to audience to critic to community.
The argument that names professional sports as bad, but playing in the park as good, is lazy and obscuring. We have to take it all on, and understand playing and watching, participating and spectating, performer and audience as bound up together, in part because observing skilled, graceful, creative, and powerful bodies in performance is an abidingly great pleasure.
We wouldn’t make that claim about music or theater or any other creative activity—no one would argue that the kid playing guitar in her basement is good, but when she gets paid to play onstage it is debased and corrosive. We absolutely, unequivocally have to talk about the contours of high-performance economics, the nature of spectacle, the outrageous exploitations embedded in the sporting world, the total bullshit inequities, the way arena logics are maiming cities: all of that is exactly what I think taking sports seriously requires. But we cannot have those conversations if we do not take all of it seriously, and with serious respect.
I’m not suggesting that sports and other forms of creative expression that we claim as “art” are directly equivalent. In the same way that activists and theorists have blown the doors off high and low arts distinctions, I want to expand our definitions of creative expression. These distinctions and the bourgeois judgements that follow in their wake become murky quickly: where’s the line between rhythmic gymnastics (ostensibly sport) and ballroom dancing (art) for example? Or the sport of figure skating and art of ballet? There are minor differences that become greater with other examples (say football and sculpture), but I do think it’s useful to place all of it on a continuum of creative expression, with varying and shifting relationships to competition, and imbue all of it with relevance and potentiality.
Who and what has defined “sport” and “art” is helpful in understanding the trajectory, and that’s a conversation I am going to return to later in a little more depth, but let me just note that those are not absolute categories, and the definitions are wholly constructed. As Louis Menand writes, talking about the 2012 Summer Games:
Twenty-six sports will be played … with medals awarded in three hundred and two events. The majority of those medals will be given in sports that originated, in their modern form, in Britain: archery, athletics (track and field), boxing, badminton, field hockey, football (soccer), rowing, sailing, swimming, water polo, table tennis, and tennis. Britain is also the birthplace of curling, cross-country, cricket, croquet, golf, squash, and rugby—which is scheduled to become an Olympic sport in 2016. No other country comes close. Three Olympic sports originated in the United States: basketball, volleyball, and the triathlon, which was invented in 1974. Two originated in Germany: handball and gymnastics.8
It’s not too much of a stretch to think of modern sports (Olympic and otherwise) as the (spectacularly) monetized performance and promulgation of empire.
This is essentially true of most contemporary sports. Certain competitions seem to be timeless: who can run the fastest, lift the heaviest thing, walk the furthest along a log, etc. But what turns games into sports is standardization so that people can compete against one another using common measurements. Throwing a stick as far as you can is a game, but it’s the sport of javelin when the field and stick are standardized. The invention, regulation, and bureaucratization of specific games as sport, however, has not happened willy-nilly or outside political and cultural contexts: the definitions, regulation, discipline, dissemination, and uses of sport have often been bent to racialist and heteronormative, masculine ends. Asking why sports are so militaristically designed, or why speed and strength are valued so much as opposed to say, rhythm and balance, is something like asking why colonialists have felt compelled to impose their wills and worldviews on the rest of the globe.
Similarly, art has always claimed to civilize, and certain forms of creativity rarely make the cut, getting relegated to “folk” or “primitive” art, or “craft” status, or just derided. Much of the art world’s historically aspirational flaunt is a Cartesian prejudice for mind over body, and soul over mind. That’s why “art” claims to elevate us, to lift us out of our corporal and sensual lives, with all the deeply problematic metaphysical assumptions and epistemologies that infers. Sports can turn those elitist presumptions back on themselves and insist that materialist collisions, bodies-on-bodies interactions, are where everyday politics is played out, understood, and contested. It is a primary site for apprehending who we are, how we get along with other people who may be very different from ourselves, and what ethical grounds we ascribe to.
I also think we can ask more of sports than just straight rabble-rousing. There is a constituency of political fans who view sports instrumentally, pointing to specific incidents, athletes or events as progressive flashpoints—like the Los Suns, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, Billie Jean King, or Muhammad Ali getting stripped of his title. Those, and so many others like them, are super-important for sure—galvanizing moments, and icons to rally around and incite the imagination. But only seeing the specific seems an inadequate rendition of politics to me. Sports matter in-and-of-themselves, not just because of how they might be leveraged.
We should be singing the praises, trumpeting, and defending any and every athlete who stands up, whether it’s Jackie Robinson, John Carlos, Brittney Griner, or the kid who comes out to her high school field hockey team: that shit takes real bravery and a consistency of courage. Because sports are so volatile and so powerful, every impact reverberates something fierce. Think of the battles that ensue when a young woman just wants to play on a boy’s football team, let alone the shit storm Ali caused. It’s said, and I think maybe it’s true, that the money shot for queer rights will be when a revered currently-playing athlete in a major sport comes out. Jason Collins probably isn’t high-profile enough to fit that bill, but maybe. Magic Johnson might well have been the tipping point that finally undermined HIV/AIDS prejudices.
But leave that aside for a minute. Politics is more than iconic events or star-struck moments. You can’t participate in or spectate sports without constantly articulating values, running into difference, talking about what matters and why, and being forced to figure out who you have responsibility for and why. Our core political ideals are always being performed in the gym, rink, ring, field, or track and then tested materially and bodily.
Grappling with a neoliberal era necessarily means confronting what matters. Late capitalism relentlessly reduces everything to commodity. Everyone is market fodder and everywhere is a potential profit center: nothing really matters so much that it cannot be bought and sold. Resisting neoliberalism requires us to imagine, carve out, and create non-market spaces where social and cultural relationships are animated by incommensurability. I submit that sports can be joyful, powerful, and sweet, but a whole lot more than that too.
1 Noam continued: “I suppose that’s also one of the basic functions it [sports] serves in the society in general it occupies the population, and keeps them from trying to get involved with things that really matter.” He said a lot more about sports here: http://terasima.gooside.com/article1sports2spectator.html
2 For a good discussion here, please see: Richard Schechner, Performance Theory, New York : Routledge, 1988.
3 Yup, these are real prices.
4 A quote from Antonio Gramsci.
5 It’s probably worth noting that part of the reason he was upset was because the previous speakers had been discussing the foreclosure crisis and displacement in Baltimore as a result of a new biotech facility. That is some horrible shit that matters unequivocally and stirs up some deep feelings. I totally understand and support his pissed-offness.