Name a sport in which star athletes earn upwards of $10 million a year. Did you guess baseball or hockey? Try bullfighting.

    Bullfighting was likely Europe's first professional and popular sport. Its matadors today command six-figure salaries, says History professor Adrian Shubert.

    Shubert who is writing a book on bullfighting, is neither a fan, nor a foe of it, he says. What interests him is bullfighting as an example of sport's earliest professionalization.

    "Bullfighting was the first professional sporting event regularly attended by large audiences," says Shubert. "It was the
first to have mass appeal: sports heroes, big salaries, ticket scalping and product endorsements."

    In his book, At Five in the Afternoon (its title echoes a line from Lorca's poem "Lament for the Death of Ignacio Sánchez Mejías"), Shubert hopes to demythologize bullfighting. "Many scholars' work has interpreted the bullfight in terms of what it tells us about Spain and Spaniards," he says. "It's largely been anthropological. I don't believe it tells us anything of the sort."

    The first product endorsement Shubert found was for a bottle of red wine in 1879. The label shows a famous matador with the (loosely translated) motto: "This wine's a killer."

    Shubert will have chapters on the breeding and selling of bulls, the business of the sport, the crowds, the specially built stadiums ­ and even one on gender.

    "In Spain, women were professional bullfighters too."