ABSTRACT
One aspect of the story so far, of amateurism as an ideology justifying a range of social practices and institutions, serves as kind of indictment. Amateurism was ‘classist’ in that it distinguished between social classes in favour of those already dominant. It was also ‘racist’ in that within the British Empire and the United States it favoured ‘white’ elites over other races. Just as in English cricket it was the universal practice for about a hundred years until around 1960 that first-class teams had to be captained by an amateur, in the West Indies it became the practice that a ‘white’ man had to be captain. In most accounts of amateurism it stands accused of institutionalized hypocrisy: all over the history of ‘amateur’ sport – in Olympic athletics, Rugby Union in France, Wales and the southern hemisphere, American college sport, even football in Northumbria – the amateur principle seems more honoured in the breach, a case of who cheats wins.
