This article is a preview from the Autumn 2015 edition of New Humanist. You can find out more and subscribe here.
Fox Tossing, Octopus Wrestling and Other Forgotten Sports (Simon and Schuster) by Edward Brooke-Hitching
All sports fans will at some point hear variations on the observation: “But it’s just men chasing a ball around”. This is of course true, but only to the extent that everything is just something: music is just someone plucking some string, art is just someone daubing paint on canvas, and so forth.
Edward Brooke-Hitching’s Fox Tossing, Octopus Wrestling and Other Forgotten Sports is an absorbing and very funny gallimaufry of mostly deservedly obsolete diversions, some of which were once very popular. The book describes ice tennis, boxing (and cricket) on horseback, fiery kites, baseball with cannon, and Italian cat-headbutting.
It’s also an intriguing reminder that all the taken-for-granted fixtures of our lives are the consequence of centuries of happenstance that could have turned out differently – and that, perhaps, there’s a parallel history in which the world is gripped by the World Cup of automobile polo.
Most potently of all, Fox Tossing, Octopus Wrestling... is a bracing reminder that sports are always more than their players doing what they are most obviously doing – whether this is kicking a leather ball between two sticks, as footballers do to great acclaim, or slapping your opponent in the face with beer-soaked rags to a soundtrack of jaunty accordion shanties. (This pastime, known as dwile flonking, was popular in mid-1960s Norfolk; an attempt to reintroduce it in 2010 was thwarted by the local council, who believed the game’s forfeits contravened new regulations forbidding speed-drinking.)
Sport, as Orwell famously noted, is “war minus the shooting”. And, like armed conflict, sport is a useful barometer of moral and social progress. Many of the sports mentioned have lapsed into obsolescence due to rank cruelty. Humans have amused themselves down the centuries with the regrettably self-explanatory bird-batting, cat-burning, eel-pulling, tip-cat, pig-sticking and monkey-fighting, as well as the baiting of ducks, bears and lions. Animals are still injured in the course of some contemporary sports, but – outside Spain, anyway – it’s usually accidental, not the point of the exercise. We’re also less horrible to each other than we once were on the fields of mob football, say, or the Viking lacrosse/hurling predecessor knattleikr.
This is great popular history. It must also be fervently hoped that it prompts the widespread revival of centrifugal bowling.
