The Idea of Sport in Western Culture from Antiquity to the Contemporary by Saverio Battente (review)

Saverio Battente's book is a bold, fascinating, and too often exasperating investigation into the longue durée links between Greek, Roman, and modern European sport. He aims to "reflect on the idea of sport in the contemporary era through synchronic and diachronic comparisons among various locations and time periods, attempting to identify longues durées as well as original and innovative aspects" (ix). Battente argues that there are significant continuities in the way that Europeans used sport to educate elites and popular classes, prepare for war, and as leisure. He considers how sportspeople across the continent played with these continuities and ruptures to continually redefine sport and its purposes.

Battente's work is brash; he takes on some of the most prominent voices in the field, hoping to offer correctives to Norbert Elias, Eric Dunning, and Allen Guttmann, whose oeuvre argue for what the author calls a "clear break between the ancient and the modern" (xv). Battente takes the opposite view, providing new ways of thinking about what sports were and are; indeed, he poses interesting questions. The field desperately needs to think about what constitutes sport in the past and now and the limits of our definitions, so Battente's ambition to redefine the very center of the subject is admirable.

His work also takes on a commendable scope. It is divided into two sections: the first three chapters deal with sport in ancient Greece, Rome, and the Middle Ages. Here he shows considerable skill working with ancient languages, drawing synthetic connections between practices in each place. The second half of the book looks at sport spatially in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the United States, Russia, and Italy. He makes efforts to draw out the links across time and geographic space.

Battente relies heavily on textual and linguistic analysis to delve into the differences between terms such as paideion, agòn, and ludus. Language allows him to show the ways in which modern Europeans referred to the past when constructing their own cultural pastimes. Medieval Italian books on physical education, for example, emphasized their shared educational and spiritual virtues with earlier eras, creating the "link between past and future … that form the basis of Western tradition" (41).

Battente's close reading of texts and linguistic analysis, however, does not lead him to abandon an essential definition of sport. He persists in writing about sports in normative ways, concluding that "the idea of sport sprang and springs from a few universal elements at the basis of human social-anthropological relations" (xxiv). He never applies this same deconstructive analysis to his own definition of sport (or education), thus producing a seemingly self-serving redefinition of the objects that he studies.

In other words, for someone so interested in the fluidity of language, careful with the ways that people ancient and modern played with the definition of words like play and game, he settles on a very normative definition of sports that privileges its educational, military, and leisure values.

The dangers of this approach become apparent when one considers his unwillingness to think about the artificiality of other terms. Here I am thinking explicitly about the broader geographical frame of sport in Western culture. I remain unconvinced that there is any longue durée, Continent-wide sporting mentality before the nineteenth century. Indeed, Battente's linguistic and cultural analysis could quite easily have been reshaped to make instead an argument for how later-day Europeans constructed the West through their reimagination of sport rather than its practice.

When he argues, as he does in his introduction, that non-Western sports tended to devalue education and military training (xxiv), he is completely wrong. Sports like cuju in China were explicitly military. He similarly seems to collapse all non-Western sport into elite sport. The Meso-American ball game in all its varieties encompassed the same themes of elite education, popular entertainment...