Sports News, Analysis And Opinion
Rugby football flourishes in other postcolonial cultures, such as New Zealand and South Africa, where the British once ruled. It was, however, association football’s destiny to become the world’s most widely played modern sport. Played with carefully sewn stuffed skins, with animal bladders, or with found objects as simple as gourds, chunks of wood, or rounded stones, ball games are universal. Descriptions of the game cuju, which resembled modern football , appeared as early as the Eastern Han dynasty (25–220). Games similar to modern badminton were also played in the 1st century. Baseball, for example, boomed in Cuba, where Nemesio Guilló introduced the game to his countrymen in 1863, and in Japan, where Horace Wilson, an American educator, taught it to his Japanese students in 1873. It was, however, only in the post-World War II world that U.S. influence generally overwhelmed British; only then did basketball and volleyball become globally popular. In the course of the 19th centur...