If you travel abroad and find one of those friendly local assistants who speaks a thousand languages with a wide smile on his face, after asking your nationality he will blurt out the name of one of these two teams. Barca or Real Madrid. What kind of person would you be if, having been born here, you didn’t like football? It is not a universal law, but it is true that this sport is the first in our preferences. And that basketball is the second. But from there the list of favorites differs. If it is about hearings, cycling and tennis follow, in that order. The same that reflects another sector of the sports business in another part of the hobby, the pages that are advertised as the best betting portal. When it comes to the sports we practice, the first and second are also football and basketball. But the third is paddle tennis, and the fourth is swimming or cycling. The reasons why the choice between practicing and watching does not coincide are closely linked to the sporting, political and urban history of our country.
There is a business law that states that the first to reach a market remains the leader. That would explain football, the first foreign and group sport that came to Spain. It was brought by the British who worked in the Riotinto mines in Huelva at the end of the 19th century. If they organized a team, it was for that original reason that made soccer the favorite sport of the working class. Practicing it was cheap. The field was the least of it, any open field or unsown plot. The kit was not important either. The only thing elaborate was the ball, an outer leather covering with a seam that served to close the inner air chamber. Where they put a simple lung-inflated pig bladder. Creating it was not very complicated either, it was enough to explain what you wanted to a local shoemaker. Of course, it was not completely spherical, and the bulge in the part called tiento, where the seam closed the slot through which to insert the pig’s bladder, could injure the player. But that didn’t matter too much either. The first players were guys who prided themselves on being tough, otherwise they would not have endured grueling shifts in factories or operating dangerous machinery. So in the field they behaved as brutally as life had made them brutal. And nothing happened.
From the south to the north, soccer spread throughout the country, becoming extremely popular. It was an almost free leisure alternative, at a time when the only option workers had at the end of their shift was alcohol and taverns. It’s not that the matches couldn’t end there as well, but while they practiced they didn’t spend their wages on wine or brandy, and they also had fun. If we transfer these conditions of the game to a much later moment, at the end of the 20th century, and substitute workers for kids, we find a similar phenomenon. Children enjoying their leisure time playing at recess, in the open fields, in improvised soccer fields and even in some created for that purpose. It was a perfect sport to socialize, integrate, and create a gang of friends.
In the nineties things began to change due to changes in the urban planning of cities. The vacant lots were turned into parks and the preference for apartments in urbanization began, with an enclosed interior area where a swimming pool and other equipment were placed. It is not that it was a homogeneous phenomenon, but it did affect the new promotions in the big cities, so that a whole generation of children grew up playing less in the streets than going down to their “urban”. This could be one of the reasons why generation Z is showing less interest in soccer, but it may only be a temporary phenomenon. Spectator audiences continue to be massive, and now both boys and girls join neighborhood clubs, as well as one more sports extracurricular. Therefore it is doubtful that soccer will stop being the first of our favorite sports.
But why basketball ranks second. To begin with, because it took much longer to get close to the football figures. Its introduction is attributed to a Piarist father, that is, to one of the members of those religious orders dedicated to education. At the beginning of the 20th century, pedagogy was already clear that sports practice should be part of education to train healthy adults. And the father Eusebio Millán He took that idea to the Escuelas Pías de San Antón in Barcelona with a sport he had known in the new Cuba. I mean on the independent island of Spain where the presence of American soldiers and their influence was still very great.
His students rejected the idea, because in 1921 football was already being played in the schoolyard. But that sport had also earned the label of being a practice of workers, or what is the same, of a rebellious, revolutionary and often anti-clerical social class. It was tolerated, but it was not well regarded in religious schools, which in addition to being paid were conservative, in connection with the parents who took their children there. Basketball was therefore a more acceptable sporting option, an idea that was soon accepted by the Catalan bourgeoisie in other religious schools, and which soon spread throughout the rest of Spain.
But its leap in popularity from basketball didn’t come until the 1970s and 1980s, when it really competed with soccer. By then there were also baskets in public schools, that is, in any schoolyard there were alternate goals and baskets, as well as in many municipal facilities. The children brought from home to play with their classmates the same balls as balls, and games of the ACB League, created in 1983, were televised, as well as some NBA games, although following that league was still impossible from here. Not even the presence of the first Spanish player in the NBA, Fernando Martín, managed to improve things. At least until 1998, with the program Cerca de las estrellas, which he broadcast, with an emotion bordering on myocardial infarction. Ramon Trecet. Of course, deferred and only one day a week. In any case, and just like football, practice and contemplation went hand in hand.
And then came the age of Jose Maria Aznar. He was not only an unusual president because for the first time his party, the PP, ruled Spain. He much younger than Felipe Gonzalez, represented the men of his generation, much more sports fans in their adult stage than the older ones. The country accustomed to the fondness of its previous president for bonsai caught the attention that his was paddle tennis. A sport that had already been in Spain since the 1970s, but which was quite a minority and had become associated with the upper class. Suffice it to say that, originally from Mexico, he found his first Spanish office in Marbella and from there he exported to Argentina, always via millionaires. But it wasn’t money or the aspiration for it that made him and keeps him popular. It was urbanism.
Because Aznar’s period of government coincides with that new urbanism that made the flats in gated communities towards the interior. In principle, the use of the patio was solely dedicated to swimming pools, but at that time something demanded by the new owners was incorporated, due to fashion. Especially from the more expensive real estate areas. So many children grew up in the 90s with paddle tennis courts in their homes, but municipal sports spaces also naturally incorporated these courts along with soccer and basketball courts. All this, together with the presidential popularity, its similarity to tennis and frontenis, already very popular before, made it the third most practiced sport in Spain today, by two and a half million people.
Fourth place had always been for swimming. The reason is somewhat political, because in the numerous municipal sports centers that were built in cities since the 1960s, a swimming pool was always included. The reason was the medical recommendation. In a country where people over the age of thirty did not generally play any sport, the easiest thing when I had gotten old to get them going again was to throw them into the water. Little physical demand and the added advantage of learning to swim. A skill that today is almost taken for granted, but that the older generations of Spaniards did not master. The summer heat also favored use and encouraged children to learn to swim from an early age, so it was basically the presence of municipal swimming pools that prompted us all to swim. At least until the 90s they began to build within the urbanizations.
But now that fourth place is shared with cycling, and not for a long time, just since the pandemic. As if the best end of the confinement had been to pedal, at the end of the confinement many people bought a bike. Those in tights were there before, of course, but those were joined by the new ones, those who have chosen to use it as a means of urban transport, and those who rediscovered the pleasure experienced in their childhood. The different profiles of cyclists would give for an entire sociological study. From those who go at full throttle on a carbon bike for ten or fifteen thousand euros, to the very gray-haired who don’t mind showing off their belly under those tight leggings on tour in those of a thousand euros or less. And it is that in sporting love, as in the other, the heart has reasons that the head does not understand.
2023-07-17 07:00:05
#love #sports #chance
