What Is Sport: A Controversial Essay about Why Humans Practice Sports
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My lifelong passion for human behavior and sports has led me to think a lot about why we practice and enjoy all these sports. In this book I shall explore the underlying reasons why we experience and organize sports in certain specific ways, both as spectators and as participants. Why do sports create so much individual and collective joy? Why do we have goals, rules, balls, equipment, objects to hit? Why are victories so important? Why are fields, arenas, courts, courses, similar across different sports? Apart from the obvious reasons (health, fun, competitiveness), why do we practice sports?...
My lifelong passion for human behavior and sports has led me to think a lot about why we practice and enjoy all these sports. In this book I shall explore the underlying reasons why we experience and organize sports in certain specific ways, both as spectators and as participants. Why do sports create so much individual and collective joy? Why do we have goals, rules, balls, equipment, objects to hit? Why are victories so important? Why are fields, arenas, courts, courses, similar across different sports? Apart from the obvious reasons (health, fun, competitiveness), why do we practice sports? What makes humans want to practice sports and get better? What makes us create a sport? Why have some sports become so popular? Why are professional athletes so popular? Why is the sport business so successful? Why are many of our most vivid memories linked to great sports victories? What links sports to our unconscious mind and basic reproductive and sexual behavior? How do sports tap into our deepest sources of desire, enjoyment, loyalty, passion and love? Why do sports fans evince a love of their teams that borders on the erotic? Sports originated from basic necessities of survival. By reproducing actions of hunting and fighting, humans practiced the activities that would help them survive and reproduce. For example, the practice of archery, horseback riding, running, javelin throwing and so many others, originate in the refining of survival, hunting skills and fighting techniques. Competitions between men helped (and still help) develop the physical and mental skills needed in essential activities of survival and natural selection. This form of natural training was also agreeable and enjoyable in most cases and had the advantage of decreasing the possibility of losing one's life at war or on the hunt. The essential characteristics or primitive physical activities were survival skills, practicing the skills needed for defense against natural enemies. Similarly, sports were essentially "survival games," or "natural sports" as many of the sporting activities had their source in the same basic skills necessary to thrive in a natural world in which life could be, as Hobbes observed, "nasty, brutish and short." When we look at early forms of sport used by primitive people in Western culture (European prehistory), we often see a warlike basis for many activities. "Success in sports required the mastery of the basic skills needed in war. We have traditionally considered this warlike basis of sport to be a common trait but it is not true for all primitive societies. However, even though primitive sport was not always warlike, or war oriented, it was taken seriously." (Freeman, 1997, p. 61-62). So this is the first reason that sports will always have a claim on our time and enthusiasm: it teaches us the basic physical skills that we need to survive, thrive, fight our enemies, build our communities and impose our desires and plans onto the world around us. But there is another reason we are so passionately connected to sports. We are not merely practical creatures who want nothing more than to not die! We are not satisfied to simply continue to feed ourselves, to gather resources, to biologically reproduce. We also - unlike all other animals - insist on doing so meaningfully. Sexuality, for humans, is not simply something that we do; it is something that we think about, that we represent to ourselves. It is something that speaks to us in symbolic language. So it is demonstrable, as we will see, that many of the modern sports are popular because these sports replicate and symbolize sexual behavior and express inherent sexual energy. All living organisms' basic function is to reproduce and that basic energy and desire is replicated, for humans, in myriad ways in everyday life (art, dancing, working, building, playing). Apart from all the obvious and historical reasons we practice sports, I will argue that at a deeply encrypted organic l
