Why We Have Come To Love Sport & Why That Is A Good Thing

...a continuation of the previous post...

But these lines of thinking fall short of reality and reveal a serious misperception. One refutation has its roots in historical change. The other lies in the nature of the human and American spirit. In terms of the first refutation, simply put, it is no longer 1836 nor is it 1890. We are a vastly different country now due to natural societal changes that have put Puritan and Victorian modes of living on the back burner. Though baseball has its nascent roots in the latter quarter of the nineteenth-century, the sport really did not flourish until the first quarter of the twentieth. By this time, America was more tolerant of sport and had even become an advocate for its benefits.[i] And though baseball is American, the influx of immigrants from Europe in the early 1900s made the country more Catholic and more Jewish and more diverse. These groups brought with them new notions of play that have given the concept various intellectual traditions. They themselves did not create an environment accepting of play—indeed it was a mixture with shifting American trends—but the two blended together and acted together to create a space for sport in the minds of many former unbelievers.

Ultimately, to discount play and sport is to deny a fundamental part of the human condition. After all, the fundamental essence of the human spirit is play. As Michael Novak so appropriately explains:

The basic reality of all human life is play, games, sport; these are the
realities from which the basic metaphors for all that is important in the rest
of life are drawn. Work, politics, and history are the illusionary,
misleading, false world. Being, beauty, truth, excellence, transcendence—these
words, grown in the soil of play, wither in the sand of work…Play belongs to the
Kingdom of Ends, work to the Kingdom of Means. Barbarians play in order to
work; the civilized work in order to play.[ii]

To be sure, work has its utility. The individual learns strong lessons and society reaps the benefits of the individual's work. But in some sense, work is a fabrication; a necessary function that works to impel society forward. The same goes for politics. But play and sport is different. It is hard to defend intellectually and even harder to put in words, but we know that play is in the "Kingdom of Ends" because in all of us burns the desire to play. If given the choice, most (it should be all) would choose play over work. Sport is not a distraction from work; work is a distraction from play.

In separating myth and reality, we find that work goes with the former and play with the latter. Work comes to us out of necessity. We must do work to provide food, to discover better health treatments, and to write laws that create peaceful society. Indeed, work is supported by the age old myth of that the fundamental purpose of humans is too improve the world. But is that all that we are about? Is our sole function to discover new medicines, invent new technology, create complex financial instruments, and improve our ability to build cities and all of its institutions? This is not to say that progress is a bad thing—to be sure, far from it. Of course it should be noted that we have made great strides in becoming more egalitarian as a society, and our work to make the world safer and more just are surely noble pursuits. But despite all of our work, the never-ending toils of life abide. Death persists, murder and crime continues, and the Earth maintains its orbit around the sun.

Thus play deserves greater attention and respect. We engage in too much of it for it to be overlooked and discredited. It necessitates our study because in sport and play we find the values “grown in its soil”: being, beauty, truth, excellence, transcendence. Work, friends, society and history will eventually pass us by. But the aforementioned qualities will never cease. They will forever maintain their value and utility. These qualities are reality. The study of and the participation in sport is imperative because sport works to better ourselves and reveals to us the important qualities of a good and rigorous life. Again, this is not to say that we should abandon work and progress. Instead, we can look to sport for the qualities that aid and inform our work and relationships—but we should not deny that these qualities are illuminated most brightly in sport.

[i] Nemec et al., 87.
[ii]Michael Novak, The Joy of Sports: End Zones, Bases, Baskets, Balls and the Consecration of the American Spirit, (New York: Basic Books Inc., 1976), xxi.