Literature and sport as ritual and fantasy

Papers on Language and Literature, Fall 2001 by Meyers, Ronald J

In the field of science, at present, there is an all out competition among adversarial biologists to map the human genome, with the same signification as the race to split the atom half a century ago, or the race to solve Fermat's theorem of more recent memory. Goal, the sporting term, has the widest possible application to characterize our wishes and attainments. Writers are no less subject to the lure of the contest in their quest to be the best-whether competing for publication or for Pulitzer or Nobel Prizes. The range of contests is as diverse as man's life experience, and we choose our favorite games and assign value judgments according to our abilities and the strategies and risks involved.

The quintessential purpose of sports-its principal metaphor and goal-is victory. Much of our analysis of play and its relationship to sport has been influenced by Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (1944), a classic work that illustrates the relationship among the magic circle, playground, theater, and temple-all being of ritual origin and significance-the field of dreams applies no less to art than to sport and play:

Why does the baby crow with pleasure? Why does the gambler lose himself in his passion? Why is a huge crowd roused to frenzy by a football match? The intensity of and absorption in play finds no explanation in biological analysis. Yet in this intensity, this absorption, this power of maddening lies the very essence, the primordial quality of play. (2-3)

The games of man are of great variety and application not only to sport but, Huizinga forcefully argues, to politics, philosophy, commerce, law, and science-all activities and events in which there are winners and losers.

From birth, men and women are "merely players," and as with most species, play serves as both as a release of energy and as a means of education. The hero of the game is, like the hero on the battlefield, trained in the game. The dream of winning leads to the desire to win. The idea gives rise to the achievement. Bravery, endurance, courage, and skill all figure in the outcome. Friedrich Schiller projected the value of play as a means of education and moral perfectibility when he asserted that man is only complete when he plays "Denn, um es endlich auf einmal herauszusagen, der Mensch spielt nur, wo er in voller Bedeutung des Worts Mensch ist, and er ist nur da ganz Mensch, wo er spielt" Uber Die Asthetische Erziehung (Briefe xu)..2

Plato argued it even more strongly: "What, then, is the right way of living? Life must be lived as play, playing certain games, making sacrifices, singing and dancing, and then a man will be able to propitiate the gods, and defend himself against his enemies, and win in the contest" (qtd. in Huizinga 19). What phrase has a wider or sweeter significance than "I feel lucky!"? We play for pleasure and to learn new skills. We delight in winning, whatever the challenge or sport we choose. We seek to excel, and we are diminished in losing. Some become very despondent. We enjoy learning and improving in our chosen endeavors. We want to improve our physical, mental, and strategic skills; we want to test our virtit. Thus, the poet-dreamer becomes the hero of his own dream. We assimilate the most profound values of our culture through play, and we learn excellence, humility, teamwork, and sportsmanship. Guttmann also has noted Freud's argument that the athlete "treats games as efforts at mastery" and, like the artist, uses his medium to resolve personal psychological exigencies; this view is reinforced by Edmund Wilson, in The Wound and the Bow, in his stunning image of the flawed hero Philoctetes, whose marvelous prowess is inextricably bound to his grievous wound, "the conception of superior strength as inseparable from disability" (235; my emphasis).