#94 SPORTS
THE SPORTS WE PLAY DEFINE US
By PETER THOMAS BUSCH
W
e are who we are in the sports we play and how we play those games that people play.
Sports depends on the competitive nature within humanity when acting as members of a family or group and also when acting independently as an individual.
And certain individuals often compete with themselves, although we do not need to get into the awkward details of those games right here and now.
Competition is often transformative, perhaps as much for the loser as for the winner, and when competing with oneself that paradigm may get a bit complicated. The joy for sports has become a shared global experience with shared understandings of the particular rules of certain sports and the overall goal of winning the game without the equally intense skullduggery of geopolitics.
The lazy days of summer are upon us for sure when our minds turn towards games of every sort for occupation of those long daylight hours from sunrise to sunset under the hot sun.
The sports we play during these months define us for the time that follows. People may choose carefully speed walking over halo jumps, hiking over heliskiing or perhaps storm chasing, if that can be considered a sport, over surfing those stormy ocean waves.
Competition in sports is more civil than other forms of competition. So no surprise then that the social barriers in society around the world were more often than not broken first in sports and then in the media and art before being broken if ever, on the city streets, and everywhere else.
American baseball player Jackie Robinson serves as an example for all the world to witness the colour barrier being broken. Or when the Olympics helped society finally begin in earnest to recognize gender equality with the sanctioning of the women’s marathon in 1984. The absence of women said as much about society as their presence at the Olympics.
And Grand Slam Tennis reflected the move to pay equity in the workplace by giving the women tennis players the same paycheck as the men tennis players.
Of course, many people play sports, but they do not get paid in proportion to their efforts.
Commercial interests are involved as in all other sectors of society. The commercialization of sports continually propels and replenishes sports from the position of a backyard game with people in the ‘hood to the lavish spectacles imbued with ritual and ceremony that games have become in this century of instant global mass media communication.
But sports have more value to civilizations than just commercial success – often showcasing elements of art and theatre as well as the technological advances being made in society. The sports of luge and car racing are examples of sports technology mirroring the technological advances taking place in the marketplace. And the fact that Lewis Hamilton is one of the more successful Formula 1 drivers of a generation is evidence of further global shifts in the colour barrier.
Jackie Robinson swung a ‘twenty dollar’ baseball bat on April 15, 1947. Lewis Hamilton drives a million dollar sports car in 2023, with 7 championships already behind him at the age of 38, driving number 44.
United States President Barack Obama is in position 44 of the American Presidency, and who was in charge of trillions of dollars plus, from 2008 to 2016.
The sports fan is just as fanatical and important as voters are to the Presidency.
A baseball game might provide to the audience the same emotive responses as those experienced watching election returns in 2008 and a movie to relax in the days thereafter. And these emotive responses are universal human experiences.
The sports we choose to play define us and the culture within which those games are played. Californians like to surf and have a distinct beach culture and language with peculiar idioms. The term “dude” may have surfaced from rivals fighting for a place in line for the ride on top of the curl, like “watch out dude”, although “dude” may be ever present in many sports and recreational pursuits mellowed out with the use of stimulants.
Drop-in-after-midnight hockey players drink beer, surfers and soldiers smoke dope, no doubt, while all of them suffer at the hands of those questions from significant others on returning home, such as ‘where have you been all night?”
Spinning figure skaters spin and spin again until they get the spin correct.
Colder climates exhibit distinctly winter sports such as figure skating and those early practices on the frozen pond and the self-made rink made with the water from a garden hose. Nightly access to some practice time from early childhood all goes to making of the superstar sports professional. But so many of us never get that far as the chosen few of professional athletes are the very few taken from the many bidding for time in the greatest global showcases.
Time often defines participation in the sport. People often give up waiting for their turn on the podium. But in the end, streaming sports may be infinitely better than participating in road games with the “car” call interrupting important moments of neighbourhood bonding.
Sports such as the Olympics keep the world strung together in a global community.
Sometimes the skill set directs us in a certain way but other times the culture demands attention to an activity. Extreme sports invites a lot of narcissists and Alpha humans, but also the individual who wants to experience the daily grind as part of the activity, such as Alex Honnold who lived out of a van and hunkered down the night before as close as possible to El Capitan in Yosemite National Park during June of 2017.
Surviving the limits of Alex’s existence surely refined his mind and was part of the package for the minimalist extreme art of free solo rock climbing large walls of granite around the world. This lonely, isolated world is different from the crowded après ski and post career lifestyle world tour currently being experienced by downhill skier Lindsay Vonn – although the two athletes might still experience the same lingering effects of the adrenaline charge at the finish line.
