Sports

As I write this, the USA soccer team is still perhaps clouded in the pain of their loss against Ghana in the World Cup. We went further than any other time I remember watching, and catching this rare, four year interval event makes me think of how The World Cup is truly an excellent event, simply because it unifies the world like no other sporting medium (aside from the Olympics) can do. When countries play against each other, respect and appreciation are almost impossible not to experience; we're dealing with the face-off between histories, cultures, trial and errors and overcomings writ large, rather than corporate-sponsored single stars and cocky states. With an event like this, only the staunchest jingoist could possibly fail to see his own team as a translucent image behind which the entire world beams in recognition.

But this isn't how the vast majority of sporting events function.

Especially in the age of social networking, the virtual sight isn't hard at all to come by. You can easily imagine a one-liner by a friendless friend on Facebook who said that she "won the game," although you may have no idea which sport she was referring to. In almost every single situation, the "win" part always stands out to me. Our sports-centric culture enjoys the mad memes that basketball, football, soccer, baseball, or whatever is all about exercise, the refinement of the physical nature of the human being, the athletic excellence of the individual, and such and so on. We're hardly honest enough to call it what it all really is: a collection of almost ridiculously trivial physical acts qualified by the same old ancient drive toward winning, of seeing the other team (albeit perhaps with noble feelings projected their way) in the inferior slot.

Yes, we're playing the power card yet again, and if you can imagine any sporting event being any bit of sensationalistic fun without the idea of winning against another person or team, you've got it wrong, but not (as will be argued below) not quite all wrong. As a recreation assistant for a church years back (easy, lazy, check please), we had a nicely thought out basketball organization called Upward. Kids would compete in teams as usual, with each player assessed for talent so as to create as closely as possible teams of approximate ability. What made the game both admirable and absurd was the underpinned theme that was often made public: there are no winners. Scores weren't kept. The closest you could do was keep track for yourself, which always led to a sense of injustice when both teams went off the court as cute little egalitarians ready to consume the cheap snacks altruistic parents had blessed upon them. I remember watching these games (quite a few, in fact), and how odd it was that my mind naturally turned from determining which team was winning to which player was the best. I'd find myself involuntarily seeking the team outlier, who scored half of the time and often had the flashy moves.

If I hadn't done this, what would the sport become? What would it be without comparison and overcoming, with one kid ripping it up over everyone else, or the others in the team who hold a moment of excellence through a steal or a well-shot score? The purely objective act of throwing a ball through a hoop. And that, of course, is a quintessential bore. It is quite simply close to impossible to take away the point tally without reducing sports to an unenthusiastic pass of the time. There just isn't much of a point of lobbing around a spherical rubber object unless I somehow know that it's a mediator for my (our) victory, and even where no score is explicit, there could easily hide a better-than-thou spirit with every chug of the ball, focusing our sights on the best player on the team in all his kinetic excellence.

Almost. There is a spiritual element to overcoming, which lies in the way to freedom and breaking the shackles that would try to hold us down. An animal may fight to win, but a human being can fight in order to progress according to the ideals he holds. If you can prune sports to overcoming, suddenly it goes from the most animalistic to one of the most spiritual of activities. Not about competition and winning, but rather about liberty, sweat-soaked and smelly it may be. And this, I think, is what it is all about for the players on the field, and an excellent reason against spectator sports. The longer you watch and root for a certain collection of individuals, the more likely you are to be drawn into the brutish push for us over them.

It's the people watching on the outside who corrupt the game to an activity of winning. It's the asshole Uncle Chuck, perpetually decked out in his Rockets jersey, shouting at opposing fans in stadiums, propagandizing his relatives with how good his team is. It's the corporations who are looking for a recognizable name to attach to their logo for the sake of money. It's the machismo father who forces his child into football and screams bloody murder for his own son's team that they might annihilate the opposition. This is where gold turns to straw and power becomes the goal, and with this comes an understanding of the pervasive irrationality behind rooting for your own side. The conversational words of Chomsky encapsulate the whole thing on this point:

Spectator sports also have other useful functions too. For one thing, they're a great way to build up chauvinism -- you start by developing these totally irrational loyalties early in life, and they translate very nicely to other areas. I mean, I remember very well in high school having a sudden kind of Erlebnis, you know, a sudden insight, and asking myself, why do I care if my high school football team wins? I don't know anybody on the team. They don't know me. I wouldn't know what to say to them if I met them. Why do I care? Why do I get all excited if the football team wins and all downcast if it loses? And it's true, you do: you're taught from childhood that you've got to worry about the Philadelphia Phillies, where I was.... But the point is, this sense of irrational loyalty to some sort of meaningless community is training for subordination to power, and for chauvinism.

The consequences are obvious enough: the more emphasis you place on your team, the less you place on other teams in general, the more they become the enemy, and in time the more anyone who opposes becomes an enemy by definition. It's extremely easy to imagine how this exclusiveness can turn into a type of anti-cosmopolitan and herdlike personality (or magnify an already present seedling), where everything associated with my group is by definition superior or better than anything associated with them, whether we're talking about the family, the nation, or the collection of our own skin cells. Thus,

All of this stuff builds up extremely anti-social aspects of human psychology. I mean, they're there; there's no doubt that they're there. But they're emphasized, and exaggerated, and brought out by spectator sports: irrational competition, irrational loyalty to power systems, passive acquiescence to quite awful values, really. In fact, it's hard to imagine anything that contributes more fundamentally to authoritarian attitudes than this does, in addition to the fact that it just engages a lot of intelligence and keeps people away from other things.

The formula is simple : the moment a team becomes my team and the goal is to beat everyone else, then the animal drive returns, qualified by consciousness yes, but still the same brutal push for conquering the other guy. Sports is sanctified insofar as the opposition reflects the faces of the persons seeking to overcome it. The moment the mirror becomes a window and the opposition gains flesh and blood, then the drive to be greater (rather than great) blooms, and by then the mountain treads downward. It thus becomes about seeing the other team insubordinate, and hence reflexively your team the best in the world, rather than the athletic charge against a faceless existential force which would try to conquer you. It's precisely this latter perspective that can allow two teams to struggle against one another for ninety exhausting minutes, with anxiety and sweat and the uncertainty of hope, and upon finishing humbly, happily greet each other for playing such a grand game. And it's this same perspective that allows us to root for anyone, and woe unto the shallow self whose respect is constrained by anything less.