1920s Sports: Heroes and Legends of the Golden Age
The 1920s were America’s first true Golden Age of Sports — a decade when spectator athletics exploded from regional entertainment into a national obsession. Stadiums filled to capacity, newspapers devoted entire sections to box scores and play-by-play, and for the first time, fans could follow their heroes without leaving home thanks to the new miracle of radio broadcasting. Athletes like Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Red Grange, Bill Tilden, Bobby Jones, and Paavo Nurmi became household names whose faces appeared on candy bars, cigarette cards, and the front pages of metropolitan dailies. Sports had become the people’s theater, played out under the summer sun and broadcast through the static-filled airwaves of a young medium.
The economic and cultural forces that defined the Roaring Twenties — rising personal income, mass-produced consumer goods, urban migration, and the spread of new media — converged to transform athletics. Workers had more leisure time, more disposable income, and more ways to follow their favorite teams. Sports owners, sensing opportunity, built enormous concrete-and-steel stadiums to capture the crowds. The result was a new kind of American hero: the professional athlete as celebrity, the home run as cultural metaphor, and the champion as proof that meritocracy still worked in a decade of widening inequality.
The Rise of Spectator Sports
The first two decades of the twentieth century had seen the consolidation of professional baseball, the founding of the National Football League’s predecessor organizations, and the emergence of college football and basketball as mass entertainments. But it was the 1920s that converted sport from a participatory activity into a mass-media spectacle. Three forces drove the transformation: urbanization, which concentrated potential fans in cities served by streetcars and, increasingly, automobiles; the eight-hour workday and rising real wages, which gave industrial workers free time and a few spare dollars; and a communications revolution that put play-by-play coverage within reach of nearly every American household.
The economics of the new sports business rewarded stars who could fill seats. In 1919, Jack Dempsey challenged Jess Willard for the heavyweight championship; the fight drew 19,000 paying fans and grossed $270,000 — an enormous sum. By 1926, Dempsey vs. Tunney at Philadelphia’s Sesquicentennial Stadium would set the first million-dollar gate in boxing history. Promoters learned that marketing a charismatic champion could yield returns unimaginable a generation earlier. The same arithmetic applied in baseball, where Babe Ruth’s arrival in New York transformed the moribund Yankees into a financial juggernaut almost overnight.
Newspapers responded to fan demand by enlarging sports coverage. Where a 1900 daily might run a single page of box scores and brief game stories, a 1925 metropolitan paper like the New York Times or the New York Daily News devoted four to eight pages a day to sports, with full-length features, syndicated columns by writers like Ring Lardner and Grantland Rice, and even the early “personality profiles” that would later evolve into celebrity journalism. The sports section became the first part of the paper many readers turned to, especially among the millions of new immigrants for whom English-language baseball slang served as an entry point into American culture.
The Coming of Sports Radio
On April 11, 1921, station KDKA in Pittsburgh broadcast a live radio report of a boxing match between Johnny Ray and Johnny Dundee, marking the first play-by-play sports broadcast in American history. Two years later, the same station would carry the first live radio broadcast of a baseball game. By 1924, WQJ in Chicago was airing play-by-play of high school football, and by 1927, the NBC and CBS networks were sponsoring national broadcasts of major-league baseball. Radio turned regional teams into national brands and made stars of athletes who had previously been known only to fans in their own cities.
The impact was immediate and measurable. When a struggling team suddenly caught fire, radio could spread the news in hours rather than days. When a star athlete suffered an injury or set a record, the story could reach every corner of the country before the next morning’s papers hit the streets. The 1927 Yankees, the 1926 Dempsey-Tunney fight, the 1927 Long Count rematch, the 1927 Notre Dame football “Four Horsemen” backfield — all became nationally known events through the new magic of radio. The technology of sport and the technology of broadcasting had been born at almost exactly the same moment, and they grew up together.
The Newspaper Sports Section
The expansion of newspaper sports coverage was the most visible sign of the sports boom. By the mid-1920s, the sports section of a major metropolitan paper like the New York Daily News — which launched in 1919 and became the country’s largest-circulation daily within a decade — was a self-contained magazine of 12 to 20 pages, with multiple daily editions of box scores, syndicated columns, photographs, and feature stories. The “wire services” — the Associated Press, United Press, and International News Service — carried play-by-play accounts of games to papers that could not afford to send their own reporters to every contest, so a baseball fan in a small Kansas town could read about a Yankees game in the morning paper as if he had been in the stands.
The era’s great sportswriters — Ring Lardner, Grantland Rice, Damon Runyon, Westbrook Pegler, Paul Gallico, Heywood Broun — became celebrities in their own right. Lardner’s “You Know Me Al” letters, fictional exchanges between a bush-league pitcher and his former teammate, captured the language and pretensions of baseball with a sophistication that elevated sports writing into literature. Rice’s poetic accounts of Notre Dame’s Four Horsemen (“Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again”) became some of the most quoted sports prose of the decade. Gallico, Runyon, and Broun would go on to write novels, plays, and screenplays that drew on their sportswriting experience, demonstrating that the sports page was now a respectable — and lucrative — literary genre.
Newsreels and the Cinema of Sport
Radio was not the only new medium to transform sports. The 1920s saw the rise of the newsreel — short news films shown in movie theaters before the feature presentation — as a major source of sports coverage. Companies like Pathé News, Hearst Metrotone News, and Fox Movietone News sent camera crews to major sporting events, and the resulting footage was shown to millions of moviegoers within days of the events themselves. The famous newsreel of the 1926 Dempsey-Tunney fight was shown in theaters across the country to enormous audiences, and the footage of the 1927 Yankees helped establish the team as a national brand. The arrival of synchronized sound film (the “talkies”) at the end of the decade would make newsreels even more powerful, allowing fans to see — and eventually hear — their heroes in action.
The College Sports Revolution
While the 1920s are most remembered for the rise of professional sports, the decade was also the high-water mark of college sports as a national entertainment. The Western Conference (later the Big Ten) had been the dominant football conference of the 1910s, but the 1920s saw the rise of Notre Dame under coach Knute Rockne as the most famous college football program in America. Rockne’s teams, featuring the legendary Four Horsemen backfield of 1924, won national championships in 1924, 1929, and 1930, and Rockne’s death in a plane crash in 1931 made him a martyr to the sport.
The Notre Dame vs. Army game at Soldier Field, played annually from the 1920s onward, became the country’s premier sporting event — drawing 100,000 fans and broadcast live on radio. The Army-Notre Dame rivalry of the late 1920s, embodied in the contrasting styles of Rockne’s open, creative offense and Army coach Biff Jones’s disciplined, hard-running attack, captured the imagination of a country that still saw college sports as a more pure form of athletic competition than the professional game. Notre Dame’s success helped spread the forward pass across the country, transforming football from a grinding running game into the wide-open aerial spectacle that would dominate the next decade.
Basketball, which had been invented by James Naismith in 1891, also grew rapidly in the 1920s. The National Basketball League was founded in 1937, but its predecessor — the American Basketball League (1925-1955) — was active in the 1920s, and college basketball was already a major draw at schools like Kansas, Indiana, Syracuse, and Penn. The first NCAA basketball tournament would not be held until 1939, but the decade saw the establishment of basketball as a major intercollegiate sport, especially in the Midwest and the East.
Baseball: The Babe Ruth Era
No sport symbolized the 1920s more completely than baseball, and no athlete transformed his sport more thoroughly than George Herman “Babe” Ruth Jr. Ruth arrived in New York in 1920 after the Boston Red Sox sold his contract to the Yankees for $100,000 — a sum so enormous that it remained controversial for decades, spawning the legendary “Curse of the Bambino” that supposedly haunted Boston until 2004. Within two seasons, Ruth had become the most famous athlete in America and arguably the most recognizable human being on earth.
Ruth’s 1920s numbers were staggering — 54 home runs in 1920, 59 in 1921, and 60 in 1927 (a single-season record that stood for 34 years) — and his power hitting launched the live-ball era of high-offense baseball. The full year-by-year story is in Babe Ruth and the Golden Age of Baseball and Babe Ruth’s Home Run Record: 1920 to 1927.
Ruth’s Yankees won seven American League pennants during the 1920s (1921, 1922, 1923, 1926, 1927, 1928) and three World Series (1923, 1927, 1928). The 1923 title was the first in franchise history, celebrated in the new Yankee Stadium that opened on April 18, 1923 — a 58,000-seat cathedral that newspapers immediately dubbed “The House That Ruth Built.” The 1927 team, known as “Murderers’ Row,” is often cited as the greatest baseball team ever assembled: a 110-win juggernaut anchored by Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Tony Lazzeri, Earle Combs, and Bob Meusel.
But the decade of baseball was not without controversy. The aftershocks of the Black Sox Scandal of 1919 continued to reverberate. In 1920, a Chicago grand jury indicted eight Chicago White Sox players — most famously “Shoeless” Joe Jackson — for conspiring to lose the 1919 World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. In August 1921, newly installed Commissioner of Baseball Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis banned all eight players for life, a decision that has been debated ever since. The scandal, and Landis’s stern response, established the office of the commissioner as the sport’s supreme authority and gave baseball a self-policing legitimacy that helped it survive the crisis.
Meanwhile, Black baseball thrived in its own parallel universe, excluded from the major leagues by an unwritten color line. On February 13, 1920, Andrew “Rube” Foster and a group of Black team owners met at the Paseo YMCA in Kansas City and founded the Negro National League, the first successful professional league for Black players. Three years later, in 1923, the Eastern Colored League began play on the East Coast. Stars like Oscar Charleston, John Henry “Pop” Lloyd, Smokey Joe Williams, Satchel Paige (in the later 1920s), and Josh Gibson (who debuted in 1930) played a fast, powerful, often more exciting brand of baseball than their white counterparts, and the Negro Leagues drew huge crowds in cities like Pittsburgh, Chicago, New York, and Kansas City. Their story would remain largely untold until the first MLB All-Star Game of 1933, which was played in Chicago’s Comiskey Park as part of the 1933 World’s Fair.
Boxing: The Million-Dollar Gates
If baseball was the national pastime, boxing was the national spectacle. Heavyweight championship fights in the 1920s drew crowds and gate receipts unmatched in any other sport. Jack Dempsey, the “Manassa Mauler,” held the heavyweight title from 1919 to 1926, defending it six times and becoming the first fighter to make a million dollars in the ring. His fights were primal contests of violence and stamina, often lasting into the late rounds and producing iconic moments of human suffering and triumph.
Dempsey’s most famous fight was the September 14, 1923 bout against Argentina’s Luis Ángel Firpo at the Polo Grounds, which drew more than 80,000 fans and produced one of the most dramatic opening rounds in boxing history — the full story is in Jack Dempsey: The Manassa Mauler’s Reign.
In 1926, Gene Tunney, a thoughtful, technically brilliant fighter from New York, defeated Dempsey by ten-round decision at Philadelphia’s Sesquicentennial Stadium. The fight drew 120,557 fans and grossed $1,895,433 — the first million-dollar gate in boxing history. A year later, on September 22, 1927 at Chicago’s Soldier Field, the two met again in a rematch that produced one of the most controversial moments in sports history: the famous “Long Count.” Dempsey knocked Tunney down in the seventh round but delayed several seconds in going to a neutral corner, giving Tunney extra time to recover. The referee, Dave Barry, paused his count to send Dempsey to a neutral corner, then picked up the count from where he had left off, allowing Tunney to get up at the count of nine (rather than fourteen) and go on to win a ten-round decision. The fight remains one of the most debated sporting events of the century.
The lighter weight classes produced their own heroes. Benny Leonard held the lightweight title from 1917 to 1925, retiring undefeated as champion. Jackie Fields won the welterweight crown in 1929. Fidel LaBarba won the flyweight gold at the 1924 Olympics before turning professional. And in the late 1920s, a young Black fighter named Joe Louis was beginning his amateur career in Detroit, polishing the skills that would carry him to the heavyweight championship in 1937. Even though Louis’s greatest years came in the 1930s, his amateur foundation was laid in this decade.
Football: Grange and the Founding of the NFL
College football was already established as a major spectator sport by the 1920s, with packed stadiums at schools like Notre Dame, Princeton, Harvard, and Illinois. The biggest star of the decade was Harold “Red” Grange, the “Galloping Ghost” from the University of Illinois. In 1924, Grange single-handedly led Illinois to a stunning upset of Michigan — running for five touchdowns in the first twelve minutes — and became a national celebrity overnight. On Thanksgiving Day 1925, he signed a lucrative contract with the Chicago Bears (then known as the Decatur Staleys, freshly relocated to Chicago), instantly legitimizing the struggling professional game. His barnstorming tour that winter, organized by promoter Charles C. Pyle, drew enormous crowds in cities across the country and proved that pro football could be a viable entertainment product.
The pro game had been organized only a few years earlier. On September 17, 1920, representatives of four Ohio teams — the Akron Pros, Canton Bulldogs, Cleveland Indians, and Dayton Triangles — met in Canton and formed the American Professional Football Association (APFA). Two years later, in 1922, the league renamed itself the National Football League. Early teams included the Decatur Staleys (soon the Chicago Bears), the Green Bay Packers (founded 1919 by Curly Lambeau and George Calhoun), the New York Giants (founded 1925 by Tim Mara), the Chicago Cardinals, the Pottsville Maroons, and the Frankford Yellow Jackets. The early NFL was a chaotic, often violent business, with teams folding mid-season and players jumping contracts for better offers elsewhere. But the framework for what would become America’s most popular sport had been laid.
College football’s most legendary backfield, the Notre Dame “Four Horsemen” of Harry Stuhldreher, Don Miller, Jim Crowley, and Elmer Layden, galloped into national consciousness in 1924 under the guidance of coach Knute Rockne. Rockne’s Notre Dame teams won national championships in 1924, 1929, and 1930, and his death in a plane crash in 1931 ended an era. His legend, and the legend of the Four Horsemen, helped turn college football into a national obsession.
Tennis: Tilden and Lenglen
Tennis in the 1920s was dominated by two of the greatest players who ever lived: American Bill Tilden and Frenchwoman Suzanne Lenglen. Tilden, a Philadelphian of imposing height and ego, won six consecutive U.S. Championships from 1920 to 1925, and in 1920 became the first American man to win Wimbledon, repeating the feat in 1921 and 1930. His powerful serve-and-volley game revolutionized tennis technique, and his flamboyant personality — he was a closet actor and a notorious traveler who insisted on bringing his own linens to hotels — made him a media sensation.
Across the Atlantic, Suzanne Lenglen was even more revolutionary. The French champion won six consecutive Wimbledon singles titles (1919-1923, plus 1925), was virtually unbeatable, and introduced a faster, more athletic style of play that emphasized power over the genteel placement favored by earlier generations. Her matches drew enormous crowds and were among the first international sports events to be closely followed by the European and American press. Lenglen and Tilden met only once, in a 1926 exhibition tour organized by promoter Charles C. Pyle (the same promoter who had managed Red Grange), and Lenglen reportedly won every set. Tennis in the 1920s was a star-driven spectacle, and the two stars were unmatched.
Golf: Hagen and Jones
Two men defined 1920s golf: the smooth, charming professional Walter Hagen and the brilliant, intense amateur Bobby Jones. Hagen won the PGA Championship four consecutive times (1924-1927) and the British Open three times (1922, 1924, 1928). He was the first golfer to make professional golf genuinely glamorous, dressing in flashy clothes, playing in a custom-built green Cadillac, and winning the devotion of gallery crowds with his easy smile and bold shot-making.
Bobby Jones of Atlanta was an amateur who, between 1923 and 1930, won thirteen major championships — a record that has never been approached. His crowning achievement came in 1930, when he swept the British Open, British Amateur, U.S. Open, and U.S. Amateur to claim the only Grand Slam in golf history. Jones retired from competitive golf at the age of 28 and co-founded the Masters Tournament at Augusta National in 1934. Even as an amateur, Jones was the most famous golfer in the world during the 1920s, and the contrast between his amateur purity and Hagen’s professional flair was a major subplot of the decade’s golf coverage.
The Olympics: Antwerp, Paris, and Amsterdam
Three Olympic Games were held during the 1920s, and each in its own way helped define the modern Games. The 1920 Antwerp Olympics, held in the wake of World War I, were the first to exclude the defeated Central Powers — Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire were not invited. They were also the first to feature the Olympic flag (designed for the 1916 Games, which had been cancelled) and the Olympic oath. The United States dominated, winning 41 gold medals, and the U.S. ice hockey team’s narrow victory over Canada in the final produced the famous “Blood in the Pool” game, so called for the injuries sustained in a brutally physical match.
The 1924 Paris Olympics were the first to be held in the host city of the original modern games (1896). They were the first to use the motto “Citius, Altius, Fortius” (Faster, Higher, Stronger) and the first to feature an Olympic Village. The U.S. team won 45 gold medals, the most of any nation. Also in 1924, the first Winter Olympics were held at Chamonix, France, in January and February, with 11 nations competing in six sports. The Finnish distance runner Paavo Nurmi dominated the Paris Games, winning five gold medals in the space of a single week — an unprecedented display of endurance and tactical genius. Nurmi would defend much of his dominance in the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics, where he won three more golds.
The 1928 Amsterdam Olympics introduced several firsts: the Olympic flame was lit for the first time, women’s track and field events were added to the program (5 events), and the standard 28-day format was established. The American swimmer Johnny Weissmuller won three gold medals and later became Hollywood’s Tarzan. The German women’s gymnastics team dominated, and Mikio Oda of Japan became the first Asian to win an Olympic gold in track and field (triple jump). The decade’s three Olympics helped re-establish the Games as a symbol of international peace and athletic excellence after the catastrophe of World War I.
The 1920s were, in many ways, the decade in which the modern Olympic movement proved it could survive the disasters that had nearly killed it. The 1916 Games, scheduled for Berlin, had been cancelled because of the war. The International Olympic Committee was deeply in debt. Many of the venues, athletes, and spectators who had been expected at the 1916 Games were dead. Yet within four years of the Armistice, the Games had resumed — at Antwerp in 1920 — and within a decade they had become the most-watched international spectacle on earth.
Track, Swimming, and the Olympic Program
The 1920s Olympics were not just about the marquee names. The decade saw the establishment of several sports as permanent Olympic fixtures. Swimming was transformed by American athletes like Duke Kahanamoku and Ethelda Bleibtrey in the early 1920s and by Johnny Weissmuller in the late 1920s, with the U.S. dominating Olympic swimming from 1920 to 1932. The introduction of uniform lane dividers, standardized pool depths, and anti-turbulence gutters made competitive swimming a more technical sport than it had been in the early 1900s. Track and field continued to grow as the centerpiece of the Summer Games: the Finnish distance runners Paavo Nurmi and Ville Ritola set the standard for endurance training, while American sprinters and field event athletes dominated the shorter distances. Gymnastics was dominated by men’s teams in the 1920s, with Finland, Italy, and Switzerland fielding the strongest squads; the 1928 Amsterdam Games featured the first women’s gymnastics competition, won by the Dutch team. Wrestling, weightlifting, fencing, and shooting were important parts of the program, with athletes from Finland, Italy, Hungary, France, and the United States dominating the medal counts. By 1928, the Summer Games featured 109 events in 17 sports — a more than doubling of the program from the 1920 Antwerp Games.
Horse Racing and Auto Racing
Horse racing had long been America’s oldest spectator sport, and the 1920s were no exception. The decade’s biggest equine star was Man o’ War, who raced from 1919 to 1920, losing only once in 21 starts and setting several world records. The Kentucky Derby produced memorable winners including Zev (1923), Flying Ebony (1925), and the legendary Gallant Fox (1930), the latter trained by “Sunny Jim” Fitzsimmons. Calumet Farm and Belair Stud dominated the sport with stables that became the equivalent of baseball dynasties.
Auto racing was a younger and more dangerous sport. The Indianapolis 500, held annually since 1911, was the premier event, and the 1920s saw speeds climb rapidly as cars became more powerful. The decade’s most legendary figure was Barney Oldfield, whose land-speed records had made him a star before World War I, but the 1920s belonged to younger drivers like Wilbur Shaw and Louis Meyer (whose 1928 victory made him the first three-time winner of the 500). Auto racing would not organize into a national series until the founding of NASCAR in 1948, but the 1920s established the cultural template: speed, danger, and the lone American driver against the clock.
The Cultural Meaning of the Sports Hero
The 1920s sports hero was a new kind of American celebrity. Unlike politicians, generals, or industrialists, athletes were famous for what their bodies could do. Their stories were simple enough for any fan to follow: Ruth hit more home runs, Dempsey knocked more men out, Tilden won more tennis matches. Their visibility was made possible by the new media — newspaper sports sections, radio play-by-play, newsreels in movie theaters — that could carry their images and exploits into every American home and saloon.
Children were the most devoted fans. Ruth and Lou Gehrig were the idols of a generation of American boys, who copied their stances in sandlot games and saved their bubble-gum cards. The 1920s saw the rise of the candy bar as a marketing phenomenon (the Baby Ruth bar, introduced in 1921 by the Curtiss Candy Company, was the era’s most famous example, though the company long denied that it was named after the player — Ruth himself sued the company in 1931) and the trading card as a marketing phenomenon. Sports had become a part of childhood in a way they had never been before, and that childhood fandom shaped the consumer habits of the next generation.
The home run, the knockout, the four-minute mile — these were the cultural metaphors of a decade that celebrated physical achievement and the spectacle of individual greatness. In an era of increasing conformity and corporate consolidation, the sports hero represented a kind of pre-modern excellence: a single body doing something extraordinary, witnessed by tens of thousands and heard by millions. The 1920s had found its mythology, and it wore a Yankee uniform or a boxing robe.
Race, Class, and the Sports Page
The 1920s sports page was not, however, a level playing field. Black athletes — most of them excluded from the major leagues by an unwritten color line — were confined to the parallel universe of the Negro Leagues and to a few individual opportunities in boxing, track and field, and college football. Jack Johnson had been the first Black heavyweight champion (1908-1915), and his successors in the 1920s — Harry Wills, Sam Langford, and a handful of others — were denied the chance to fight for the title that Jack Dempsey held, a fact that did not go unnoticed by Black newspapers like the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender. The exclusion of Black players from the major leagues would not be broken until Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, but the 1920s saw the establishment of the Negro Leagues as a thriving, financially viable alternative that produced some of the greatest baseball players in history.
Class lines were less rigid in 1920s sports. The sports hero was, almost by definition, a man (and occasionally a woman) who had risen from humble origins to fame and fortune. Babe Ruth was an orphan; Jack Dempsey was the son of immigrants and a transient worker; Gene Tunney grew up in a tough Irish neighborhood; Bill Tilden was the son of a well-to-do Philadelphia merchant but cultivated a working-class persona. The story of the sports hero was, in many ways, a story of social mobility — and as such, it was one of the most powerful narratives available in a decade of widening inequality. The sports page offered working-class readers a vicarious share in the wealth and glamour of the celebrities they followed, even as the broader economy was concentrating wealth at the top.
Women in 1920s Sports
The 1920s were, paradoxically, both a period of expanding opportunity for women in sports and a period in which the dominant culture still questioned women’s athletic ability. Women’s track and field was added to the Olympics in 1928, and American women like Betty Robinson (the 100-meter gold medalist), Elizabeth Robinson (no relation), and the relay teams became international stars. Suzanne Lenglen dominated tennis. Gertrude Ederle would swim the English Channel in 1926. Mildred Babe Didrikson, the most versatile female athlete of the era, was just beginning her career; she would become the dominant figure in women’s sports in the 1930s.
Yet the prevailing wisdom of the era was that strenuous physical activity was dangerous for women. The 800-meter race at the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics, in which several runners finished in distress, was used as evidence that women were physically unsuited to distance running, and the event was dropped from the program until 1960. The rise of women’s sports in the 1920s was real, but it was fought against every step of the way by a medical and journalistic establishment that saw female athleticism as unfeminine and dangerous. The full integration of women into competitive sports would have to wait for the post-World War II era.
The Stadium and the City
The 1920s were, finally, the decade in which the modern sports stadium was invented. Yankee Stadium (1923), the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum (1923, expanded in the late 1920s), the Soldier Field in Chicago (1924), and the Sesquicentennial Stadium in Philadelphia (1926, demolished after the Dempsey-Tunney fight) were among the decade’s iconic architectural projects, and they all shared a similar logic: they were enormous concrete-and-steel structures designed to hold crowds of 50,000 to 100,000, with ticket prices high enough to make them profitable and sight lines engineered to put the spectators as close to the action as possible. The stadium became a new kind of public space — part cathedral, part theater, part city — and the rituals that took place within them (the singing of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” the seventh-inning stretch, the pre-game pep rallies) became part of the decade’s popular culture.