The Roaring Twenties was a decade unlike any other. This decade was a period of social and cultural revolution, especially in areas like sports, fashion, and social life.

Sports gained a tremendous amount of popularity in the 1920’s. Professional sports like baseball and football were becoming very popular. By 1923 there were 20 Major League Baseball teams in 2 leagues. Also, sports were becoming popular with children as well. Teams were being formed for various sports at school and in local communities.

Perhaps the most important sport of the Roaring Twenties was baseball. Baseball revolutionized sports in America, leading it to be appropriately named “America’s Pastime”. In the 1900’s and 1910’s baseball was little more than a few scattered professional teams playing in squalid conditions. Baseball really started to really kick off because of factors like the radio and the newspaper. Additionally, there were many more teams and they were building mammoth stadiums like Yankee Stadium and Fenway Park. Also, it is said that one man made baseball the golden sport of America. That man was the Sultan of Swing, George Herman (Babe) Ruth. He was the first superstar the game had ever known and he made the New York Yankees a household name around the country.

Baseball also saw the creation of the Negro Leagues in the 1920’s. For the first time, African Americans could play a sport semi-professionally. Many stars like Satchel Paige and Jackie Robinson would come out of the Negro Leagues. Baseball also saw a major scandal in the late 1910’s and early 1920’s. A man by the name of Arnold Rothstein tried to fix the World Series between the Chicago White Sox and the Cincinnati Reds. Several members of the Sox conspired with gamblers to throw the World Series. A couple of years later “Shoeless” Joe Jackson and eight other members of the White Sox were banned from baseball.

On 17 September 1920 the American Professional Football Association was founded in Ralph Hays's automobile agency in Canton, Ohio. Before the decade was over the sport grew into a popular spectator sport thanks to players like, Joe E. Carr, Tim Mara, Red Grange, and Knute Rocknee At the beginning of the 1920s professional football was in disarray. The play-for-pay sport was twenty-five years old in 1920, but few people took notice. Tickets to games could hardly be given away. Players met in the lobby of a hotel on a Sunday morning, discussed some plays, and then put them into the game that afternoon. A teammate in one game might be an opponent in the next. What league organization existed was merely a loose confederation.

The sport of football in the 1920’s had rules that are very different from today’s rules. Up until the late 1910’s players could not even throw a forward pass. The concept of the “throwing quarterback” came about in the 1920’s. The touchdown’s point value was raised to six during this time period and the field goal’s point value was decreased to three (from four). The Strategy for football changed dramatically with the forward pass. “Pop” Warner wrote the first book on football strategy and provided the foundation for many modern playbooks.

Knute Rocknee Red Grange

Throughout all weight divisions, from flyweight to heavyweight, the 1920s produced splendid boxers, including two of the greatest fighters of all time: heavyweight Jack Dempsey and light-weight Benny Leonard. Before World War I, boxing in the United States had been largely regarded as disreputable, practiced by rough characters in saloons and attracting spectators of uncertain character. After the war many of the laws that had banned boxing were rescinded, and the sport was brought under the control of commissions intended to reduce the undesirable criminal and gambling elements so often associated with it. With legal impediments lifted, boxing spread rapidly throughout the country and became one of the popular athletic spectacles for both the privileged classes and the common man.

Benny LeonardJack Dempsey