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

20 страница из 41

The argument that names professional sports as bad, but playing in the park as good, is lazy and obscuring. We have to take it all on, and understand playing and watching, participating and spectating, performer and audience as bound up together, in part because observing skilled, graceful, creative, and powerful bodies in performance is an abidingly great pleasure.

We wouldn’t make that claim about music or theater or any other creative activity—no one would argue that the kid playing guitar in her basement is good, but when she gets paid to play onstage it is debased and corrosive. We absolutely, unequivocally have to talk about the contours of high-performance economics, the nature of spectacle, the outrageous exploitations embedded in the sporting world, the total bullshit inequities, the way arena logics are maiming cities: all of that is exactly what I think taking sports seriously requires. But we cannot have those conversations if we do not take all of it seriously, and with serious respect.