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CINCINNATI — Kolten Wong hit a career-high three homers and drove in five runs, helping Brandon Woodruff and the Milwaukee Brewers beat the Cincinnati Reds 5-1 on Thursday night. Wong hit a two-run drive in the second inning against Hunter Greene. LONDON — Roger Federer was paying attention right along with everybody else when Serena Williams played what is expected to be her last match three weeks ago at the U.S. Early Saturday morning, at half past midnight, a small but passionate group of fans will gather in front of our American TVs to watch the Grand Final, the Super Bowl of Aussie rules football. According to the World Sports Encyclopaedia , there are 8,000 indigenous sports and sporting games. The 49ers tried to move on from Jimmy Garoppolo, but the value of game-managing quarterbacks is highest to teams with sudden openings to fill.

Neither sport enjoyed the popularity of association football. Although the Football Association and most of its affiliated clubs were initially dominated by the middle and upper classes, soccer had definitely become “the people’s game” by the end of the century. For instance, Manchester United, one of Britain’s most storied teams, can trace its history to a club established by the city’s railroad workers in 1880.

Sports are part of every culture past and present, but each culture has its own definition of sports. The most useful definitions are those that clarify the relationship of sports to play, games, and contests. “Play,” wrote the German theorist Carl Diem, “is purposeless activity, for its own sake, the opposite of work.” Humans work because they have to; they play because they want to.

Unambiguous definition is nonetheless a prerequisite to practical determinations about what is and is not an example of play. Football is the world’s most popular ball game, but, wherever American economic and culture influence has been dominant, the attraction to baseball, basketball, and volleyball has tended to exceed that to football. Baseball, for example, boomed in Cuba, where Nemesio Guilló introduced the game to his countrymen in 1863, and in Japan, where Horace Wilson, an American educator, taught Sports it to his Japanese students in 1873. It was, however, only in the post-World War II world that U.S. influence generally overwhelmed British; only then did basketball and volleyball become globally popular. Peasant women participated freely in the ball games and footraces of medieval times, and aristocratic ladies hunted and kept falcons, but middle-class women contented themselves with spectatorship. Even so, they were more active than their contemporaries in Heian Japan during the 8th to 12th centuries.

It was not unusual to combine the skills of the wrestler with those of a mystic poet. Indeed, the celebrated 14th-century Persian pahlavan Maḥmūd Khwārezmī was both. An engineering student at the University of Utah allegedly threatened to "cause mass destruction" if the school's football team lost to San Diego State. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.