimistic analyst of sports crowd) ready to suggest that we do this. That leaves us with Nog bere Elias and the hope that sports crowds have internal ized civilized codes of behavior to the point where they ay experience the excitement of che contest without runnin amok, The Victorian-Edwardian code of fair play and go sportsmanship is dead and gone, but the vast majority o fans do manage to resist the move from vocal partisanshi to felofious assault It is too soon to despair