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From the Islamic Middle East across the Indian subcontinent to China and Japan, wrestlers—mostly but not exclusively male—embodied and enacted the values of their cultures. The wrestler’s strength was always more than a merely personal statement. More often than not, the men who strained and struggled understood themselves to be involved in a religious endeavour. In Buenos Aires, for instance, British residents founded clubs for cricket and a dozen other sports, but it was the Buenos Aires Football Club, founded June 20, 1867, that kindled Argentine passions. In almost every instance, the first to adopt football were the cosmopolitan sons of local elites, many of whom had been sent to British schools by their Anglophile parents. Seeking status as well as diversion, middle-class employees of British firms followed the upper-class lead. From the gamut of games played by the upper and middle classes, the industrial workers of Europe and Latin America, like the indigenous population of...