History
The World Wrestling Federation coined the term "sports entertainment" during the 1980s as a description for professional wrestling, although precursors date back to February 1935, when Toronto Star sports editor Lou Marsh described professional wrestling as "sportive entertainment". In 1989 WWF used the phrase in a case it made to the New Jersey Senate for classifying professional wrestling as "sports entertainment" and thus not subject to regulation like a directly competitive sport.
Some sports entertainment events represent variants of actual sports, such as exhibition basketball with the Harlem Globetrotters association, or football with the Lingerie Football League. Others modify sport for entertainment purposes: many types of professional wrestling (which derived from traditional wrestling), roller derby (derived from roller skating), and more recently many of the various mascot races held at numerous Major League Baseball games in-between innings.
Some forms of sports entertainment involve taking competitive games usually considered minor, such as dodgeball, poker, or rock-paper-scissors, and televising them with trumped-up theatrics, involving (for example) celebrity competitors or elaborate audiovisual packages.
Read more about this topic: Sports Entertainment
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of American politics is littered with bodies of people who took so pure a position that they had no clout at all.”
—Ben C. Bradlee (b. 1921)
“Boys forget what their country means by just reading “the land of the free” in history books. Then they get to be men, they forget even more. Liberty’s too precious a thing to be buried in books.”
—Sidney Buchman (1902–1975)