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That cricket was an enjoyed pastime and some man developed a reputation for being good is not the same as the sports-celebrity culture today. Boys can name twenty athletes at minimum, they watch most of the games of their favorite team, buy the jerseys and shoes, play FIFA (315 million* copies sold) or Madden (130 million copies sold), invest significant childhood time on competitive sports. I doubt middle class children in England grew up worshipping pugilists or cricket players.
And I mean, maybe pugilism was prosocial when your destiny as an illiterate lower class Englishman was to soldier overseas or die of malaria; it instills courage and desensitivity to pain. But that wasn’t the world of the other classes, and now we are all in these other classes.
Nothing I've said is a knock-down argument against your historical claim, but you're scarcely providing any argument for it either, just a lot of pointing and spluttering about "kids today" and bald assertions that it couldn't possibly have been so in days gone by (coupled with trivialities about modern mass media and so on). As a side note, projecting the modern concept of childhood back to a time when midshipmen were routinely commissioned at 13 is a chancy business.
At least in boxing, it was a good deal more than that. Champions dined with royals, drew aristocratic sinecures, and seem to have been household names (to the extent that any names were household names in a pre-mass-media era). John Gully, for one, became an MP. I recall references to news of prizefights and cricket matches being avidly sought after by East India Company men. All very recognizable.
"Significant" and "competitive" are rather weaselly words, but the aristocratic boarding schools certainly expected participation in their house games (Rugby football was officially codified in the 1830s and played for generations before that) and it doesn't seem to have been uncommon for aristocratic scions to play nationally competitive amateur cricket by at least the 1830s. Have you read Tom Brown's Schooldays? Well worth it for its own sake, and may shed some light on early 19th century British sporting culture. Hell, I'd recommend Boxiana as well, albeit perhaps as toilet reading due to its episodic nature.
I make no claims whatsoever about pro- or anti-sociality, to be clear.
I can’t offer any definitive proof that @coffee_enjoyer’s claim is correct, but as someone who spends a great deal of time dealing with 19th century American primary sources and who has read many autobiographies of men and women who grew up in that time, I’d say the lack of sports idols rings very true to me.
Newspapers were ubiquitous back then, serving not only as disseminators of news but also fulfilling the role that social media plays today. If you want to get a good sense of regular life during the 19th century, you can hardly do better than to just read 19th century newspapers. If you do, you’ll notice a striking absence of sports news. By the end of the century, a medium-sized newspaper might have a page or two per week devoted to their local sports teams’ games, but usually hardly more than that, while smaller papers didn’t even have that level of coverage. And if you read autobiographies of men and women who grew up in America in the early- to mid-19th centuries, you’ll typically find many references to playing sports, but few to no references to any sports idols.
This is in part because there weren’t any major sports leagues at that time. The first professional baseball team wasn’t founded until 1869, the first professional football players weren’t paid to play until 1892, and the first professional basketball league wasn’t founded until 1925.
All that said, while I think coffee_enjoyer is correct about the lack of sports heroes, I think he’s kind of wrong about young boys’ real heroes back in that day. Sure, they learned about great men of history and were taught to admire and emulate their virtues, but I don’t recall ever reading of a boy who had any real gripping, emotional connection to those men, as many boys do with sports superstars today. Instead, going by memoirs and autobiographies, most boys’ idols seem to have been older brothers, fathers, upperclassmen, teachers, fashionable young men around town, etc.
See, this is fairly compelling! Thanks.
Many of whom were at least locally distinguished in folk sports (e.g. wrestling), it seems to me, but this is of course quite different than modern spectator sport culture.
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