Sport
Second to NASCAR, American football is one of the most popular spectator sports in the United States. It is directly descended from rugby football and has its origin in varieties of football played in the United Kingdom in the mid-19th century, in which a ball is kicked at a goal and/or or carried over a line. Thus the history of American football is an important part of both the culture of the United States and the broader history of various football games around the world.
Americans began playing baseball on informal teams, using local rules, in the early 1800s. By the 1860s, the sport, unrivaled in popularity, was being described as America's "national pastime."
Alexander Joy Cartwright (1820-1892) of New York invented the modern baseball field in 1845. Alexander Cartwright and the members of his New York Knickerbocker Base Ball Club, devised the first rules and regulations for the modern game of baseball.
Baseball was based on the English game of rounders. Rounders become popular in the United States in the early 19th century, where the game was called "townball", "base", or "baseball". Cartwright formalized the modern rules of baseball.
Boxing, also called pugilism (from Latin), prizefighting (when referring to professional boxing) or the sweet science is a sport and martial art in which two participants of similar weight fight each other with their fists in a series of one to three-minute intervals called "rounds". In both Olympic and professional divisions, the combatants (called boxers or fighters) avoid their opponent's punches while trying to land punches of their own. Points are awarded for clean, solid blows to the legal area on the front of the opponent's body above the waistline, with hits to the head and torso being especially valuable. The fighter with the most points after the scheduled number of rounds is declared the winner. Victory may also be achieved if the opponent is knocked down and unable to get up before the referee counts to ten (a Knockout, or KO) or if the opponent is deemed too injured to continue (a Technical Knockout, or TKO). For record-keeping purposes, a TKO is usually counted as a knockout when calculating the total knockouts.
Golf is a sport in which individual players or teams hit a ball into a hole using various clubs, and also is one of the few ball games that does not use a fixed standard playing area. It is defined in the Rules of Golf as "playing a ball with a club from the teeing ground into the hole by a stroke or successive strokes in accordance with the Rules."
It is said that the first ever game of golf may have been played at the Bruntsfield Links in 1456, claimed by the history of the Edinburgh Burgess Golfing Society, now The Royal Burgess Golfing Society.
Golf, in essentially the form we know today, has been played on Scotland's Musselburgh Links since at least 1672, while variations of the game had been played throughout the British Isles and the Low Countries of northern Europe for several centuries before that.
Football is the name given to a number of different, but related, team sports. The most popular of these world-wide is association football (also known as soccer). The English word "football" is also applied to American football, Australian rules football, Canadian football, Gaelic football, rugby football (rugby union and rugby league), and related games. Each of these codes (specific sets of rules) is to a greater or lesser extent referred to as "football" and sometimes "footy" by its followers.
Swimming has been known since prehistoric times. Drawings from the Stone Age were found in "the cave of swimmers" near Wadi Sora (or Sura) in the southwestern part of Egypt. Written references date from 2000 BCE, including Gilgamesh, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Bible (Ezekiel 47:5, Acts 27:42, Isaiah 25:11), Beowulf, and other sagas. In 1538, Nikolaus Wynmann, a German professor of languages, wrote the first swimming book, The Swimmer; or, A Dialogue on the Art of Swimming (Der Schwimmer oder ein Zwiegespräch über die Schwimmkunst). Competitive swimming in Europe started around 1800, mostly using breaststroke. The front crawl, then called the trudgen, was introduced in 1873 by John Arthur Trudgen, copying it from Native Americans. Swimming was part of the first modern Olympic games in 1896 in Athens. In 1902 the trudgen was improved by Richard Cavill, using the flutter kick. In 1908, the world swimming association, Federation Internationale de Natation de Amateur (FINA), was formed. Butterfly was developed in the 1930s and was at first a variant of breaststroke, until it was accepted as a separate style in 1952.
Ball games can be traced back to ancient times and the earliest representations can be found in carvings in Egyptian temples dating from 1500BC. The Ancient Egyptians and the people that followed actually played ball games as part of their religious ceremonies. These traditions and the whole concept of the ball game spread into Europe in the 8th century, the influence spread by the Moors whose Empire reached into Southern France. As strange as it may seem, it was the meeting of this eastern culture with Christianity which eventually gave rise to tennis!