Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T05:54:27.963Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Sport: An Historical Phenomenology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Anthony Skillen
Affiliation:
University of Kent at Canterbury

Extract

Sport often seems to teeter on the edge, on one side of the entertainment industry, on the other of cheating violent aggression: from a make-believe simulacrum of serious play to a nasty chemically enhanced descent into a Hobbesian state of nature. Such perversions lend credibility to reductive views of sport itself as a metonymic feature of capitalism. But that sport as entertainment means fixing it to produce exciting outcomes and amplifying capacities to superhuman proportions, while sport as aggression means treating rules as mere obstacles to brute dominance, shows how far we in fact are from these abysses, even in the days of the Coca Cola/Nike Olympics, Vinny Jones and cricket sledging. In this essay, I try to delineate through history— from Homer to … Gomer?—a common culture of sport and sportsmanship that, with its excesses and perversions, continues to operate as one, albeit complex, ideal of human excellence.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1993

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Epistle of St. Paul, I Corinthians, 9, 2427.Google Scholar

2 The Human Condition, (Chicago University Press, 1958).Google Scholar

3 On Revolution (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), 63.Google Scholar

4 Republic, 547550Google Scholar. But see Laws 795–8Google Scholar, for Plato on the significance of games.

5 The translation is Butler's, Samuel (1898)Google Scholar. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936).

6 Translations from Finley's, MosesThe Olympic Games, the First Thousand Years (London, Chatto & Windus, 1976), pages 1191 and 347Google Scholar. It wasn't Pindar who composed the doggerel by which the teams at the 1992 Winter Olympics were introduced:

‘Stand now and sing if you're a fan o’

The wonderful team from beautiful Canada'.

7 Paedeia. The Ideals of Greek Culture transl. Highet, G.. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965), 205.Google Scholar

8 A Theory of Justice (Harvard University Press, 1971), 426.Google Scholar

9 Anarchy, State and Utopia (UK: Blackwell, 1974), 243Google Scholar. I criticize Nozick's ignoring of intrinsic pride in Ruling Illusions (UK: Harvester, 1978), 4852.Google Scholar

10 Ethics, Book IV.

11 See Finley, op. cit., Kyle's, Donald G.Athletics in Ancient Athens (Leiden: E. S. Brill, 1987)Google Scholar and Sweet, Waldo E.'s Sport and Recreation in Ancient Greece (Oxford University Press, 1987).Google Scholar

12 The Baron's quote does not foresee the impact of nationalism on the Olympics, let alone the move to professionalism, and show business.

13 Finley, , op. cit., 91.Google Scholar

14 Discourses 3.22.52 (quoted in Sweet).

15 See also Professionalism in Archaic and Classical Greek AthleticsYoung, David C.. Ancient World 7 (1983) pages 44–5.Google Scholar

16 Harris, , Greek Athletes and Athletics (UK: Hutchinson, 1964)Google Scholar and Sport in Greece and Rome (London: Thames and Hudson, 1972).Google Scholar

17 Gardiner, , Athletics of the Ancient World (UK: Oxford, 1930)Google Scholar. It seems to me that the Trinidadian Marxist James, C. L. R.'s great book on cricket, Beyond a Boundary (UK: Hutchinson, 1963)Google Scholar, is much closer in spirit to these humanist and Christian historians than to the economic reductionists.

18 Gardiner, , op. cit., page 99f.Google Scholar

19 Book VIII. 143; translation of Butler, Samuel (1900) (London: Jonathan Cape, 1922).Google Scholar

20 Op. cit. 158.

21 Iliad, 23, 256ff.Google Scholar

22 The values here are deeper and more complex than the ‘hopeless tangle’ unearthed by Adkins, in Merit and Responsibility (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), 56.Google Scholar

23 470–486.

24 (1899) (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1919), pages 1, 8, 253. But see C. L. R. James' aptly horrified observations on American sport, op. cit. pages 52–53.

25 Veblen, , op. cit., page 256.Google Scholar

26 This non-participatory ‘democratization’, notorious in Ancient Rome's blood sports, has been revived in Spain where the crowd can now ‘vote’ for a ‘brave’ bull to be spared and retired to the stud. Whether electronics will eventually include television viewers in the plebiscite remains to be seen.

27 Quoted in Understanding Aggro’, by Marsh, Peter, New Society, Vol 32, 04 3, 1975Google Scholar. Gambling is a non-aerobic form of secondary participation. Punters put their money where their mouths are and commit themselves so that they, and not only the contestants, stand to win or lose. The proper analysis of gambling and of games of chance would need to go beyond talk only of greed or masochism to look at the expressive dimensions of the gambler's plunge.

28 Circus Factions, Blues and Greens at Rome and Byzantium, Cameron, Alan, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 294.Google Scholar

29 Anarcharsis II quoted by Swaddling, Judith in The Ancient Olympic Games (London: British Museum, 1980), 12.Google Scholar

30 There is a poem of Ovid in which the young lover, failing to distract his Stadium companion from the chariot race, seeks to channel her passion for her champion towards himself. Ovid likened exile to an athlete's being-sidelined and able only to watch from outside the arena.

31 See, for example, Harris, , Sport in Greece and Rome, page 48Google Scholar. One must of course make allowances for petty racism in all such attributions.

32 Treated in Rosenstein, Nathan's Imperatores Victi (USA: University of California, 1990).Google Scholar

33 Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857)Google Scholar (Dublin: Educational Company of Ireland, 1929), 79, 80 (Part I Chapter 5), 219 (Part II, Chapter 5), 257, 260 (Part II, Chapter 8).

34 Stephen, James Fitzjames in the Edinburgh Review, Vol CVII. No. CCXVII, 01 1858Google Scholar, reviews Hughes' story as veiling some hideous barbarism. J. A. Mangan's researches emphasize the vicious Social Darwinism of the Victorians' sporting ideology (See ‘The Grit of our Forefathers’ in Imperialism and Popular Culture MacKenzie, J. M. (ed.) (UK: Manchester, 1986), pages 113140Google Scholar. A mellower but critical perspective is found in the tenth chapter of Marples, Morris, A History of Football (London: Secter and Warburg, 1954).Google Scholar

35 Act V, Scene 3.

36 Act V, Scene 6.

37 ‘The Fight’, in Selected Essays of William Hazlitt Keynes, Geoffrey (ed.) (London: Nonesuch Press, 1948) pp. 9899Google Scholar. Hazlitt had likened the Gasman Hickman to Achilles in his swaggering arrogance).

38 Chapter XI (London: Everyman, 1907), 86.

39 The Hill (London: John Murray, 1920)Google Scholar. ‘Fellowship’ page. 68.Google Scholar

40 Op. cit., ‘Lord's’, 202.Google Scholar

41 Op. cit., ‘Good Night’, 235.Google Scholar

42 The Concept of Mind (UK: Hutchinson, 1949), 108.Google Scholar

43 The Moral Judgement of the Child (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1932)Google Scholar. Chapter I: ‘The Rules of the Game’.

44 See James', William lecture ‘The Gospel of Relaxation’ in Talks to Teachers (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1917), 37.Google Scholar

45 Even in aerobics sessions the public acknowledgement of pulse-rate changes functions to foster among pounding hearts a gentle emulation.

46 A Bruce Springsteen song about wallowing in such memories.

47 ‘Professionalism’ conceals a great variety in ethos. Some professional clubs tend towards mere business outfits imposing purely monetary incentives, while others are more deeply permeated by a spirit of solidarity and tradition. A ‘tourist's’ account of English Rugby League clubs, Simply the Best, by McGregor, Adrian, (Australia: University of Queensland 1991)Google Scholar is revealing of this issue of ‘true professionalism’. I, for example, am frequently struck by the respect and understanding among professionals in contrast with an adolescent triumphalism common among amateurs.

48 In Brave New World ‘experience surrogates’ that prefigure ‘virtual reality’ machines give fantastic adventure experiences to citizens whom real risks would reduce to a wreck.

49 Colin Radford, Michael Irwin, Walter Chamberlain and Jack Kyriaco have helped in the preparation of this article, as has Radford, 's ‘Utilitarianism and the Noble Art’, Philosophy, 63, 1988CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This article addresses from a different perspective themes discussed in Midgley's, Mary ‘The Game Game’, (this journal, Vol 49, 1974, pages 231253.Google Scholar