A Philosophy of Sport

Liam Hogan
Jul 25, 2017 · 3 min read

Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man’s physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.

Charles Baudelaire

What inspires us to play sport? Are we inspired by acts of extreme fitness and discipline or is it artistry and creativity? Can the two be separated?

Sport, contrary to logic, is not about winning. Victory is but one of the byproducts. So is defeat.

Sport is about expression, communication, imagination. Rhythm, timing, anticipation, intelligence, concentration, emotion, stress, trauma.

It is physical creation that flows in reaction to competition and the constraints of a game. In my opinion there is one athlete who embodies this sporting paradox of art and industry. His name is Roger Federer.

You see, Roger Federer is a genius who does not play the ball, but plays with the ball. While the purpose is to win a point, or a game or a match, the way that this is attempted matters just as much as the result.

I remember how the similarly ethereal tennis players like Stefan Edberg and Steffi Graf inspired my brother and I to race outside our home every Wimbledon summer, waving tennis rackets and setting up an imaginary net across the road.

We were not the only ones.

Children, who were never formally taught how to play tennis, streamed from their homes each year in an exuberant bid to mimic their tennis heroes on TV. The games we played were far more important that the result.

It is Federer’s juxtaposition of transcendence and ruthlessness that inspires us to create, to play and to express ourselves.

But as David Foster Wallace once wrote

All this is true, and yet none of it really explains anything or evokes the experience of watching this man play. Of witnessing, firsthand, the beauty and genius of his game. You more have to come at the aesthetic stuff obliquely, to talk around it, or — as Aquinas did with his own ineffable subject — to try to define it in terms of what it is not.

But I will try.

Watching Federer play reminds me of what it was like being a child.

He plays with imagination, risk and wonder.

Childhood recaptured at will.

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