Sportsmen and Gamesmen

The gradual transformation of the British aristocratic sporting tradition into a popular one in America is a principal theme of Sportsmen and Gamesmen. John Dizikes locates the distinction between sportsmen and gamesmen in different attitudes toward rules. Beginning with Andrew Jackson, the personification of American democracy, for whom the traditional code of conduct was a vital part of the sporting spirit, he finds a diversity of views in the next generation of American sportsmen, some accepting, other modifying or rejecting, the old sporting code, which came, in the changing conditions and values of nineteenth-century American life, to seem irrelevant, almost un-American. These sporting portraits vividly depict the process of creating a distinctive American sporting culture.