My connotation of working class has to do with the industrial age, and given our economic shift to a post-industrial economy, then concept of working class hs to be modified. Basically, there's a huge middle class, and then there's a 10% underclass, and then there's a privileged class. Most of the sporting public is the middle class, who seek entertainment of many varieties. Interestingly, you find the underclass over respresented in the SPORTING domains, as it's one of the few LEGAL means out of the underclass.
Sorry. I'll try to amplify it later when I get a chance. Who were they? That ended in the 1930's, didn't it? I don't know if you're wrong or not. But how many white collar people were there then? More than now, or fewer? Even percentage-wise? Weren't we a mostly industrial nation at one point? I would imagine quite a few. When there's a good portion of our country that no longer works in the dot-com world, I think they are all working in construction now. Seriously, I don't know. A recent book called The Working Class Majority argues that our country is 62% working class, 36% middle class and 2% capitalist class. I haven't read it, don't know where the definitions he uses come from, and don't know whether or not I buy into that. But I think it's bigger than you seem to think. And I do buy into the notion that at the time our country's sports space was staked out, the sports that had appeal to the greatest number of people and weren't viewed as "English" (in a period not too long after the time when Americans were trying to distance themselves from things European, especially English) were the ones who got the best seats at the table. Hell the guy may be a Marxist for all I know. Does NC reflect the nation as a whole? God help us all. I'm not flaming you, Dave, you know I think you're the goods. This is an interesting debate, and I'll continue it later. Now I have to look busy.
For the college sports, it was college graduates. Think about the sponsors for college bball over the last 25 years. Paine Webber sponsors ABC's games. As for the NBA...dude, those tickets are a lil' too expensive for your typical blue collar worker. I think your statement is very true about the NFL. Maybe my view is distorted from my parents being from Detroit, a town where blue collar workers could well afford season tickets to NFL games. But I wouldn't say that about any other sport. The NHL boom rode in on the wallets of upscale white collar workers, for another example. You mean day games? The transition was gradual, started in 1935 (IIRC) and (here's the most important part wrt your post) AFTER baseball was already a major sport. Hell, at the time, the nation had two major team sports...pro baseball and college football. Despite having not read the book I can definitively state that the author is using an income based definition, not a job based definition. He's probably re-defining jobs such as work in retail or clerical work as working class, when they've always been considered white collar (or, recently, by some, pink collar.) Unless I'm missing something, you just wrote that the most popular sports were the sports with the most fans. Rather tautological, wouldn't you say? Your jealousy amuses us greatly. (would be a smiley here, but that would be too many images) I hope you saw my point there, tho. The percentage of Latinos in blue collar work is substantially higher than the percentage of Latinos in the nation as a whole. Substantially. My sense is that many big soccerites have a weird reverse snobbery about suburbanites. I hope my thoughts on this have made you stop and examine if you've fallen into the trap. WUSA can do just fine without a working class base of fans. Other sports have. But it's probably not a good idea to disinvite, well, me. I was planning to go to some Courage games, but the ad campaign dissuaded me.
They are now. They weren't then. When the sports were gaining their positions in sports space and in the pecking order. And you don't have to go to games to be a fan of a sport, do you? This is the problem with the baseball analogy. Until 1953, baseball had been played in the same 10 cities for 52 years, and I would imagine a great percentage of Americans never went to a Major League game. Yet baseball became very popular because it had wide-spread appeal to the average person. The NHL "boom" maybe (though what sport could you say has not become the province of prawn-sandwich eaters in this era of the Luxury Box?). I was referring more to the point in time where the Big Four became the Big Four (or Three and a Half), when the sports space in this country (and most industrialized nations) was settled, making it very hard for other sports to get in, or those sports to be forced out. Goes back to what I was saying before. You said baseball couldn't have been very popular with working people because working people couldn't go to day games as easily. Yet all those who probably never went to a game (for whatever reason, whether they were working or not) still became fans. Night baseball made it easier, as did the post-WWII boom when just about everything took off. At some point, what you "wear" (figurative, I know), or what someone classifies your job as (its "sexiness" or whatever) becomes less important than how much it pays, doesn't it? I don't think defining "working class" on the basis of income is that far off. Ask someone making $18,500 a year if he considers himself a "working stiff" (with a good connotation) or not. But there are lots of plumbers who make $75,000 a year, right, so maybe there's no one interpretation. Obviously. What I meant to say was there was a concerted effort at that point in our nation's history to cast off things "English" and that soccer got kind of squeezed out of that by virtue of having been perceived as an English game. If you could explain it in greater depth, maybe I could tell you. But being a suburbanite myself, it's unlikely I would have too many negative feelings about them. Define "just fine" (burning through your first $40M?) and while there are other sports now who obviously cater to corporations and people who can afford Club Seats and Luxury Boxes, those sports positions in our sports space were set in cement (at least from a position of being in the "Big Time", whether or not their positions within that "Big Time" have changed over time, i.e. when the NFL overtook baseball) a long time ago. And it's my (and not just my) contention that they did that on the backs of the working class. We may have a lot more prawn-sandwich eaters now, but we have a lot more people now, as well. Don't like soccer?
1. I left something pretty important out of my last post, and somehow didn't get busted on it. The NFL is an eyeball league, and thus, it depended on the working class in its growth stage alot, above and beyond game attendance. 2. The NHL had 6 teams in 1966, and two of those were in Canada. It obviously was not a major sport at that time in the US. There was no Big 4 or even a Big 3 and a Half. Sometime in the next quarter century, it became a major sport here. Since the NHL is a fanny league, I'd be very interested on how many hours one had to work at the minimum wage to afford an average NHL ticket in 1971, 1976, 1981, 1986, 1991. 3. Kenn, to me, you're sliding dangerously close to the following argument: No sport has ever become major without appealing to the working class. And the working class is made up of people in average income brackets (broadly defined). Again, if that's not a tautology, you sure as hell can see Tautology City without binoculars from there. 4. You're the first one to slap down people who want to compare MLS attendance and growth today to that of the NBA in 1954. So I don't see baseball as a terribly useful analogy. And to the extent it is useful, I don't buy it. Baseball was established as the major US team sport (along with college football) by 1910. Given what I know about the economics of the working class (and I'm an MA in American history, you know ), I can't see the working class as being a terribly important factor in the growth. I don't think I said they weren't fans. I said they weren't much of a factor in making MLB a major sport. I mean, we're talking pre-radio here. Also, I think you might be underestimating the status of the minor leagues in the South and West pre-1958. 5. When did the NBA become a major sport? I would argue in the 80's, and if I'm right, then, given what I know about Hornets ticket prices when they entered the league, the NBA became a major sport on the backs of the prawn eaters. 6. How many fans per game and how many teams would MLS need for you to consider it a major sport here? To bring it back to WUSA...it would take a major, at this point inconceivable, sociological shift for any women's team sport to be a major sport in the US. 7. What the hell is a prawn, and what is a prawn sandwich?
You know what, Dave? I wrote a huge post in response, but it had ONE too many images (I only used two, but you had one!), and so when I went back to fix it, EVERYTHING I HAD WRITTEN WAS GONE. F***ING GONE. Nice going, Bigsoccer, thank you very f***ing much. I'll put it back together later.