Bloodsport research

Continuing the general research into the subject of Bloodsports,-as i'm not that well versed in them or where they came from.

'Bloodsports are a category of sports or entertainment that involves the killing or injuring of animals for the pleasure of spectators,or more broadly sports that involve bloodshed.Common examples of the former include hunting, coursing, and combat sports such as cockfighting and dog fighting. Activities characterized as blood sports, but involving only human participants, include the Ancient Roman gladiatorial games and the modern mixed martial arts'

The earliest use of the term is in reference to mounted hunting, where the quarry would be actively chased, as in fox hunting or hare coursing. Before firearms a hunter using arrows or a spear might also wound an animal, which would then be chased and perhaps killed at close range, as in medieval boar hunting. The term was popularised by author Henry Stephens Salt.

Later, the term seems to have been applied to various kinds of baiting and forced combat:bull-baiting, bear-baiting, cockfighting and later developments such as dog fighting and rat-baiting. The animals were specially bred for fighting. In the Victorian era, social reformers began a vocal opposition to such activities, claiming grounds of ethics, morality and animal welfare.

Limitations on blood sports have been enacted in much of the world. Certain blood sports remain legal under varying degrees of control in certain locations (e.g., bullfighting and cockfighting) but have declined in popularity elsewhere.Proponents of blood sports are widely cited to believe that they are traditional within the culture.Bullfighting aficionados, for example, do not regard bullfighting as a sport but as a cultural activity.It is sometimes called a tragicspectacle, because in many forms of the event, the bull is invariably killed and the bullfighter is always at risk of death.

Blood sports have been a common theme in fiction. While historical fiction depicts real-life sports such as gladiatorial games and jousting,speculative fiction, not least dystopic science fiction suggests variants of blood sports in a contemporary or future society. Some popular works themed on blood sports are Battle Royale, The Hunger Games, The Running Man, The Long Walk, Fight Club, Death Race 2000,Amores Perros, and "The Most Dangerous Game". Blood sports are also a common setting for video games (Unreal Tournament, Street Fighter etc.), making up much of the fighting game genre.

Man V Man 

A gladiator (Latin: gladiator, "swordsman", from gladius, "sword") was an armed combatant who entertained audiences in the Roman Republic and Roman Empire in violent confrontations with other gladiators, wild animals, and condemned criminals. Some gladiators were volunteers who risked their lives and their legal and social standing by appearing in the arena. Most were despised as slaves, schooled under harsh conditions, socially marginalized, and segregated even in death.

Irrespective of their origin, gladiators offered spectators an example of Rome's martial ethics and, in fighting or dying well, they could inspire admiration and popular acclaim. They were celebrated in high and low art, and their value as entertainers was commemorated in precious and commonplace objects throughout the Roman world.

The origin of gladiatorial combat is open to debate. There is evidence of it in funeral rites during the Punic Wars of the 3rd century BC, and thereafter it rapidly became an essential feature of politics and social life in the Roman world. Its popularity led to its use in ever more lavish and costly games.

For the poor, and for non-citizens, enrollment in a gladiator school offered a trade, regular food, housing of sorts and a fighting chance of fame and fortune. 

Gladiators customarily kept their prize money and any gifts they received, and these could be substantial. 

Tiberius offered several retired gladiators 100,000 sesterces ($500,000) each to return to the arena.

Nero gave the gladiator Spiculus property and residence "equal to those of men who had celebrated triumphs." 

Mark Antony promoted gladiators to his personal guard.

Women

From the 60s AD female gladiators appear, as "exotic markers of exceptionally lavish spectacle". 

In 66 AD, Nero had Ethiopian women, men and children fight at a munus ( gladiatorial show) to impress King Tiridates I of Armenia.

Romans seem to have found the idea of a female gladiator novel and entertaining, or downright absurd; Juvenal titillates his readers with a woman named "Mevia", hunting boars in the arena "with spear in hand and breasts exposed" and Petronius mocks the pretensions of a rich, low-class citizen, whose munus includes a woman fighting from a cart or chariot 

A munus of 89 AD, during Domitian's reign, featured a battle between female gladiators and dwarfs.

Roman morality required that all gladiators be of the lowest social classes, and emperors who failed to respect this distinction earned the scorn of posterity; Cassius Dio takes pains to point out that when the much admired emperor Titus used female gladiators, they were of acceptably low class

Some regarded female gladiators as a symptom of corrupted Roman sensibilities, morals and womanhood, regardless of class. Before he became emperor, Septimius Severus may have attended the Antiochene Olympic Games, which had been revived by the emperor Commodus and included traditional Greek female athletics. His attempt to give Rome a similarly dignified display of female athletics was met by the crowd with ribald chants and cat-calls.Probably as a result, he banned the use of female gladiators in 200 AD.

------------------------------------------------------

Seneca, Roman senator and philosopher, tells of a visit he once paid to the arena. He arrived in the middle of the day, during the mass execution of criminals, staged as an entertainment in the interval between the wild-beast show in the morning and the gladiatorial show of the afternoon:

All the previous fighting had been merciful by comparison. Now finesse is set aside, and we have pure unadulterated murder. The combatants have no protective covering; their entire bodies are exposed to the blows. No blow falls in vain. This is what lots of people prefer to the regular contests, and even to those which are put on by popular request. And it is obvious why. There is no helmet, no shield to repel the blade. Why have armour? Why bother with skill? All that just delays death.

In the morning, men are thrown to lions and bears. At mid-day they are thrown to the spectators themselves. No sooner has a man killed, than they shout for him to kill another, or to be killed. The final victor is kept for some other slaughter. In the end, every fighter dies. And all this goes on while the arena is half empty.

You may object that the victims committed robbery or were murderers. So what? Even if they deserved to suffer, what's your compulsion to watch their sufferings? 'Kill him', they shout, 'Beat him, burn him'. Why is he too timid to fight? Why is he so frightened to kill? Why so reluctant to die? They have to whip him to make him accept his wounds.

(http://www.historytoday.com/keith-hopkins/murderous-games-gladiatorial-contests-ancient-rome)

History of Pro Wrestling research…

Being a big fan of WWE ( then WWF) wrestling growing up, with all the colourful costumes and characters. I looked into the origins to try and find out what made it so globally popular in the 80's/90's. Also how it its popularity waned and the arrival of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) & UFC gave fans something new and 'real' to watch.

Found a few vids on the history of Pro Wrestling.

The Unreal Story Of Professional Wrestling (1998)

http://www.alluc.ee/l/The-Unreal-Story-Of-Professional-Wrestling-1998-avi/qsoq4zyx

• Professional wrestling, a performing art, is a popular form of entertainment in Australia, North America, Latin America, Europe, and Japan. It developed in the early 20th century, with predecessors in funfair and variety strongman and wrestling performances, which could often involve match fixing, in the 19th century.

•Wrestling as a modern sport developed in the 19th century out of traditions of folk wrestling, emerging in the form of two styles of regulated competitive sport, "freestyle" and "Greco-Roman" wrestling (based on British and continental tradition, respectively), summarised under the term "amateur wrestling" by the beginning of the modern Olympics in 1896. 

• Professional wrestling, in the sense of traveling performers paid for mass entertainment in staged matches, began in the post-Civil War period in the late 1860s and 1870s.During this time, wrestlers were often athletes with amateur wrestling experience who competed at traveling carnivals with carnies working as their promoters and bookers. Grand circuses included wrestling exhibitions, quickly enhancing them through colourful costumes and fictional biographies for entertainment, disregarding their competitive nature.


• Professional wrestling in the United States, until the 1920s, was viewed as a legitimate sport. This view did not endure into the 1930s, as professional wrestling became identified with modern theatrics, or "admitted fakeness" ("kayfabe"), moving away from being a showcase for true competition.


• The scripted nature of the art has made critics view it as an illegitimate sport, particularly in comparison to boxing, mixed martial arts, amateur wrestling, and the real sport itself, wrestling. No major promoter or wrestler denies that modern professional wrestling has predetermined match outcomes.



•Its popularity declined during World War II, but it was revived in the late 1940s to 1950s, the First Golden Age of professional wrestling in the United States, Mexico and Japan,


There was a marked decline in public interest in the 1970s and early 1980s, but with the advent of cable television in the mid 1980s, there followed a Second Golden Age as the United States experienced a professional wrestling boom, with protagonists such as Andre the Giant, Randy Savage, Ric Flair, and most notably Hulk Hogan.


• In the early 1980s, professional wrestling in the U.S. consisted mainly of three competing organisations: the World Wide Wrestling Federation (WWWF) in the Northeast, the American Wrestling Association (AWA) in the Midwest, and the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA), which ran a territorial system around the country.

• The nature of professional wrestling was changed dramatically to better fit television, enhancing character traits and story lines Television has also helped many wrestlers break into mainstream media, becoming influential celebrities and icons of popular culture.


• Wrestling's popularity boomed when independent enthusiasts unified and their media outlets grew in number, and became an international phenomenon in the 1980s with the expansion of the World Wrestling Federation (now know as World Wrestling Entertainment, shortened to simply WWE


• The WWF expanded nationally through the acquisition of talent from competing promotions (AWA,GCW) and, because it was the only company to air televised wrestling nationally, became synonymous with the industry, monopolising the industry and the fan base. The WWF's owner Vince McMahon revolutionised the sport by coining the term "sports entertainment" to describe his on-screen product, admitting to its fakery as well as enhancing its appeal to children.


• The WWF became the most colourful and well-known wrestling brand to children because of its child-oriented characters, soap opera dramaticism and cartoon-like personas. Most notable was the muscular Hulk Hogan, who marked the 1980s with his "all-American" persona. His sheer size, colourful attire, charisma and extravagance made his main events into excellent ratings draws


WrestleMania III, with a reported record attendance of 93,173 people, is widely considered to be the pinnacle of the period.[33] The first episode of The Main Event is the highest rated professional wrestling television show to date, with 33 million viewers


• Generally, WrestleMania VI on April 1, 1990, is acknowledged as the end of the 1980s wrestling boom.


• Throughout the 1990s, professional wrestling achieved highs in both viewership and financial success during a time of fierce competition among competing promotions, such as World Wrestling Federation, World Championship Wrestling (WCW) and Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW).


• During the early 1990s, the growing WWF(E) was being hindered by competing brands and nagging legal troubles and since the mid 2000s, there has been another decline in popularity of professional wrestling.


• The WWF was forced to change itself to overcome its competition, remodelling itself with added bloodshed, violence, and more profane, sexually lewd characters. This new "Attitude Era" quickly dominated the style and nature of wrestling to become far more teen-oriented


• WWE's television programs have sine seen all-time low ratings. This is paralleled with a renewed interest in competitive combat sports with the rise of mixed martial arts (MMA/UFC)




The WWF was investigated by the Federal Government in 1991 for a steroid scandal.Large names, including Hulk Hogan, gained infamy when news of their long-time steroid use was revealed.

• A civil lawsuit involving sexual misconduct on the part of Pat Patterson in 1993 further weakened the company.This gained great criticism to the WWF, weakening its once "family-oriented" programming.

• WWE gained national media coverage in 2007 for the Chris Benoit murder-suicide, hypothesized to be related to brain damage resulting from multiple concussions. This incident, along with the death of Eddie Guerrero in 2005, made drug use and young deaths in the business a subject of intense controversy.


"You eat steak for every meal, you get tired of steak. That's what happened with the women and the midgets" Classy Freddie Glassie, (1998)


"What you see in Wrestling is a reflection of what you see in society today and what our society wants, and what it feeds off of." Del Wilkes, 'The Patriot' (1998)

Dissertation topic thoughts..

As with every essay (well, both of them), i always start by just brainstorming the main things that i find interesting or that i think would be researchable enough to make into an essay. These brainstorms are always feature the same, FEW subjects but i never seem to be able to end up actually writing about any of them. I realise as i've got to churn out at least 6000 words this time so i really need to be choosing something that holds my interest for the long haul. That in itself is a massive mission, as it appears there's very little that i'm interested in that could form any sort of academic paper. Not to say they're not interesting, maybe just too niche and weird. This is already a struggle and i haven't even nearly started anything yet.

The traditional mind map with the usual suspects, namely;

Films of the 80's, Fashion of the 80's, Music of the 80's....The 80's. My needs are simple.

These interests have somewhat branched out a bit this time around, but i'm still non the wiser to where i could take it as a research project. These mindmaps sprang from the following list of initial subjects;

• Sub-genre fashion resurgence

• Retro / Re-cycling the past 

• Post Modernism in trends 

• Nostalgia >> How the digital age has effected or effectively killed the ideals of genuine nostalgia

(thanks to facebook, digital cameras, 'selfies', scanners, printers, video tape converters, games console emulators etc)  Merely replicating the past. 

• Romanticism

• Memorabilia

• Collecting/ Hoarding / Obsessions / Addictions / 'Nerd' Culture

• History of Masks >>Meanings >> Anonymity/Reclusiveness/Isolation in creative types

.

Books slightly related to retro/vintage/collecting themes, for starters - but not altogether that useful.

"The Cultures of Collecting" J.Elsner, R.Cardinal (069)

"Pretty Ugly"  (745.2) 

"Packaging source book" (745.2)

"Digital Retro"  (745.2)

"Collectors edition" (745.2)

"Collections of Nothing" - W.Davies King

..and of course, vintage WWF wrestling >> The changes to what it has become now >>> Peoples changing views on masculinity, which took me off in quite a different tangent ?!

Big Fat 80's Wrestlers, global prime time TV

v

v

v

Popularity waining 

v

v

v

                                                 Emergence of UFC/MMA and                                                    subsequent rise in popularity 

God knows how, but from an initial starting point of the popularity of Pro Wrestling of the 70's/80'S/90's i've ended up asking the question why, what is the behind humans desire/interest in watching violent bloodsports or the actual deaths of other humans,or animals? (roman gladiators,public executions, bullfighting,youtube videos of car/plane crashes etc)