America the Sporting

Hey, let’s talk about sport! I love sport, and I have reason to believe I am far from alone in that regard. Sport is a dynamic part of the contemporary society, filling the airwaves and consuming weekends across the world.

What I really want to explore is the intersection of sport and religion. I have spent the vast majority of my life actively engaged in both sport and religion, having grown up dividing my weeknights between sporting practices and church meetings, like many Americans have. I then spent a decade as a youth pastor before coming to the realization that I was having a bigger impact in the lives of youth as a soccer coach than I was from the pulpit. At that point I transitioned to coaching full time and spent two decades traveling the world as a soccer coach.

Coaching soccer took me to England, Mexico, Prague, and every one of these United States. I got to see the world while teaching the game I had loved since I was a boy. It was the greatest life I could ask for. Along the way I got to see how sport is embodied in different cultures, and I developed some ideas about what sport means to us today, ideas that I’m going to share over a series of posts on this blog.

I am, my worldwide travels notwithstanding, quintessentially American. My perspective of sport and the role it plays in the modern world is colored by the fact that I grew up here playing sports, made my living here coaching sports, and spend a great deal of my free time here watching sports. My discussion of sport can’t be anything but a discussion of sport from an American point of view.

America is a great place to focus this discussion of sport, as America has to be the sportingest sporting culture that has ever sported, in breadth, at least, if not depth. We Americans sport casually, passively, competitively, and professionally. We have fantasy games about our sport, gambling to bandy our money about our sport, and video games to pretend to be playing sports.

Part of what sets America apart from the rest of the world, sporting-wise, is that the sporting calendar in America goes year round, with even the quieter summer months filled with baseball, women’s basketball, and domestic soccer, and that’s just the professional sports. At least two of the Big Five Men’s Professional sports—the leagues represented by the NBA, the NFL, MLB, the NHL, and MLS—are in action every month of the year, and the much broader selection of college sports has an even more crowded calendar.

America is so sporting that it spawned the first sports television network just dedicated to watching and commenting upon sports, ESPN, which has grown to be the most expensive network channel in the standard television package, costing almost as much as the rest of the network offerings combined. ESPN has since inspired a number of spin-off sports channels both in America and around the world, as everyone tries to get their own slice of the giant sports marketing revenue pie. Every year the Super Bowl sets new records for the most expensive commercial slots, as all but one of the thirty most-watched television broadcasts in the United State’s history were the end of the season football games.

Don’t get me wrong, the rest of the world does the sport thing, too, with passion and fervor all their own. The entire Indian subcontinent gets pumped about their cricket; Aussies are all hyped about their rugby and the game they call Aussie rules football that looks exactly like rugby. The table tennis environment in China is fierce and competitive. Everyone everywhere loves the game we call soccer and the rest of the world calls football (on account of primarily manipulating a ball with one’s foot). Sport is a pretty big deal, the world over. I mean, the only things that over 3.5 billion people have ever done together are breathing and watching a sporting event (World Cup 2018).

And to think, this sporting all started with a little respectful decapitation among neighbors.

From what archeological and sociological research indicate, the earliest example of sport in the way I intend to discuss it was an ancient central American game, a solid 700 years older than the Olympics, which I will address shortly.

The first sport deserving of the name was a ball game played by two teams on an elliptical court where the object of the game was to throw the ball through a hole in the end of the walls, kind of like quidditch minus the whole flying bit and the game breaking snitch. Also, the losing captain, or even the entire team, was usually subject to a ritual beheading. I call this the first sport because the complexity is pretty distinct from simple racing, which it appears humans have done ever since first learning how to run, but I’m not going to consider simple races a sport, for the purpose of this discussion.

This is the axe I have to grind, my own, personal axe, but I’m not going to be too onerous about it. Here’s the thing. I’m going to consider sport a dynamic athletic contest where one side is actively trying to hinder or stop the other side. You need to play some sort of defense, in a word. So I guess we’ll allow marathons where you can block other runners, but not sprints where you are lane protected and certainly nothing decided by time trials or judges. Or at least, not solely decided by judges. I’m in favor of counting boxing, but not figure skating. In any event, regardless where someone might come down on say, gymnastics or competitive cheerleading, I think we can all recognize that there is something distinct about a game with teams, using a ball (or puck, or even a birdie), with complex rules.

I am inclined to include races where you are actively blocking other competitors, even if you are piloting some form of transport. Horse racing seems like a sport, the equestrian jumping competitions, less so. Race car driving should count in the races where collisions happen, because you can clearly play some defense, but the drag races where it’s just a sprint to the finish, not so much.

To be clear, I don’t mean to impugn athletic contests, which are very demanding and skill intensive, by classifying them as not-sport. I just want to focus on the more dynamic interaction between opposing forces. Golf is still a challenging and pleasant way to spend a Sunday afternoon; it would just be more sporting if the players were allowed to interfere with each other. Similarly, gymnastics would be more enthralling if the opposing team got to try and stop your vault. The vast majority of what has become the modern Olympics, in fact, are little more than compelling athletic competitions that are in no way sports. I mean, where is the sport in seeing who can fling a discus farther, really? Add someone jumping in the air to try and swat your discus, however, and now we’re talking.

I would be considerably more inclined to include among the ranks of sport some of the more modern examples of electronic sports. The case against e-sports is that they aren’t particularly athletic, though I am of a mind to credit the hand-eye coordination of video game controller manipulation as a physically demanding enough task to qualify. The question here is where the line is between simple games and full sports. In my estimation, a physical requirement, like hand-eye coordination, plus a real-time stipulation would distinguish most games from sports. Speed chess is closer to being a sport than a board game like Settlers of Katan. Poker, with the real time reading of opponents and the deceptive nature of bluffing, is more sporting than blackjack where you just count the cards and play the probabilities. (Full disclosure: I am banned from three different casinos for successfully counting cards at blackjack.)

Regardless what you want to consider a sport, I’m not going to fight you. Anything that involves striving to improve performance in a competitive setting performed before an audience will work for the vast majority of what I intend to discuss about the role of sport in contemporary culture. It doesn’t really matter if it is a sport or an athletic contest when millions of people are watching together and engaging in the moment in real time, or even on video delay.

I want to start back at the beginning though, with the first sport to really distinguish itself as such. This first sport, the ground-bound, blood-letting version of quidditch, for sure, fluctuated in both structure and popularity through the millennia it appears to have been played. While it has become popular to talk about sport as a metaphor for war, there is evidence to suggest this early sport was actually used as a proxy for war, with games arranged to settle the conflict between allied regional people groups. The art from some of the Mesoamerican periods suggests the contest would sometimes be accompanied by the beheading of one or both of the competing teams, but losing four able-bodied contributors to an early agrarian society is considerably better than however many both sides might lose in open battle.

This is the kind of sociological development that happens when your culture can accept that conflict doesn’t have to conclude with genocide, in a world where one could want to win without destroying a valuable ally and trading partner. A world before the absolutism of colonialism, in point of fact, but I digress.

To get back to my initial desire to talk about sport and religion, sport and religion have often been closely intertwined. In some cases sports have grown directly out of religious rituals or festivals, as seen in this Central American ballgame or the Grecian games like the Olympics that aren’t altogether sports. Sports serves as a metaphor for religious discipline and focus, notably in Hindu and Christian religions, as verses in the holy texts compare striving after salvation to a runner focused on winning the prize. In some eastern disciplines the practice of some competitions like archery or martial arts serve directly as religious disciplines to the same end.

In any event, sport and religion have a strongly inter-tangled history. The Mesoamerican ballgame, the ancient Gaelic shinty (field hockey precursor), Indian kabiddi (a breath-holding game of raider-tag, totally awesome), and the Olympic Games all have mythological origin stories attached about the relevant deities teaching a young humanity how to explore and enjoy their athletic capacity. Then Christianity entered the picture demanding that everyone take their sports a little less seriously and their religion a little more seriously, and the great separation of Church and Sport was achieved.

Kind of, anyway.

Sport and religion have a long history together. Well, if not together, at least side by side. In general terms, sport has risen in popularity in times of peace, well stability, in any event, while religion rises to ascendancy in times of war. We are currently living through a time of relative peace, and sport is rising in popularity. Sport is pervasive, dominating the television airwaves even in an age of unprecedented television media.

I will delve into this more at a later date, but the roles both sport and religion are taking in our society have shifted over the last hundred years or so, in several ways, and I’m looking forward to exploring how we are engaging in both of them.