Does sport even matter?
Sport, language and growing up
Sport is amazing. It’s illogical, predictable and hypocritical all at the same time. It’s a paradox that we can’t seem to look away from. To some it’s a reflection of us a society and as individuals and to others it’s nothing at all.
But what does it mean? Anything?
In theory sport means absolutely nothing and yet at times, to millions of people, it clearly means everything. Sports’ power is that collective groan from the crowd as the ball hits the post. It’s a catch going to hand in the Sunday cricket leagues. It’s the feeling of connectedness as the final whistle sounds and the tensions fade from thousands at once. It’s not in the words of the commentators, but in the memories of the all consuming effort, the elation of winning and the despair of losing.
But it isn’t for everyone.
My girlfriend on the whole does not enjoy sport. She tries, but she cannot seem to grasp what it is that I adore about watching grown adults spend an allotted amount of time playing along to arbitrary rules. For her, there is no anchor to a life lived playing and watching sport.
Honestly, I have a hard time defending it. There is something about sport that isn’t done justice by my pleading of ‘passion’ and ‘skill’. There is something in sport that exists beyond what I can manage to put into words.
My ego demands that rather than accept that I am incapable of expressing myself, I posit that it’s language itself that is failing. Language is the one that cannot give voice to the real meaning of sport, not me.
Now watch me try and prove this with words.
This may get messy. But if you do persevere I promise you’ll feel just a little different about sport. Or you won’t.
The crux of my argument is below. In a big ‘fuck you’ to all the essays I’ve written in the past 10 years I’m going to smatter through inconsistencies and unexplained tangents and just generally abuse the rubric for a ‘well-written essay’. I expect a solid C- in return.
As such, this is my contention:
Sport is fascinating because it exists outside of language. It’s unassailably personal, crosses into all domains of modern society. Players and spectators alike do not need language to engage in sport. As such it’s something we can connect meaning to directly without articulation, without sacrifice and without the alteration of the personal meaning it bears with it .
So where does this come from? I’ll bullet it to make it quicker but this is my (I’ll admit fairly basic) understanding;
- Meaning is how we, humanity, try to make sense of what we absorb from the world around us;
- Language is the means by which we give voice to this meaning;
- Because everyone interacts with the world differently, no two interpretations of language can be exactly the same;
- The result of this flawed interaction is that the meaning you originally intended to express fails to be communicated.
For bonus points: if you listen to some opinions, both the original meaning and the inferred meaning are casualties of this flawed attempt at interaction.
Which sucks and can get depressing… so we can just ignore that.
So where does this first impression of sport come from?
Childhood.
Sport is just a glorified version of play. It’s an adults version of play.
Children, across the globe, from the poorest children in Africa to the wealthiest little bastards in Manhattan. It’s unavoidably human. By the age of four, when children begin to really communicate they have taken part in, and most importantly attributed value to, play. Without words or communication an idea has formed of what play is.
The actions and behaviour of adults hold more meaning for children. As they grow up sport carries all the values inherited from play; winning and losing, effort and capitulation — but it has the added meaning associated with adulthood heaped onto it. Sport’s physical nature and almost universal saturation means that at no point does anyone ever really ask you, ‘Why sport?’ and if they did, you’ve already formed a meaning associated to sport that predates language, and as such you’d be unlikely to be able to answer (see paragraph 1).
It’s this feeling that stays with us to the threshold of adulthood. So that as we play or watch sport we are taken back to the original meaning we placed onto sport as a child. The ‘play’ lessons remain, while the sport accumulates more and more meaning and passion as we grow and experience it until we reach the threshold of adulthood.
At this point that a large portion of the meaning of sport becomes self-propagating. As adulthood realigns the meanings of our entire life, so it does to sport, but at its core remains the inexplicable meaning inherited from the unadulterated act of childhood ‘play’.
Sport can be all things to all people, at whatever stage of life. Sport can take a break for a few years and reignite later in life, or it can carry on being important to someone forever because of the subjective nugget of personal meaning wedged at its core.
My own meaning is play fighting with my brothers. It’s backyard cricket and classic catches. It’s watching football with my father. It’s a run out from point in Under 14's. It’s vomiting after squash. It’s serving double faults and choking in big moments. It’s beers spilling four at a time. It’s pizza and drinking on the last Saturday in September. It’s effort, passion, skill, satisfaction, desire and just a touch of something I can’t put into words.
So did you learn anything from this article?
Probably not. You already knew that sport was great.
