The bond between the secular and the sacred has been
broken, the attachment to the realm of the transcendent
has been severed. Modern sports are activities partly
pursued for their own sake, partly for other ends which
are equally secular. We do not run in order that the
earth be more fertile. We till the earth, or work in our
factories and offices, so that we can have time to play.
(p. 26)In his Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture
(1950), the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga describes hu-
mans as “Homo ludens,” the player, and asserted that all of
culture has its origins in the spontaneous activities of play.
Like Guttman, Huizinga considers the rules and regulations
characteristic of sports to be antithetical to the spirit of play,
and he blames what he regards as the deplorable conditions
of modern sports on the English. He attributes the rise of ball
games to English competitions between villages and schools;
to “the specifically Anglo-Saxon bent of mind” (p. 197); to
the emphasis on “association and solidarity” occasioned by
English social life; to the need for physical exercise in the ab-
sence of obligatory military training; and to the English ter-
rain, which provided ideal playing fields. Huizinga sums up
the English sensibility for sport: “Everybody knows the de-
lightful prints from the first half of the 19th century, show-
ing the cricketers in tophats. This speaks for itself” (p. 197).
He adds:
The great competitions in archaic cultures had always
formed part of the sacred festivals and were indispens-
able as health and happiness-bringing activities. This
ritual tie has now been completely severed; sport has be-
come profane, “unholy” in every way and has no organ-
ic connection whatever with the structure of society,
least of all when prescribed by the government. The
ability of modern social techniques to stage mass dem-
onstrations with the maximum of outward show in the
field of athletics does not alter the fact that neither the
Olympiads nor the organized sports of American Uni-
versities nor the loudly trumpeted international con-
tests have, in the smallest degree, raised sport to the
level of a culture-creating activity. However important
it may be for the players or spectators, it remains sterile.
The old play-factor has undergone almost complete at-
rophy. (p. 198)
Huizinga acknowledges that his view of modern sport
may not be a popular one: “This view will probably run
counter to the popular feeling of today, according to which
sport is the apotheosis of the play-element in our civilization.
Nevertheless popular feeling is wrong” (p. 198).
Although Guttmann agrees with Huizinga in general,
he acknowledges that even modern sport sometimes has its
moments of transcendence: “It is actually one of the happier
ironies of modern sports that we can lose ourselves in play
and forget the creative and sustaining (and restricting) social
organization and cultural assumptions that have been a cen-
tral concern of this book” (p. 160).
Those who bemoan the secularization of sport do not
express similar criticisms of other aspects of human social
life. Modern sports, which are largely the product of western
Europe, have undergone secularization at the same time as
other institutions. European governments became secular-
ized as monarchs broke away from the authority of the
Roman Catholic Church. The United States was founded on
the ideal of separation of church and state. This was an at-
tempt to avoid the religious rivalries and persecution that
drove a number of groups to leave their European homes and
settle in the land that became the United States. The French
achieved their ideal of separation of church and state only
in the early twentieth century, a hard-won accomplishment
that in 2004 led the French government to ban religious ap-
parel in the public schools. Modern science emerged as such
thinkers as Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) and Galileo
Galilei (1564–1642) supplanted religious dogma with em-
pirically derived data. At the time of the Enlightenment in
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, writers
such as Voltaire (1694–1778) rejected the domination of ec-
clesiastical authority. In the process, theater, the visual arts,
literature, and music became secularized.Scholars generally regard the secularization of govern-
ment, education, science, and the arts as positive, since it lib-
erates these institutions from the constraints of dogma and
subjugation to religious hierarchies. Why then, do Gutt-
mann and some other scholars bemoan the secularization of
sport? In their view, sport alone seems to call for an alliance
with an institutionalized moral and religious order. In Sport
as Symbol: Images of the Athlete in Art, Literature and Song,
Mari Womack argues that the secularization of sport is com-
monly viewed as degradation rather than liberation precisely
because sport has retained its close symbolic ties to religion,
whereas the other institutional forms have drifted further
away.Athletes may no longer be viewed as gods, but they re-
tain their role as heroes. Athletes are held to higher standards
than musicians, actors, artists, or writers. Only government
officials, educators, and religious leaders excite similar de-
grees of outrage in the wake of scandal. American sportswrit-
ers often lament the behavior of athletes who violate cultural
norms, but in fact the failures of heroes in all domains often
educate us as much as their successes. Could any sermon
teach the perils of arrogance and hubris better than the fic-
tional baseball hero in Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s 1888 poem,
“Casey at the Bat”? In a similar situation, the real-life baseball
hero Babe Ruth (1895–1948) succeeded where Casey failed.
The Sultan of Swat called his shot during the fifth inning of
the third game of the 1932 World Series, in what has been
called “the most magnificent gesture ever made on a baseball
diamond.” (Durant and Bettman, p. 239). It was a grudge
match between the New York Yankees and the Chicago
Cubs at the Cubs’ own Wrigley Field:The score was tied at four runs each when Babe Ruth
came up to bat for the Yankees. He was greeted by a
barrage of abuse from the Chicago bench. He took a
strike and then defiantly pointed to the centerfieldSPORTS AND RELIGION 8725