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

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It’s worth saying that I like to fight and I admire fighters of all kinds, but my goal here isn’t to defend fighting per se. Instead, my defense of fighting in this context is intended to serve as a route to my larger argument about the value, power, and potentiality of sports, and, even more than that, the exigency of neighborly friendship. But talking about fighting provokes people, so it’s a convenient way to put the argument to a stiff test right off the hop.

What I’m articulating here is an aesthetic desire for sure, but it’s also, and maybe moreso, a political one. I am convinced that sports offer a particular and irreplaceable arena for radical social transformation. All sports—fighting maybe more immediately than most—open up specific and enigmatic possibilities for engaging with pillars of liberatory politics: difference, equity, and solidarity. And, in part, it’s the encounter with materiality that I am after here.

It’s like the difference between walking and driving: sliding by in a vehicle you really don’t see shit. You can’t smell or hear anything, you move too fast, you miss all the subtleties by keeping at a comfortable distance. If you walk (and especially if you walk regularly), you feel places differently. There is something analogous about the physicality, the bodies-on-bodies immediacy and pleasure of sports: it’s the promise of an unmediated capacity to apprehend ethical decisions, the expression of difference, and the visceral encounters with solidarity that interest me.