Can you write me a 1500-1700 word paper (excluding word limits) for me? Please find the below attachment for the instruction and will provide you readings after I hire you.

WEEK 11

SPORT IN ENGLAND (1): THE IMPORTANCE OF RULES

1. The English Invented Sport!

a) “... the English invention is the Game. The legacy can be seen any week in schools and stadia anywhere from Spitsbergen to Tierra del Fuego. The word ‘soccer,’ the world sport, is public-school slang for Association Football. Baseball is a form of the English children’s game rounders. American football a version of rugby, which developed after William Webb Ellis picked up the ball and ran with it during a game of soccer at Rugby School. Tennis was redeveloped by the Marylebone Cricket Club and the first of the world famous Wimbledon tournaments was held in 1877. Englishmen set the standard distances for running, swimming and rowing competitions and developed the first modern horse-races. Contemporary hockey dates from the codification of rules by the Hockey Association in 1866, competitive swimming from the formation of the English Amateur Swimming Association in 1869, modern mountaineering can be dated from the 1854 attempt on the Wetterhorn by Sir Alfred Wills. The English invented goalposts, racing boats and stopwatches and were the first to breed modern racehorses. Even when they imported sports from abroad, like polo or skiing, the English laid down the rules.... The list goes on.” (from Jeremy Paxman, The English, 1998)

b) “We know that almost all the field events of a track meet were invented by English university students. They invented the running broad jump, the triple jump, the hurdles, and steeplechase races. They also established the standard track distances. Englishmen set the distances for swimmers, for rowing competitions, and for horse races of all kinds. By selective breeding Englishmen established the modern race horse and most recognised varieties of sporting dogs. They built the first sporting yachts, racing sculls, and row boats for trained crews. They also devised the first football goal posts, boxing gloves, stopwatches, and most other sporting equipment for which they set the earliest standard dimensions, weights, materials, and so on. Englishmen ‘invented’ (that is, they first wrote down the fixed rules for games which had been variously played earlier) almost all the team games now played from football (both Rugby and soccer) to polo. ...

There are other English innovations that are less concrete and more difficult to identify than hurdle races, wickets, and single sculls. Perhaps more indicative of changes in ideas or culture were such things as handicaps to increase the excitement at a finish line, odds (as in betting), the concept of sporting ‘fairness,’ and the notion of a sports record.” (from Richard D. Mandell, Sport: A Cultural History, 1984)

Sports DIRECTLY developed in Britain include: Football (soccer), Rugby, Hockey, Cricket, Golf, Lawn Tennis, Squash, Boxing, Athletics, Swimming

Sports INDIRECTLY developed in Britain include: American Football, Baseball

Sports not developed in Britain include: Basketball, Judo

2. How? When? Why?: Beyond Martial Arts

a) In most pre-modern societies the idea of “sport” is very much associated with “martial arts,” the development of fighting skills in men. Men needed to train their bodies so as to be able to fight effectively in war. (Women usually played no kind of “sport” at all.)

On the other hand, such societies usually have a number of popular games that are often primitive versions of modern sports. In Britain, and in many European countries, such games were associated with noise, drunkenness, violence and various bad behaviors: the authorities therefore often tried to suppress them.

b) Modern sport developed when the need for martial arts diminished, and the authorities tried to DISCIPLINE rather than suppress popular games. Two other factors were essential:

1. Rules and standardized playing conditions were developed to make sports TRANSFERABLE.

2. Media developed to spread news of sporting events, and to encourage interest in COMPETITION.

c) Table of Sport “Firsts”

* Britain vs. France; ** Canada vs. United States; *** In Italy; **** In United States

d) “Three recognisably modern sports were firmly established in Britain before the eighteenth century was out: horse-racing, cricket and pugilism. ... Modern sport must first of all have rules and the means of arbitration to determine whether the rules have been broken. It must have a more-or-less regular programme of events and be able to match the best competitors against one another. It has specialised venues for play and is essentially commercial, paying the performers, charging people to watch and giving the chance of profits to promoters and backers. It seeks publicity before its events and creates a thirst for accounts of play immediately afterwards. In short, a modern sport develops both an economic and literary life of its own, and its transactions are important to significant sections of the community.” (from Dennis Brailsford, Bareknuckles: A Social History of Prize-Fighting, 1988)

3. The Importance of Boxing

Boxing was the first “modern” sport in the sense that it had written rules, a national championship, and generated lots of media interest. From the early 1700s to the late 1800s many people considered boxing to be THE British sport. It was supported by all the social classes, especially the upper classes and lower classes.

A national championship was established in 1719, on the modern principle that when a champion is declared, anyone who beats the champion becomes the next champion.

At this time boxing was only just beginning to separate itself from a sort of mixed wrestling / boxing sport. The man who developed the modern style of boxing was Jack Broughton (1704-89), the second national champion and the first celebrity sportsman in the modern sense. He wanted to make boxing MORE SAFE, but also MORE ATTRACTIVE TO SPECTATORS.

Boxing was the first truly open and democratic professional sport. Anyone could attend a boxing match; anyone could compete. The first professional black sportsmen were boxers.

4. The Difference of Sumo

Sumo lovers like to claim that it is at least 2,000 years old. There is no evidence for this, and the beginnings of sumo are just as mysterious as the beginnings of boxing. What is clear, is that sumo as it is played today was only developed in the late 1700s:

“Sechie sumo [performed at court festivals in old Japan] was quite different from modern sumo. The most obvious difference is that it was not performed within a ring, thereby precluding the means of victory most common today—delivering your opponent out of the ring. Wrestlers won by throwing their opponents to the ground, much as in judo today. Indeed judo also claims sechie sumo in its own history. What has become two sports began to differentiate only in the middle of the Edo period, when the wrestlers were separated from spectators by a boundary, which eventually developed into the ring.”

(from Lee. A. Thompson, “The Invention of the Yokozuna” in Mirror of Modernity, 1998)

The biggest DIFFERENCE between British boxing and Japanese sumo is that the Japanese took so long to develop any idea of a champion / championship. The rules and rituals(!) of sumo developed long before there was any organizational structure for creating champions.

In the Meiji period some Japanese newspapers began to make awards to wrestlers that they considered “champions.” However, there was no agreement on how to judge who was the champion, because there was no agreement on how to count “no decision” (azukari) matches, draws (hikiwake), and absences (yasumi)—which comprised about one third of all sumo matches. Most newspapers did not even bother to report other newspapers’ choice of “champions.”

Not until 1926 did the Sumo Association accept the idea of an individual champion and create a set of rules to decide how the champion should be decided.

Another difference, of course, is that sumo does not have a good record of being “open and democratic,” and of encouraging international interest.

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