Sports are good aren’t they? More to watch than to play obviously. We’re firmly in that camp that says given the right training we could have been Lionel Messi, or Manny Pacquiao, or Lebron James, or Tony McCoy.
But sadly, our sporting prowess was overlooked growing up and now we have to make do with inter-company softball and smashing goals in for fun in Sunday League.
But unlike the benign sporting experiences we’re all used to these days — most modern sports have some grissly history behind them.
Histories littered with broken limbs, pre-biblical riots and heads on pikes. The kind of history that your primary school textbooks conveniently left out.
Well we’ve decided to set the record straight. Sports aren’t all gold medals and role models, they’re pain and punishment.
Keep reading for five of your favourite sport’s bloodthirsty histories.
Sport: Basketball Nowadays: Basketball is supposedly a “non-contact” sport but the reality on the court is far from that. The chances that you’ll find an elbow in your temple and your nose on the pine are still pretty ample. Even fans aren’t safe — as the Ron Artest incident aptly demonstrated in 2004. But neither are the refs too. History: However, this is all small potatoes compared to basketball’s scary historical cousin: The Mesomerican Ball Game. You probably heard about this game in primary school when you were learning about the Aztecs. How it was very close to modern day basketball? But what they didn’t tell you is that the only parts of your body you were allowed to use to flick the ball towards the 20 foot high hoop, were your hips and stomach. The ball which by the way, weighed about a stone. Flicking a 5KG ball through a twenty foot hoop with your hips? Sounds hard right? Well it was. That’s why it was played for days at a time, with people often dying on the pitch. Oh and if you lost, chances are your team was decollated and their heads put on pikes. We’ll stick to pogs thanks.
Sport: Horse Racing Nowadays: Horse racing is still a dangerous sport for the horses and jockeys. Broken collar bones are the most common injury after concussion. Over 150 jockeys have died racing horses in America alone since 1940. History: But that number of people could die in a couple of weeks during chariot racing season. The most bloody day in chariot racing history came in 532 AD. In the city of Constantinople there were two chariot racing teams, the blues and the greens (this is what they were actually called). The Emperor, Justinian, was a fan of the blues. Fans from both sides converged on the city’s hippodrome for the races, but by the end of the second race the chants of green and blue had become one unified cry of Nika. Both sides’ fans broke out of the hippodrome mid-race and charged on the royal palace. After two days under siege Justinian bribed the blues to exit the hippodrome leaving the greens alone, 30,000 of whom were slaughtered by Justinian’s soldiers.
Sport: Football Nowadays: We all know the state modern football is in. You can’t touch an opposing player without it being deemed a foul. That’s not to say we want to go back to bad old days when the best players were just kicked off the pitch. History: But even those bad old days don’t compare to the old days of football. Before it was codified and become the glorious association football we know and love today, football was played between opposing town and villages. One town’s men, often hundreds, would lomp the ball, generally shaped from wood (and not a pig’s bladder), from their goal, usually between two trees, or the side wall of a pub, across a few fields to another village. Broken legs were the order of the day, but being that the rules were basically “get the ball to the other village,” broken jaws were also common. In one particularly bloody Lancashire derby, 21 men broke a leg each, while four broke their hips and one even managed to severe a finger.
Sport: Boxing Nowadays: Under threat from mixed martial arts competitions like UFC, boxing is in a difficult phase. With top boxers ducking each other left right and centre — it seems they don’t care about being champion, they care about the purse. History: Bare-knuckle boxing was a massive sport across the country from the early 1700s. Fights would go on for hours, 50 round matches were not uncommon, with fighters not even able sit between rounds. William Hazlitt’s essay from 1822 on a bout between Gas-man and Bill Neate is still regarded as one of the finest meditations on boxing. Though oddly during this period deaths were incredibly rare, so often were broken hands sustained that landing substantial punches became more difficult. Boxing’s most dangerous period came during the initial years of gloved combat. Not only could fighters hit harder, but they could also hide any number of dangerous paraphernalia in their gloves, from iron filings to nails. Deaths in the ring sky rocketed in the early years of gloved boxing leading to stricter weight categories, shorter rounds and bigger gloves. And the later unlicensed boxing of the 60s and 70s, where Lenny McClean made his name, were also incredibly dangerous.
Sport: Motorsport Nowadays: With their carbon fibre body shells and super advanced kevlar petrol tanks racing cars and in particular F1 cars are a testament to the technological advancements motorsport drives. History: This wasn’t always the case — and motorsport is still the most dangerous sport on the planet in terms of sheer number of deaths. It’s also a pretty dangerous sport to go and watch. The most tragic day in motorsport history came at the 1955 Monaco Grand Prix. A formula one race that ended in disaster when Mercedes driver Pierre Levegh caught the back of Lance Macking’s Austin Healy sending the Mercedes over the guard barrier and crashing into the crowd killing 80 and wounding 120. It is to this day motorsport’s worst ever tragedy. The most dangerous track in the world is the Indianapolis speedway, which has seen 56 people die on its tarmac with the Nuremberg ring in second with 48. The Isle of Man TT has also seen 231 people die taking part. The word you’re looking for is, a swear word and it rhymes with shit — no wait, it is shit. Shit.
