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From ＂Border War＂ to ＂National Entertainment＂： How Rugby Became the First Sport in America

"border war"

On August 30th, 1856, a fierce battle broke out in the small town of Sabato, Kansas, USA. The warring parties were neither white men and Indians, nor Jiang Yang thieves and local people, but abolitionists from the north and militia from Missouri, a slave-holding state in the south. About 400 heavily armed Missouri militiamen attacked this small town guarded by the famous abolitionist leader John Brown. Being outnumbered, john brown and the abolitionists finally had to retreat, and Mr. Sabato was also looted. The incident became a microcosm of the Kansas Civil War.

In 1854, the US Congress passed the kansas-nebraska act, allowing Kansas and Nebraska to decide whether to join the United States of America as a "free state" or a "slave state" by referendum. This is tantamount to the abolition of the Missouri compromise in fact, which intensified the contradiction between the north and the south on the issue of slavery.

After that, a large number of abolitionists from the north and southerners who advocated the maintenance of slavery flooded into Kansas, hoping to win the referendum by means of large-scale immigration in the short term. Under the tense atmosphere, a series of violent conflicts broke out between the two sides of the contradiction, which eventually led to a Kansas version of the "civil war." This mini-war, known as "bloody Kansas", is often regarded by later generations as a prelude to the American Civil War or a scaled-down version of the Civil War. In January 1861, after this bloody baptism, Kansas finally joined the Union as a free state. However, only three months later, the Civil War officially started. At the beginning of the war, out of revenge, a group of Kansas militia named Jayhawks attacked and looted several towns in Missouri. Later, a local armed force calling itself "Fighting Tigers" rose in Missouri to confront it. As a result, the two sides continued their hatred since "bloody Kansas" on the battlefield.

In May 1865, the Civil War officially ended. Nearly 30 years after the smoke of the Civil War dispersed, the blood feud between Kansas and Missouri did not dissipate, and even found a new battlefield to prolong the old hatred and renew the new hatred. On Halloween in 1891, the University of Kansas and the University of Missouri met head-on in an American Football game. Coincidentally, the names of these two college teams are "Kansas Jayhawks" and "Missouri Tigers". In this extremely fierce game, the University of Kansas won by 22-10, which seemed to swear that it was the winner of the civil war again, while the University of Missouri, which was unwilling, stubbornly continued to challenge. Therefore, the two teams agreed to have a contest every year. In the end, this football game not only became a competition between two universities, but also became an honor struggle between two states. The football match between "Jieying" and "Tiger" was even called "Border War" because of the hot and even explosive atmosphere. Since 1891, this "border war" has been fought for 120 years, and it was not until the University of Missouri announced its departure from the "Big 12 Conference" in 2011 that it called a truce. In the final year of the competition, the University of Missouri crushed the University of Kansas 24-10.Revenge for one’s ancestors. During these 120 years, this football game has become a projection of the political, military and historical disputes between the two States.

The "border war" between "Jieying" and "Tiger" lasted for 120 years.

Transformation of American football

George Carlin, a famous American comedian, once described the war metaphor of American football in a famous paragraph: "Baseball is a pastime game in the 19th century, while rugby is a tit-for-tat for industrialization in the 20th century; When you watch baseball, you will feel like going to a picnic, while when you watch football, you will want to kill your opponent at least 27 times. The goal of rugby is clear, and all actions revolve around the Quarterback, the’ battlefield general’. He has to observe the enemy lines and launch a surprise attack, find his catcher in the chaotic army and pass the ball accurately. He must lead an army into enemy territory and try his best to tear a hole in the enemy’s defense line! "

In the world of American football, especially college football, similar and tense feuds are everywhere, and even become one of the biggest selling points of the game, attracting the attention of the whole state and the whole country. For example, the football confrontation between the University of Texas and the University of Oklahoma is called "Red River Showdown", because in 1931, the National Guard of Texas and Oklahoma had a gun battle over the ownership of a bridge across the Red River between the two States. The feud between the University of Michigan and Ohio University can be traced back to the conflict between the two States around the border demarcation in 1835. Since 1897, the fighting between the two schools on behalf of the two States on the football field has become the most wonderful, intense and even tragic rivalry in the history of North American sports. Before and after the game, Ohio will hold "Beat Michigan Week". On the day before the 2006 World War II, Bo Schembechler, the meritorious coach of the University of Michigan, died of a heart attack. After that, every year before the Ohio University, the University of Michigan will play Bo Schembechler’s cry "Team!" before his death. Team! Team! " （The Team！ The Team！ The Team！ ) to boost morale.

The reason why American college football has become the carrier of American social tradition and even national hatred is closely related to its development and evolution to some extent. In the eyes of many foreigners, American football players seem to be all rough and tough men with big arms and round waist, developed limbs and mostly simple minds. However, American football was originally popular in college campuses all over the United States as elite and intellectual sports. In fact, even today, all professional players who participate in the National Football League need to take an IQ test before they can qualify. At the beginning of American football’s popularity in universities in the 19th century, it happened that the movement of "Physical Christianity" was in the ascendant. This Christian faction, which originated in England, advocates that sports can not only exercise the physique, but also improve the spiritual character of Christians. And a strong Christian is a symbol of God’s glory. Influenced by it, a very important task of YMCA is to advocate young people to actively participate in sports. The rapid popularity of American football in American universities also relies on the east wind of "strong Christianity" and "YMCA", and also provides religious legitimacy for hot-blooded college students to participate in such intense and even violent sports. As a social elite, college students have naturally become spokesmen and defenders of historical traditions in various States and regions.

In 1869, Princeton University and Rutgers College played the first American football game in history. As a sport born out of rugby, American football is even more intense, and college students are injured and even killed because of the game. In 1905, as many as 18 famous college students were injured and died in the competition, which became a major news in the United States at that time and alarmed then President theodore roosevelt. As a "progressive", Roosevelt Sr. issued a statement demanding that the rules of American football must be revised to ensure the safety of players, and young people who should be the pillars of the country should not be allowed to die in vain on the court. In the end, the rules of American football changed decisively-players were allowed to pass the ball forward instead of passing it back or flat like rugby, which gradually transformed the sport into what it is today.

Athletes singing hymns, taken in the gymnasium of YMCA Training School in Massachusetts, USA in 1909.

"national entertainment"

Although as early as the 1920s, professional football games, represented by the National Football League (NFL), appeared, but their commercialization was not high. In contrast, baseball, which has been professional and commercialized as early as the 19th century, is the "first sport" for citizens and workers. At that time, many professional football teams were "attached" to professional baseball clubs. Until today, people familiar with American sports can easily find many football teams and baseball teams with the same names, such as Giants, Cardinals, Redskins, Pirates and so on. In addition, quite a few early professional American football teams were actually in a "semi-professional" state, and players had other businesses besides playing. For example, the old team with a long history-"Green Bay Packer" is a team composed of local paper packers, which started with a sponsorship fee of $500 from the boss. Later, in order to ensure the normal operation of the team, the packers turned to issue the team’s shares to local residents, and finally let the team continue to this day in the form of "crowdfunding", even in the league.

In fact, until the eve of World War II, the campus elite label of American football remained unchanged, and most professional players were also graduates from universities, including many famous schools such as Ivy League. Many of the stars of universities or professional teams in those days later became world-famous politicians and social elites, and even entered the White House. Former US President Ford was once the star center of the University of Michigan. During the two years from 1932 to 1933, he not only helped the school achieve unbeaten results in the season, but also witnessed the epic battle between his alma mater and Ohio University. After graduating from college, Ford was recruited by professional scouts. After rejecting the invitation of Green Bay Packers and Detroit Lions, he went to law school to continue his studies and enter politics.

Byron White, one of the most important justices in the history of the United States Supreme Court in the 20th century, was the absolute main force and the star of the football team of his alma mater, Colorado State University. In 1937, he was even selected as the best team of college football in the United States, leaving more than ten competitive records on the field during his school days. In the second year after graduation, White went to the Pittsburgh Pirates (later the famous Pittsburgh Steelers) to play a professional game for one year. After winning the Best Newcomer Award with the highest rookie salary, White "hung up his boots" and went to Oxford University to study law. However, due to the outbreak of the European War, he had to return to China and transfer to Yale Law School. While studying at Yale, White also took time off to participate in professional competitions, played for Detroit Lions in 1940 and 1941, and finally became the record holder of "the longest charge". In 1942, White was drafted into the U.S. Navy and ended his football career. In 1962, the former football star became a Supreme Court Justice at the age of 44.

Byron White

After the end of World War II, especially after the popularization of television, rugby finally ushered in its own commercialization opportunity. Because the NFL was still an emerging professional sports league at that time, it was more willing to embrace such an emerging product as TV broadcasting. As early as 1848, the normalized broadcast of football matches began to appear on TV. Throughout the 1950s, ABC, NBC and CBS began to broadcast important NFL games one after another, and the broadcasting fee for championship games has reached a million dollars. The NFL, which has tasted the sweetness, is even willing to modify the schedule and rules for TV broadcast to enhance the viewing as much as possible and attract more viewers.

First of all, in order to ensure the visibility of the game and avoid the disparity between teams, the TV broadcasting rights of NFL are negotiated by the league as a whole with major TV networks, and the broadcasting fees obtained are shared equally by all teams, thus ensuring the relative balance of financial resources of each team. Therefore, many Americans jokingly call the NFL a "communist" professional sports league. Secondly, in order to cooperate with the prime time of TV viewing at night, NFL became the first professional sports league to change the important game from afternoon to evening for the first time, and created the tradition of professional sports night games.

Prior to this, Major League Baseball’s important games were usually held on weekend afternoons. After that, Sunday Night Football and Monday Night Football became the trump cards of ratings. In 1967, the American Football Confederation and the original National Football League merged to form a new NFL, and then a new annual championship event, Super Bowl, was established.

As a result, the "Super Bowl" quickly became the highest-rated TV program in the United States and lasted for a long time. Since 1991, the ratings of "Super Bowl" have remained above 40%, and the ratings have been stable above 45% since 2010. In 2016, the audience of the 50th Super Bowl in the United States reached 167 million, and the advertising fee per second reached an astonishing $5 million, almost 118 times that of the 1st Super Bowl in 1967. The "Super Bowl" halftime show has become the biggest stage for American performing stars to dream about. During the 50 years when the "Super Bowl" economy flourished, professional American football finally replaced professional baseball and became the most popular and commercially valuable sports game in the United States.

Similarly, in order to attract more audiences, the venue of the "Super Bowl" is not the home of the two champion teams, but the third place chosen in advance. In the view of NFL management, this arrangement is to show that the "Super Bowl" is a national holiday, not a special welfare that residents of the cities where the two teams are located can enjoy, making it a veritable "national entertainment".

(This article was published in Wenhui Scholar on February 3rd. The original title was From "Border War" to "National Entertainment": American Football Past and Present, which was reprinted by The Paper with authorization. Now the title and subtitle are drawn up by the editor. )

Mai gentile： We should distinguish what is of real value to our life and prosperity.

Ethics in the Conflict of Modernity is a book published by the famous ethicist Mai gentile in the late nineties, which is an authoritative exposition of his philosophical thoughts. In this book, Mai gentile thinks that although the modern welfare state has made up for the disadvantages of capitalism to some extent and improved the living standards of most people, it has not fundamentally eliminated the greater disadvantages of capitalism, which often makes people tired and go astray in satisfying their desires, making it difficult to fully balance their interests and maintain a real cooperative life. Mai gentile hopes that people can think and study these problems, understand their social life, know how to negotiate and make correct moral choices, and become practical rationalists.

In this night when countless people revel in consumption, we hope that more people can understand the call of Mai gentile, examine their own desires and pursue a truly happy life.

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Mai gentile

Mai gentile: Modernity Suitable for Modern Moral Existence

What is the subject’s desire? How are these desires felt and expressed? How are they related to the subject’s practical reasoning? These problems have changed within the social and cultural order and between different social and cultural orders. Biological needs can be constant, but the objects to satisfy desires will be very different. In Edo in the 19th century, people ate sashimi to satisfy their appetite. In Bologna in the 19th century, people’s appetite was satisfied with salsa sauce. Today, Londoners, who have gained the advantages of many families, also appreciate these two delicacies. But no matter in the past or now, the way people learn to eat at the beginning of their growth will change greatly later. Other needs and demands will also undergo the same transformation. In different social and cultural order, people’s ways to meet their needs and demands run through all kinds of life, with different family and professional roles and corresponding goals, aspirations and hopes. As we mentioned earlier, our desires are always closely linked with our emotions, habits and beliefs, which show different forms in different lifestyles. If we want to understand what is the legitimate reason of desire, we must explore the various functions of desire in those lifestyles, which have the characteristics of the social order and cultural order in which we live, and this is the social order and cultural order of modernity. In this quest, we can mainly consider some obvious problems. Opportunities and hopes, security and poverty, regrets and lamentations, aspirations and other issues all show unique modern forms.These problems come from the continuous transformation of work and are the result of the development of economic modernity since the 18th century.

We start with the question of opportunity and hope. The social and cultural order of modernity, no matter what its form, is the result of long-term economic growth and technological innovation. This long-term nature seems to be indefinite, while the growth is sometimes slow, sometimes fast, sometimes continuous, sometimes disrupted, sometimes deliberately shaped, but in more cases it is unplanned. This growth often provides new types of jobs, sometimes provides people with new opportunities to become managers and professionals, and sometimes brings rich returns to those who can dominate others’ work and occupy their surplus labor value, which often makes workers tolerate the slow growth of wages. As a result, a new system has emerged and the old system has been transformed, and perhaps the most obvious result is that schools have become places to train children and teenagers into labor. In these changes, new types of inequality, new forms of class differentiation, new contradictions and struggles, and new goals of desire and ambition have emerged. We only consider three examples of different types of desire subjects. First, workers in the 19th and 20th centuries were generally employed in mills and factories. These workers are realistic. They mainly want to improve their lives and those of their families. They never want to leave the working class. Secondly, the contemporaries who pursued social and economic success (regardless of social background) had skills, imagination and luck, and wanted to go up through the class system to achieve the success recognized locally at that time. Finally, there are contemporary people with money aspirations. They started from some resources and pursued unlimited wealth. The past and present are not satisfied with this statement.

The first kind of stories are about working-class individuals and families, both of which are the political backbone of the trade union movement throughout its history. Such stories often illustrate the necessity of taking collective action. The second kind of stories provide material for novelists and some sociologists, from which we can study the career structure of the bourgeoisie and see the changes of people at all levels of management, such as engineers or lawyers or newcomers in accounting becoming big coffee in this industry. The third kind of stories are sometimes fables of the rich, but they often record cases of habit addiction, which is an addiction to money. These stories all tell the experiences of some individuals, families and groups. Their life motivation comes not only from ambition and hope, but also from fear of frustration and failure, fear of long-term unemployment and poverty, fear of being unable to get rid of the painful work pressure and fear of debt burden.

With these hopes and fears in the macro sense, individuals have formed the forms of love and hate, harmony and hostility, which make their specific desires, tastes, emotions and habits diverse, such as eating this and not eating that, spending time with these people instead of those people, doing things in this way instead of that way, and being willing to stay here instead of there. Only three types of life are mentioned above, but other types of life are also obviously subject to the hopes and fears brought by capitalism and technological modernity. If all these are carefully studied, we need to describe people’s living situations in large quantities, explain how the subject makes choices in specific situations at each stage of his life, and how to weigh the various objects of desire, that is, regard the satisfaction of some desires only as a means to satisfy others, think that some desires have a high priority compared with others, and may painfully or happily re-examine some of his past choices. If these subjects can reflect on how to best balance their desires and lives, what intellectual, moral and social resources do they have?

In fact, they always lack some urgently needed resources, partly because their thought patterns reflect the characteristics of their living situation and partly because of the constraints of their living situation. Let’s talk about the latter first. The common point of their living situation is that they have changed in different degrees due to the influence of capital flow. At first, capital flow may be creative and productive, or destructive, or both. When capital flow can promote the development and application of new technologies, its role is obviously creative and productive, which will lead to new forms of work, such as iron and steel smelting industry in 18th century, German chemical industry in 19th century, or American information technology industry in 20th century. Capital flow is also very destructive. For example, people in a very mature and stable production mode find that their products have no market, so they suddenly and unexpectedly lose their jobs, have no source of life, and sometimes cut off the way out of their whole lives. However, no matter what people’s living conditions are, the key problem of individuals and their families’ desires lies in the relationship between the salary income they earn and the prices of goods and services they pay. People can’t just think about "what I or we want" or "what I or we should get", but what I or we can afford.

When answering the latter question, people need to constantly evaluate the object of their desire and compare its market value, because the market will change according to the demand. But demand is to satisfy any desire that may exist, and it is the need of self-recognition when people happen to have enough money in their pockets at a certain time and place, whether these needs are real needs or not, and whether these desires are the desires that the subject should satisfy. Economic growth requires people who are engaged in productive work to become consumers. In this way, people who provide goods and services to these consumers shape consumers’ tastes, make their products the object of consumers’ desires, and make consumers feel that anything the economy requires them to consume is their own needs. Therefore, these producers and consumers must be able to distinguish between what is of real value to their lives and prosperity and what is the value induced by the market. However, the market society makes it difficult for working-class and middle-class people to think and negotiate together, which is necessary for them to make the above distinction in their daily decision-making. Why do you see it?

To answer this question, we first need to study the conflicts that have occurred in a long and tangled history, in which there are many obstacles, but as a result, they have promoted economic growth or provided the market with necessities of life. From the protection of traditional rights in the British enclosure movement in the 17th and 18th centuries, to the hand-loom workers’ opposition to the use of mechanized looms to maintain their survival, to the radical trade unions’ actions to demand higher wages and better working conditions, and to the protests of urban community organizations and organizers in Chicago and Boston in the 20th century. Many things in this history should have left a deep impression on us. One of them is that people trapped in this kind of conflict can easily express clearly what they oppose rather than support, and can find all kinds of unjust things sharply and accurately, but they can’t clearly explain the influence and function of these unjust things on the correct understanding of the concept of justice. Therefore, in the face of this constructive and destructive change of modernity, ordinary people trapped in this conflict can rarely think and find an appropriate alternative concept about the direction that social and economic changes should take for themselves, so that they can more fully evaluate the ideas that various political movements have firmly believed since the 18th century.

The problem here is that modernity is used to expressing itself in its own terms, which makes it extremely difficult for people to think about modernity without these terms, so they never leave these terms, and these terms exclude the most needed concepts in radical criticism, making them useless. Therefore, we need to explain the distinctive institutionalized activity patterns and thinking habits in those activity patterns, which enables us to answer two different questions, one is about the specific form and deformation of desire in the context of modernity, and the other is about the way of thinking about our activities and life, which is quite different from modernity, but it is an indispensable element to understand modernity. But before trying to make this explanation, I’d like to make a cautious remark, especially for readers who resent my negative views on modernity.

As far as it has experienced a series of social and political freedom and liberation movements against autocracy and oppression, the history of modernity is indeed a real and admirable history of progress in some key aspects. As far as its great artistic and scientific achievements are concerned-from Raphael to Roscoe, or from Palestrina to Schoenberg, and from Copernicus and Galileo to Feynman and Higgs-the history of modernity is indeed a real and admirable history of progress. What I have said here and elsewhere is not meant to slander. However, this same modernity constantly produces new forms of oppressive inequality, new types of material poverty and spiritual poverty, new setbacks and new misleading of desire. There are many very different stories about modernity, all of which are true, but they all need a unique political and economic framework as the premise.

Ethics in the Conflict of Modernity: On Desire, Practical Reasoning and Narration (Watchman)

Author: Alasdair gentile.

Publication date: May 31, 2021

Press: Renmin University of China Press

Original title: "Mai gentile: We must distinguish what is of real value to our life and prosperity"

Read the original text

In 2023, the first Bay Area National Fashion Industry Agglomeration and Digital Intelligence Transformation and Development Conference was held in Guangzhou.

Zhongxin. com, Guangzhou, December 11th (Reporter Jun Guo) The first 2023 Bay Area National Fashion Industry Agglomeration and Digital Intelligence Transformation and Development Conference was held in Guangzhou on the 10th. More than 300 celebrities and representatives from the fashion industry and digital economy, as well as representatives from more than 30 universities including Jinan University and South China Agricultural University attended the meeting to discuss how to release the vitality of the national fashion industry and how to use digital technology to help the industry develop with high quality.

The first 2023 Bay Area National Fashion Industry Agglomeration and Digital Intelligence Transformation and Development Conference was held in Guangzhou on the 10th. Photo by Jun Guo

The conference was co-sponsored by Guangdong Garment Industry Association, Guangdong Electronic Commerce Association, Guangdong Business Economics Association and China Education Group, and undertaken by Guangdong Baiyun College. The theme of the conference is "Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area National Fashion Industry Agglomeration and Digital Intelligence Transformation". Ren Xingzhou, former director of the Market Economy Research Institute of the State Council Development Research Center, Fu Longcheng, vice president of China Business Federation, and Ji Wenbo, vice president of China Fashion Designers Association, and other industry experts gave speeches on topics such as "Super-large-scale consumer market and great opportunity of fashion industry in the tide of the country", "Boosting consumer service innovation to provide strong support for building a new development pattern with double cycles" and "The tide of the country calls for innovative talents in international fashion design".

In his keynote speech, Ren Xingzhou pointed out that the trend of China’s consumer fashion showed obvious stage characteristics with the development of reform and opening up. Take clothing as an example, from the imitation of fashion in Hong Kong and Taiwan in 1980s and 1990s, to the pursuit of Japanese and Korean fashion trends by some young people, to the favor of European and American fashion brands after the obvious upgrade of consumption, and to the rise of national fashion and the development of rapid consumption.

Ren Xingzhou believes that national fashion is the product of China’s sustained economic development and escalating consumption, which is determined by China’s manufacturing supply capacity, consumption scale and consumption grade. In essence, it is the dynamic balance between consumption and supply, and it is also the result of strong industrial chain, supply chain and ecological chain support. At present, the development of national fashion is facing great opportunities, and cultural self-confidence is a powerful driving force for the rise of national fashion. Digital economy is an accelerator for the development of national fashion industry, and the continuous opening up has improved the internationalization level of fashion industry.

At the meeting, Wang Xianqing, vice president of China Business Economics Association, released the Report on the Development of Fashion Industry in the Bay Area in 2023, which revealed the development trend of fashion industry in the national tide represented by clothing with data and cases, and deeply studied the layout and characteristics of fashion industry agglomeration in Greater Bay Area. (End)