So I have a theory, “the standard history” theory, which is that everything was invented, more or less, between 1880 and 1910.  By ‘everything’ I mean Italy, college fraternities, marriage ceremonies, dog breeds, sports, the city of Redlands, and so on.  Everything.  I’m serious.  More specifically, the usual way that we talk about the history of these things follows a standard pattern:

1. Pre-history; fuzzy antiquity, including Egyptians, Native Americans, Picts, that sort of thing, in vague generalities.
2. Invention: coming into focus for the first time between 1880 and 1910.
3. All the rest: the familiar, reassuringly detailed, story from invention to the present.

This is not to say that there weren’t, for instance, dogs before 1880.  But the idea of dog breeds, in our sense of pure blood lines and AKC registration, dates from this period, so that the story of the cocker spaniel or the golden retriever follows my standard history pretty closely — and I chose those examples before checking to see if they fit the theory.  But if you still don’t believe me, go look at the AKC list of breeds and test it against some other examples.  The history of most breeds only comes into focus between 1880 and 1910; before then, they were just dogs, chasing rabbits or whatever.

Sports, too, follow this pattern, precisely.  For example, soccer, rugby, American football and others (Australian rules football, Gaelic football) are all modern variations of games which were played since time immemorial at English high schools (“public schools.”)  These local English games collectively are pre-history; the modern sports that we watch and play today all came about between 1880 and 1910.  After their invention, they follow the familiar story (Knute Rockne, AFL/NFL, Roger Staubach…)

You wouldn’t think, at first glance, that soccer and (American) football have much in common, but their differences are really only a century or so old.  The similarities are much clearer when you put them on a continuum with their relatives, from least to most violent:

• soccer (association football)
• Gaelic football
• Australian rules football
• rugby (union and league)
• American football

Gaelic football, at least to the naive viewer, looks like nothing so much as a bunch of soccer goalies running around.  The ball is the same, there’s very little contact, the goals are similar, and so forth.  Gaelic football was codified by Michael Cusack and others in 1884 while the modern game of soccer is only a few years older (1848 – 1863, thus predating the standard history by a bit; pray forgive me dear reader.)

Australian rules football is similar enough to Gaelic football that the two national associations held interleague tournaments for many years.  The Irish are still angry about the 2006 “international rules” Gaelic/Australian rules match at Croke Park in Dublin and it doesn’t look like the series will continue, although top  Irish players (the Irish GAA is all-amateur) are being poached by the Aussies.

The Australian game is much more physical and looks — to me, at least — more like rugby without the scrums; the ball is a rugby ball, not a soccer ball.  Rugby itself, named after an English high school, is then transitive between the Australian game and the American game, which has seen probably the most innovation over time, including the forward pass and the reshaped ball to aid passing, the idea of downs and yardage, and the subsequently required body armor.  (Interestingly, there was a hybrid Australian-American game that developed during WWII but it never took off.)

You can see remnants in the rules and quirks of each game; American football came to emphasize touchdowns at the expense of the kicking game, which is now vestigal; punters today are wretched specialists, not heroes of the game.  But it used to be that you scored a touchdown in order to get a chance at a kick to score a point; the touchdown itself, like a mark in Australian rules, didn’t itself count for anything.  Over time, the balance shifted away from the kicked score to the touchdown, but we still have the odd ‘extra point’ in American football.  When I played soccer as a kid, I remember a rule, which I don’t think is enforced any more, that the goalie could only take four steps with the ball in his hands before having to bounce it, a rule that is central to Gaelic football.

Other sports besides the ‘football complex’ follow the standard history as well; tennis (handball/squash/real tennis/etc.) and baseball, for example.  Baseball has a much-discussed pre-history, including rounders and other games, a famous invented history (the myth of Abner Doubleday), and the subsequent modern history.  Undoubtedly, other sports, and much else besides, follows the same story, the standard history.