There Was A Time When The True Sportsmen Were Amateurs

The Evolution of Sportsmen Have Come a Long Way.

Young people today regard professionals as the best sportsmen and athletes meaning those who earn a living from their sporting endeavor, and amateurs, meaning those who take part in sports as a hobby or for pleasure are those who belong to a lower level of performance. Indeed the expression in English “he is very professional” or “he is very amateurish”, means the first is superior to the latter.

Many people would not realize that most modern sport came from the British, some going back to the 18th century and they were played by the upper and middle classes. The working classes were excluded and sport was very much connected with snobbery.

The rich played sport for its nobility and were superior persons. They did not play for money, which was wrong and low class.

In the Oscar winning film “Chariots of Fire” there is a conversation between the university student Harold Abrahams, who would eventually win a gold medal in the Olympics, and the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge when Abrahams is accused of having adopted a professional attitude in his training. And Abrahams replies “Perhaps you would rather I played the gentlemen and lost”.

And the answer was yes. The Olympics was originally only for amateurs and Jim Thorpe, who at the 1912 Olympics won the pentathlon and decathlon event, was stripped off his medals when it was discovered that he had played semi-professional baseball before the Olympics. It was only after the 1988 Games that the IOC decided that all professional athletes be eligible for the Olympics.

In cricket, there used to be a match in England between the Gentlemen and the Players, the noble amateurs against the professional cricketers.