American Sports Values

Americans are active people who enjoy a great variety of sports. The great enthusiasm for sports does not happen overnight. American sports have undergone great changes over the past two centuries. This paper will be developed from the Puritan legacy of American sports, probing into the American cultural values projected in the major organized sports.Firstly, the paper will review the history of American sports in order to get better understanding of the American sports values. Early in the colonial period, the Puritans enjoyed as many as sports like footraces and wrestling, especially those honing useful skills like archery. The American sports have undergone three stages of development: the Age of Folk Games (1607-1850), the Age of the Player (1850-1920), and the Age of the Spectator (1920 to the present).Secondly, the thesis will illustrate the American cultural values projected in the major sports. Such values as character-building, equality of opportunity, competition, discipline nationalism, religiosity are reflected in sports. Americans view organized sports as"a laboratory in which young men, regardless of social class, can learn the advantages and rewards of a competitive system."The most common virtue attributed to sport participation is probably character building. Character, in this context, refers to sport's contribution in nurturing the development of socially desirable personality traits such as integrity, responsibility, wholesomeness, maturity, honesty, dependability, and cleanliness. For many people in the USA, sport is not only just for fun. It's almost a civil religion, a kind of hero worship. In fact, sports and religion have been interfaced for centuries.Thirdly, the paper will illustrate the cultural values reverberated in three major popular organized sports: baseball, football and basketball. Baseball depicts American devotion to the ideal of individuality in the service of personal self-expression and of common goals. Football expresses commitment to self-sacrifice for collective action. In a perfect complement to football and baseball, basketball presents the reasoning for commonplace situations with their precarious balance between collective good and the striving for individual freedom.Fourthly, the paper will exemplify the impact of sports on American society and belief. Sports heroes reflect dominant American cultural values. The nature of the worship of sport hero in the United States has changed throughout the 20th century.Finally, the paper points out that professional sport has become a bottlenecked traffic jam for American black youth who see it as the only avenue to upward social mobility in the process if its commercialization. And the way out for them is to develop their intellectual talents as well as their athletic ability.