In the context of historical import, few things could be less consequential than the winner of the Nineteen-Anything World Series, Super Bowl, World Cup, U.S. Open...you name it. Yes, Jesse Owens’s spectacular triumphs in the 1936 Berlin Olympics rang with racial and political resonance, but the games themselves had little to do with the emerging war in Europe or with culture thereafter. As a continuing ritual, reintroduced to the world in the nineteenth century, the Olympics do reflect our admiration for the skill and daring, the perseverance and dedication, that we associate with high athletic achievement. What we celebrate, however, are general cultural values that would remain whether the Olympics took place or, as happened during World War II, they did not.
Nevertheless, be it the Olympics or a bowling-league playoff, the World Series or a Little League championship, we tend to invest in sports a measure of attention and emotional intensity out of all seeming proportion to their civic or moral relevance. Some see this behavior as, at best, a sign of attenuated (usually male) adolescence; at worst, adult idiocy tremulous with all manner of pathology.
While such observations have merit, they are, I would argue, observations validated mainly in extreme cases and too often insensitive to the concept and role of sport as ritual. Among other things, ritual is a cultural and psychic activity that enables a people to express and experience profound and often dangerous sensibilities, but doing so within a format that, while respecting the power and ambiguity of these sensibilities, precludes their real-life consequences.
It was in discussing one such ritual-Greek tragedy-that Aristotle established the grounds for our assessment of this universal social phenomenon. In his Poetics, he describes the role of drama, especially tragedy, in Greek culture. Rising out of religious rites celebrating, among others, the god Dionysius (whose mysterious association with both violence and vitality touched something deep in the common psyche), drama provided the Greeks with not only entertainment but with a powerful spiritual experience that Aristotle called “catharsis.” This emotional process, he asserted, had for its object the evocation of fear and pity. Fear because audiences were exposed to the perils of being human: the instability of the will, the deceptiveness of appearances, the fallibility of human judgment, the flip indifference of fortune. And pity, because they came to identify the fate of the play’s protagonists with their own lives. As ritual rather than mere entertainment, these tragedies were meant to be moral engagements-not diversions designed for momentary escape from reality, but formative experiences exposing audiences to the awesome and extraordinary realities underlying their ordinary lives.
Some scholars argue that the Greek citizen left the theater not merely entertained but changed-that the tragedy was, therefore, a quasi-religious experience. Now, without ascribing such value or solemnity to modern sport, the near universal delight we take in competition suggests that, like drama, it too is rooted in some abiding ritualistic need, some hunger for catharsis. In a manner that at once engages us in an “action” (Aristotle’s word for the moral working out of a play) but leaves us physically whole, sport mirrors the conflictual nature of our lives: the irony and uncertainty of circumstance, the urge to excellence that pursuit of victory entails, the joy of the battle for the sake of the “action” itself. Consider the oval shape of a football, which causes freakish, unpredictable bounces. Its very form becomes a vehicle for chance and uncertainty: a deserving team may lose the game because a random hop has touched a leg or gone out of bounds on the one-yard line, leading to all manner of untoward consequences. Then there is human error: a baseball umpire who loses his concentration for one second may be duped by a catcher “framing” ball four into calling it a game-ending strike. All this occurs, like tragedy, within the economy of art: unlike the desultory, drawn-out, irregular events of ordinary life, sport, like tragedy, provides the unity and focus, form and intentionality that distinguish art from casual experience, significant action from mere activity. What is more, it allows the devotee to appreciate what is taking place-its complexity, irony, beauty-as the uninitiated cannot.
Competition, of course, involves risk, physical or psychological (some bridge players would rather suffer a broken nose than a loss), together with skill, training, endurance, and all those other clichés we associate with pursuit of the trophy. And, because the body ages and the mind declines, the competitor, sooner or later, comes to grips, as does the audience of a tragedy, with the inevitability of defeat at the hands of that player whom Faulkner calls “the dark diceman.”
Despite these correspondences, though, we must admit that sport, unlike tragedy, belongs more to the realm of amusement than artistic or religious ritual. The latter is marked by ambiguity, paradox, and irony-necessarily so, because life itself is replete with such qualities at every turn. We live to die; power is both necessary and corrosive; knowledge is both alluring and perilous; true love approaches fulfillment in loss of self; wisdom seems inseparable from suffering; the spiritual beckons even as the flesh demands; success is often the beginning of the fall; and so on. While it is true that, at the level of action-that is, of melodrama-sport evokes some of these themes, great art, drama, and literature plunge us morally and intellectually into their murkiest and most disturbing depths. When St. Paul says we see now as in a glass darkly, he is referring to religious mystery, not to today’s betting odds at Vegas. If comparisons are odious, then, we must tread carefully when noting correspondences between sport and tragedy.
The correspondences, though, are compelling. Both sport and tragedy leave their audiences (and, generally, their actors) intact. They ritualize rather than actualize violence, thus alerting us to, rather than bringing about, the tragic possibilities inherent in such pursuits as fame, success, dominance, pleasure, and the like. It is this ritualistic function, I believe, that explains and justifies our fascination with both social functions.
In similar ways, their forms set the boundaries beyond which ritual flirts too closely with actual reality. If the Greek audience, for example, had required Oedipus literally to blind himself on stage, the moral function of the drama would have been lost in physical horror. Indeed, the banning of theater at various times in history may often have been associated with the moral degradation of the literal enactment of evil, be it murder or rape-a distortion of the expressive arts we call pornography. For this reason, boxing, so perilously close to mayhem, demands especially careful regulation; and football, for all its approval of the bone-crushing tackle, frequently imposes an “unnecessary roughness” penalty.
Oedipus left the stage (theatrically) blinded and nearly out of his mind, but the Greek patron, if the acting was effective, left the theater sobered, reflective, and (Aristotle would argue) saner than before. At a much less sublime level, sport effects a similar response, and, while not necessarily evoking fear and pity, it commands an attention comparable in intensity and feeling. Again, it is ritual, its forms shared by players and audience alike, that explains for both “actions” so powerful a response. The formalism of Greek tragedy-its masks, its costumes, its act and scene divisions, its choral commentary, its elevated language-emerged out of religious ritual as conventions setting the tragic “action” both apart from ordinary reality and interpretive of it. Sport is similarly formal. The uniforms and equipment (sometimes even jersey numbers) signify distinctive functions; the playing boundaries, time or period segments, pregame ceremonies; the emergence and adulation of heroes, the distinctive jargon; and, especially, the intensive, focused, and goal-driven “action” with its elements of chance, surprise, excellence of execution, suspense, and resolution: all these conspire to become ritual, to set the game and its players apart from ordinary life even as they somehow satisfy one of its needs.
What is that need? Is it, at some profound, unconscious level, an elevation to significance of what novelist Walker Percy calls getting through an ordinary day? Is it a communal sharing of this sensibility (we talk to strangers at games)? Is it a reduction, perhaps, of all that assaults us to the terms of a comprehensible game? Is it a vicarious gratification of all these, and other, needs through formal, larger-than-life enactments? In its execution of exceptional skills and strength and strategies, does it satisfy some measure of our own need for grace and beauty of execution, for excellence of gesture or design? In its controlled aggression or violence, its legitimized deceits, does the catharsis of athletic competition consist in the release of our own pent-up angers, frustrations, failures, and fantasies-in a way and within a context that exempts us from their consequences?
Indeed, in its tensions and reversals, its ingenious uncertainties, sport does seem to “act out” some of the same human themes as do the great tragedies, but at the level of play, at a level that, unlike tragedy, does not so much engage us in reality as, for a few brief hours, allow us to escape it.
Early in my English studies, I came across the distinction between the literature of entertainment and that of interpretation-between, for instance, stories of adventure or detection or romance meant to give us a temporary respite from our daily cares, and those writings designed to help us better appreciate the human condition. There is much overlapping between the two kinds of literature and both can be marked by good or poor craftsmanship. What is important here is that the most cerebral of readers can (and, I think, should) enjoy both kinds of writing-both Robertson Davies’s Fifth Business and his rollicking ghost stories in High Spirits. Diversion from daily reality may be less critical to our sanity than sobering confrontations with mortality or with the mysteries of evil and grace; but that is not to say that such entertainment-including that divertimento we call sport-is either trivial or dispensable.
The mocker knows little of this, seeing in sport only a time-wasting absorption in a meaningless ritual. The addict, we must admit, perhaps disappointed by “real” life, can allow sport to assume undue importance, sometimes with painful consequences. But the true fan, Hemingway’s citizen of aficion (often a devotee of other pursuits as well), enjoys sport as the creative diversion it is: a temporary departure from ordinary reality, not in the long run to escape it, but to return to it refreshed, entertained, and even a bit encouraged, as the Irish say, to “keep on keeping on.”
It is precisely because of its relative inconsequence that sport allows us such freedom of emotional commitment: should the home team lose, “it’s a shame” (as the song goes)-but the buses still run, the bills get paid, water leaks are repaired, children will phone home at roughly the same anxious intervals, and the body is more or less what it was before. Vicariously, we have risked, we have dared, we have struggled, we have won and lost. Imaginatively, we are authenticated: warriors, generals, strategists, acrobats, contenders, victorious (even fallen) heroes. That master of paradox, Chesterton, might have called this exercise an inconsequence of consequence.
As a retired English teacher who may spend too many hours clicking off commercials between innings, I find solace in these reflections, and some resolution of guilt in taking my beloved out to dinner (seldom, alas) at the Flat Iron Sports Grill, whose glowing one-eyed votaries pay day-long homage to the gods of inconsequence. end
