Sports Dbq Essay

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Witham: WW2 DBQ Dan Gable, a twentieth century Olympic wrestler, once said, “Gold medals aren’t really made of gold. They’re made of sweat, determination and a hard-to-find alloy called guts.” These words capture the essence of European view on sports in the early 1900s. Cultural advancements changed the sport world. People saw it differently in terms of a way of life, a war, and even acceptance of women in the field. Sir Robert Baden-Powell, the man who founded the Boy Scouts, taught boys how to survive in the wilderness, but he also searched for ways to instill in them an inner honor and respect. Due to this, he viewed the playing of soccer as “a grand game for developing a lad physically and morally.” However, he found that the spectators of soccer tended to be “miserable specimens” who lacked solid characteristics(doc 3). Another man used the recent emergence of cricket and rugby to show how the individualism instilled in young men resulted in a lack of union and ability to work as team(doc 4). Frenchman, M. Faure-Dujarric, further reflected on this by pointing out how the increase struggles and victories in a team will eventually “make up the great national team of which we are obliged to be members.”(doc 7) The British National Workers Sports Association even went along with the team providing benefit in an international concept. “When the working class of the world know one another better, and fraternize more freely, it will be much easier to talk peace and infinitely harder for capitalists and dictators to stir up nations to war against each other.” (doc 11) It believed the global union via sports would ultimately result in lack of war and global peace. Ironically, four years after the article was published, World War II began. Another way people viewed the emergence of sports was in a war-like perspective. For ages war has been used as a method to prove
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