ABSTRACT
Sports and warfare can trace their affiliation at least as far back as classical Greece: Plato in The Republic refers conflatingly to “warrior athletes” whose conditioning in the “military gymnastic” was crucial for their specialization as the state’s “dogs” of war ( Jowett 1969: I, 334). The intensity and motivatedness of this association has, if anything, only increased in recent years: Mrozek (1980: 178–9) shows that an American creed of “toughness,” characterized as an “aggressive, action-oriented attitude,” intensified in the wake of World War II and in the Cold War period. Thus, the “Football is Violence” culture that flourished in Cold War America and after has its roots in a militarism which associated America’s military successes with the broad inculcation of an aggressive toughness such as was fostered by painful physical training. Similarly, Chick and Loy (2001: 6, 14) show how “combative sports” – those that “involve actual or potential contact between opponents with the object of inflicting real or symbolic injury on opponents, gaining playing field territory, or are patently warlike” – play a significant role in socializing values of aggressiveness associated with “warfare.”
