Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Why Sports?
The other day I was talking to my friend of mine and I asked him if he was watching the baseball playoffs. To my utter disbelief, he said no he was watching the presidential debate. Nothing against the presidential debate or politics, but I asked him why he liked to pay attention to politics so closely. Once again I am not saying that if someone watches the debate they are instantly a politics fanatic, it's what determines the future of our country(Go Obama). Anyway, the next day I found myself wondering why I love sports so much as opposed to loving politics or anything else. No one in my family is obsessed with sports as I am or even likes sports. I go home and turn on a Thursday night game and my mom yells at me to bring a sappy movie and my dad grabs the remote and immediately brings CNN. So how did I get into sports? Well that question was partly easy to figure out; when i was a kid I was introduced to basketball and I absolutely could not stop playing it. To this day I try to get my friends to play football or basketball or any sport just because of the rush I get playing it that started from my childhood. Despite this I have grown up to watch sports of all different kinds and the reason for that is not just the fun of playing sports because obviously when I'm watching sports I'm not playing. So this leads back to my original inquiry. Why do people watch/love sports? After much speculation I think I may have it. Some people say it's the action or the hits; if that were true then more people would watch hockey, and baseball would never have become America's pastime. My final verdict was that people watch for the passion and the intensity of sports. The passion in the fans is shown at every sports event when tens of thousands of people show up on the free time and shell out their hard-earned money to watch their favorite teams in person. The players themselves have their own passion which, unfortunately, can get lost in professional sports; that passion of the players is why people love college sports where the "kids" are playing for the love of the game and for the rush that gave them happiness as small children. I recently saw a clip of a highlight reel for the Monday Night game between the Saints and the Vikings. This clip showed the Saints quarterback Drew Brees getting his team hyped up for the game they were about to play by explaining to them, in a chanting fashion, that they must protect their New Orleans home and take pride in the fact they live in New Orleans; he wants to use that as in intimidating factor against the other team. I have provided a link to the video, and honestly for some reason I can't stop watching it myself in fact I'm watching it right now(watch it in high quality). To the narrow-minded outsider, this act of pre-game chanting may seem barbaric and unnecessary, but they are not seeing what is really happening here. Drew Brees is uniting his team so that they may go out and play as one unit instead of many individuals, and the way he is able to do that is get them to chant together as he leads them in chant as he will on the field. Speaking of New Orleans, this city is a perfect example of sports passion. When Katrina hit New Orleans the city was devastated, but when the Superdome was re-opened, the city came together to watch the one thing they had left - football. The team recognized this and went out and played their hearts out as they beat up the Atlanta Falcons. It was an emotional night, but the passion and love of the game brought this city's pride back. So why do fans love sports as much as they do? The passion of the players brings cities and sometimes countries together as they battle for a set amount of minutes to see which city/country is better. No wars, no one getting hurt(sometimes), just living by the phrase: Leave it all on the field.
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3 comments:
As a human who completely doesn't get sports, I actually enjoyed reading this post because I can sort of get it--everybody has a passion that others often don't understand. It's kind of difficult to read in such a big chunk. Can you create a bunch of paragraphs with spaces so it's easier to read? Thanks for the link!
Upon consideration of Cassius Clays’ blog entitled “Why Sports” I am forced to reexamine my previous notion of the world of sports. Myself neither truly a sports fan nor a political animal (aside of course from the Aristotelian sense of the phrase), but rather a meditator upon the true nature of what is – that is to say a lover of wisdom – that is to say a philosopher – I have come to an appreciation of both, but a true love of neither. My understanding of what is termed “sports,” is grounded perhaps in a classical notion of its etymological roots. The word sport is derived from old French, from a word meaning something between pleasure, and to divert. Thus understood the activity of “sport-ing” is a pleasureable diversion, something “entertaining.” Rooted deeper in the classical sense this etymology obviously implies a certain grace, imagination, form, and beauty in the ordering of sports; thus to my comprehension true football, i.e. soccer, is the most excellent sport, as it is the most endowed with form, by which I mean to say it partakes most of grace in its activity and its strategy. At the same time I consider it in this classical way, I am reminded of the origin of my love for soccer, namely the playing of it, and the intoxicating joy of the playing of it derived at once from the satisfaction one partakes from acknowledgement of one’s own competence and dexterity and the more truly intoxicated joy of the competition, the spirit (it would be folly to call this a peaceful spirit) and the anger of it. This reminds me of the link provided by the shah, wherein the overwhelming strength of the spirit is witnessed. Being a member of my demographic, I could not help but be reminded by Brees’s quote “This is New Orleans” of a similar line in the movie 300, where the same spirit is witness. The same spirit that was applied by the Greeks to war, is then applied by us moderns – perhaps postmoderns – to sports (I certainly do not mean this as an attack on sports, for one must consider the Greek’s attitude towards war and how very different from our own).
Having been drawn back to that incentive world of the Greek’s I am now reminded of Socrates’, and how his thoughts might here apply. What comes to mind is the sort of “tripartition” of the soul he discusses in the “Republic.” What I mean is, his doctrine of the soul as having three parts: the rational, the spirited, and the desiring. In this sense we should consider “sports” as an affectation of the spirited, or thumotic (to use the Greek-English polyglot), part of the soul. To Socrates this part of the soul was essential, it was the part that gave the rational part of the soul the ability to master the desiring, and only through an acceptance of the thumotic (as well as the desiring) could the soul be brought, wreathed in nobility, to justice. The great power the activity of “sport-ing” has over the soul, is the power of thumos, something which well cared for, and moderated by the rational to bring it unto the just, is a noble thing. The purpose of sporting is, then, to care for the thumotic in a way governed by reason, such that the thumotic does not go beyond its limits, and lead to overarching rage or on the other hand to weakness (both of which make impossible the justice of the soul); as the shah so sagely puts it: “Leave it all on the field.” By this the shah has shown that the dangerous potentials of the spirited part of the soul are given boundaries by reason, wherein they might draw the soul to nobility (to grace, and beauty, and all those things which lead the soul upward unto to truth), such that on the field those potentials for disharmony are released into to spirit of the game, but not allowed to overflow into heinous acts of violence that betray reason. At once the activity of sporting, then, combines something of intoxicating rage, and its rational limitation; it is then activity which, practiced appropriately, leads to the harmony of the soul. To “sport” is at once a thing of beauty and of sublimity, of nobility and the accepting mastering of the deep intoxication of the soul; in it is a powerful path to the noble, to the good, and to the just, for in it is the path to the properly and rationally ordered harmony of the soul.
I'm with you man, whenever I watch a video like that one with Drew Brees I get chills. I have loved sports all my life too and I really feel they are great for bringing people together. Things like the Olympics are so cool to watch because a whole country is united for once. The passion is often lost in the pros and thats why I love to see when someone like Drew Brees shows so much emotion. I love it!
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