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Sport: An Historical Phenomenology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Anthony Skillen
Anthony Skillen
Affiliation:
University of Kent at Canterbury
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Extract

Sport often seems to teeter on the edge, on one side of the entertainment industry, on the other of cheating violent aggression: from a make-believe simulacrum of serious play to a nasty chemically enhanced descent into a Hobbesian state of nature. Such perversions lend credibility to reductive views of sport itself as a metonymic feature of capitalism. But that sport as entertainment means fixing it to produce exciting outcomes and amplifying capacities to superhuman proportions, while sport as aggression means treating rules as mere obstacles to brute dominance, shows how far we in fact are from these abysses, even in the days of the Coca Cola/Nike Olympics, Vinny Jones and cricket sledging. In this essay, I try to delineate through history— from Homer to … Gomer?—a common culture of sport and sportsmanship that, with its excesses and perversions, continues to operate as one, albeit complex, ideal of human excellence.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 68 , Issue 265 , July 1993 , pp. 343 - 368
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1993

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References

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27 Quoted in ‘Understanding Aggro’, by Marsh, Peter, New Society, Vol 32, 04 3, 1975Google Scholar. Gambling is a non-aerobic form of secondary participation. Punters put their money where their mouths are and commit themselves so that they, and not only the contestants, stand to win or lose. The proper analysis of gambling and of games of chance would need to go beyond talk only of greed or masochism to look at the expressive dimensions of the gambler's plunge.

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46 A Bruce Springsteen song about wallowing in such memories.

47 ‘Professionalism’ conceals a great variety in ethos. Some professional clubs tend towards mere business outfits imposing purely monetary incentives, while others are more deeply permeated by a spirit of solidarity and tradition. A ‘tourist's’ account of English Rugby League clubs, Simply the Best, by McGregor, Adrian, (Australia: University of Queensland 1991)Google Scholar is revealing of this issue of ‘true professionalism’. I, for example, am frequently struck by the respect and understanding among professionals in contrast with an adolescent triumphalism common among amateurs.

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