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

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GIVING IT 110%

It’s pretty common to condescend to sports as territory really only fit for hormone-addled teens, Neanderthals, and developmentally-delayed retrogrades. Sort of strangely, this attitude shows up in a whole variety of guises, constantly embedded, reiterated, and repercussed by sports fans, casual observers, and antagonists alike, and amounts to an assumptive abandonment of the sporting world as worthy of serious engagement.

Sophisticated “thinking” people of all ideological persuasions have seemingly always held condescending attitudes towards sports—and that’s for lots of obvious reasons, and subtler ones that dovetail with a generalized disdain (from the left as much as the right) for working-class, everyday culture. Aside from the occasional Plimpton-esque (or Mailer/Oates/Remnick-esque) quasi-anthropological foray, intellectuals (and I’m using that term as loosely as imaginable) overwhelmingly dismiss the sporting world.

No less than Noam Chomsky articulated a cheap (but super common) line when he suggested that if people paid as much attention to politics as they do to sports we’d have a much better world.ssss1 It’s the frequent default stance of leftists, progressives, and liberals everywhere, even those who love sports: this tired old position that sports are the contemporary opiate of the masses. But Noam never would have said that about music, dance, theater, painting, or poetry, and that contradiction is what I’m after here. I want us to consider sports as seriously as we take other “high” art forms, to understand sports as sitting squarely within a spectrum of creative expression, and just as worthy of our serious attention, engagement, reflection, love, and respect. Sports and art are not the same thing, but those delineations are arbitrary ones, and they largely exist to stabilize class pretensions and social positions. I suggest we eviscerate those definitions entirely. ssss1