Unit 14 · Field as Square

In 1906 Athens hosted an extra set of Games, now called the Intercalated Games. The word intercalated means inserted between. The Games fell between the regular Olympics of 1904 and 1908. The IOC today does not count them as an official Olympics, but athletes then treated them as the real thing.

Ireland was part of the United Kingdom in 1906. Irish athletes had no Olympic committee of their own. They were entered under Great Britain. Peter O’Connor, a lawyer’s clerk from County Waterford, held the world record in the long jump. He wanted to compete for Ireland, not Britain.

O’Connor placed second in the long jump behind the American Myer Prinstein. The judge was Matthew Halpin, the manager of the American team, and O’Connor believed the judging was unfair. When the British flag went up for his medal, O’Connor climbed the flagpole. He waved a green flag with a gold harp and the words Erin go Bragh, meaning Ireland forever.

A few days later O’Connor won the triple jump. His flag protest came more than a decade before the Irish Free State was founded in 1922. It shows that the flag-raising ceremony was already a place where national identity could be argued over. Ireland first sent its own team to an Olympics at Paris in 1924.

On September 5, 1918, the Chicago Cubs played the Boston Red Sox in Game 1 of the World Series. The game was held at Comiskey Park, the White Sox home on Chicago’s South Side, because it held more people than the Cubs’ park. The United States had been fighting in World War I since April 1917.

During the seventh-inning stretch, a military band played The Star-Spangled Banner. Red Sox infielder Fred Thomas, who was on leave from the Navy, stood at attention and saluted. The crowd sang along. Newspapers reported the moment, and the song was played at the other Series games that fall.

The Star-Spangled Banner was not yet the national anthem. Congress made it the official anthem in a law that President Herbert Hoover signed on March 3, 1931. During World War II, more and more ballparks played it before every game, and leagues in other sports followed.

This history matters for protest. The anthem at a game is a custom that grew during wartime, not a rule as old as the sport. When athletes later knelt or raised fists during it, they were responding to a patriotic ritual that clubs and leagues had added to the game.

In the early 1900s, many European workers belonged to socialist clubs for gymnastics, cycling, swimming and soccer. These clubs saw the Olympics as run by aristocrats and business owners. They also objected to athletes competing as rivals for their nations. They wanted sport to unite working people across borders.

The Socialist Workers’ Sport International organized the first Workers' Olympiad in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1925. A second was held in Vienna, Austria, in 1931, and a third in Antwerp, Belgium, in 1937. The events mixed races and games with mass gymnastic displays, music and political speeches. Tens of thousands of club members took part.

In 1936 organizers in Barcelona planned a People’s Olympiad as a counter-event to the Berlin Olympics hosted by the Nazi government. Athletes from many countries traveled to Spain. The Games were set to open in July 1936, but the Spanish Civil War broke out days before, and they were cancelled.

The workers’ Olympiads show a form of protest bigger than a single gesture. Instead of speaking inside the Olympic ceremony, these groups built a separate institution with its own calendar, host cities and values. Their movement faded as fascist governments banned workers’ clubs and war came in 1939.

Harry Edwards taught sociology at San Jose State College in California. Two of the fastest sprinters in the world, Tommie Smith and Lee Evans, were students there. In the fall of 1967, Edwards and Black athletes founded the Olympic Project for Human Rights, often shortened to OPHR.

The group first proposed that Black American athletes boycott the 1968 Olympics. A boycott is a refusal to take part, used to press for change. The OPHR also published demands. They asked that Muhammad Ali’s boxing title be restored and that Avery Brundage step down as IOC president.

Other demands asked that South Africa and Rhodesia, both ruled by white minorities, be kept out of the Games. The OPHR also called for more Black coaches on the United States Olympic staff. Brundage had led the U.S. Olympic Committee in 1936, when it chose to compete in Nazi Berlin, and many athletes distrusted him.

The full boycott never happened. Most athletes chose to compete, and each decided privately how to use the moment. The OPHR badge, a round button with a wreath, became the group’s quiet symbol. Athletes of several nations wore it in Mexico City. Lee Evans, who won the 400 meters, wore a black beret on the podium with his teammates.

Tommie Smith won the 200 meters in 19.83 seconds, a world record. Peter Norman of Australia took silver in 20.06, and John Carlos took bronze in 20.10. Before the ceremony, the two Americans chose symbols. The black gloves stood for Black power and unity, and the shoeless black socks stood for Black poverty.

Carlos had forgotten his own gloves, so Smith wore the right glove of a pair and Carlos the left. Carlos also wore beads, which he later said honored victims of lynching. Norman, a white Australian, supported them and wore an OPHR badge. On the podium all three faced the flags as the anthem played.

IOC president Avery Brundage called the act a political display that broke Olympic principles. The IOC pressed the United States Olympic Committee to act. The USOC suspended Smith and Carlos from the team and ordered them to leave the Olympic Village. Both men received threats when they returned home.

Over time the view of the moment changed. In 2005 San Jose State unveiled a large statue of Smith and Carlos on campus. In 2019 both men were inducted into the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Hall of Fame. The same gesture had been punished by one generation of officials and honored by another.

In spring 1968 Czechoslovakia’s Communist leaders loosened censorship in a period called the Prague Spring. Gymnast Věra Čáslavská signed a public statement supporting the reforms, known as the Two Thousand Words. In August 1968, armies of the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact states invaded Czechoslovakia and ended the reforms.

Čáslavská trained in hiding for a time before the Games. In Mexico City she won four gold medals, including the all-around title. On the floor exercise, judges changed a Soviet gymnast’s score, and Čáslavská had to share the gold with Larisa Petrik of the Soviet Union.

During the medal ceremonies with Soviet gymnasts, the Soviet anthem played. Čáslavská turned her head down and to the side while it played. The gesture was small, but people at home understood it. Many saw it as a silent protest against the invasion.

Back in Czechoslovakia, the new hard-line government kept her from traveling and from coaching for years. After the fall of Communism in 1989, she worked as an adviser to President Václav Havel and led her country’s Olympic committee. Her story shows that podium protest came from both sides of the Cold War.

In October 1961 the Boston Celtics traveled to Lexington, Kentucky, for an exhibition game. A coffee shop at the team hotel refused to serve Black Celtics players. Bill Russell, Sam Jones, K. C. Jones and Satch Sanders decided not to play. They flew home, and the game went on without them.

An exhibition game does not count in the standings, but it earned money for the teams and the host city. By leaving, the players cost the organizers the stars fans had paid to see. The Celtics did not punish the four players for leaving. Kentucky passed its own civil rights law covering hotels and restaurants in 1966.

In January 1965 the American Football League held its All-Star Game in New Orleans. Black players were turned away by taxi drivers and some nightclubs. Twenty-one Black players voted to leave rather than play. League commissioner Joe Foss moved the game to Jeppesen Stadium in Houston within days.

Both cases were workplace protests. The players did not speak during the game; they refused the work. The 1965 walkout had quick results because a league had to fill a stadium. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which barred segregation in hotels and restaurants, had passed only months before.

Muhammad Ali won the world heavyweight title in February 1964, under his birth name Cassius Clay. Soon after, he announced he had joined the Nation of Islam and taken a new name. In 1966 he was classified as eligible for the military draft during the Vietnam War. He asked to be exempt as a conscientious objector.

On April 28, 1967, Ali went to an induction center in Houston and refused to step forward when his name was called. Within hours, the New York State Athletic Commission suspended his boxing license. The World Boxing Association took away his title. Other states refused him licenses too.

In June 1967 a federal jury convicted Ali of refusing induction. He was sentenced to five years in prison and fined 10,000 dollars, but stayed free while he appealed. He could not box for about three and a half years. He spoke at colleges to earn a living.

Ali returned to the ring in October 1970 in Atlanta, a city without a state boxing commission. On June 28, 1971, the Supreme Court overturned his conviction, 8 to 0, in Clay v. United States. He won the heavyweight title again in 1974. The case showed that sport bodies could punish an athlete long before a court decided anything.

Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf played guard for the Denver Nuggets. During the 1995–96 season, he stayed seated or in the locker room during the anthem. He said standing conflicted with his Muslim faith and his views on oppression. An NBA rule required players to stand in a dignified posture for the anthem.

On March 12, 1996, the NBA suspended Abdul-Rauf without pay. He missed one game. Within days he agreed to stand and pray silently during the anthem. The case showed that a league could write anthem conduct into its rules, much as a company writes a dress code.

In August 2016 San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick sat during the anthem to protest police violence against Black Americans. After talking with Nate Boyer, a former Army Green Beret, he began to kneel instead, starting September 1, 2016. Other players in the NFL and beyond joined him.

Kaepernick became a free agent in 2017 and was not signed by any team. He filed a grievance, a formal complaint under the labor agreement, saying owners had colluded to keep him out. The NFL settled it in February 2019. In May 2018 the league adopted a policy requiring players on the field to stand, then paused it that July.

The Olympic Charter is the IOC’s rule book for the whole movement. In recent editions, Rule 50 says that no demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is allowed at Olympic sites. The rule, under earlier numbers, was the basis for punishing podium protests like that of 1968.

In January 2020 the IOC published guidelines stating that athletes could not kneel or make hand gestures on the podium or the field of play. After protests for racial justice that summer, athletes’ groups asked for change. The IOC’s Athletes’ Commission surveyed athletes around the world.

In July 2021, weeks before the Tokyo Games, the IOC changed the guidelines. Athletes could now make gestures on the field before the start of a competition. Examples included kneeling before a soccer match. Protest on the podium and during the ceremonies stayed banned.

On August 1, 2021, U.S. shot putter Raven Saunders crossed her arms above her head in an X on the Tokyo podium. She said it stood for the meeting point of oppressed people. The IOC opened an inquiry, then paused it after her mother died days later. The rule still marks the podium as the IOC’s space, not the athlete’s.

In fall 2015 students at the University of Missouri protested racist incidents on campus. A graduate student, Jonathan Butler, began a hunger strike. On November 7, Black players on the football team announced they would not practice or play until university system president Tim Wolfe left office. Coach Gary Pinkel backed them.

The team’s next game, against Brigham Young University, was scheduled in Kansas City. Canceling it would have cost the university about one million dollars under its contract. On November 9, 2015, Wolfe resigned. The players’ leverage came from the money and attention that a college football game carries.

On August 23, 2020, a police officer in Kenosha, Wisconsin, shot Jacob Blake, a Black man, seven times. Three days later the Milwaukee Bucks were set to play the Orlando Magic in a playoff game. The NBA was playing in a closed bubble at Walt Disney World in Florida because of COVID-19. The Bucks did not come out of the locker room.

The NBA postponed that day’s games. WNBA, Major League Baseball and Major League Soccer players also sat out games. NBA play resumed on August 29 after the league agreed to steps such as turning arenas into voting sites. A walkout, not a gesture, had stopped a league’s schedule.

The All England Croquet and Lawn Tennis Club held its first championship at Wimbledon, near London, in July 1877. Only men played. Seven years later, in 1884, the club added a ladies' singles event. Maud Watson won it by beating her older sister, Lilian, in the final.

For nearly a century, Wimbledon and the other major tournaments were open only to amateurs, players who were not paid to compete. Top players who turned professional were barred. Men and women both played for trophies, not money, though leading amateurs often received hidden payments for expenses.

In 1968 tennis entered the Open Era, when professionals and amateurs could play in the same tournaments. The first open tournament was the British Hard Court Championships in Bournemouth that April. At Wimbledon that summer, men’s champion Rod Laver received 2,000 pounds. Women’s champion Billie Jean King received 750 pounds.

The Open Era turned tennis into a paid job for both sexes, but not an equal one. Organizers argued that men played longer matches, best of five sets, while women played best of three. Women answered that crowds and television came to see them too. That argument would last almost forty years.

Professional golf in the United States was organized by men first. The Professional Golfers’ Association of America was founded in 1916 by club professionals. Its tour of tournaments became the main way for golfers to earn money by playing. Women were not members of that tour.

Women golfers earned money mostly through exhibitions and a few events. In 1950 thirteen women founded the Ladies Professional Golf Association, or LPGA. Among the founders were Patty Berg, Louise Suggs and Babe Didrikson Zaharias. Berg served as the first president. Zaharias had already won Olympic gold in track in 1932.

The founders did far more than play. They set up courses, wrote rules for the tour, recruited sponsors and sometimes did their own publicity. The LPGA is now one of the oldest women’s professional sports organizations in the world. Zaharias won the U.S. Women’s Open in 1948, 1950 and 1954.

The LPGA is a parallel institution: a separate body, running its own tour, beside a men’s body. That structure gave women control over their own schedule. It also meant their purses depended on their own sponsors and television deals, which for decades were far smaller than the men’s.

During World War II, hundreds of minor league baseball players entered the military. Chicago Cubs owner Philip K. Wrigley feared that major league baseball might stop too. In 1943 he founded a professional league for women. It later took the name All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, or AAGPBL.

The first four teams were the Racine Belles and Kenosha Comets of Wisconsin, the South Bend Blue Sox of Indiana and the Rockford Peaches of Illinois. The Peaches played in every season of the league and won four championships. Players came from across the United States and Canada.

The league required players to wear skirted uniforms and to attend evening classes in manners and makeup. Wrigley and the managers wanted the players to appear feminine to win over fans. The league drew its largest crowds in the late 1940s, then declined as television kept fans home. It ended after the 1954 season.

The AAGPBL did not sign Black women. Toni Stone, Mamie Johnson and Connie Morgan instead played for Negro American League teams in the 1950s, alongside men. Their careers show that a league for women still had a color line. Stone joined the Indianapolis Clowns in 1953, a team Hank Aaron had left for the major leagues.

The Original 9 were Billie Jean King, Rosie Casals, Nancy Richey, Kerry Melville, Peaches Bartkowicz, Julie Heldman, Kristy Pigeon, Valerie Ziegenfuss and Judy Dalton. They came from the United States and Australia. They signed with Gladys Heldman for a symbolic one dollar each in September 1970.

The tournament was the Virginia Slims Invitational at the Houston Racquet Club. Joseph Cullman, head of the tobacco company Philip Morris, agreed to sponsor it. The prize money was 7,500 dollars. Rosie Casals beat Judy Dalton in the final. The event ran the same week as Kramer’s tournament in Los Angeles.

The United States Lawn Tennis Association, which sanctioned official events, had refused to approve the tournament. Sanction means official approval from a governing body. The association suspended the players for a time. The women went ahead anyway and planned a full tour for 1971.

The Virginia Slims circuit began in 1971. It gave women a reliable schedule and prize money for the first time. In 1971 Billie Jean King became the first woman athlete to win more than 100,000 dollars in prize money in a single year. The tobacco sponsorship later drew criticism as health warnings about smoking grew, and the tour changed sponsors in later decades.

Men players had formed the Association of Tennis Professionals, the ATP, in 1972. It gave them one voice in dealing with tournaments and national bodies. Women players saw that a tour needed more than sponsors. It needed an organization that the players controlled.

In June 1973, the week before Wimbledon, dozens of women players met at the Gloucester Hotel in London. Billie Jean King had asked for the meeting. They founded the Women's Tennis Association, or WTA. King was elected its first president. Days later she won the Wimbledon singles title for the fifth time.

A players' association speaks for its members on prize money, schedules, rankings and rules. The WTA later ran the women’s tour itself and created computer rankings for women players in 1975. Over time it became the main governing body of women’s professional tennis.

The founding of the WTA shows the difference between a tour and a union of players. The Virginia Slims tour was built by a publisher and a sponsor. The WTA was built by the players, so they could bargain on their own behalf. The ATP had started computer rankings for men in 1973.

Bobby Riggs had won Wimbledon in 1939. By 1973 he was 55 years old and claimed that a man his age could beat the best women players. On May 13, 1973, he beat Australian Margaret Court, then ranked first in the world, in a televised match in California.

Billie Jean King agreed to play him. The match, promoted as the Battle of the Sexes, took place on September 20, 1973, in the Houston Astrodome. More than 30,000 people attended, and the ABC network broadcast it in prime time. The winner would take 100,000 dollars.

King won in straight sets, 6–4, 6–3, 6–3. The match was an exhibition, not part of any tour. Its importance lay in its audience. Many people who had never watched women’s tennis saw a woman win a nationally televised contest against a man. Riggs had first challenged King earlier in 1973, and she had declined.

The match came between two institutional steps: the founding of the WTA that June and equal prize money at the U.S. Open that same month. It turned King into one of the best-known athletes in the country. She used that attention to press tournaments and sponsors for better pay for women.

The four Grand Slam tournaments are the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon and the U.S. Open. They carry the most ranking value and the most prestige. Each is run by its own national tennis body or club, so each set its own prize money. Winning all four in one year is also called a Grand Slam, which Margaret Court did in 1970.

In 1972 Billie Jean King won the U.S. Open and received 10,000 dollars. The men’s champion, Ilie Năstase, received 25,000 dollars. She said she would not play the next year unless the prize money was equal. The tournament’s organizers found a sponsor willing to add money to the women’s prizes.

In 1973 the U.S. Open paid its men’s and women’s champions the same amount, 25,000 dollars each. John Newcombe and Margaret Court won the singles titles. It was the first major to offer equal prize money. The tournament was then played on grass at the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, New York.

The other three majors did not follow for decades. Their organizers repeated the argument about match length and said men’s matches drew bigger crowds. The U.S. Open example gave players a model: one major had shown that equal pay was possible. The Australian Open became the second major to pay equally, in 2001.

By 2006 two majors paid equal prize money: the U.S. Open and the Australian Open, which had done so since 2001. The French Open paid its two singles champions equally that year but not the other rounds. Wimbledon still paid men more in every round. That year Roger Federer received 655,000 pounds and Amélie Mauresmo 625,000.

On June 26, 2006, Venus Williams published an essay in The Times of London. She had won Wimbledon in 2000, 2001 and 2005. She argued that paying women less told every girl she was worth less. The WTA and its players had lobbied for years, but her essay drew wide attention.

On February 22, 2007, the All England Club announced equal prize money in every round. The French Open made the same decision for 2007. That July, Venus Williams won Wimbledon again. She became the first woman champion there to receive the same prize as the men’s champion.

The change took 34 years after the U.S. Open’s decision. The argument about best-of-three and best-of-five matches never ended, but the majors decided that a champion’s pay should reflect the title, not the number of sets. Most regular tour events kept separate and unequal prize lists.

After college, top American women basketball players had to go overseas to play professionally for pay. Several short-lived U.S. women’s leagues had folded, including the Women’s Professional Basketball League of 1978 to 1981. In 1996 the U.S. women’s team won Olympic gold in Atlanta, drawing big crowds.

In April 1996 the NBA’s Board of Governors approved a women’s league. The Women's National Basketball Association, or WNBA, played its first game on June 21, 1997, when the New York Liberty beat the Los Angeles Sparks. A rival, the American Basketball League, had started in 1996 but folded in December 1998.

The WNBA was built as a summer league, playing when NBA arenas were free. NBA owners owned many of its first teams. That link gave the WNBA arenas and television time, but it also meant the women’s league depended on the men’s. The first season, in 1997, had eight teams.

The Chicago Sky began play in 2006. In 2021 the Sky beat the Phoenix Mercury to win their first WNBA championship. Players’ pay stayed far below NBA pay, and many WNBA players kept playing overseas in the winter to earn more. Since 2018 the Sky have played at Wintrust Arena on Chicago’s Near South Side.

The U.S. women’s national soccer team won the Women’s World Cup in 1991, 1999, 2015 and 2019. The men’s team has never reached a World Cup final. Both teams are run by the same body, the United States Soccer Federation. The two teams had separate collective bargaining agreements, contracts negotiated by each team’s union.

In 2016 five players filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a federal agency. On March 8, 2019, twenty-eight players sued the federation for sex discrimination in pay and working conditions. That summer, crowds at the World Cup final in France chanted equal pay after the U.S. won.

In May 2020 a federal judge dismissed the main pay claim. The judge noted that the women had chosen a contract with guaranteed salaries, unlike the men’s pay-per-game deal. The players appealed. In February 2022 the federation agreed to pay 24 million dollars to settle the case.

In May 2022 the federation signed new agreements with both teams. For the first time, the men’s and women’s teams would pool and share World Cup prize money. The federation became the first to promise equal pay for its two national teams. The agreements run through 2028.

In 1989 sociologists Michael Messner and colleagues began studying sports news on Los Angeles television. They repeated the study about every five years. Later rounds added ESPN’s SportsCenter. Researchers counted minutes of airtime about men’s and women’s sports.

The final round, published in 2021 by Cheryl Cooky, LaToya Council, Maria Mears and Michael Messner, covered 2019. It found that women’s sports received about five percent of airtime. That share had barely changed in thirty years, even as more girls and women played.

Media coverage matters for money. Sponsors pay to reach viewers, and viewers follow what they see. Less airtime means fewer fans, which leaders then cite as a reason for smaller budgets and prize money. Researchers call this a cycle that is hard to break.

Coverage has jumped at some moments, such as World Cup finals and the NCAA women’s basketball tournament. In 2024 the NCAA women’s title game drew a larger television audience than the men’s. Scholars still debate whether such moments change the everyday pattern.