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

19 страница из 41

I also think watching and following sports is a worthy activity. It’s common to suggest that playing sports is defensible but spectating is opiatical, passive, mind-numbing, and likely brain—if not soul—damaging.ssss1 I dispute this from beginning to end. It would be crazy-talk to suggest that playing music is alright, but listening to it is a waste of time. Or that acting is good, but going to the theater is passive and consumptive. Or that you are creatively actualized if you make films, but somehow less-than if you watch them. We all know that music, movies, theater, dance, poetry, and all the rest are vibrant and legitimate sites of conversation and contestation for observers and critics as much as creators. Why not sports?

It is really important to understand sports comprehensively (and not as arbitrarily separate) as playing and watching; fanning and participating; pro, high performance, amateur, and everyday. There are obviously critical distinctions between each of those activities (and kinds of activities): they are not the same and carry all kinds of different weights, impacts, reverberations, and effects. But to understand sports we have to encounter them as a nexus of relationships that bind performers to textssss1 to audience to critic to community.