James mostly chides the Puritans and says most activities are ok, though he does ban bear-baiting.

They had gay clubs back then??

Anyway, glad we brought this conversation back to James.

greg

i did not list horseracing because in previous threads the seeming consensus by others was that horseracing was not a sport

i strongly disagree but was not interested in rehashing that discussion

thanks for including!

Tennis was popular for the upper classes. As were horse-racing, billiards. The 17th century actually appears to be when cricket started to come into existence. Tilts or jousts were still popular in the Jacobean period, but were going out of fashion.

You mean real tennis, right? Or is...uh..."fake"? tennis that old? There are plenty of non-western sports, like polo, that date back much farther than that. Most modern sports are late 19th century creations, right?

When did backgammon blow up in England?

I believe forms of Rugby Football go back a long long time--as far back as Roman days. And if you think Rugby is violent now, people were maimed and killed back in its folk days. I'm sure Greg knows more about this.

Oh, BTW, this conversation between Bill Simmons and Malcolm Gladwell discusses James' (Bill, not I) theory of the JFK assassination.

Wheels within wheels, people.

it's not James idea on the assassination

he shared another writers work

I'm not sure that town ball goes all the way back to Roman times, but it does go back a long way; IIRC there are accounts of it being played as early as the 12th century. Soccer split with rugby in I want to say the 1850s, soccer being the game for the lower classes that would allow them to be athletic without being exposed to the brutality that only the upper classes could handle.

And... guh, now I have to read about this alternate theory of the JFK assassination.

Caution: the Donahue assassination theory (linked by the DA in #255) is very well-presented in Bonar Menninger's book Mortal Error – but it is, to put it mildly, incredible.

The Romans had various ball games but we don't know a lot about them; they seem to have been casual diversions rather than regularized sports.

I've never heard of a team ball game akin to rugby among the Romans however.

It's interesting that the idea of "sport" appears to be largely a Western creation. Other cultures had various forms of outdoor diversions, of course, and kids everywhere pay various games, but the concept of professional athletes, spectator-oriented events, regular rules, referees, and prizes, appears to be largely Western. Or am I incorrect?

The main exception I can think of is the Mesoamerican ballgame, but our knowledge of that is partial and it's not clear that it would meet all of the above criteria.

wouksn't the coliseum count as a spectator event with some degree of paid athletes?

What I don't know about the history of Asian martial arts could fill several Internets, but I suspect that some of the older competitions parallel classical Greek boxing and wrestling. I don't know if there is any close Chinese parallel to the classical Olympic Games, however. Most ancient cultures seem to have had some concept of organized sports as military training. I agree that that's a long way from "let's play a game of tag for fun but in a seriously organized way."

wouksn't the coliseum count as a spectator event with some degree of paid athletes?

Some of the gladitorial matches were team vs. team so sure, sort of.

Caution: the Donahue assassination theory (linked by the DA in #255) is very well-presented in Bonar Menninger's book Mortal Error – but it is, to put it mildly, incredible.

Incredible in the Bob Breyer "King Tut might have been assassinated and hey we'll probably never know but it's interesting to speculate about" way, or incredible in the "hai I liek chakras" way?

:-D Incredible as in "unworthy of belief."

I found this object at the British Museum to be extremely charming and bizarre. It's a little Roman sculpture of an acrobat balancing on the back of a crocodile. The note in the vitrine said (I copied it down) that he's a member of "the Tentrytae tribe of Egypt, famous for diving on the backs of crocodiles in the Nile." Admittedly, I'm not sure if this is a sport or a particularly stylish method of suicide.

:-D Incredible as in "unworthy of belief."

Well, that's too bad; I just opened up James' book and I found myself going "OMG YES" at his depiction of some of the stupider Jack the Ripper theories. It's too bad that he fell into his own silly stuff later on in the book (although I feel like I almost have to give him a pass on JFK, as so, so many otherwise smart people toss their brains into the gutter with that whole thing)(and stupid people, don't get me wrong; you don't have to be smart to believe in silly JFK conspiracy theories).

:-D Incredible as in "unworthy of belief."

I only read the re-telling of the James version that Gladwell provided, but it actually seems a lot less incredible than a million other versions.

wouldn't the coliseum count as a spectator event with some degree of paid athletes?

Yes, as would the various Greek games (Olympic, Nemean, etc.), and the contests between the Blue and Green chariot teams in the Hippodrome of Constantinople, but all of those cultures are part of Western civilization.

I've always wondered this and I can't seem to get an answer, maybe someone here does. Why are some of these grand slams set up so that Rafa, the 2 seed, is away from both Djokovic and Federer until the finals? US Open last year, 1 plays 3 in the semis, 2 plays 4. Same thing at the French this year. I guess it's less of an issue this year at the French since Rafa should be the #1, but still, why does it change? Sometimes it's set up for 1 to play 4, 2 to play 3, and sometimes not.

I've been wondering the same thing.

There's a guy I know who is MAJORLY nerdy into major and minor league baseball scheduling and through him I know that there's an actual name for the 1 v 3, 2 v 4 style of playoffs. I forget what this name is, I will grant you. Still, the point of this set-up is, as you probably guessed, to make the first rounds a bit more competitive for all parties involved. Several minor leagues have used this method in the past. I'm not the biggest fan of the setup but yeah, it's not the strangest thing the world has ever known or anything.

In the 1960s, when I was first following sports, both the NBA and NHL used the 1-3, 2-4 system for initial playoff rounds. It never occured to me there was any other way to do it. I don't really know why they did it that way.

Depending on talent distribution, it could also produce a higher likelihood of a 1v2 matchup in the finals.

Answer to tennis seeding question

What type of sports did they have in the 17th century?

Fox tossing, goose pulling, #### throwing, bear baiting, and camel wrestling, just to name a few. Good, wholesome pursuits.

The Barber of Seville

This would be my recommendation.

Or if you want a tragic one, it's hard to dislike Carmen.

#### throwing

That wasn't what I thought it was going to be.

Another quality 17th-century sport: Bottle-kicking.

From the link: "There are virtually no rules to the bottle-kicking, except that there is no eye-gouging, no strangling, and no use of weapons. In the early afternoon, the hare pie is spread on the ground at a dip at the top of Hare Pie Bank, which is possibly the site of an ancient temple. Each bottle is then tossed in the air three times, signaling the start of the competition. Each team tries to move the bottles, on a best-of-three basis, across two streams one mile (1.6 km) apart, by any means possible."

hare pie

They had strip clubs back then??

The Book of Sports James I published in 1617

What exactly is "interludes"? Besides the period between which one takes ludes.

I found this object at the British Museum to be extremely charming and bizarre. It's a little Roman sculpture of an acrobat balancing on the back of a crocodile.

Not only did he balance on the back of a crocodile, but he had to do it long enough for the artist to make a sculpture.

I think I've mentioned it before on here, but at a Welsh history conference I heard tell of a story of two Welsh monestaries settling a rivalry by bringing two horses to a neutral ground and having them fight to the death (as the monks did not feel it would be right to spill their own blood in the feud).

I'm not entirely sure how you convince a horse to kill another horse, but I'm sure it was entertaining.

I imagine it might look something like this

It's a little Roman sculpture of an acrobat balancing on the back of a crocodile.

This sounds like the Minoan bull-leapers, which I read about in a book about the lost city of Atlantis. Atlantis is so obviously not real, and so uninteresting, that the majority of the book was about tangentially related topics. Such as the bull-leapers of Minoa.

(BTW, Digby is a great epitome of late Renaissance swagger, industry, intellect, and weirdness. The Wikipedia article on him touches on what a wild and varied career he had, but it goes well beyond that. He wasn't a very nice man, but he was an endlessly entertaining one.)

If there's a book with lots of mini-biographies of such interesting characters, I would read that book. Or Greg UK should write it.

I picked up the Bill James book and I'm really enjoying it so far. And I think you guys missed the point of the "sabermetric" stuff regarding Lizzie Borden. It served two purposes:

a. as more of a thought experiment to provide a framework for thinking about cases like these, and
b. to point out how completely baseless the case against Lizzie Borden was.

I think he's pretty upfront about how arbitrary his numbers are. The thing is, the points underlying the numbers make a lot of sense, especially to people like me who like to have something hard and fast to base everything on. If a particular clue is 15% damning and there's an 80% chance it is viable, that makes it 12% damning. Also, if a person has a violent history that might make a case against them 15% more damning but you don't get to demonstrate this 8 different ways and make it count 8 times. I totally and completely agree with him that this is the kind of thing that happens *all the time* in these high-profile cases that are essentially tried on television. For instance, we heard over and over again a couple years ago how creepy Michael Jackson was without ever hearing a great deal about the actual circumstantial evidence linking him to molesting that child. Whatever you think of his actual guilt or innocence, had that been the case presented before the courts, it should have been thrown out.

Ultimately, though, I think this book is more useful in informing the reader about how to read crime stories than it is about what we should do about the criminal justice system. And that's by design. As someone who's working on a mystery book of my own, I am loving it.

If there's a book with lots of mini-biographies of such interesting characters, I would read that book. Or Greg UK should write it.

Rogues, Villains, Eccentrics

#260 (and others) I remember reading that Alexander the Great hated professional athletes. No sources cited for this assertion (I believe it was part of the justification for the pure amateur standards of the early days of the modern Olympics. Would put it past those guys to have simply made this up), but I'm pretty sure that there were professional runners and wrestlers at this time.

#269 Basically what it boils down to is that 3 and 4 are treated as equals for seeding purposes as are 5-8, 9-16 and 17-32. (Basically they're seeded according to the round they're expected to go out) So (assuming no upsets) The #1 seed gets random unseeded players until the field is down to 32. In that round he's scheduled to face any of 17-32 (random draw at the start of the tournament -- or the player who "inherited" the seed), and of 9-16 in the next round, any of 5-8 and then either of 3-4.

A lot to be said for the method in that there's no real difference between the 17th and 32nd player in the world (particularly in a ranking system that rewards playing a lot) There is a huge slice of luck in being just on the right side of the dividing line.

If there's a book with lots of mini-biographies of such interesting characters, I would read that book. Or Greg UK should write it.

I was considering compiling a reference book on jibes, jests and puns in parliament 1559-1649. But I'm not sure it would quite have the same appeal.