The games a society plays are a modest but significant part of its cultural essense, if we are to accept that phrase as having any meaning at all. The Duke of Wellington is supposed to have said that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, and the Olympic athlete was one of the defining figures of classical Greek civilization. Baseball has long been held out as the quintessentially American game; if so, the successive rises of football and basketball to equal prominence may say something about a newer America, while the historical failure of soccer, the "world game," to catch on in the United States, at least at a professional level, perhaps says something about the distinctiveness of American society.
So it is with other nations and their sports as well. Our concern in the following discussion is with Spain, and with the history of sports in that country and that culture. Does the history and development of sports in Spain, from the most casual children's street play to the most professional level, say anything useful about Spanish society, and its relationship to other societies? The brief references made above to other societies and their sports hints that it may. Certainly the role of Spain as the source and center of that most extraordinary of sports, the bullfight, suggests the distinctiveness of Spanish culture, and perhaps reveals something deep in the Spanish soul.
This essay will first briefly touch on the historical issues of Spanish identity as they relate to sports, and on the present place of Spain in the international athletic scene. It will then survey what is known about Spanish sports in the past, and the informal roots of Spanish athletics among children in the village lanes and urban streets of Spain. Attention will then concentrate on the history and character of that supremely Spanish drama, the bullfight, before in conclusion we seek to draw something of the Spanish charact...