On Sports, Seriousness, and Stupidity
No one in their right mind, I should think, would call James A. Michener stupid. By the time he died (here in Austin, in 1997), Michener had published more than four dozen books and had won the Pulitzer Prize. He graduated from Swarthmore with Honors, won the Medal of Freedom, and, from 1979 to 1983, served as a member of the Advisory Council to NASA (among other things). In short, the man was well-traveled and well-lettered, being neither an ivory-tower pedant nor a charlatan. (And, what’s more, his books were good enough not to require subtitles).
And yet, he loved sports. While on one hand his 1976 book Sports in America is a searing indictment of blind competitiveness and corporate influence run amok, on the other it’s a testimonial to the validity of sports and sportsmanship in our otherwise sedentary and scripted culture. Michener writes eloquently about the role of athletic contests in our physical and social worlds, extolling what sports have to offer while weaving a cautionary tale about letting money, power, and petty provincialism corrupt their original intent.
Whether or not one particularly likes this book or any of Michener’s others, one must, when looking at his love of both activity and letters, see very plainly that athletic and intellectual pursuits are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, they’re two sides of the same coin; one is not as fulfilling in the absence of the other.
While running the risk of ignoring Michener’s advice (when he wrote: “I was brought up in the great tradition of the nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains, and never disdains.”), I would like to gripe, if gripe is the right word, about the prevailing idea that people who play or care about sports on any level (let alone enough to write about them) are categorically vapid, silly, or, perhaps worse of all, patriotically credulous.
Nowhere is this idea more entrenched, in my experience, than in groups who self-identify as political circles—groups in which, what with all the elections and debates and campaigns, sports are just “not serious.” Don’t get me wrong, I realize that there’s a difference between amateur and professional (corporate), televised sports, and that on a macro level, one team beating another or one player scoring a goal is, on any given day, literally trivial.
However, as loci for cultural orientation and engines of deep meaning for many geographically and socially linked groups (the proletariat, for example), sporting events are among the few significant activities we have left as humans; even watching them on TV is, in some way, more valuable than most other weekly rituals. Besides, I can’t think of many things more trivial than electoral, bumper-sticker rhetoric: what’s generally reported as political “news.”
I am all for taking action to help our fellow living beings (humans and non-humans), and I have always been a proponent of critical thinking that’s actually critical. But why can’t one be serious about social justice and enjoy playing and watching sports at the same time (cf. the work of Dave Zirin)? Must one choose between the two?
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