Why Sport Matters
Sometimes I wonder why I give so much of my time, so much of myself, and so much meaning to sport.
Of course this is never in the act of actually watching live sport (or even highlights from years and decades ago — thank you, YouTube!). I am too much in the present in those moments to think of anything — all is sport, sport is all.
But when it’s all done, when I am emotionally spent and need a drink to calm my nerves, I ask: why are you doing this to yourself? I don’t think it’s unhealthy but I have no doubt it’d be something I’d quell if I suffered from any heart conditions.
All this to say, that sport matters to me. Which is why I keep wondering: why does it matter?
It isn’t for financial reasons. I have never made or even looked to make money off sport. I was never that talented an athlete that anyone would pay me to play a sport for a living. Perhaps you think it’s because I am possibly a gambler. Few things in life are as uninteresting as gambling is to me. Any urge that hopes to profit so much on chance and randomness is a path towards anxiety and stress. It seems a toxic relationship to anything, much less to something as timeless as sport.
Timeless. I’ve always like that word.
And it’s perhaps a clue to why sport should matter to us all.
The modern Olympics is undoubtedly the greatest of stages for sporting excellence, but it began — and endures today — as a homage to Western European culture. The Olympics in ancient Greece was as much a religious event as it was sporting and entertainment; it was an act of gratitude to Zeus for His bounty — because only in bounty can the mind and the body turn to sport. Greek thought endures even today because they made guesswork and speculation into myth and art. Their guess on this front was half correct.
Today, in every court or every field, in every corner of the world, child or adult, people of all kinds, from every culture, play or have played a sport, however well or poorly.
And in doing so, we are saying thanks to ancestors older than Zeus. Older than oldest of Gods. I believe we are paying tribute to our oldest human ancestors in an unconscious act of almost religious gratitude towards the earliest humans.
What made our ancient proto-human different from the rest of ape kind who share a common ancestor with us?
The clues to the answer lies in all our sciences, all our arts and all our humanities. If the story of human evolution can be summarized succinctly, this may be one way: our earliest ancestors were the first ‘conscious and conscientious competitors’ who decided to take on the forces of nature, on the grandest of all sporting fields: earth. These forces of nature — the laws of biology and physics: the former manifested itself most tangibly as competition for food and survival; while the laws of physics made itself known most physically in the form of weather.
Why did our most ancient ancestors choose then to wrestle these forces of nature?
Most species, extinct and roaming the wild today, are content to subject themselves to these laws.
Not the proto-human.
They saw their lot and thought, ‘no.’
I believe that in this act of defiance lies the primal reason why we play and love sport.
That defiance allowed us to walk erect, hunt for food, gather, farm, build civilizations, create art, build towers, fly, sail, connect across vast distances, even reveal the word of God a few times. That defiance has transformed our species, allowing us to go on a ruthless streak of seemingly endless victory over nature.
The Anthropocene, the geological epoch that we occupy, is living testimony to that victory. Streaks of dominance though, as all sports fans know, never last. When a dominant team or athlete begin sliding, it is often precipitous, but long and drawn out at the same time, often crashing into depths that fans would have nightmares about for years. Sport people and tragics of every sport know this to be true.
In answering that question of why, I think we can find insights into how: how, for instance, are we going to come together as a species to tackle the truly global challenges we face today, and will face in the future, when biology and physics return to dominance in terrifying new ways?
At least that’s what I think.
This blog is a documentation of the journey to finding out for myself.
It will also be a love letter to sport.
