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

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If we abandon or condescend to sports, we lose a valuable and fertile route to a world where people are more than industrial inputs: a world where people can trust and rely on each other. Sports are hardly the only way we can bodily encounter trust, but they are a specific and irreplaceable one, in no small part due to their physicality. Fighting, like all sports, requires trust, without which larger notions of solidarity and community are impossible. Why is it that after almost every bout combatants gratefully and effusively hug each other, check to make sure each other is alright, and give thanks that no one was really hurt?

The immediacy of these physical encounters forces us to face the consequences of our actions, putting our ethical choices into living color. Every time you agree to fight someone, you are placing a huge amount of trust and faith in them. There is the very real possibility that they can damage you, maybe badly. In any fight, you have to take care of the other, and pull up before anything ugly happens: you have to believe that when you tap they’re going to stop. Sometimes it doesn’t work. Sometimes that trust is misplaced. Overwhelmingly, though, that trust is validated. In team sports there is another layer of mutual aid involved, when you not only enter a series of agreements with your opponents, but with your teammates as well.