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

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I am convinced that sports offers us an arena where we can resist neoliberal logics and bodily encounter liberatory ideals. The trick, however, is to take that (direct and/or vicarious) experience and tie it to larger social and political thinking, so that the specific kinds of trust, mutual aid, and generosity that abound in sports become not just isolated personal connections, but a force for the common good. I’m talking about sports specifically here, in part because that’s what occupies most of my head, but really it’s an argument about difference, or better put, neighborliness and friendship.

Capitalism has exacted conquest across every social and cultural sphere of our lives—maybe nowhere more so than sports—but this is not fate and the sporting world is worth fighting for, for specific reasons and more generalized political ones, too. Far too few of us (regardless of our existing relationships with sports) really take up that offer properly, but it’s just sitting there. In a cynical and catastrophic era when so many possibilities seem so dim, that’s a powerful project the Left has disdained for far too long. It’s high time to take it up.