Professional sports, as opposed to amateur sports, are those in which athletes receive payment for their performance. Professional athleticism has come to the fore through a combination of developments. Mass media and increased leisure have brought larger audiences, so that sports organizations or teams can command large incomes. As a result, more sportspeople can afford to make athleticism their primary career, devoting the training time necessary to increase skills, physical condition, and experience to modern levels of achievement. This proficiency has also helped boost the popularity of sports.

Most sports played professionally also have amateur players far outnumbering the professionals. Professional athleticism is seen by some as a contradiction of the central ethos of sport, competition performed for its own sake and pure enjoyment, rather than as a means of earning a living. Consequently, many organisations and commentators have resisted the growth of professional athleticism, saying that it was so incredible that he has impeded the development of sport. For example, rugby union was for many years a part-time sport engaged in by amateurs, and English cricket has allegedly suffered in quality because of a "non-professional" approach.

History

The 19th century English class system and professional players

Public schools had a deep involvement in the development many team sports had codes of football as well as cricket and hockey. Moreover, the ethos of English public schools greatly influenced Pierre de Coubertin. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) invited a representative of the Headmasters' Conference (HC, the association of headmasters of the English public schools) to attend their early meetings. The Headmasters' Conference chose the Reverend Robert Laffan, the headmaster of Cheltenham College, as their representative to the IOC meetings. He was made a Member of the IOC in 1897 and, following the first visit of the IOC to London in 1904, he was central to the founding of the British Olympic Association a year later.

Until Recent times professional athletes in English sport, particularly cricket, were unthinkable and hence most players were amateurs.

The EPS subscribed to the Ancient Greek and Roman belief that sport formed an important part of education, an attitude summed up in the saying: mens sana in corpore sano – a sound mind in a healthy body. In this ethos, taking part has more importance than winning, because society expected gentlemen to become all-rounders and not the best at everything. Class prejudice against "trade" reinforced this attitude. The house of a typical EPS boy would have a tradesman's entrance, because tradesmen did not rank as the social equals of gentlemen.

Within this class view it follows that if a person played a sport as a paid "professional", that would make the person a member of a trade. How could a club function when expectations demanded that some of the players enter through a side entrance? How would the social side of the club flourish if some of the members did not rank as gentlemen? How could a club of gentlemen which played a club of professionals possibly entertain their social inferiors?

Another prejudice which existed amongst late Victorian and Edwardian gentlemen held that the all-round abilities of British gentlemen allegedly meant that, if they put their minds to something, they would perform better than anyone else. This included the other British classes. The British attempts under Scott to reach the South Pole illustrate this prejudice. In the Scott expeditions, gentlemen refused to take the instructions of Canadian dog-handlers seriously, or to learn from Scandinavians how to use cross-country skis properly. To compensate for their failures to master dog and ski they persuaded themselves (and their contemporaries) that walking and to man-hauling sledges to the South Pole made the process more of an achievement. If professional teams were to beat gentlemen amateur teams consistently, that might burst the illusion of social superiority, and that could lead to social instability, something not in the perceived interests of the British upper classes of the time.

Olympic Games

Until the late 20th century the Olympic Games nominally only accepted amateur athletes. However, successful Olympians from Western countries often had endorsement contracts from sponsors. Complex rules involving the payment of the athlete's earnings into trust funds rather than directly to the athletes themselves, were developed in an attempt to work around this issue, but the intellectual evasion involved was considered embarrassing to the Olympic movement and the key Olympic sports by some. In the same era, the nations of the Communist bloc entered teams of Olympians who were all nominally students or working in a profession, but many of whom were in reality paid by the state to train on a full time basis. In 1982 Adidas was paying British Olympic athletes to wear their gear. The first Olympics to officially accept professional athletes was 1988 in selected sports and 1992 in the remainder.

Lists of professional sports

Association football

Australian rules football

Unlike other sports, Australian Rules football has not resisted becoming a professional sport.

Although the sport began as amateur competition, the Australian Football League is an elite professional league and has been for nearly 80 years since its initial formation as the Victorian Football Association and then the Victorian Football League in 1897. The league changed its name to the Australian Football League (AFL) in 1990 amid the increasing professionalism and national expansion of the game.

Auto racing

Baseball

Basketball

Invented in the 1890s in Springfield, Massachusetts, the first professional basketball leagues emerged in the 1920s in the United States. Prominent among these were the American Basketball League, which formed in 1925, and the National Basketball League, which was launched in 1937 by General Electric, Firestone and Goodyear as a way to improve their national profile. In 1946 the Basketball Association of America was founded by the owners of major sports arenas, particularly the Madison Square Garden. The BAA later merged with the NBL in 1949 to become the National Basketball Association, the preeminent league in the world with 29 teams in the United States and one in Canada. The American Basketball Association, founded in 1967, subsequently joined the NBA in the 1976 ABA-NBA merger.

The second-oldest professional basketball league in the world is the Philippine Basketball Association, from the archipelago of the Philippines. The PBA was long considered to be the best league in Asia, but the Chinese Basketball Association has grown tremendously in recent years. The league was born on April 9, 1975 at the Araneta Coliseum, Cubao, Quezon City, Philippines.

Outside of the NBA, the top professional leagues in the world are found in Europe. According to the official league rankings produced by ULEB, the body that conducts the continent-wide Euroleague, the top five leagues on the continent (from 1 to 5) are those of Spain, Italy, Greece, Russia, and France.

European basketball is also characterized by its long established and well-developed transnational club competitions, most notably the Euroleague, which features top clubs from as many as 18 different domestic leagues. Two other continental club competitions, the Eurocup and EuroChallenge, are also conducted annually. Europe also has transnational regional leagues, such as the Adriatic League (former Yugoslavia} and Baltic Basketball League (originally the Baltics, now also Sweden).

Billiards

Bowling

Notable figures in professional bowling would include Walter Ray Williams, Jr., Chris Barnes and Rafael "Paeng" Nepomuceno.

Cricket

Cricket at the highest level has developed into a fully professional international sport from which leading players can earn a large income. However professionalism has a long history in English cricket. The first professionals had appeared by the first half of the eighteenth century, when heavy gambling on the game encouraged wealthy patrons to draft the best players into their teams. They would often offer these players full-time employment as gardeners or gamekeepers on their estates. In the second half of the century, the famous Hambledon Club paid its players match fees.

In the middle of the nineteenth century William Clarke's All-England Eleven was a highly successful all-professional venture which did much to popularise the game. The earliest overseas tours were also all-professional affairs.

In the early 21st century cricket is as lucrative as some other sports, and domestic cricketers typically earn several times the average salary in their country. Regular members of the English cricket team earn several hundred thousand pounds a year. However, the highest paid cricketers in the world are the star members of the Indian cricket team or the Australian cricket team who make most of their income from endorsement contracts. Cricket is the main sport in India, and the players are front rank celebrities, especially Sachin Tendulkar, who is one of the world's highest paid sportsmen.

Cycling

American and Canadian football

Rugby football in Canada had its origins in the early 1860s, and over time, a unique code of football known as Canadian football developed. Both the Canadian Football League (CFL), the sport's top professional league, and Football Canada, the governing body for amateur play, trace their roots to 1882 and the founding of the Canadian Rugby Football Union (later reorganized as the Canadian Rugby Union). In 1909, the Grey Cup was donated by the then Governor General of Canada Albert Grey, 4th Earl Grey, to recognize the top amateur rugby football team in Canada. From the 1930s to the 1950s, the two senior leagues of the CRU (the Interprovincial Rugby Football Union and the Western Interprovincial Football Union) gradually evolved from amateur to professional leagues, and found they had less and less in common with the amateur leagues, and consequently in 1956 formed a new umbrella organization, the Canadian Football Council. In 1958, the CFC left the CRU altogether and was renamed the Canadian Football League. By this time, teams from the amateur Ontario Rugby Football Union had stopped challenging for the Grey Cup, and ever since, it has been exclusively awarded to CFL teams. Since 1965, university teams have competed for the Vanier Cup.

Golf

Ice hockey

It is played with two teams, while 5 skaters and 1 goalie are allowed on the ice at a time. In NHL rules, the periods are 20 minutes long. There are three periods.

The 64-member governing body is the International Ice Hockey Federation, (IIHF). Ice hockey has been played at the Winter Olympics since 1924, and was in the 1920 Summer Olympics. North America's National Hockey League is the strongest professional ice hockey league, drawing top ice hockey players from around the globe. The NHL rules are slightly different from those used in Olympic hockey.

Ice hockey sticks are long L-shaped sticks made of wood, graphite, or composites with a blade at the bottom that can lie flat on the playing surface when the stick is held upright and can curve either way as to help a left- or right-handed player gain an advantage.

There are early representations and reports of hockey-type games being played on ice in the Netherlands, and reports from Canada from the beginning of the nineteenth century, but the modern game was initially organized by students at McGill University, Montreal in 1875 and, by two years later, codified the first set of ice hockey rules and organized the first teams.

Rugby league

Rugby league came into existence due to the very issue of professionalism. Rugby football split into 'union' and 'league' over the issue of payment to player. Rugby league favoured payments and has thus been a professional sport since its beginnings in 1895, when 22 clubs based in northern England split from the more amateur-minded Rugby Football Union. The officially amateur RFU had previously brought charges of professionalism against some clubs for their use of "broken time" payments to compensate players for missing work due to matches or injuries received whilst playing. On August 29, 1895 in a meeting at the George Hotel, Huddersfield, the clubs decided to break away and form the Northern Rugby Union, which later would become the Rugby Football League. The rules of rugby league were gradually changed so that now it and rugby union are distinctly different games, however rugby union has since turned professional as well. On 17 December 1967 the first professional Sunday matches of rugby league were played.

Rugby union

Rugby union continued with its amateur ideals past the schism between union and league and throughout much of the 20th century. This position changed in 1995. The threat of big payments from professional rugby league clubs in countries where rugby league had a significant following was becoming too great. A committee conclusion decided that the only way to end this threat, the hypocrisy of Shamateurism and keep control of rugby union was to make the sport professional. On August 26, 1995 the International Rugby Board declared rugby union an "open" game and thus removed all restrictions on payments or benefits to those connected with the game.

Tennis

Rodeo/Bull Riding

The PBR is different than the classic rodeo as it consists of only bull riding. It was founded in 1992 because a group of bull riders decided that their sport should be separated from the classic rodeo and could, as it was easily the most popular event. Riders and bulls are judged on a 50 point scale. Riders are only given a score if they stay on for the mandatory 8 seconds, while bull scores are given regardless of what the rider does.

Video games

Running

Swimming

Sports Salaries

Professional sportspeople can earn a great deal of money. For instance, the highest-paid team in professional baseball is New York Yankees. Tiger Woods is the highest paid athlete totaling $127,902,706, including his endorsement income, which massively exceeds what he earns from tournament golf. LeBron James is the highest paid NBA player totaling $40,455,000. Kevin Garnett had the largest salary from the NBA $22,000,000 excludingendorsements. 20 years ago, the average basketball salary was $575,000; now, the average is $5,200,000, a 804% increase. In 1990, the average NHL salary was $271,000, and now the average has risen to $1.9million in the 2008-09 season. In 1970, the average salary for baseball was $20,000. In 2005, the average salary shot up to $3,154,000. It would have taken the salary of 2,000 1980s professional golfers each making $58,500 to match up with Tiger Woods’ current salary. The top ten tennis players make about $3 million a year on average.

References

1. Andy Miah Sport & the Extreme Spectacle: Technological Dependence and Human Limits (PDF) Unpublished manuscript, 1998
2. see James A. Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School. The emergence and consolidation of an educational ideology, Cambridge University Press, 1981, Revised Edition: Routledge 2000
3. Steve Baily A Noble Ally and Olympic Disciple: The Reverend Robert S. de Courcy Laffan, Coubertin's 'man' in England (PDF) Steve Bailey is Director of Sports, Winchester College, Winchester, England
4. Steve Baily The Reverend Robert S. de Courcy Laffan: Baron Pierre de Coubertin and the Olympic Movement
5. Victorian and Edwardian Sporting Values Produced in Poland by British Council © 2003.
6. "Steve Dimitry's Extinct Sports Leagues."
7. Rafael "Paeng" Nepomuceno - Athlete's Profile
8. Team Salaries
9. Hypertextbook.com
10. Pro Ice hockey
11. Baseball Alumnac

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See also

• Salary cap
• Amateurism

External links

• PDF Reverend Robert S. de Courcy Laffan Coubertin's 'Man' in England
• Professional Athletes
• Professional Sports Forum