SPORTS PSYCHOLOGY ESSAY ASSIGNMENT

Violence in Sports

Introduction

Fair play has nothing to do with professional sport as professional sport is closely associated with jealousy, hatred, boastfulness, sadistic pleasure in witnessing the violence, and disregard for all the established rules. In other words, we can say professional sport is a war minus the shooting. Most of the sports that are being playing in today's world are of ancient origin, but there is a consensus among historians who have explored the area of sport in ancient times that between Roman times will nineteenth century, people never took sport that seriously. After this period, new sports were invented and old sports were evolved and improved chiefly in United States and England and made the sport a whole new industry. Sport eventually became heavily financed activity with a capability to attract vast crowds and rouse savage passions among spectators or fans. Later on, this infection of sport spread to other countries and gradually different kinds of sport became famous worldwide. But it is most violently combative sports such as boxing and soccer that have spread the widest. When it comes to the violence in sports, discussions are often associated with ideas of people about the moral and ethical condition of a society as a whole. Mass entertainment has been provided through sports throughout the history of the world. Ancient Mesoamericans used to play their ball games, the Greeks played Olympic Games, and Romans played several spectator games such as chariot races and gladiatorial contests. These ancient sports of Romans, Greeks and Mesoamericans later developed into present day sports such as Soccer and are heavily influenced by economic and financial issues. This heavily financed activity for providing entertainment to huge crowds has heavily influenced the 21st century. One best example to define this phenomenon are the profits of NFL (National Football League) which crossed the revenues and profits of United States Film industry Hollywood in the year 2009. This shows how much money is now involved in sports which go a long way in demanding more competitiveness on the part of players who are supposed to entertain the huge crowd or audience. This adds more burden on the shoulders of players who are already worried about how their individual as well as team performance is going to turn out. Added demands from couches as well as public eventually lead to aggression on the part of players which quite often results in the violence. This essay has attempted to explore the issues of violence in sports, its causes and its effects on the spectators (Chase, 2009).

Literature Review

Violence in Combative Sport: A Reason to Make Them Popular

Ancient sports, especially combat sports has been evolved into modern day professional boxing, wrestling and MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) which are based on the concept of Prize Fighting. Although modern day professional wrestling should be called a circus than sport as it involves dramatic staging, mock violence, scripts and stories which are soap-operatic in every sense, it has managed to garner an ardent fan ...