Читать книгу One Game at a Time. Why Sports Matter онлайн

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Regardless, I think it is very problematic (and maybe a little paternalistic) to critique sports as simply a poor career choice. People engage in creative pursuits, whether it’s boxing, painting, basketball, singing, judo, dancing, or writing, not to get rich but because we love being creative: the act of individual and collaborative creativity is good in and of itself. A small subset of us get highly skilled at those pursuits, and then a much smaller subset still actively pursues a pro career in hoops, movies, the music business, fighting, or whatever. For most of my youth, I played ball seventeen hours a day and dreamed that I was Downtown Freddie Brown or Dennis Johnson, but was I planning for an NBA career? Well, I guess highly abstractly but not really. Ball wasn’t a career move: it was pleasure, and it wasn’t a failure or wasted effort when I fell far short.

I don’t want to reduce creative expression to instrumentality and assess its value based on potential career earnings. Lives should not be managed like stock portfolios. The problem isn’t that boxing or basketball or musical theater or hiphop or the trombone are not sure-fire routes out of economic marginalization. It’s that long-shot lottery-winning dreams are necessary because, for so many folks, there is so little else to realistically hope for. To blame sports for not being able to fix the failures of capitalism is chasing the wrong squirrel up the wrong tree.