Intercollegiate Sports in America, 1900-2021

Spring 2021

History is a discipline that considers the actions of people and the sequence of events in particular places and at specific times. Time, for the historian, is a critical concept and underlies the logic of historical analysis. At the simplest level, time establishes the order of events. If event B happens after event A, then B cannot be a cause of A. Time however is both a measurable quantity and a concept. In today's society we teach each other to think of time as a linear quantity that moves forward from one point towards another point in time and never repeats. Our cultural understanding of time tells us that units of time have equal value (all minutes always have sixty seconds). This is not the only way to think about time.

Many cultures in different places over the years have seen time as a circular phenomenon marking the repetitive passage of similar recurring events, not as a linear process marking the passage of unique moments never to be repeated. Time, in this view, reflects personal, individual experience as people live through the days, the seasons, and the years in cycles that repeat in a continuing process.

Linear Time: A society's concept of time also reflects an understanding about progress, change, and the purpose of life. Most of us see time as a measure of our rate of improvement, the speed of change towards something better. We think of time as an upward striving indicator, moving from less to more: less civilization to more, less prosperity to more, less technology to more. We cherish each unique moment of time that we must spend well lest we "waste" time. We imagine that if we allow any moment to pass unused we will have "lost" its irreplaceable value forever. The straight line of our sense of time is composed of equally divided units, each one unique and therefore of special and specific value. We also usually imagine this linear time as a vector, an arrow with an always upward direction leading to continuing progress.

Circular Time: Other societies have seen and many still do see time differently. They see time as an experiential quantity, something that marks the regularity of life itself. When we experience circular time, we recognize that it measures what is normal and repetitive, not what is unique. If we miss a sunrise we can see another one much like it tomorrow. If we miss a 10 AM appointment Monday there will be another 10 AM on another Monday or on another day arriving soon. The purpose of our lives within circular time is to learn the repetitive characteristics of nature's cycles and to bring our lives in closer synchronization. Success, when living in circular time, comes when we match our activities to the rhythm of each natural life cycle. We plant and harvest in the right season of each repeating year, and we mark the passing of time by celebrating the successful completion of these important recurring cycles. It is no accident that the Maya and the Aztec civilizations organized their calendars around circular, repetitive cycles.

Sports and Time: Sports have always served to model human experience in stylized and simplified form. The element of time, so important in our own lives, is also a critical element in sports. Each sport models time somewhat differently, capturing the varying value time has within different circumstances and reflecting the many ways we can understand and experience time.

We have highly structured games such as football, where the clock serves as a critical element and places rigid limits around the competitive activity. We have remarkably flexible time in sports such as baseball or golf, where the rhythm and course of the game create their own chronological limits. Highly regulated sports like tennis follow the sequence of competition to determine the variable length of the time spent on each cycle of the game, recognizing that the time required to complete each cycle can vary significantly. Basketball, although less rigorously structured than football, drives the game against a clock that precisely marks the limits of the game and its components.

Some sports use time as the critical dimension of competition. Track and swimming events determine their winners by time, not by direct competition between individuals or teams. The primary measure of the 100 meter race is an absolute measurement, an individual's time, not the winner of any particular race.

Each sport, then, models some aspect of our own lives. Time is an important element in life, for we all have a finite time to live, and we struggle constantly to fit our goals, dreams, and activities into our chronological space. Each of our sports captures some element of our sense of this struggle against time and replays it within a stylized competition. Much of the satisfaction we get from watching or participating in sports reflects our relationship to the structure of time associated with each sport.

Place: Historians also have a commitment to place. Although we seek answers to large questions of structure and organization, cause and effect, we do so by focusing on the specific actions of individual people who lived their lives at a particular place during a defined period of time.

We focus on what happened in Latin America, the United States, Europe, Africa, or China, and within these large places, we often focus more closely on Caracas, Los Angeles, Berlin, Beijing, or Capetown to more accurately measure the actions of individuals and groups within a particular place and time. Even in our most broadly based analysis, when we seek to understand universal human dimensions such as oppression, revolution, progress, industrialization, or war, we find ourselves comparing the behavior of specific groups of people in specific times and places to identify what is common among them and what sets them apart.

Place in sports: Place, of course, is also a critical dimension of every sport. Each sport creates a defined space to contain its competition and each sport's space reflects a different understanding of the boundaries of the game. Just as different aspects of life occur within differently configured spaces (a home, a school, a city, a state, an ocean, a continent), the competitions of sports inhabit special places.

Some sports spaces are rigidly specified. Every American college football field today is exactly the same size as every other, and the markings and sub-domains within it are also clearly delineated. Soccer takes place within similar sized fields but the width's need not be exactly the same. Golf courses are famously variable in their spaces, although the general structure of golf spaces are similar. Cross country is a race through a course that varies from place to place while the 100 meter race is always exactly 100 meters long. In some sports, the dimensions of space are absolutely critical (football, basketball, tennis) while in others the key events and action take place within the space but not primarily in relation to its borders (golf). We often appreciate sports whose definitions of place match how we see the role of space in our own lives.

People and Events

Although we can locate our understanding of history through a focus on time and place, these two boundaries only establish the frame within which we understand the behavior of people as they participate in events. The events of history are the result of the actions of individuals within a place and over a period of time. A revolution is not a theoretical event but the consequence of people's actions in revolt and the responses of those in power. We seek the causes of revolution by investigating what individuals and their groups do and by understanding why they do it.

Causation: When we engage in this work, historians often carry with them a perspective on what matters more in the balance of causation: the individuals or the events. Do the opportunities of history create the context out of which heroic individuals emerge, or do heroic individuals determine the events that mark important moments in the past?

A people-centered perspective examines the unique characteristics of individuals who take decisive roles in the development of events: generals and intellectuals, saints and villains, rich and poor, oppressed and liberated, artists and artisans, the personalities whose words and deeds inform the legends of the past and provide content for the biographies of outstanding people. In this view, it is the unique and extraordinary actions and abilities of individuals that determine the course of history.

An event-centered perspective sees these heroes emerging as the result of structures, circumstances, and movements that create opportunities for heroism and great deeds. Within this perspective, the events make the heroic action possible rather than a individual creating the dramatic events. This point of view imagines that heroism and special talents always exist in any human population. The opportunity created by structural and long-term changes in human societies, the cumulative effect of the actions of many people over time, or catastrophic and perhaps accidental occurrences create the circumstances and opportunity for heroic individual behavior as some people take advantage of the moment, exercise skills that they have always had and that always exist in a population, and become leaders of great events.

From this point of view, Simón Bolívar is not a unique manifestation of Spanish American caudillesque genius but rather an example of a talented individual among many, who, given the opportunities created by the independence wars, the political and social turmoil of Northern South America, and the accidents of his own life, allowed him to emerge as a heroic personality. The times made the man, the man did not make the times.

Both perspectives have merit, for it is the action of individuals that produces the events of history but it is also the events that provide an opportunity for individuals to act. A Bolívar born twenty years earlier in Venezuela would never have become the Liberator of South America, although he might well have become a successful merchant, planter, or government official.

Sports and Causation: Our sports, because they speak directly to our need to understand success and failure and to capture in symbolic and stylized form the meaning of competition (that universal constant of human existence), model various elements of causation. We have sports that focus entirely on the individual performance of heroic figures: for the most part, track and swimming isolate an individual's performance in competition against a clock or unique personal performance that defines the achievement of every other individual in the world who competes within the same frame of time and space.

Other sports highlight a team's competition against other similarly configured teams. Here, the individuals contribute talent and skill and perhaps heroic behavior to the competition, but success cannot rest on one person alone. The team must win, and it wins during an immediate unique competition against another team. Heroic behavior can emerge out of the contest, out of the opportunities provided by the ebb and flow of the competition, but individual heroic behavior always appears within the context of the team's competition against a similar team. We may argue about the greatest football win in history or the most remarkable player of all time, but each game is a unique event not easily measured against other unique football contests.

A heroic performance by an individual track star highlights our sense of the importance of the individual. These individuals triumph because of what they personally and individually have done, and their success may reinforce our own belief that if we only had the opportunity to compete and excel on our own merit within uniform and fair rules, unhampered by the complex constraints of society, we too could triumph.

A dramatically successful football competition, however, highlights our understanding that in real life, competition occurs within and among groups, that a combination of talents produces a more powerful force than can be obtained by a single heroic individual. It shows us in stylized form that exceptional individual skills do not necessarily produce success unless the circumstances of the team, the opposing team, and the game provide the opportunity. The superior receiver cannot be a hero unless an occasion arises where a pass is called for, the line protects the quarterback, and the completed pass frees the receiver to run for a touchdown. In football, the circumstances create the opportunity for heroes to emerge within a context in which the talent is always there, but an opportunity must also appear. This is much like our understanding of historical causation in which we see heroes as products of the opportunities created by events.

In track, the circumstances are always there for the hero to emerge and only the individual is responsible for a heroic performance. This comes closer to an alternative notion of historical causation in which significant events are the product of individual performance. A world record in the 100 meters is caused by one individual, for the circumstances are always available for a world record, only the appearance of a hero is needed to make the world record moment take place.

In almost all sports, as in life itself, we find elements of both models of causation. Some sports like football emphasize the importance of the team, the group, and the contest itself as the primary circumstances creating opportunities for heroism. Others like track emphasize the importance of the individual.

Sometimes our sports highlight competitive structures and model individual behavior within those structures in ways that fulfill our wishes rather than our realities. We may wish that life rewarded heroic performances, knowing that often fate and accident are more significant. We may hope that the team around us is wholly supportive of our own individual performance within a larger competition, but often in life that support is lacking. So we project these wishes onto our games, and our games respond with actions, rules, and performances that fulfill these idealized expectations.

We may highlight the heroic performance of the quarterback, ignoring the fact that the members of the offensive line determine the quarterback's ability to perform. We may highlight the dramatic back's run for a score, minimizing the fact that two downfield blocks make the run possible. Our focus on the dramatic individual performance within team games may reflect our own frustration with the complexities and ambiguities of our complex, highly organized, and structured lives.

Sports always speak to our hopes, fears, dreams, and circumstances, and they draw their power in large part from their ability to illustrate and highlight many of the various essential elements of human competition that determine success or failure in the real world.

© 2021