The Glamor Years: Sports and Nationalism The Nazi Olympics The 1936 Olympics were the first Games to be televised, although only to 160,000 people in and around Berlin. They became a stage for the incitement of nationalism and ritualistic struggle of one nation against another. In August 1936, The Times editorialized on the "failure" of the British team and the relative success of other countries: only three years after the Berlin Games Britain and Germany were at war again. " Heroic" performance and achievement in sport has fueled the notion that individual merit is more important than national affiliation. The case of the black American athlete Jesse Owens, seen as the perfect counterbalance to Nazi propaganda, argues against this. Read More Depression Era and Sports The Depression left an uneven pattern of poverty and prosperity. Like the rest of the service sector and the mass entertainment industry, spectator sports expanded during the Depression, as those who could afford it grasped the alternative vision of fun and the "good life" that sport provided. In Britain it was the "golden age" of soccer and cricket attendances, and in the United States baseball, football and basketball were flourishing businesses. Professional football was still organized for the working class rather than by them. Like baseball and other sports, soccer (Association football) provided working-class men and boys with the fantasy of escape from hardship and poverty. By the 1930s it was played almost exclusively by men with working-class origins. Soccer was also used by entrepreneurs to cultivate legalized gambling, institutionalized in the football pools. Read More Alternatives to Conventional Sports While the west was going through its gorgeous epoch of gambling, drinking, and gun-play, a series of athletic crazes were sweeping through the states of the East. Baseball developed from its humble beginnings in the days before the Civil War to its recognized status as America's national game. The rapid spread of croquet caused the startled editors of The Nation to describe it as the swiftest epidemic the country had ever experienced. Read More