Update time! Time for more social stuff, in this case, sports!
Culture #2: Some Sporting Ideas
The Pan-Hellenic Games and the First Olympiad:
The Olympic games embodies both the Classical ideals of the nineteenth century as well as the growing internationalism of the era. But the modern games actually had much of their origins in Greece itself, almost a decade before the first Olympic games of the modern era was held. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Greek Revolution in 1822, King Otto and the Greek Parliament funded a grand sporting exhibition for the Greek people. After the Conference of Berlin, the planners of the Pan-Hellenic Games invited any Europeans to celebrate the arrival of peace on the continent and participate in the games. Only a dozen foreign athletes participated in the Pan-Hellenic Games out of a total 137, but they represented six other nations. In total, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Great Britain, Russia, and Greece played in the Pan-Hellenic Games and laid the ground for a revival of the Olympics a decade later.
In 1877, the Greek philanthropist Evangelos Zappas offered his fortune to fund the creation of an international organization to revive the ancient Olympic games. Other interested European parties followed and the International Olympic Committee was formed and met later in 1877 in Rastatt in Baden[1]. William Penny Brookes, who had previously organized smaller Olympiads in Britain, was elected president of the committee and the IOC began developing the basics of the modern Olympiad. The first IOC meeting established that the games should be open to all nations and emphasized the amatuerism that should be in place in the competition. Later, in 1879, the committee met in Athens and convinced the Greek government to hold the first modern Olympiad in the Greek capital in 1882.
The 1882 Olympic games took place from May 12 to May 19 of 1882 in Athens. While only 256 athletes competed in the 1882 Olympics and only 47 of those athletes were from outside Greece, this was double the number of athletes that the Pan-Hellenic Games had drawn and the games were a sensation in national newspapers around the world. Countries from Europe and both Americas were represented in the games, although there was a notable absence of the Ottoman Empire or its satellites in Serbia, Romania, and Egypt, which forbade its athletes to go. Some of the noted competitors were Dmitri and Grigori Rasputin, two peasant brothers from Siberia. The two brothers had been found by Russian officials and were funded by the Tsar personally to go to Athens. They took gold medals for Russia in the equestrian events and returned home heroes[2]. Also notable was Francis Duquesne, an American from Georgia who edged out Ioannis Xenakis of Greece to win the gold medal in the first international running of the marathon.
Early Baseball:
The late 19th century saw the beginnings of many of the professional sports leagues in the United States today. With cheaper cross-country transportation and the spreading of instant communication networks with the telegraph and later the telephone, organizing larger sports leagues became economically feasible. One of the first sports to benefit from this was baseball. The first baseball league, the Union Base Ball Association, was established in 1863 during the National War. However, it was an amateur league and the teams were primarily situated in the northeastern United States. The first professional baseball league would not be founded until the 1870s.
The first professional baseball league in the United States was the American Professional Base Ball Association, which split off from the UBBA in 1873 after eight teams decided they want to play professionally. These original teams were New York, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Boston, Hartford, Columbus, Baltimore, and Miami[3]. The APBBA remained relatively static over the next decade, although the Hartford team folded in 1877 and was replaced by a team in Syracuse. While the APBBA was relatively successful, it only had a limited audience in the northeastern United States. Reluctance by the members of the APBBA to expand the association resulted in its stagnation, and the opportunity for other leagues to arise.
The lack of a professional baseball league in the Midwestern United States presented a grand opportunity to Albert Spalding of Rockford, Illinois. Spalding had been playing for Brooklyn since 1878, and tried to urge the APBBA to expand into the Midwest, having played amateur baseball in his youth and knowing how popular the sport had become in the region. The APBBA's foot-dragging caused Spalding to leave Brooklyn in 1884 and move to Chicago. After a year of gathering investment, Spalding founded the Midwestern Baseball League in 1885. The MBL originally had six teams in Chicago, Rockford, Indianapolis, Cairo, Saint Louis, and Milwaukee. The MBL only lasted twelve years with several difficulties with the teams before going bankrupt and being absorbed into the APBBA (by then renamed the American Baseball Association), but Spalding's efforts helped spread professional baseball in the United States and standardize the rules of the sport. Spalding would also later serve as president of the American Baseball Association from 1897 to 1904 as owner of Rockford.
Football Crosses the Atlantic:
During the late 19th century, another new sport managed to catch on in various parts of the United States. This sport was football. Football had originated in Great Britain and was first formalized with its modern rules in 1863 when the Football Association was formed. With the large amount of Irish emigration from the British Isles in the 1860s and 1870s, many immigrants to the United States began playing the game and it became popular in many cities where many Irish settled. From those areas, the sport spread and grew in popularity, especially in urban areas.
Like Great Britain, the United States has more than one national football association that play internationally. This is the result of an interesting quirk of history and highlighted lingering regional identities in various parts of the country. Besides the Football Association of the United States, the country also has national associations representing New England (all states east of New York), and Texas (the states of Houston, Tejas, New Mexico, and Chihuahua)[4].
The New England Football Association, or NEFA, was the first national football association in the Americas, having been founded in 1890. NEFA began once football initially becoming popular with the Ivy League schools in the Northeast and the seven Ivy League schools started an intercollegiate football league. The league eventually dropped its exclusiveness to universities. In 1890, the Ivy League of Football reorganized itself along the regional identity of New England, adding city leagues and removing Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, and Princeton. This new New England League created the NEFA as an overall way to organize the league and its scheduling, but soon established itself as a football association on the national level.
The Texas Football Association began once Irish immigrants to New Orleans started moving west and bringing their interest in the sport with them. Interest in football grew in Tejas and Houston, and many regional activists, Anglo and Ibero alike, promoted football as a way to revive the Texan regional identity. The Texan Football Association was eventually founded in 1918, two years after the United States Football Association, after several teams in the Texas region protested against longer travel times to the rest of the nation. The USFA met in Saint Louis in 1917 and allowed the formation of the Texas FA a year later.
[1] It's nice to have a small neutral country in Europe other than Switzerland and Belgium.
[2] Aristocratic propaganda, gotta love it. Grigori is the famous OTL Rasputin, Dmitri is his younger brother who died as a child in OTL.
[3] I haven't decided how the naming will work for teams yet, so right now I'm just listing the cities.
[4] This isn't set it stone yet, as I'm still not sure if or how far the US will expand into Mexico.
