Resolved: Sport is Transcendent

Great Debates
1

From this thread:

This reasoning does offend me to some degree.

Professional sports might not contribute as directly to the human condition as medicine or education, but it can present aspects of the human condition or draw attention to issues great and small simply because of the place it occupies in our lives.

I was at Yankees-Diamondbacks Game 3 in 2001. It was one of the most galvanizing moments I have ever had as a New Yorker and it displayed the resilience of a city and a nation. A whole city could rally behind a baseball team, and could fill a stadium in defiance of the fear we still felt then, and could dull the edge of that worry with nine innings of catharsis- that has value to individuals and to the group psyche that you couldn’t get by spending the same amount of money on counseling.

This past fall, the New Orleans Saints helped keep a nation’s attention on a town that might have been forgotten much more quickly or completely. I cried my eyes out at the opening of Monday Night Football. The Saints became a symbol of that town’s resilience. Symbols have power. The fact that these people, horrible as their lives had become, could put all that aside and watch those boys play for a couple hours, and enjoy that game- that had value that you can’t put a price on. The fact that you could turn the Superdome that far around in that amount of time and make it a viable place to play again had symbolic value beyond compare- not to mention REAL value for a city whose economy is 44% tourism.

Let us also not forget the wave of empowerment of young girls and women to play sports in the wake of the US Women’s run at the World Cup a few years back as well.

**RESOLVED: ** Professional sports and the people who play them are supported by the people who take interest in it. Its place in the collective consciousness of a nation is secure because we all want to see people do things that we cannot- we all want to see drama that isn’t scripted- we want human interest stories- we want triumph, adversity, “the thrill of victory… the agony of defeat.” These resonate with everyone. That many of us find that in sports does not make sport lame or lowbrow or somehow deserving of derision, or somehow of less worth than other entertainment.
RESOLVED: You can love those Saints, or you can appreciate Mapplethorpe or you can be intrigued by Shakespeare or you can be enraptured by Hitchcock. You can love all of these things or none of them, and it is in NO way a reflection on one’s worth as a person or one’s ability to comprehend beauty.

2

OK, I’m making this counterargument up as I go, but let’s see where it leads:

It could be argued that the competitive aspect of Sport is the negative - that it attracts and emphasises those parts of the human persona that are best completely suppressed in civilized society - the desire to thwart your fellow man, deriving enjoyment from the defeat of others, formation of non-inclusive cliques, the desire to cheat to win, etc.
This argument suggests that

the bits I’ve bolded are not actually a desirable outcome

It might be said that an* ideal society* would have eliminated these competitive desires for a world where we all just get along happily. One could point to the no-winner kid’s soccer matches and the taunt-free Little League games as indicators of Society’s desire to move in that direction, as a recognition that competition is not actually of maximal benefit for the most number of people. This would change Sport from its current competitive model to more of an exhibition model. A performance art. Like Pro Wrestling :wink:

The competitive aspect is not so enshrined in the arts you gave examples of. Mapplethorpe doesn’t ordinarily care if Tom of Finland sells more, Shakespeare doesn’t care if the theatre down the road is putting on Loydd-Webber, Hitchcock and Tarantino can be on at the same multiplex. Sure, there is an element of financial competition, and there are awards, but the primal artistic impulse does not require that someone else be defeated. I can’t think of a sport that doesn’t.

3

I think that sports consume far too many resources. Specifically, I am amazed at how much public money some people want to spend on sports, by building new stadiums and such. I also think that sports are over-emphasized in school, or they were when I was going to school. The football stars are not the most admirable students, to my way of thinking. Notice that I said sports, and not PE. I think that we don’t have enough emphasis on physical education, such as proper nutrition, exercise, that sort of thing.

4

So long as people have different desires and different ideas on how to satisfy those desires we’re going to have competetion. Unless we cease being human, we’re going to have competetion at our place of employment, in our social lives, and even in our families. Since this is part of the human condition, sports teaches people how to compete, how to win, and how to accept loss.

The no score soccer games were started as a result of the self-esteem movement to ensure that little tykes never got their feelings hurt. I wonder what the damage was to these kids when they got into other areas of the world and suddenly had to deal with real competetion and defeat? Who am I kidding, I’m positive those kids knew who scored the most points and therefore who “won”.

I promise you that Shakespeare, Hitchcok, Tarantino, and Webber care about how many asses they’re putting in the seats. Good box office returns means being about to stage the productions you want rather than having to perform dreck to make a living. They might not care if other movies play in the same mega-plex but I’m sure they want to have a larger audience than everyone else.

It does require a degree of popularity. While it may not require the defeat of other artist there is still competetion for that popularity.

Marc

5

Mountain-climbing, surfing, snowboarding etc
These can be organized into entertainment and competition, but generally aren’t. [overblown rhetoric]What I find to be noble in sports, both as a participant and a spectator, is the pursuit of excellence, the beauty and poetry of the body, the motion, overcoming limitations of self and nature etc[/overblown rhetoric]
I suspect that the ‘problem’ with sports (if any) lies more with the spectators and promoters than with the sports themselves.

6

You’re assuming that they are parts of the human condition that can’t be eradicated. I disagree that this is axiomatic.

That’s because they are still socialised into it. In my postulated “better world” they would be ashamed of such feelings. And the rest of Society would be equally noncompetitive, so the “training them for their future” argument is redundant.

Sure, we can only devote a certain amount of time to , say, viewing movies, but I don’t think it’s intrinsic to the artform. Look at an art museum - Van Gogh and Picasso are both hanging there, and you don’t see the fans of the one rioting in the streets because the museum is doing a retrospective on the other. Well, not so much anymore…

I must emphasise, I’m playing Devil’s Advocate here. I personally don’t have a problem with a healthy amount of sport that enriches Society, even if it takes some public funding.

When they are, then they’re sports, otherwise they’re recreational activities.

7

…that last quote by Themenin, of course.

8

In response to MrDibble,

I do see where you’re coming from, and I see the argument that you are forming. My estimation of your objection c goes as follows, and please tell me if I’m wrong:

  1. The competitive urge in humans is destructive and should be socialized out of us, and sport works against that urge; and

  2. “Art,” as I have given examples of it, is intrinsically noncompetitive because it strives to describe an ideal in a way that does not denigrate its contemporaries within its medium (or across media).
    I would respond to those points as follows:

  3. This statement is heavily subjective and I must admit that I disagree with it strongly. The desire to excel, to perform, can only really be measured against another. How do we know that 9.76 seconds is an astonishingly short time to run 100 meters? Because only one person can do it. And I don’t think Gatlin would have gotten there that quickly had he not had competitors around him pushing him toward it. CAN the competitive urge be destructive? Of course it can. But so can any urge. And, for every Arash Miresmaili there are ten Boo Weekleys. And we rightly vilify the former and glorify the latter. And I personally think that the lionization of our sports heroes enables us to point to a discrete example of the behavior we find exemplary.

  4. I think that, given my stance in #1, argument #2 is sidestepped. Absent “competition” as a distinguishing factor between sport and art, the aspirational models are no different.
    Lynn, I read your post, and, as you can probably guess, I disagree with it on some level, but I have to get to class. I will have more later.

As always, comments are welcome, and, **MrDibble,[/] if I have assumed that you are making a different argument than you are, please let me know.

9

The value of those actions are not instrisic to sports. City pride, or solidarity, can be manifest in many ways; for example, attendance at a memorial, or a concert. The only reason that these particular events had special significance for you is that sports happened to be the best way to draw a large crowd.

Which demonstrates that it’s self-propogating. That’s not much of a reflection on its value.

10

I’m trying to think of many instances where competetion wasn’t a factor in history and I’m coming up short. Who’s going to be king? Should we follow Hiawatha’s idea to unite or should we follow Bob’s example and remain with our own seperate tribes? Should we hire Dave or would Darlene be a better choice? Competetion.

Sure, I guess if we manage to fundamentally change human nature then this “better world” could be a possibility. Otherwise, I just don’t see this world becoming a possibility.

Marc

11

If you don’t think theatre is competitive, you’ve never been to a community theatre audition.

WARNING: Half-assed theorizing while I wait for results from the monstrosity of a Mafia thread that we have spawned is now forthcoming.

There is nothing wrong with our ingrained competitive instinct. It’s how we exist. It’s why we keep moving, keep working, keep improving.

  • “I want a part in the school musical, but Sally Goldenthroat can belt an Eb and I can’t. I will work harder and get better at singing to increase my chances of getting the part instead of Sally.”

  • “I want a promotion, but only one person from my department gets promoted; I better work harder.”

  • “I want to date the attractive woman who lives two doors down, but there are three other single guys in this apartment building and none of them smell bad. I’d better shower regularly.”

Actually, I’ll go further. Without competition, without comparing ourselves to others, society would collapse entirely. How’s that for a blanket statement? Competition is ultimately how we define our roles in society:

PERSON A: I can write simple sentences, like “I like cats.”
PERSON B: Well, my name is William Faulkner.
PERSON A: Oh. Well, I guess you should be the person who writes inspiring and moving literature. Hey, can you perform cardiothoracic surgery as well as I can?
PERSON B: No. What’s more, I’m pretty sure Bob, the guy who’s much better with computers than either of us, can’t perform cardiothoracic surgery as well as you can, either. You should perform the cardiothoracic surgery.

This is oversimplified, obviously, but it’s competition, and on some level, it’s how we structure our society. Without the urge to compare ourselves to others, we’d have no good way of identifying how we are best equipped to contribute to society.

But there’s a problem. Because in most cases, competition can also be harmful. Doctors can be competitive in some ways, but an all out competition to see who’s the best doctor would be counterproductive, as the purpose of medicine is not to identify the best doctor, but to help the sick and injured. Making competition the focus of activities where competition is not the goal is only going to be to the detriment of the goal.

So we create sports (and games). Activities where the skillsets required are so specific and arbitrary that being good at them signifies absolutely nothing other than itself. Activities where the competition is the point, where we can exhaust our competitive instinct in the context of a friendly agreement among the participants that in the end, it doesn’t really matter. It matters whether Donna is a better surgeon than I - at least, it matters to the patient who will be operated on by one of us; it doesn’t matter if I can beat her at chess. Chess allows us to compete in a context where there are no stakes, to reduce the chance that we will feel the need to compete when there are.

So there you go. Sports and games. The glue of society.

12

Consume far too many resources as opposed to what, though?

There are valid points on both sides of the “sports create revenue for a community” argument. The immediate community is marginally positively impacted (if at all) by many stadia; however, a pro sports tenant can revitalize an area. See the current revamp of Brooklyn in anticipation of the Nets or ask Shaquille O’Neal (probably not the world’s biggest hockey fan) how his real estate speculation in Newark went once the Devils decided to move.

While I’m not sure I agree with the legislature forcing a new building on the taxpayers over their objections, I do think that a stadium is a viable discretionary purchase.

However, Lynn, I must say that this is an objection that does not really reach my point. While I recognize that sports must be played somewhere, my main objection is to the idea that pro sport is societally useless or has no redeeming value. The fact that people place such a huge emphasis on it is proof that it does indeed have value.

My argument is not that such values are intrinsic to sports- my argument is that they undeniably EXIST in sport, and in a manner that is unduplicatable by other means. The World Series game in question was possibly the ONLY event that could have created such a moment, due both to baseball’s unique place in American culture, the location of the game in New York, and the resilience and pride that is present in the people and projected onto the team. No memorial could have been created that quickly and had the same effect. No rally would have been that well-attended and powerful. The beauty of the game was that we were doing the exact thing that terror is designed to disrupt, and so the game succeeded on levels that a rally or memorial could not have.

Your “significance” argument is both unfounded and circular. It is unfounded for the reasons I have laid out in the paragraph above. The game had special significance because it was a victory on both actual and symbolic levels. And it is circular because of the fact that such a large crowd COULD be drawn- that is further evidence of such transcendence. I assure you that I was not the ONLY person in that crowd, or the only person choked up in front of my television, thinking those thoughts.
The position of sport in our society may represent a misallocation of resources on some level. But that misallocation is not forced. It is representative of the significance that sport has to a huge portion of the human community. It has that significance for many reasons, but one of the biggest is its transcendent nature.

13

I agree with Happy Scrappy Hero Pup. I think it would be nearly impossible to be from Pittsburgh and to love the city and not to recognize the degree to which the value and appreciation of and identification with professional sports transcends professional sports. That comes from something far greater than the ability to draw a crowd. Although the Steelers always draw crowds, the city still takes pride in the Steelers as an entity interwoven with the history of the city even when the Steelers aren’t having success. Similarly, the spirit of the Cubs or Red Sox (especially before they won it all again) was still much a part of Chicago and Boston, despite their history of not winning championships.

I also appreciate sporting events as one of the few shared events that the outcome isn’t known, and, within limits, anything can happen. That can be said about relatively little these days.

Furthermore, I don’t think it’s a good idea, or really, even possible, to socialize competition out of us, as a society or as a race. I think sport fills an important role as a venue for pure competition, for which it would be hard to imagine an alternative.

14

The amount of money that flows to sports is just indicative of the technological progress of our society. Sure, that money could be going into something more productive, but banks, the government, and salary changes handle that. Busting our ass for a few hundred years means that we get to sit on it and watch a game. :wink:

For better or worse.

15

That’s perfectly valid. I think whatever you enjoy doing consumes too many resources.

The nice thing about these sorts of disagreements is we get to vote, with our votes and our wallets.

16

Did it ever occur to you that these stadiums are the venue that gives many of us a real physical connection to our community ? How else can the community assemble 10’s of thousands of fellow citizens with many different backgrounds all coming together with one simple purpose to root for their team.

Today, many north Americans live isolated lives comprising an existence at home, at work, and shopping at big box stores. Sports allow us an opportunity to share our humanity with a large group of people.

This aspect of sports starts at high school where the school spirit for many is cultured through competitive football(to name an example), Athletes and the students in the stands are bonded as in no other time.

College and then professional sports bring a wider sense of community. These massive gatherings in stadiums are usually preceded by the national anthem.

And finally the Olympics where more than anything we can share common interest with the rest of the world.

There is nothing like competitive team sports to put the serious divisive issues aside and enjoy a relationship with our community. And though we may desire to beat the competition we are also bonded to the visitors who are just as important to make the whole experience happen.

I shudder to think what our western society would be like with competive sports and stadiums.

17

I don’t follow modern professional sports, but playing them and even competing in them? I have to kind of agree with the OP. If you look at recorded history, it is rife with sport. The Greeks did it, so did the Romans, I would imagine mongols held race horses or had other less tolerable sport they participated in. I bet man in his infancy had sport. Rock throwing competition, tree climbing races, you name it, I bet it was there.

I think it is hardwired in somehow.

18

The difference between what I enjoy doing and what you enjoy doing is that I don’t expect you to pay for my hobbies.

And then burn it down when you win the big game.

Is this the bond that leads to soccer stadiums in the UK having segregated visitors sections to protect them from violence at the hands of fans of the home team?

19

Well, that depends on what your hobbies are. My tax dollars pay for museums, grants for the arts, the construction of the convention center where your model railroad convention is held, etc.

Always? Violence is not necessarily coexistent with sport.

The exception that proves the rule. That this level of hooliganism is seen as abhorrent is precisely BECAUSE it is so outside the idea of what we see as sportsmanship and fandom.

If you don’t like sport, that’s fine. But the fact does remain that, as a symbol of community or solidarity, as an aspirational model for a large segment of the population, and as an unscripted, dramatic spectacle, sport has a valid and noble place in the human experience.

20

Well, actually, we don’t get to vote a lot of times. Cities make deals with sports franchise owners without putting it to the vote. Government uses eminent domain to buy up property for the enrichment of sports owners. I’d have fewer problems with sports if the owners were required to pay the going market price for all their privileges.

As for what I like doing…I enjoy reading, computers, and various handicrafts. I can read without consuming any resources, other than buying the book in the first place. While I enjoy the library, most people use it for research…so it gets a pass, I think. I do consume some resources for my computer, but we’d have electricity without computers, and we need the internet for business these days. My crafts generally produce more than they consume.

I’m not saying we should do away with all sports. I’m just saying that only the sports lovers should pay for it. I don’t expect deeply discounted books or computer stuff or craft supplies, to be paid by the general population.

I also don’t like having sports stars as heroes for so many kids. There are many more types that can be heroes. Of course, I live in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, and there was a time not too long ago when it seemed that the newspapers were featuring yet another Dallas Cowboy who was in trouble with the law for one reason or another.