ACCORDING TO THE legendary Liverpool soccer manager Bill Shankly, “Football is not a matter of life and death. It’s much more important than that.”
It’s a good joke, not least because Shankly wasn’t aiming to be funny. But it also highlights a real issue. Where does sport stand in the scheme of things?
You don’t have to agree with Shankly to believe that sport adds a positive element to many lives. Still, not everyone concedes even this much. Another important thinker, Noam Chomsky, thinks sport is nothing but a capitalist trick. He dismisses it as “an area which has no meaning and probably thrives because it has no meaning, as a displacement from the serious problems which one cannot influence”.
If you ask me, Chomsky is talking through his hat. He may know all about the foundations of linguistics—though I have my doubts about that too—but when it comes to sport I am with Shankly every time. Only someone who is a complete stranger to the joys of athletic achievement could dismiss sport as having “no meaning”.
Those few philosophers who have written about the value of sport tend to stand somewhere between Chomsky and Shankly. They don’t dismiss sport as meaningless, but at the same time they distinguish it from real life. In their view, sport is worthwhile precisely because it gives us a break from more serious pursuits.
I think that these philosophers have it wrong too. Sport is just as serious as the rest of life. Shankly may have been a tad overenthusiastic, but he had the right idea. Sport reaches deep into human nature, and can be as important as anything else.
Over the last couple of decades, The Grasshopper by the late Bernard Suits has acquired a cult status among philosophers who think about sport. It’s a quirky dialogue in which the eponymous grasshopper celebrates game-playing as the supreme virtue. Along the way Suits offers a convincing definition of games (thereby refuting Ludwig Wittgenstein’s claim in his Philosophical Investigations that the notion can’t be defined).
In summary form, Suits analyses games as “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles”. His idea is that all games specify some target state—like reaching the final square in snakes and ladders, or getting your golf ball in the hole—and then place arbitrary restrictions on the means allowed—you must go down the snakes but not up, you must propel the ball with your clubs and not carry it down the fairway.
So far so good. Suits’s definition elegantly captures what games have in common, whatever Wittgenstein might have said. However, Suits goes wrong when he suggests that all sports are a subspecies of games. In truth, while some sports are games in his sense—tennis, cricket, soccer—many others are not, precisely because they aren’t constituted by arbitrary rules—running, rowing, and skiing, for example.
Moreover, in assimilating sports to games, Suits misunderstands what makes them worthwhile. In Suits’s view, the value of all games lies in overcoming the arbitrary obstacles they involve. Indeed he regards this as the ultimate good. Towards the end of his book, he imagines a Utopia in which all practical needs can be met at the touch of a button. In this world, argues Suits, game-playing would become the only valuable activity. Since the pursuit of practical ends would be pointless, the only challenges worth meeting would be those set by games.
Suits concludes that no activity is essentially valuable, apart from playing games. In real life, we must work to provide the necessities of life. However, such work is never valuable in itself, but merely as a means to an end. The only intrinsically worthwhile pursuits are the games we would continue to play in Utopia.
I know nothing of Suits’s personal life, but it is hard to avoid the impression that his book was written by someone who never knew the joy of hitting a six back over the bowler’s head, or of body-surfing a wave 100 yards up onto the beach, or of hitting a backhand top-spin crosscourt winner. (All right, I confess. While I have hit sixes, and am proud of my body-surfing, I don’t have a top-spin backhand. I don’t care. Ivan Lendl won eight grand slams without one.)
As I see it, the value of sporting achievement is nothing to do with arbitrary restrictions, but lies rather in the enjoyment of sheer physical skill. Suits’s account trivializes sport. It reduces the grandeur of physical excellence to the giggly thrills associated with children’s board games.
In the end, it is hard to see how overcoming arbitrary obstacles can be worthwhile in itself. If something isn’t worth doing, it isn’t worth doing even when it’s made difficult. If that was all there was to sport, we might as well stick to snakes and ladders, and avoid the physical rigours of serious athletic pursuits altogether.
The real worth of sport, I say, lies in the pure exercise of physical abilities. Pride in physical performance is a deep-seated feature of human nature. Humans hone their physical abilities and take delight in exercising them. Perhaps this originally had its roots in the practical needs of hunting, fishing, and fighting, but we have come to value physical performance as an end in itself. We devote long hours to improving our physical skills, and seek out opportunities to test them.
The point generalizes beyond physical skills. Suits assumes that the pursuit of practical ends can’t have any value in itself. But this ignores the way in which many people find their deepest gratification in tuning a car, or analysing a balance sheet, or solving a philosophy problem. For many of us, the employment of these skills is itself worthwhile, quite apart from any useful results they might produce. We would want to carry on exercising these abilities even in Utopia.
But let us stick to physical skills. If you want a definition of sport, I would say that it is any activity whose primary purpose is the exercise of physical skills. This definition explains why plenty of sports are not games. While some sporting skills only exist within a game—top-spin tennis backhands, for example—many other sports involve nothing but skills that are already found in ordinary life—running, rowing, shooting, lifting, throwing. These ordinary activities turn into sports whenever people start performing them for their own sake and strive for excellence in their exercise.
Doggett’s Coat and Badge is the oldest rowing race in the world, dating back to 1715, when the working watermen on the Thames first tried their skills over a course from London Bridge to Chelsea. What could be more natural than for these young men to test themselves against each other? In fact, there seems no limit to the range of everyday activities that can turn into sports in this way. Bronco riding, sheep dog trials, medieval jousting, catfish noodling, trailer truck reversing, competitive bricklaying.…
My favourite example is fishing casting. When I was a youngster in Natal, the local surf fishermen vied to see who could cast out farthest beyond the Indian Ocean breakers. Soon some of them decided to skip the fishing and concentrate on the casting—and so ended up holding casting competitions on sports fields with special equipment.
What is the relation between sport and competition? As I see it, there is a natural connection, but it is by no means essential. To want to exercise a skill is to want to do something well, indeed as well as is feasible. And a natural way to test whether you are doing as well as you can is to measure yourself against other people. It is scarcely surprising that people who take pride in how far they can cast a fishing line will want to see if they can cast farther than others.
Still, even if sport lends itself naturally to competition, it does not require it. A rock-climbing team that sets out to conquer some challenging ascent need not be competing with other teams; when I became keen on golf, I was desperate to break 100, and then 90, and then 80, and played many solitary rounds in pursuing these challenges; recreational wind-surfers, skiers, and hang-gliders are not out to beat anybody.
In those sports that are competitive, it is of course essential that you play to win. If you aren’t competing, you aren’t trying. But it would be a mistake to infer that victory is the only thing that matters in competitive sports. For most participants, playing well is just as important as winning. After all, if people got nothing out of matches they lost, it is hard to see why most contests would take place. Among my regular tennis opponents are some I rarely, if ever, beat. But it doesn’t occur to me to stop playing them on this account. It is enough that I measure up to my own standards. I don’t need to be better than everyone else.
Perhaps competition is crucial to spectator sports, and indeed a large part of the reason why people watch them. But that is a different issue. I am talking about the nature and value of playing sports, not watching them. There may well be a number of further features needed to make a sport worth watching, beyond those that make it worth playing. (Most obviously, it will need to be visually engaging. Many very popular participant sports fall at this first hurdle. Squash and field hockey spring to mind.)
In his attempt to lever all sports into his definition of games as “voluntary attempts to overcome unnecessary obstacles”, Suits focuses on the rules that become necessary whenever there is competition. Thus he argues that it’s not enough to breast the tape to win the 200-metre sprint—you must stick to the track and not cut across the bend, you must run and not ride a bicycle, and so on.
However, this is scarcely enough to show that sprinting is defined by “unnecessary obstacles”. The essence of the sport is simply running as fast as you can. You don’t need any rules for that. The rules only come in when people want to measure themselves against each other. Their purpose is not to define some new activity into existence, but simply to enable people to see who can really run the fastest.
In any case, Suits’s idea of sports as games has no grip at all when it comes to non-competitive and rule-free activities like recreational windsurfing or hang gliding. When I was younger, I used to take my windsurfer out every weekend in Essex and have fun zooming around the Blackwater Estuary. I can remember my doctor once asking me whether I did any active sports. “Tennis, golf, cricket—and I go out windsurfing at weekends,” I said. I doubt that it occurred to my doctor to object that “solo windsurfing isn’t a sport”.
Of course, some sports are also games in Suits’s sense. While running and windsurfing don’t depend on rules for their existence, tennis, baseball, and many other pastimes do. There wouldn’t be any such thing as a tennis shot if the rules didn’t require you to hit the ball over the net and within the lines. Still, even with sports that are games, their value lies in the physical abilities they involve, and not the obstacles they set. Top-spin crosscourt backhands are good because they are admirably skilful, not because you have to overcome tennis’s arbitrary rules in order to win a point.
Not all games are physical—think of bridge, chess, ludo, Monopoly, baccarat, craps. And those games that aren’t physical don’t count as sports, for just that reason. But even with non-physical games we need to go beyond Suits to appreciate their value. If a game is worth playing, it is worth playing for some other reason than the obstacles it presents.
Thus, some games are worthwhile because of the mental powers they demand—bridge and chess would be the paradigms. Other games engender excitement, such as children’s dice games like snakes and ladders, or gambling games like roulette. And in general, contra Suits, any game worth playing offers some further value beyond its arbitrariness.
I have defined a sport as any activity whose primary purpose is the exercise of physical skills. So what about dancing? The stars of ballet and modern dance are certainly distinguished by their exceptional physical skills and spend much of their lives developing and improving them. So should they then be counted as athletes, on my theory?
Well, some forms of dance are indeed sports. Ice dancing is one of the major disciplines at the Winter Olympics. Rhythmic gymnastics, in which the competitors perform routines accompanied by music, has been part of the Summer Olympics since 1984. Competitive ballroom dancing is nowadays called “dancesport” by its practitioners, and has been recognized by the International Olympic Committee as an eligible sport, though it languishes low down on the list of pastimes waiting for a spot in the Games.
Even so, I agree that it would be odd to count ballet and modern dance as sports. But these activities are different. While they undoubtedly involve physical skills, the exercise of these skills is not their primary purpose. Balletomanes and other dance enthusiasts look to the dancers to entertain, to interpret the music, and to otherwise edify. The physical skills of the dancers are only a small part of what the fans find to admire in the dance.
Down on the lower reaches of the cable channels, you can nowadays follow the competitive barbecuing circuit. This is a big business, especially in the United States, and its followers tout it as a fast-growing “sport”. But I think that’s pushing it. There is an element of physical skill all right, but that’s not the main point of the exercise. After all, the judges aren’t interested in your skill per se, but solely in how your meat is cooked. Your particular technique for preparing a perfect piece of pork is no concern of theirs.
I’d take the same line with baking, pottery, and sewing. All of these feature in popular televised competitions—the annual final of “The Great British Bake-Off” regularly attracts over 10 million viewers—and all of them demand high levels of physical skill. But again, it is the product that is judged, not the skill. Similarly with musical performance, which demands physical ability all right, but is appreciated for the sounds produced, not the dexterity behind them.
I go the other way with speed-eating, though. You may have trouble thinking of fat men stuffing their faces for fun as a sport. But, if so, let me tell you about Takeru Kobayashi.
The blue riband of competitive eating is Nathan’s Coney Island Hot Dog Eating Contest, held every year on the Fourth of July. In 2001, a slim twenty-three-year-old from Japan stepped onto the stage and revolutionized the sport. The existing record was twenty-five hot dogs in twelve minutes, but Kobayashi ate fifty. By combining rigorous training with inventive techniques, he showed that the limits of fast eating had scarcely been explored. One result has been an upsurge of interest in eating contests. It might not be the most athletic of sports, but I don’t see why it has any less claim than other activities whose primary interest is to test the limits of the human body, like weightlifting or free diving.
What about video games? Many young men spend inordinate amounts of time hunched in front of a screen trying to outshoot the virtual competition. Why doesn’t that qualify as sport? The whole point of these games is the digital skill, with their levels and time limits designed specifically to elicit higher and higher levels of dexterity. (I know what I’m talking about. I went through a Tetris phase a few years ago. You wouldn’t believe how good I became. By the time I lost interest, the virtual falling blocks I was manipulating were just a blur.)
Perhaps you haven’t heard of eSports. In 2015 a capacity crowd of 20,000 filled Madison Square Garden to watch the top two American teams vie for a spot in the League of Legends World Championship. The championship itself attracted 36 million online streaming viewers, and the six-strong eventual winning team shared a prize of $1 million. League of Legends and similar games support a large community of professional athletes and coaches. I don’t see any reason not to count video gaming as a sport.
My analysis leaves no room for sports that don’t involve physical skills. Some games players will object. Both chess and bridge are on the list of “eligible sports” that the International Olympic Committee periodically considers for inclusion in the Summer Games, along with tug-of-war, waterskiing—and “dancesport”. Neither has as yet managed to win a place, but their governing bodies are indefatigable in pursuit of the goal.
The status of bridge became a question for the British courts in 2015. Sports in Britain receive large amounts of funding from National Lottery profits. When the lottery people decided that bridge wasn’t a sport, its defenders took legal action. Mr. Justice Mostyn in the High Court was sympathetic. In his view, “You are doing more physical activity playing bridge, with all that dealing and playing cards, than in rifle shooting.”
Nevertheless, with all due respect to Mr. Justice Mostyn and the International Olympic Committee, bridge and chess are not sports. They are not tests of physical skill. There may be physical effort involved in playing the cards or moving the pieces, indeed more effort than in a rifle shooting contest. But that’s not what the competitors are trying to be good at.
After all, it would make perfectly good sense for an armless competitor to play bridge or chess by telling someone else how to play the cards or move the pieces. But you aren’t competing in a shooting event if you arrange for someone else to shoot on your behalf. Shooting is a sport because it is essentially physical in a way that bridge and chess are not.
What about chess-boxing? In this hybrid sport, three-minute rounds of chess and boxing alternate, with victory being decided either by a boxing stoppage or a chess victory. The tactical possibilities are intriguing. You don’t want too many punches to addle your mind, lest this induce a false move on the board.
The game was invented by a Dutch performance artist, Iepe Rubingh, but has since outgrown its artistic origins, and regular tournaments are now held throughout Europe. Whether it will take off as a mass sport remains to be seen. Still, whatever its fate, I’d say that it qualifies as a sport, in virtue of the boxing element, even if that is diluted by the chess.
Perhaps there is a more general moral here. I say sports are activities whose purpose is to exercise physical skills. But I don’t intend this to imply that there isn’t also a mental side to sport. As I emphasized in Part I, any physical skill needs mental backing. Athletes who do not have their minds right will not perform to the best of their ability. So all sports call for the exercise of mental abilities alongside physical ones. Chess-boxing is just the extreme end of the spectrum, in isolating periods where mental abilities are displayed on their own.
In the end, perhaps we should simply accept that no analysis of sport will fit all the marginal cases. Exactly what is counted as a sport often depends on arbitrary facts of social history, rather than any principled definition.
One of the favourite books in my library is The Oxford Companion to Sports and Games, edited by John Arlott and published in 1975. It is a large old-style compendium, with entries arranged alphabetically, and plenty of detail about the history, rules, and prime exponents of pretty much every sport you can think of. (And it is specifically about sports. I’m not sure why “Games” is in the title—bridge and chess aren’t included, let alone ludo or Monopoly.)
The book is comprehensive and emphatically international—two of the longest entries are for pelota and kendo. But there are some curious omissions. There is no entry for darts, nor for snooker. I don’t know what to make of this. True, at the time the book was compiled neither of these were the major spectator sports they have since become on world television. But they were scarcely unknown.
In particular, snooker, along with its sister game billiards, already had a proud history. I grew up with tales of past champions. My teenage friends and I were keen players, and spoke with awe of the English brothers Joe and Fred Davis, and their epic mid-twentieth-century battles with the Australians Walter Lindrum and his nephew Horace. It is odd, to say the least, that a compendium that has room for canoe polo and deck quoits should leave out snooker and billiards.
I can only suppose that these games, along with pool and darts, were shunned because of their historical association with smoky drinking dens. As they used to say, proficiency at billiards is the sign of a misspent youth. But their omission was surely a mistake. As millions of television fans know, the top contemporary snooker and darts players display unnatural levels of physical skill. For the editor of The Oxford Companion, the undoubted abilities demanded by these games were somehow obscured by the dissoluteness of their surroundings.
The Companion also includes extensive entries on a number of animal pastimes: equestrian sports, greyhound racing, homing-pigeon racing. I agree that these are sports all right. Still, it might not be clear how they tally with my story. Where’s the physical skill? With horses, it is true, the riders must be skilful to control their mounts. But what about greyhound and pigeon racing? It doesn’t take much skill to bring your animals to the starting line and let them go.
The puzzle disappears, however, if we switch our focus from the human handlers to the racers themselves. It is the skills of the animals that these events are designed to display, not of their owners. The top racing dogs and pigeons are no less exceptional athletes than Usain Bolt. In the 1930s, Mick the Miller became a household name in Britain when he strung up nineteen victories in a row and won the Greyhound Derby twice. Until recently his stuffed body was on display in the Natural History Museum in London. The author of his entry in The Oxford Companion had no doubt about Mick the Miller’s outstanding skills, describing him as “the greatest exponent of trackcraft in the history of the sport”.
Where do sports stand in the overall scheme of things? From my perspective, the value of sports lies in the worth of the physical skills they involve. Hitting a home run or sinking a long putt is virtuous in itself, independently of any further benefit it may bring. Such achievements are rightfully regarded as objects of admiration and pride. Athletic prowess is something to aim for and cherish, along with other features of a good life.
Some will feel that I am here overvaluing the significance of sports. Do I really want to put athletic achievement on a par with the other important things in life, like happiness, knowledge, friendship, and artistic achievement? In the end, many will feel, sports are not really serious. Isn’t sport essentially playful, leisurely, lighthearted, the opposite of serious endeavour?
On Suits’s account of sports as games, this unseriousness is essential to sports. Suits portrays sports as the antithesis of work. In his view, where work demands necessary effort to meet essential needs, sports set us unnecessary challenges that we take up for the fun of it. By contrast, my own analysis arguably casts no light on the difference between sport and the rest of life. By saying that sporting achievements are valuable in themselves, I seem to be in danger of blurring the difference between playful games and needful work.
My response is to deny the premise. I do not agree that sport has a different kind of worth from other things. Sporting achievement is as basic a value as anything else. Someone who devotes their life to high-jumping or baseball is no less serious a person than someone who devotes it to mathematics, say, or the ballet. There is nothing intrinsically dilettante about sports compared with other walks of life.
Sometimes advocates of sporting activity will point to the benefits it brings, in terms of physical well-being, increased self-esteem, relaxation, and so on. These benefits are all no doubt real, but they are incidental to the worth of sport. Exercising physical skills to the best of your ability is valuable in itself, whether or not it brings any further advantages. Along with happiness, friendship, and other basic goods, it is one of the things that makes life worth living. Justifying sports in terms of their positive spin-offs is like valuing friendships because they will advance your career.
I can’t help quoting from Chinaman, Shehan Karunatilaka’s wonderfully scurrilous novel about the world of Sri Lankan cricket:
I have been told by members of my own family that there is no use or value in sports. I only agree with the first part. I may be drunk but I am not stupid. Of course there is little point to sports. But, at the risk of depressing you, let me add two more cents. THERE IS LITTLE POINT TO ANYTHING. In a thousand years, grass will have grown over all our cities.
Note that Karunatilaka is not here agreeing that there is no value in sports. (“I only agree with the first part.”) His point is rather that sports are no less important than anything else. Of course, if we set the bar of significance too high—surviving the passage of millennia—then sport will fall short. But so too will the other things that matter—family, friends, prosperity, prizes.
If there is something peculiar about sport, perhaps it lies in the point that Karunatilaka does concede to his family—there is no use in sports. It is true that sport doesn’t connect up with other aspects of life. Sporting achievements are generally disconnected from personal relationships, social life, or political developments. They do not edify or inform, still less explore and transform our perceptions of the world. And by their nature they are ephemeral—unlike other hobbies, they leave no lasting products, not even a garden or a stamp collection.
Because of this, the rest of life normally goes on the same, whoever wins the big matches. In 1982, France had a supremely talented soccer team. Before their World Cup semifinal against West Germany, their captain Michel Platini was asked how he would cope with defeat. “The sun will still rise tomorrow,” he answered. In the event, the West Germans (the same side that had featured in “the disgrace of Dijon” a couple of games earlier) won a fabulous game on penalties, after Patrick Battiston was denied a goal by the most notorious foul in soccer history. The rest of the soccer world joined with France in lamenting this travesty of sporting justice. But Platini was of course right. The French side might have been denied their sporting destiny, but the next day the banks still opened and the trains still ran on time.
Still, even if sport forms a self-enclosed realm, insulated from the rest of life, this does not mean that it lacks intrinsic worth. As we have seen throughout this book, people across the world celebrate sporting achievement as a self-standing virtue. They hone their skills as participants and applaud their champions as spectators. From their perspective, sport is a matter of seriousness and concern, not the flippant holiday from real life that Suits would make it.
Sporting achievements at any level can be the occasion for justified pride. Even amateurs like me can feel a happy glow remembering long-past feats. Given the levels I played at, I would hope that my professional and personal achievements outstrip my minor sporting triumphs. But, even so, my life would have been thinner without them. They count high among the events I am pleased to recall. For serious athletes, sporting success of course signifies more. If I can think back with pride to feats I performed in friendly cricket matches, imagine what it must be like to have led your country to victory over its long-standing rivals.
It is tempting to confuse the insulation of sports with a lack of significance. We are too quick to conclude, just because sports don’t matter to other things, that they don’t matter at all. But this doesn’t follow. Success on the sports field might not advance your career or influence the course of world history. But this doesn’t mean that it is not important and valuable in its own right. Even if sporting achievements are cut off from the rest of life, they are still worth striving for.