News, Live Scores, Schedules, Fantasy Games, Video and more

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 Africa, appropriated football as their own. Played with carefully sewn stuffed skins, with animal bladders, or with found objects as simple as gourds, chunks of wood, or rounded stones, ball games are universal.

Sports league and tournament are two common arrangements to organize sport teams or individual athletes into competing against each other continuously or periodically. Female participation in sports continues to rise alongside the opportunity for involvement and the value of sports for child development and physical fitness. Despite increases in female participation during the last three decades, a gap persists in the enrolment figures between male and female players in sports-related teams. Female players account for 39% of the total participation in US interscholastic athletics. In all probability, polo evolved from a far rougher game played by the nomads of Afghanistan and Central Asia.

After a long and frequently bitter struggle, African Americans, Australian Aboriginal people, “Cape Coloureds” , and other excluded racial and ethnic groups won the right to participate in Sports. After a long and somewhat less-bitter struggle, women also won the right to compete in sports—such as rugby—that had been considered quintessentially masculine. Rowing , one of the first sports to assume its modern form, began to attract a following after the first boat race between the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge and the inauguration of the Henley Regatta . “Athletics” became popular after Oxford and Cambridge held their first track-and-field meet in 1864.

A hotly contested play was debated on social media during the New York Giants and Dallas Cowboys game on Monday night involving Sterling Shepard and Trevon Diggs. Every year as Rosh Hashana approaches, a longtime reporter thinks back to 1971 when he was running out of time and Ron Blomberg, the Yankees’ only Jewish player, came through. But some players and coaches enter this season under more pressure than others.