The History of Sports and Athletics
The Sports History section of the Historyguy.com website features pages and articles on the long and multi-faceted history of sports and athletics in the United States and throughout the world. While the majority of the content in this section highlights Baseball, Football, Basketball, other forms of competition are dealt with, from Figure Skating to Professional Poker.
Sports Categories and SportsHistory site internal links:
Texas Tech Bowl Game History–The latest on the Mike Leach/Craig James Drama
Major League Baseball (MLB)
National Football League (NFL)
Poker: World Series of Poker (WSOP)
Gambling In Sports:
Given the extremely competitive nature of sport it seems only natural for it to be so closely entwined with gambling that the two activities sometimes overlap and merge. For example, betting is a vital part of horse racing. This can be traced back to the Roman sport of chariot racing, which along with Gladiator contests was the only activity were betting was allowed in Rome. Dice games were illegal, but the law was often flouted. In fact it was well known that the Emperor Caligula was a terrible gambler with dice, dipping in to the Empire’s coffers to fund his loses, and executing wealthy citizens to bet with their remaining estates. His extravagance even went so far as to convert the Imperial Palace into a casino games house for a period, where wealthy citizens would come for summer periods and spend their time gambling on various dice and coin games and frolicking with women – much like modern casinos in Las Vegas.