Today’s youth set to rewire sporting rules

As previously advised, I contacted Chuck Klosterman last week — author of What If We’re Wrong: Thinking about the Present as if it were the Past. In this new book, Klosterman conducts some interesting thought-experiments about art and culture and society — and sport, and one side-effect of reading it is to be brought up short about the relatively recent development of sport.

For instance, one tends to forget how recent codes of conduct have developed in relation to large-scale team sports in particular, given few of them reach back (in legislated form) beyond the middle of the 19th century.

In that context I proffered an example to Chuck from another book on my nightstand, Crazy ’08, about the 1908 baseball season, in which author Cait Murphy points out that large crowds were still, at that point, learning what was and wasn’t appropriate behaviour, at big sporting events. The eventual disappearance of the grand tradition of battering participants with empty beer bottles was, alas, well under way by then.