Leisure Activities: More Fun and Games 503Luna Park at Coney Island was a vast living theater in which the strollers were both spectators and actors. At night, a quarter of a million electric
lights turned Luna Park into what its designer, Frederic Thompson, called “a different world—a dream world, perhaps a nightmare world—
where all is bizarre and fantastic.”
their modern form during the last quarter of the cen-
tury. Various forms of what became baseball were
played long before that time. Organized teams, in
most cases made up of upper-class amateurs, first
emerged in the 1840s, but the game only became
truly popular during the Civil War, when it was a
major form of camp recreation for the troops.
After the war professional teams began to
appear (the first, the Cincinnati Red Stockings,
paid players between $800 and $1,400 for the sea-
son), and in 1876 teams in eight cities formed the
National League. The American League followed
in 1901. After a brief period of rivalry, the two
leagues made peace in 1903, the year of the first
World Series.
Organized play led to codification of the rules
and improvements in technique and strategy: for
example, the development of “minor” leagues;
impartial umpires calling balls and strikes and ruling
on close plays; the use of catcher’s masks and
padded gloves; the invention of various kinds of
curves and other erratic pitches (often enhanced by
“doctoring” the ball). As early as the 1870s, base-
ball was being called “the national game” and los-
ing all upper-class connotations. Important games
attracted crowds in the tens of thousands; betting
became a problem. Despite its urban origins, its
broad green fields and dusty base paths gave the
game a rural character that only recently has begun
to fade away.
Nobody “invented” baseball, but both football
and basketball owe their present form to individu-
als. James Naismith’s invention of basketball is
undisputed. In 1891, while a student at a YMCA
school, he attached peach baskets to the edge of an
elevated running track in the gymnasium and drew
up what are still the basic rules of the game. The
first basketball was a soccer ball. The game was pop-
ular from the start, but because it was played
indoors it was not an important spectator sport
until much later.
Football was not created by one person in the
way that basketball was; it evolved out of English
rugby. For many decades it remained almost entirely a
college sport (and thus played almost entirely by
upper- and middle-class types). Organized collegiate
sports dated back to before the Civil War; the first
intercollegiate matches were rowing races between
Harvard and Yale students. The first intercollegiate
football game occurred when Rutgers defeated