By THOMAS L. KRANNAWITTER, PH.D.
Few things are more American than baseball, and this is Opening Day.
Many modern sports have historic roots either in royalty, aristocracy, and political privilege, or uncivilized savagery. Early golf, like fox hunting, required sprawling tracts of land that was typically owned by a crowned sovereign and managed by royal “landlords.”
American football owes much to rugby, which in medieval Europe was a kind of rule-less, tribal, mob warfare between neighboring villages that featured bare-knuckled brawls and sometimes even murder.