Sport: An Historical Phenomenology

ANTHONY SKILLEN

Sport often seems to teeter on the edge, on one side of the entertain-
ment industry, on the other of cheating violent aggression: from a
make-believe simulacrum of serious play to a nasty chemically
enhanced descent into a Hobbesian state of nature. Such perversions
lend credibility to reductive views of sport itself as a metonymic feature
of capitalism. But that sport as entertainment means fixing it to pro-
duce exciting outcomes and amplifying capacities to superhuman pro-
portions, while sport as aggression means treating rules as mere
obstacles to brute dominance, shows how far we in fact are from these
abysses, even in the days of the Coca Cola/Nike Olympics, Vinny Jones
and cricket sledging. In this essay, I try to delineate through history—
from Homer to . . . Gomer?—a common culture of sport and sports-
manship that, with its excesses and perversions, continues to operate as
one, albeit complex, ideal of human excellence.
George Carey set off a ripple of laughter at his enthronement as
Archbishop of Canterbury by quoting Liverpool Football Club's old
manager, Bill Shankly's 'Football is not a matter of life or death; it's
more important than that'. But he was in the highest tradition:
You know, do you not, that at the sports all the runners run in the
race, though only one wins the prize. Like them, run to win! But
every athlete goes into strict training. They do it to win a fading
wreath, we a wreath that never fades . . . I am like the boxer who
does not beat the air.1
We have more than one model and there is more than one way of sport's
distinctness from the normal run of life. 'Only a game' suggests an
appropriate lack of serious purpose. 'It's not cricket' assumes cricket as
a paradigm of human worth.

Greatness, Games and the Greeks

Hannah Arendt, learning, she claimed, from the Ancient Athenians,
divided life into three main areas: 'labour', 'work' and 'action'.2Labour,

1
Epistle of St. Paul, I Corinthians, 9, 24-27.
2
The Human Condition, (Chicago University Press, 1958).

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Anthony Skillen

the lowest category and the lot of the lowest in society, was the neces-
sary drudgery whose aim is biological survival. Animal in aim, labour
is, as she conceives it, animal, even 'mechanical' in form: mindless and
repetitive and, like any biological process in that its outcome is lost in
consumption or disposal. This is servile activity under the thumb of
necessity. Work, the next level, consists in the more or less skilled
production of more or less durable artefacts—the vessels made from the
labour-extracted clay, in which the labourer's produce is served. This is
the realm of craft, of the making of a distinctively human world out of
the materials nature yields. Though reflecting the individual skill of
their producers, work's creations are, like the outcomes of labour,
subordinated to ends beyond themselves: shelter, nourishment, war-
fare—to utility. Action, the highest realm, consists of what might more
idiomatically be called 'deeds', of public and publicly esteemed actions
of individuals living in or stepping into the 'arena' or 'stage' of decisions,
enterprises, struggles, whose outcome is seldom predictable and whose
consummation is glory. Achilles, 'doer of great deeds and speaker of
great words', is a paradigm, his heroics immortalized in popular tradi-
tion as well as in Homer's Iliad. Whereas the workman's creation may
survive for ages, his own position tends to anonymity. But the hero, the
participant in great affairs, constitutes his public identity through his
conduct, and it is in the public eye and ear that such actions are embarked
on. Hence, whatever their objective consequences, actions do not
outlive their completion unless they are recounted, remembered and
commemorated. The man of action lives in the realm of honour and
glory. Insignificance, neglect, dishonour, derision are what he fears
more than the destruction of objects (work's products) or of life
(labour's concern).
In On Revolution, Arendt gives a wonderful illustration of what she
means by the spirit of 'action'. She quotes the American revolutionary
John Adams:
The poor man's conscience is clear; yet he is ashamed . . . He feels
himself out of sight of all others, groping in the dark. Mankind takes
no notice of him . . . In the midst of a crowd, at church, in the market
. . . he is in as much obscurity as he would be in a garret or a cellar.
He is not disapproved, censured or reproached; he is only not seen
. . . To be wholly overlooked and to know it are intolerable.3
Arendt's categories are open to criticism. 'Labour' and 'work' for
example are defined by their goals, yet she assumes that they are
characterized equally by their modes—mechanical against skilled. (In
this context, by the way, she draws a superbly illuminating contrast
3
On Revolution (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), 63.

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between craft specialization and Adam Smith-Henry Ford type 'divi-

sion of labour'.) But artefacts can be produced 'mechanically' and
amazing skill can go into the struggles of survival, let alone that most
'immediately consumable' good, a meal. Arendt tends to assume that
labour, being under the rule of necessity ('enslavement to nature'), is by
the same token under the thumb of masters ('enslavement to man'). But
these dimensions should be kept analytically separate. The position of
the artist, even if we confine our attention to the ancients: of the famous
sculptors, architects and poetic singers of deeds, is anomalous in a
scheme which counts art 'work'. Arendt valorizes Athenian democracy
and the public forum of speeches as 'conversation'. But she plays down
the decisive role of 'great' demagogues in whipping up the assembly to
fervent militarism; she writes shy of the invidious harshness of the
'agonistic' struggle for greatness and of the bloody heartlessness of
much of the aristocratic action most bathed in glory at the time. Plato's
critique of the corruptibility inherent in the 'timarchic' life:4 of the
tendency to deceit, and of the way reputation becomes a means to
material advantage rather than a sacred trust, is underplayed in
Arendt's urge to contrast ancient glory with modern servility. Arendt's
trio might be thought of as possible dimensions of many activities:
there is labour, and work, involved in the most consummate actions.
None the less, as a framework within which to develop an Olympian
perspective on the modern world, labour-work-action are invaluable
categories. But it is sport, unmentioned by Arendt, that is action par
excellence.
Although warfare and political debate take place in the pursuit of
'policies', of concrete objectives, it is as constituents of a culture, of a
way of life and of the self-identity of an individual and of a people that
actions, for Arendt, have their primary meaning. Homer voices this
vision: Achilles, eager to avenge Patroclus,
made sign to the Achaean host and shook his head to show that no
man was to aim a dart at Hector, lest another might win the glory of
having hit him and he himself might come in second {Iliad 367).
Hector, realizing himself outmatched, responds (to the inevitability of
a fight—in full view of the Gods and the Trojans):
My doom has come upon me; let me not die ingloriously and without
a struggle, but let me first do some great thing that shall be told
among men hereafter {Iliad 369).5
4
Republic, 547-550. But see Laws 795—8, for Plato on the significance of
games.
5
The translation is Samuel Butler's (1898). (London: Jonathan Cape,
1936).

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Achilles is determined not only to defeat Hector but to dishonour him.

Having refused Hector's plea for an agreement about due treatment of
the vanquished's body, and having killed his rival champion, with
vengeful viciousness and in contempt of the dying man's last prayer, he
seeks (unsuccessfully) to render Hector's body unrecognizable and fit
only as meat for dogs and vultures, by dragging it ostentatiously around
behind his chariot. As a further mark of the Homeric hero's preoccupa-
tion with honour, he elects, though Troy is at his mercy, to devote a day
to games in celebration of Patroclus' funeral. No Francis Drake-like
demonstration of nonchalance, these games are an appropriate and
necessary tribute. No time out from the real struggle, they have their
own stature as part of the realm of action. The gods, indeed, watch and
intervene just as they do in the Trojan war itself.
That heroic excellence is some distance from Socratic virtue is
manifest from the fifth century Pindar:
Whensoever a man who hath done noble deeds descendeth to the
abode of Hades without the meed of song, he hath spent his strength
and his breath in vain and winneth but little pleasure by his toil,
whereas thou hast glory shed upon thee by the soft-toned lyre and by
the sweet flute, and thy fame waxeth widely (Olympic Ode X).
Again:
When toilsome contests have been decided the best of healers is good
cheer and songs that are the sage daughters of the muses are wont to
soothe the victor by their touch. Nor doth warm water soothe the
limbs in such welcome wise as praise that is linked with the lyre.
Louder than deeds liveth the word, whatsoever it be that the
tongue,—by the favour of the Graces, draweth forth from the depth
of the heart (Nemean Ode IV). 6
I have passed from the heroism of war to the heroism of the athletic
contest. It ought also to be noted that Pindar not only sees his commem-
orative odes as constitutively establishing the champion's glory, ('one
thing thirsts for another, but victory loves song best') but, contrary to
Arendt's placings, accords his own lyric an equal status to that of the
magnificent athlete's performance. For the ode shares divinity-seeking
perfection with the bodily action of the victor. It is not only a matter of

6
Translations from Moses Finley's The Olympic Games, the First Thousand
Years (London, Chatto & Windus, 1976), pages 1191 and 347. It wasn't
Pindar who composed the doggerel by which the teams at the 1992 Winter
Olympics were introduced:
'Stand now and sing if you're a fan o'
The wonderful team from beautiful Canada'.

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action's dependence on words for its fame, nor as if the poem belonged
alongside scalps and armour as a lasting trophy; the poetic celebration
appropriately matches the athlete's glory in another mode and thereby
lays its own claim to greatness.
Werner Jaeger expressed this intimate union in the following terms:
The athlete whom these sculptures portray in the harmonious
strength and nobility of this utmost perfection, lives, feels and speaks
for us again in Pindar's poetry, and through his spiritual energy and
religious gravity, still affects us with the strange power which is given
to the unique and irrecoverable achievements of the human spirit.
For it was a uniquely precious moment when a god-intoxicated but
human world of Greece saw the height of divinity in the human body
and soul raised to a perfection high above earthly powers and when in
those Gods of human shape the effort of man to copy that divine
model through which artists had realized the law of perfection,
unattainable yet imperious, found its purpose and its happiness.7
To the extent that man seeks to partake of divine excellence, the earthly
ambitions of territory or wealth, let alone of mere property and material
comfort, are set at low value. Thus does the hero, whether in war or
wrestling match, pray for victory or death. By the same token then, the
sort of greatness alluded to by Arendt, the military and the political, is
inherently compromised by its utilitarian dimension. Sport, games,
play, then, stand out in relief, and not just as relief, in the purity of their
pointlessness. They take place in the arena of the exhibition for its own
sake of heroic virtue: strength, courage, skill, stamina, patience, judg-
ment, quickness of mind, style, and enterprise: of the struggle to attain
one's potential and to excel. Shorn of the mythic lineage of Greek
theology whereby the Gods themselves admire the attainments of their
mortal descendants, such besting requires social acknowledgement,
recognition. We are not now talking only of the 'Aristotelian Principle'
of John Rawls, according to which:
other things being equal, human beings enjoy the exercise of their
realized capacities (their innate or trained abilities) and this enjoy-
ment increases the more the capacity is realized, or the greater its
complexity.8
Such ('workmanlike') pleasures consist in their possibly private exer-
cise. Action's happiness is in fact closer to Robert Nozick's more
Pindaric principle:

7
Paedeia. The Ideals of Greek Culture transl. G. Highet. (Oxford: Black-
well, 1965), 205.
*A Theory of Justice (Harvard University Press, 1971), 426.

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Anthony Skillen

People generally judge themselves by how they fall along the most
important dimensions in which they differ from others.9
Indeed, Aristotle himself has a more public and aristocratic vision of
the happy life than Rawls' cheerful craftsman model allows, for his
'magnificent' gentleman is 'properly' concerned to display his qualities
and to receive due praise.10
There is a salutary contemporary backlash among historians against
the 'mythic' elevation of the Ancient Games by the Victorians and their
inheritors of the ideology of amateurism, of sport for love.11 These
illusions are thought to be immortalized in the Utopian words of the
modern Olympics' founder, Baron de Coubertin:
The important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take
part, as the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the
struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have
fought well.12
On the contrary, such was the attitude to 'taking part' that, not only did
the winner in the Ancient Olympics alone receive a prize, the loser had
to endure such ignominy as this from Pindar:
Alicimedon, by heaven-sent good fortune, but with no slackness in
his own prowess, thrust off from himself on the bodies of four boys, a
most hateful return amid jibes of contempt, while they slink to their
homes unseen . . . Ye know that the grave is forgotten by him who
has won befitting fame (Olympian Ode VIII). 13
And Epictetus says:
In the Olympic Games, you cannot just be beaten and then depart,
but first of all, you will be disgraced, not only before the people of
Athens or Sparta or Nikopoulos but before the whole world.14
Such, moreover, was the attitude to the intrinsic rewards of athletic
prowess, that contests were for big prizes, for which the laurel wreath is

9
Anarchy, State and Utopia (UK: Blackwell, 1974), 243. I criticize
Nozick's ignoring of intrinsic pride in Ruling Illusions (UK: Harvester, 1978),
48-52.
10
Ethics, Book IV.
11
See Finley, op. cit., Donald G. Kyle's Athletics in Ancient Athens
(Leiden: E. S. Brill, 1987) and Waldo E. Sweet's Sport and Recreation in
Ancient Greece (Oxford University Press, 1987).
12
The Baron's quote does not foresee the impact of nationalism on the
Olympics, let alone the move to professionalism, and show business.
13
Finley, op. cit., 91.
14
Discourses 3.22.52 (quoted in Sweet).

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said to have been a mere token. Payment, says Donald Kyle, was taken
for granted,15 while our distinction between amateur and professional
was merely the difference between those in part and those in full-time
training. David Young tells us that a sprinter's income from a major win
in the Fifth Century win was the equivalent of three full years' wages for
a skilled worker, enabling him to buy a fine house and slaves to go with
it.
There was no prize for second at the ancient Olympics. But histo-
rians are rash to assume that, in the inevitably lost oral culture, no
honour attached to good losers, that there was no conception of a
bravely lost fight or race well fought or run. In an event which we shall
examine in more detail below, the paradigmatic funeral games for
Patroclus in the Iliad, Achilles offers not only a first prize for the
chariot race, but a fifth prize, and that in a five man contest. So it would
be unwise to assume that Olympic prizes and Pindar's odes are an
accurate reflection of the distribution of honour. Imagine someone
from your village winning the right to compete in the first place! Nor
should the revisionists be allowed to have all their own way on the issue
of 'professionalism' or 'payment'. For we ought not to assume that the
magnificent prizes offered stood to the successful performance simply
as mere 'payment' for a win, as if the magnificence of the prize were a
matter, not of pride, but only of avarice. In a culture that is both
materialistic and emulative, material 'recognition' was a visible and
durable form of esteem—if a champion athlete is a demigod, he
deserves to live and to be seen to live like one. If, from the other side,
the rich patron of a contest is a great man capable of recognising
greatness in athletic achievement, he had better offer prizes appropriate
to the esteem proclaimed.
If more recent historians are to be trusted, then the fathers of sports
history, such as H. A. Harris16 and E. Norman Gardiner,17 allow
idealism to generate their vision of an amateur aristocratic golden age
replaced only after many decades by the 'Nemesis' of an hitherto
creeping 'professionalism', reaching its peak with the replacement of
Greek athletics by the stadium spectacles of Rome. But the idealists'
fault may have lain more in their chronology than in their sense of
ancient values at play. For it is surely important that, although from the
15
See also 'Professionalism in Archaic and Classical Greek Athletics' David
C. Young. Ancient World 7 (1983) pages 44-5.
16
Harris, Greek Athletes and Athletics (UK: Hutchinson, 1964) and Sport
in Greece and Rome (London: Thames and Hudson, 1972).
17
Gardiner, Athletics of the Ancient World (UK: Oxford, 1930). It seems to
me that the Trinidadian Marxist C. L. R. James's great book on cricket,
Beyond a Boundary (UK: Hutchinson, 1963), is much closer in spirit to these
humanist and Christian historians than to the economic reductionists.

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sixth century BC an Olympic victor could expect to be not only famous

but rich, these riches came to him as triumph from his own city patrons
and from appearance money at 'Prize' Games. The Olympics them-
selves retained the aura of the 'sacred', with the laurel wreath as the
official prize. So 'prize' was conceptually distinct from 'reward'. More-
over, as I have suggested, 'reward' itself was honorifically bestowed and
should itself be distinguished from the more 'alienated' phenomenon of
'income' seen in abstraction from honour. This abstraction had its
concrete expression in athletes' pursuit of the wealth the many games'
prizes offered and in the transfer for gain of athletes' allegiance from
one place to another. But, however frequent, such contempt for honour
was contrary to the norms and ideals of the time: when the reigning
champion Astylus switched nationalities for the 480 Olympics,
His fellow citizens, indignant at what must have seemed an act of
sacrilege, destroyed the statues they had erected in his honour and
turned his house into a common prison.18
This is not the response of a public inured to what we think of as
professionalism. We might expect then that, as today, the most mercen-
ary performers would know that their bread was buttered by maintain-
ing and even exaggerating the trappings of glory as an end in itself, in
preserving the Homeric mystique. The hero's contempt for mere gain
is superbly expressed in the Odyssey. Entertained as an unknown guest
in a royal household, the mighty Odysseus is invited to join the athletic
contest:
I hope, Sir, that you will enter yourself for one or other of our
competitions if you are skilled in any of them—and you must have
gone in for many a one before now. There is nothing that brings any
one so much credit all his life long as the showing of himself a proper
man with his hands and feet.19
Trying to excuse himself from what would be an embarrassing and
revealing pushover, Odysseus pleads that grief make acceptance dis-
agreeable. He is, however, successfully goaded by this worst of insults:
I gather then that you are unskilled in any of the many sports that
men generally delight in. I suppose you are one of those grasping
traders that go about in ships as captains and merchants, and who
think of nothing but of their outward freights and homeward
cargoes. There does not seem to be much of the athlete about you.20
18
Gardiner, op. cit., page 99f.
19
Book VIII. 143; translation of Samuel Butler (1900) (London: Jonathan
Cape, 1922).
20
Op. cit. 158.

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But it is on the Iliad that I want to concentrate:

He brought prizes from the ships—cauldrons, tripods, horses and
mules, noble oxen, women with fair girdles, and swart iron.21
Thus in commemorating Patroclus does Achilles set up the stakes as he
summons the contenders from among his athletic military elite. It is
unnecessary to labour the fierce competitiveness of the proceedings. I
want rather to emphasize the dimension of 'sportsmanship' that current
writings are prone to deny. I would go further: Achilles has just gone
over the limit in his revenge against the more roundedly heroic Hector.
He has thus risked the Gods' anger. It seems to me that these games,
strategically placed in the epic, have almost literally the status of a play-
within-the-play, with heroic values being asserted here against the
hubristic ambitions of the participants.22
Early on in the major event, the chariot race,23 Antilochus danger-
ously crowds Menelaus. 'Cheat', cries the latter 'You'll not bear away
the prize without sworn protest on my part'. Eumelus, his yoke broken
by Minerva's intervention, finishes at the tail. But Achilles says 'The
best man is coming in last. Let us give him a prize for it is appropriate.'
So he awards him second place, thereby relegating to third place
Antilochus, who protests that Minerva's sabotage was due punishment
for Eumelus' lack of prayer. Antilochus urges Achilles not to deny him
his second prize but, if he must, give Eumelus gold from his own tent,
worth if he likes, as much or more than the coveted prize itself. 'But I
will not give up the mare and he that will fight me for it let him come
on'. Achilles, moved by the argument, gives Eumelus a trophy breast-
plate. At that point Menelaus voices his protest against Antilochus'
deliberately cutting him and challenges him to swear by Neptune to the
contrary. Antilochus admits his foul. 'I would rather yield [the mare] to
you at once than fall from your good graces and do wrong in the sight of
heaven'. Honour satisfied, Menelaus 'freely grants' his rightful prize to
Antilochus—'the people will then see that I am neither harsh nor
vindictive'—and accepts the third prize of the cauldron. To complete
this particular contest of anomalies, the uncompeted-for fifth prize
goes to old Nestor, Antilochus' father, in honour of his former emi-
nence. Thereafter, in the boxing, the winner helps support the hurt
loser, the wrestling match is declared a tie as it seems so evenly
balanced, the third-placed runner accepts his prize with humble laugh-

21
Iliad 23, 256ff.
22
The values here are deeper and more complex than the 'hopeless tangle'
unearthed by Adkins in Merit and Responsibility (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1960), 56.
23
470-486.

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Anthony Skillen

ter and the spear fight is called off for fear of a death, the prize going to
the superior combatant. All in all then, these games display a range of
paradigms around the theme of sportsmanship and make a mockery of
the idea that Greek athletic values scarcely rose above the brutal or
commercial. And, given the pedagogic authority of Homer, we can say
that sporting ideals existed. This is not to deny the permanent reality of
mere pot-hunting or of cheating. It is, however, to assert the reality of
'sportsmanship' as a recognized virtue, as a cultural fact.

Onlookers, Partisans and the Romans

I want to bring out some aspects of this ethos that have been only
implicit in the discussion so far.
To be 'glorious' one must stand out, not only against vanquished or
disgraced rivals but against those who are not even 'in the race'; the
ordinary run of mankind, at least in terms of that event. Moreover, one
must stand out to an 'audience', first of observers, second of those for
whom the event is mediated by reporters—whether bards, chroniclers
or humbler eyewitnesses. The realm of 'action' as a public realm
requires a 'public'. This is evident in Homer: Achilles' battle with
Hector is watched, not only by the gods (hence 'the gods' at the
theatre), who 'take our places on some hill off the beaten track and let
mortals fight it out' {Iliad XX, 133), not only by the Achaean host, but
also, from the city walls, by the alarmed Trojan citizens, especially
Priam and Hector. Andromache, as befits a wife, is not present to see
the horrible action. She is within her proper, private realm, 'at her
loom, in an inner part of the house, weaving a double purple web, and
embroidering it with many flowers' and having a bath prepared for the
return of the already killed and violated Hector {Iliad, 437). 'Watching'
all this is the omniscient poet, bestowing human immortality on the
whole proceedings. At the funeral games, in addition to the mythic
presence of the gods, the presence 'in spirit' of Patroclus ('Farewell,
Patroclus!') and the metaphoric presence of the poet, there is of course
the Achaean crowd. Standing out in that crowd is Achilles himself, the
games' great and in this context truly noble patron, capable, were he to
condescend, of beating any of the contestants at their own games. For
the great chariot race, as if he were scripting a great movie, Homer
moves partly into direct speech, relating the progress through a specta-
tor's running commentary . . . 'Come up and see for yourselves, I
cannot make out for certain but the driver seems. . . .'He is brusquely
interrupted by a rival commentator

You are not one of the youngest, nor are your eyes among the
sharpest, but you are always laying down the law. You have no right

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to do so, for there are better men here than you are. Eumelus' horses
are in front now.
His rival-in-judgment angrily meets the challenge with a big bet on
himself. But Achilles majestically silences the 'unseemly' and 'scan-
dalous' row and focuses attention back on the real event.
If this passage shows up the normal spectators, Homer gives them a
different status after the race. Then, in the controversy over prizes,
they assume the right, as an assembly rather than as a mere crowd, to
influence on Achilles' decisions. And when Menelaus returns the
second prize to the remorseful cheat Antilochus so that, as we have
seen, 'the people will see that I am neither harsh nor vindictive',
Antilochus for his part confesses his misdemeanour rather than pro-
claim the propriety of his driving conduct on oath before the judgment
of Neptune. So not only do earthly spectators adopt a variety of roles,
the gods themselves pass without much apology from race-riggers to
justices.
Why be concerned with the spectator? As we have seen, Arendt's
account of action entails an audience. But to return to her paradigmatic
'hero' John Adams, quoted already,
the poor man . . . is ashamed. He feels himself out of sight of all
others, groping in the dark. Mankind takes no notice of him . . . To
be wholly overlooked and to know it are intolerable.
If a culture sets the glory of victory in conspicuous exploits as a pinnacle
of excellence, then, by the same token as they share that valuation and
bestow glory on the Great Men, the many who, by definition, cannot
themselves be part of this aristocracy of the body, are in the position of
implicit acknowledgment of their own inglorious defectiveness and
invisibility—'intolerable'. To the extent that the culture is one of
competition for honour and one shares that culture, then, in so far as
one is not honoured one is not only not a success, one is a failure.
Whether on a seat or standing, the average spectator is a bum—yet he
jeers at the loser in the game itself.
This constitutive unpleasantness was perhaps pre-empted in fully
aristocratic cultures where you had to be an aristocrat to enjoy the
privilege of participating in 'action' and where the lack of utilitarian
motivation defined the activity as proper to the free man. It is precisely
in this context that, in his great Theory of the Leisure Class, the
American sociologist Thorstein Veblen in 1899 located sport. His
account casts a critical shadow on 'action' that is foreign to Arendt's
glorying account:
The rule holds with but slight exception that, whether warriors
or priests, the upper classes are exempt from industrial employments

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and this exemption is the economic expression of their superior rank

Under this ancient distinction, the worthy employments are those

which may be classed as exploit; unworthy are those necessary
everyday employments into which no appreciable element of exploit
enters . . .
These manifestations of the predatory temperament are all to be
classed under the head of exploit. They are partly . . . expressions of
an attitude of emulative ferocity, partly activities deliberately
entered upon with a view to gaining repute for prowess . . . Sports
shade off from the basis of hostile combat, through skill, to cunning
and chicanery, without it being possible to draw a line at any point.
The ground of an addiction to sports is an archaic spiritual constitu-
tion—the possession of the predatory emulative propensity in a
relatively high potency . . . A strong propensity to adventuresome
exploit and to the infliction of damage is . . . especially pronounced
in . . . sportsmanship. 24
So if athletics, like generalship, is the aristocracy's own god-like game,
the mass can admire, even shower glory, in the secure sense that they
are not in the class of their betters through the divine providence that
determines their 'ascribed' social status, not through their failing to
match up to an ideal that properly regulates their lives.
In more democratic cultures whose elite of sporting heroes are not
confined to an hereditary aristocracy, the sense of failure is opposed by
the possibility of identification: to the extent that an audience 'identi-
fies' with its heroes it shares in their glory. If 'we' won, I through my
'representative' won. I am proud, I can look down, not only on the
vanquished athlete but on the 'them' that he represents. This identify-
ing capacity, which in young children is part of the imitation that is at
the heart of Plato and Aristotle's conception of art. ('Trabert lobs but
Hoad jumps and smashes it away!' Mutters the Australian tennis tyro in
a magnificent self-commentary as he swipes clumsily at the ball
rebounding from the wall. 'The Australian has won! The crowd goes
mad!')
I may identify with an individual champion. But if, as since the
ancient Olympics, athletes have regional and local identities, then this
is no mere personal fantasy. Rather it becomes a constitutive part of the
imagining of community, of the affective unity of a collectivity. And to
the extent that this unity is a matter of 'sharing' in victories, whether

24
(1899) (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1919), pages 1, 8, 253. But see C. L.
R. James' aptly horrified observations on American sport, op. cit. pages
52-53.

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 Sport: An Historical Phenomenology

military or sporting, the 'rant and swagger' which Veblen25 found

pervasive among sportsmen filters down to non-participants who, more
than 'fans', become intoxicated as if they themselves had drunk from
the victory cup rather than from the beer can. And so instead of feeling
a 'wholly overlooked' nobody in the civic street, the individual, himself
perhaps an utter incompetent, exults in a fantasy of triumphal 'active'
citizenship. So the proudest moment of his life may be 'the time when
Stan McCabe hit Larwood all around the Sydney Cricket Ground'.
And so, although it is indeed the case that just because the few are
gloriously successful the many are humble failures, it is also the case
that the many are flushed with pride through their champions' achieve-
ments and when glory is denied this unstably narcissistic identification
projects itself in vengeful derision on to the 'clowns', 'mugs', 'girls' in
whom all hopes had been placed.
A third refuge from the pain of the not-even-also-ran, given again, a
shared sporting culture, is a consequence of 'professionalism'. For if the
athlete is a professional his excellence passes from one any one might-
but-does-not share to one that is a product of a specialized aptitude and
dedication requiring the abandonment of other work and, for that
matter, other pleasures. The professional then, can be admired without
the admirer having to endure a sense of humiliation, by those with a
different 'job'.
There is a huge distinction between the background necessity for an
audience of lesser mortals to constitute a champion's glory and the
champion's being there only because there are people to applaud and
financially maintain him. Similarly, there is a huge distinction between
the privilege that an audience feels in being present at a great contest
and the sense a crowd might have that it has a right to be impressed and
entertained. None the less the conceptual link that I have been stressing
between 'action' and audience exposes the deep but fine line between
sport and entertainment, or show business. And, although the specta-
tor at professional sports is likely to be aware of his own frailty as a
physical actor, he is compensated by the sense that, as part of the
public, he has the power to shape, if not this particular game, then the
fate of the game itself—it exists after all for his pleasure.26 Consumer
sovereignty means that, except as a gimmick, the athlete had better
'respect' the public and not disdain the common man in the manner of
an aristocratic Pindaric hero.

25
Veblen, op. cit., page 256.
26
This non-participatory 'democratization', notorious in Ancient Rome's
blood sports, has been revived in Spain where the crowd can now 'vote' for a
'brave' bull to be spared and retired to the stud. Whether electronics will
eventually include television viewers in the plebiscite remains to be seen.

355
Anthony Skillen

As the charioteers charged around the field at the games for

Patroclus, spectators as we saw had to be restrained by Achilles from an
unseemly verbal brawl. 'Hooliganism' appears to have been characteris-
tic of spectators from the start. It represents, arguably, a fourth balm
for the witnesses of excellence. Begotten by imitative identification out
of envy, this ugly near-universal, occasionally redeemed by bardic wit,
guarantees a punk piece of the 'action' to people otherwise beyond its
perimeter. The hooligan, in other words, both apes and competes for
attention with the champions. At the same time, he asserts his identify-
ing attachment to this against that country, region, town, district, club
or colour, an attachment which may well be deeper than that felt by
professional sportsmen kitted out far from any soil that may be native to
them in the colours of the highest bidder. In a fashion, albeit ritualized
and sometimes restrained, the hooligan expresses the militaristic
aggression in the sport itself, but unsublimated by its rules and
unanswerable to its referee. Local explanations of hooliganism ought to
be qualified by the thought not only of its relative ubiquity, but of its
ancient, even divine lineage: Homer's gods, as we have seen, orchestr-
ated ancient wars as mortal proxies of their own immortal rivalries,
using human beings 'for their sport'.
Bobby Moore, who had captained England's victorious World Cup
soccer team in 1966, wrote in the Daily Mail:
I've a simple message to that moronic minority who do not go to
watch football and its great players, but go to fight, throw missiles at
policemen, invade the pitch and make an utter nuisance of them-
selves, clear off.27
But, in his study of the great Roman crowds two thousand years ago,
Roman Factions, Alan Cameron offers reasons for doubting the
efficacy of Moore's message:
The games can serve as a field where the youth who lives an otherwise
ordinary and unexciting life can prove himself a man by fighting and
destroying, hunting in a pack with his peers; for an hour or two he
can be an object of fear to all who cross his path.28

27
Quoted in 'Understanding Aggro', by Peter Marsh, New Society, Vol 32,
April 3, 1975. Gambling is a non-aerobic form of secondary participation.
Punters put their money where their mouths are and commit themselves so
that they, and not only the contestants, stand to win or lose. The proper
analysis of gambling and of games of chance would need to go beyond talk only
of greed or masochism to look at the expressive dimensions of the gambler's
plunge.
28
Circus Factions, Blues and Greens at Rome and Byzantium, Alan
Cameron, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 294.

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 Sport: An Historical Phenomenology

So timocratic cultures, I am arguing, have a conflict built into their ego-

tripping core which shows itself in a range of options for the common
man. Hence, it seems to me, what we might think of as the 'ideal'
spectator: the appreciative admirer of 'great play', must himself have a
measure of grounding independent of the sport's honorific culture itself
such that his modesty of achievement is matched by personal humility,
enabling him to resemble the second-century Roman writer Lucian:
No one can describe in mere words the extraordinary pleasure
derived from [Greek games] . . . feasting your eyes on the prowess
and stamina of the athletes, the beauty and power of their bodies,
their incredible dexterity and skill, their invincible strength, their
courage, ambition endurance and tenacity. You would never stop
applauding them. 29
In the Roman world the spectator and the colossal circuses that housed
him (and her), 30 came into their own. Not only was sport, especially
chariot racing, big business, its significance in political life was recog-
nized. The 'factions', supporters of the various racing 'colours' compet-
ing for glory, more materially sought to influence political decisions.
Meanwhile, it seems, their focus on the make-believe world of the
circus made them distractable from the harder realities of life. The
cultural decadence inherent in all this is not something I wish to
contest. Suffice it here to say that the 'moment' of spectatorial 'fan'
consumerism and surrogate power-assertion has already been pre-
figured in our account of sport in its 'classical' phase.
Given the above, though, it is interesting that among the Roman elite
there was widespread contempt for what was seen as the specifically
Greek way of sport.31 First, their near-naked wrestling was seen as
tending to homosexuality and narcissism, to an 'unmanliness' that
belied the military values thought to be expressed and reinforced in
proper sporting activity. Secondly, and perhaps more interestingly, the
Greek mania for victory and intolerance of defeat was seen, again, as
unmanly and dishonourable. The Roman gentleman was to compete,
as he was to fight, virtuously. His virtues, indeed, were manifested in
defeat as much as in victory, for they were qualities of character as
much as proficiencies of art. Here though, and again, the rules and
29
Anarcharsis II quoted by Judith Swaddling in The Ancient Olympic
Games (London: British Museum, 1980), 12.
30
There is a poem of Ovid in which the young lover, failing to distract his
Stadium companion from the chariot race, seeks to channel her passion for her
champion towards himself. Ovid likened exile to an athlete's being-sidelined
and able only to watch from outside the arena.
31
See, for example, Harris, Sport in Greece and Rome, page 48. One must of
course make allowances for petty racism in all such attributions.

357
Anthony Skillen

conduct of Homer's funeral games again prefigure this, it is central that

sport is an activity constituted and regulated by rules, reverence for
which is therefore a part of the sportsman's ethos. So profoundly does
this attitude appear to have embedded itself in Roman culture that
generals on condition that their nobility and courage in the face of the
enemy was attested, suffered no shame, loss of credibility or power, at
home through defeat.32 Character rather than craft had such priority
that public criticism of what we would call 'generalship' regarding
strategy and tactics was an extreme rarity.
So it is wrong to rubbish the Romans as merely wine-soaked addicts
of the circus. The Roman sporting culture was Janus-faced and so that
culture 'points forward' with both cheeks to the Victorians and their
successors.

Christian Muscularity and the Victorians

'You say you don't see much in it at all; nothing but a struggling mass
of boys, and a leather ball, which seems to excite them to a great fury,
as a red rag does a bull. My dear Sir, a battle would look much the
same to you, except the boys would be men and the balls iron; but a
battle would be worth your while looking at for all that, and so is a
football match. You can't be expected to appreciate the delicate
strokes of play, the turns by which a game is lost and won—it takes an
old player to do that, but the broad philosophy of football you can
understand if you will. Come along with me a little nearer and let us
consider it together.'
'As endless as are boys' characters, so are their ways of facing or not
facing a scrummage at football.'
'And Tom and Slogger shook hands with great satisfaction and
mutual respect. And for the next year or two, whenever fights were
being talked of, the small boys who had been present shook their
heads wisely, saying, "Ah but you should first have seen the fight
between Slogger Williams and Tom Brown.'"
'Come, none of your irony, Brown', answers the master. 'I'm begin-
ning to understand the game scientifically. What a noble game it is
too.'
'Isn't it? But it's more than a game. It's an institution', said Tom.
'Yes', said Arthur, 'the birthright of British boys, old and young, as
32
Treated in Nathan Rosenstein's Imperatores Victi (USA: University of
California, 1990).

358
1
 Sport: An Historical Phenomenology

habeas corpus and trial by jury are of British men'.

'The discipline and reliance on one another which it teaches is so
valuable, I think', went on the master, 'it ought to be such an
unselfish game. It merges the individual in the eleven, he doesn't
play that he may win, but that his side may'.
'That's very true', said Tom, 'and that's why football and cricket,
now that one comes to think of it are much better games than fives or
hare-and-hounds, or any others where the object is to come first or to
win for oneself, and not that one's side may win'.
'And then the captain of the eleven!' said the master. 'What a part is
his in our school world. Almost as hard as the Doctor's; requiring
skill and gentleness and firmness, and I don't know what other rare
qualities.'
(On a technicality, Rugby loses).
'But such a defeat is a victory: so think Tom and all the school eleven,
as they accompany their conquerors to the omnibus and send them
off "with three ringing cheers".'33
In Hughes' conception and in the Victorian age, sport reaches its
apotheosis. The pursuit of excellence is, by becoming a team thing,
moralised into a microcosm of communal virtue. By its closely repres-
entative tie to house and school, moreover, the team becomes the very
image of a wider communal unity, where yet that community is con-
stituted of distinctive characters and talents. We are, via Newbolt's
Vitai Lampada, on the way to that stunning and perverse moment on
the first day of the Battle of the Somme, when Captain D. P. Nevill,
five minutes from his own death, produced four footballs and led his
Surrey regiment in a dribbling charge towards the German trenches:
The fear of Death before them is but an empty name
True to the land that bore them the Surreys play the game (Daily
Mail).
There had been team ball games from the start. The big Roman chariot
events were team efforts, with the lesser drivers' task to wreck the
danger men's chances. But the Victorians' inventiveness should not be
underrated. The Public School not only standardized popular collec-
tive sports, and invented new ones. They placed them in an arena to be
viewed, marrying participatory with spectatorial dimensions in such a
way as to cement the bond of player with the represented institution.
33
Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857) (Dublin: Educational Company of Ire-
land, 1929), 79, 80 (Part I Chapter 5), 219 (Part II, Chapter 5), 257, 260 (Part
II, Chapter 8).

359
Anthony Skillen

There is no lack of the craze for victory in Tom Brown.,34 But, as the
quotations show, disinterested reverence, with both ethical and aes-
thetic constituents, for the game itself, is central. Slogger Williams'
'sportsmanship' in accepting that he has been bested (even though Tom
has used some village tricks) needs to be emphasized here. Clearly, if
the 'human excellence' that I am claiming for the sporting ideal is to be
worthy of full respect, this dimension, present as I have mentioned in
the 'Roman' outlook (Shakespeare's Mark Antony: '. . . a Roman by a
Roman valiantly vanquished') must be central. Yet, if you read through
the 'Boys' Own' literature of the period it is almost universally the case
that 'we' win, while Tom Brown himself never loses an important
contest, so that we do not get an imagined presentation in Hughes of
what that means to a hero. Rather, what we usually find is the villainiza-
tion of the opponent as a sometimes murderous cheat whose machina-
tions fail in the face of the superior qualities of 'our' fair-playing heroes.
So, we need to dig for this vein, this quality that, as children, we are
taught makes a 'good sport'.
Shakespeare's Hector, in Troilus and Cressida is such. With Achilles
helpless, he shows what Troilus derides as the 'vice of mercy'.
'You bid him rise and live'
'O, 'tis fair play'
'Fool's play, by heaven, Hector.35
And in the final battle, before Achilles has his henchman hack down the
'unarmed' Hector, he again offers Achilles a 'pause if thou wilt'.36 Such
an outlook permeates the chivalric legends of the Christian era in which
we can include those of Robin Hood. The true knight fights fair, and if
in no position to show himself magnanimous in victory, rejoices appre-
ciatively in his opponent's excellence. And so it was in the later more
democratic literature of the fist fight. Hazlitt's fighters' courage and
thirst for victory is matched by their fairness, mutual admiration and
acknowledgement:
'What's the matter?' asks the dazed and battered Gas-man Hickman
after failing to come out for the nineteenth round.
34
James Fitzjames Stephen in the Edinburgh Review, Vol CVI I. No. CCXVII,
January 1858, reviews Hughes' story as veiling some hideous barbarism. J. A.
Mangan's researches emphasize the vicious Social Darwinism of the Vic-
torians' sporting ideology (See 'The Grit of our Forefathers' in Imperialism
and Popular Culture J. M. MacKenzie (ed.) (UK: Manchester, 1986), pages
113—140. A mellower but critical perspective is found in the tenth chapter of
Morris Marples, A History of Football (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1954).
35
Act V, Scene 3.
36
Act V, Scene 6.

360
 Sport: An Historical Phenomenology

'Nothing is the matter, Tom, but you, you are the bravest man
alive. You have lost the battle.". . . Neate (the victor) instantly went
up and shook him cordially by the hand', celebrating 'in all good
humour and without any appearance of arrogance'.37
Pip in Great Expectations is challenged by Herbert Pocket,
fetishistically but ineffectually devoted to the noble art, who finally
throws in the sponge.
. . . I said 'Can I help you?' and he said, 'No thankee', and I said
'Good afternoon', and he said 'Same to you'.38
But it is in Horace Annesley Vachell's late-Victorian Harrow stories
The Hill and its sequel John Verney that the idealization of the good
sport is most clearly seen. For the main thing here is that it is the hero,
Verney, who suffers defeat and takes it properly, whereas the 'ill-bred'
Scaife, wonderfully talented, lacks all the attributes of sportsmanship:
he is selfish, greedy, gives up under pressure, blames every one else,
and cheats when he thinks he can get away with it. As 'Caterpillar' puts
it
'One doesn't pretend to be a Christian, but as a gentleman, one
accepts a bit of bad luck without gnashing one's teeth. What? That
Spartan boy with the fox was a well bred 'un, you take my word for it.
Scaife isn't.'39
By contrast, the Eton captain at the Lord's match, having been caught
out by the glorious (and beautiful) 'Caesar', pauses on his way back to
the pavilion:
'That was a glorious catch' he says with the smile of a gallant
gentleman. As the sound judge Caterpillar remarks 'That Eton cap-
tain is cut out of the whole cloth; no shoddy there, by Jove!'.40
Caesar, still a boy, takes his Harrovian attributes to the Transvaal
where, 'cheering on his fellows' as he leads the assault on 'a small hill',
he 'ran—so the Special Correspondent reported—as if he were racing
for a goal. . . aflame with ardour'. He is found 'shot through the heart,
and dead, and smiling at death'.41
In the sequel, Vernon and Scaife, now politicians, continue, cru-
cially, to show in the world of affairs their qualities as schoolboy
cricketers.
37
'The Fight', in Selected Essays of William Hazlitt Geoffrey Keynes (ed.)
(London: Nonesuch Press, 1948) pp. 98-99.. Hazlitt had likened the Gas-
man Hickman to Achilles in his swaggering arrogance).
38
Chapter XI (London: Everyman, 1907), 86.
39
The Hill (London: John Murray, 1920). 'Fellowship' page. 68.
^ O p . cit., 'Lord's', 202.
41
Op. cit., 'Good Night', 235.

361
Anthony Skillen

Kipling modulates his imperial triumphalism, not only in 'If:

'If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat these two impostors just the same',
but in 'Fuzzy Wuzzy' a salute from the Soudan Expeditionary Force to
a foe who 'played the cat an' banjo with our forces'.
Reference to Kipling is a reminder of Recessional'?, deeper theme:
'Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre'.
and this suggests a perspective from which to look at the sporting
morality I have been lately stressing. We have seen that the Pindaric
outlook is one of 'victory or death'. But for the 'Roman' and the
'Christian' gentleman, earthly death is itself the ultimate antagonist. In
that respect, earthly victory is in many ways a temptation and it is in
defeat that the sportsman confronts the deeper truth. Though they
verge on necrophilia and masochism, Vachell's books are important in
bringing home these chivalric depths, in which coming to terms with
losing, with defeat, are seen, not just as fundamental to decency in life
but to an ability to face a loss that is inevitable, whether or not, with
Paul, one sees such loss as only a stingless preliminary to victory in the
Grand Final Analysis.

The Complexity and Importance of Play

Arendt's sphere of 'action', we saw, was a realm of glory, and on the

other side of the same token was the mute inglory either of defeat or of
non-participation. We are in Nozick's realm of invidious esteem here,
where one person's pride is another's humiliation. Rawls' 'Aristotelian
Principle', on the other hand, is one of satisfaction in the 'exercise of
realized capacities.' Such satisfactions require encouragement and
training, the cultivation of capacities; but the person absorbed in their
constituent activities, is neither looking over her neighbour's fence to
see if she is being out-done, nor glancing at the surrounding windows in
the expectation of being the object of admiration. If sport approaches,
or can approach this model, de Coubertin's ideal of 'taking part' is not
an empty fantasy.
I criticized Arendt for conflating distinct dimensions in her way of
demarcating 'action' from 'work' and 'labour'. But this was not a mere
analytical confusion. It reflects a conceptual tension at the heart of the
'Greek' culture. For, as Aristotle says, the things 'valued for their own
sake' are, being 'that for the sake of which other things are done',
necessarily valued more highly than the means to them (which is not the

362
 Sport: An Historical Phenomenology

same as their being more worthwhile than the means to more important
ends). These are the highest, hence the most esteemed, praised and
glorified pursuits. But this produces a timocratic echo of 'Psychological
Egoism', the doctrine that when we do something for its own sake we do
it for the sake of the satisfaction we get out of it. For the valorization of
activities, entails their cultural recognition and celebration. Hence
excellence in such activities is praised to the point where it is the praise
that can seem to be their very point. This slippage is visible even in
those purest of performances in the realm of the intrinsically valued,
the Socratic dialogues, where Socrates is as often presented as sending
off his interlocutory rivals with their tails between their legs, whipped
by an irony the more painful for the putative purity of its motivation,
and where only a pious reading can fail to notice that Socrates is scoring
'eristic' points and rubbing noses in their own excretions.
But as we saw in Patroclus' funeral games, the pleasure in praised
achievement is glory, and Antilochus demands his second prize, not a
meterial compensation for being denied it. Glory's satisfaction is in
recognized achievement, not in its material reward considered in
abstraction from it. The cheat, who otherwise would have lost, is
denied that sense of triumph just as much as is someone given a prize
through mistaken identity. This is a conceptual, not a moralistic point,
and can be evaded only by self-deception. The ego tripper, in modern
terms, must actually make that trip, he cannot get his high simply
through drugs! Were Socrates to think, as the audience scoffs at
Euthyphro, that he had seen the fool off through a sophistic cheat, he
would indeed be the 'Socrates dissatisfied' of Mill's phrase. Yet the
more detachable are the satisfactions and rewards from the activities
that merit them: valuable trophies, money, admiration, sexual and
other favours, power, the more are they capable of being the objects of
unprincipled pursuit. And so enters the continuum from gamesman-
ship to sabotage: the perversions familiar throughout sporting history.
And they are 'perversions', rather than mere anomalies, because of their
intimate connection with the very ennobling of sport as valuable 'in
itself.
There are other tensions in the idea of Action being 'for its own sake'.
Gilbert Ryle, for example, used as a paradigm his much-loved activity
of gardening. The true gardener is not a utilitarian about his plants—he
would not stop growing them if he could get as good blooms or
vegetables more cheaply from the shop. He loves gardening for its own
sake. But would he be as happy to go on with this activity if annually the
flowers and vegetables were stolen? Hardly. Gardening, unlike going
for a walk, has, like a journey, its 'ends' built into it. Its constituent
activities, preparing the soil, digging, even weeding, are enjoyed, but
partly because of their yield. And yet the yield is enjoyed, partly

363
Anthony Skillen

because it is an index and measure of those lead-up activities—their

'prize'.
Vegetarianism not withstanding, nothing so resembles gardening in
these respects as the blood sports, hunting and fishing, whose victims
are also trophies which would lose that meaning if they were bought or,
for that matter, if they were brought down by poisoning or dynamite
without a 'sporting chance'.
Drawing a veil over these delinquent members of the sporting fam-
ily, however, we find the same structure in all competitive sports. Ryle
writes hyperbolically:
The absorbed golfer . . . would at no moment of it have welcomed an
interruption; he was never inclined to turn his thoughts or his
conversation from the circumstances of the game to other matters
. . . he had enjoyed the whole game.42
But the fullest enjoyment of 'the whole game' is not, again, as much like
the fullest enjoyment of a walk as it is like the fullest enjoyment of a
journey. For the game has an aim: to go a round with the lowest score.
If you are not aiming at that you are not really playing. Other games'
targets are different. But in all those with proper names, to talk of a
target is to talk of what counts as winning, hence of at least doing well.
Does this reduce games' activities to mere means to victory? Are
games Rylean 'tasks'? Our comparison with the multi-layered activities
of gardening and journeying rightly suggests not. 'Whole games' break
down into indefinite component sequences and outcomes at various
levels. Winning entails the intermediate achievement of goals, tries,
holings, runs, dismissals, points. These entail moves, passes, shots,
tackles, pitches, bowls, throws, sidesteps, dribbles, charges, jumps.
Cerebral activity is entailed in co-ordinating with team-mates in strate-
gic and tactical planning and switching, in feints, in spotting weak-
nesses, in anticipating and exploiting conditions. At the other
('laborious') end of the mind-body unity essential to sports, the physi-
cal heart-lung-and-muscle end, we have the dimensions of speed,
strength and endurance. And it should not be forgotten that all these
dimensions have, in addition to their intrinsic joys and distresses, their
aftermaths, from retrospective exultations and miseries, from delicious
or agonized weariness, and from friendly and respectful embraces and
exchanges 'when it's all over', to convivial relaxation with fellow play-
ers—or gloating, depression, backbiting and complaint, whether col-
lective or individual.
Any one-track view of sport, whether it focuses with Arendt and
Pindar on public glory, or with more private individual or team pursuit
42
The Concept of Mind (UK: Hutchinson, 1949), 108.

364
r Sport: An Historical Phenomenology

of a victory whose delights are confined to the victors, will miss the
multi-dimensional pleasures internal to sporting activity. Such views,
while avoiding the outright utilitarianism of seeing sport solely in terms
of getting fit or training for 'life' (whose own point is left unclear), are in
many ways as reductive. The pleasures and pains of sport are multiple
and many-layered. Sports and games exercise and test all sorts though
by no means all of physical, mental and moral capacities. The keen
player of what occupy most playing time in the world, informal games,
will try his or her hardest, even though the final result—which may be
the score when the lights, or the sun provides insufficient illumination
to continue—is of little moment, especially when teams are chosen and
re-shuffled to even things up and to pre-empt an easy winner ('Only
nine of them turned up so we lent them one of ours'). Pindar, in whose
odes is to be found no interest whatever in the description of component
activities, would read a book while such playing was going on. Yet you
will hear 'good shot', 'bad luck', in every real field of informal play just
as much as in Vachell's Harrovian idyll. And, whether or not such
recognition is forthcoming, let alone from absent spectators, the plea-
sures in games' activities, in the harmonious, even beautiful, exercise of
'psycho-physical' 'sensory-motor' capacities, is attested in the universal
delight in 'aimless' ball-playing—testing but relaxing, competitive but
co-operative, serious but playful, in which, while one might be better
than the other, no one 'wins', because no one keeps score or because
there is no score to keep.
Games and sports, as the above analysis displays, can be engaged in
from a variety of motives. For the seeker of exercise they may function
equivalently to mowing the lawn. For the pursuer of victories, other
avenues of personal triumph are available. At every level there are
virtues and vices, obsessions and slacknesses. There is no general rule
governing all this except that most adaptable one of 'appropriateness'.
These are matters of cultural nuance.
In the last few paragraphs I have slipped surreptitiously between
talking of games and sports. One could add the complication that when
people play, say, catching and throwing a ball to each other, it is
artificial to say there is a game they are playing. As Wittgenstein's
remarks at Investigations 66 and 67 suggest, the tangle and multi-
centred clustering here are connected with the historical and cultural
nature of these terms. It seems to me for example that 'sport' becomes
consolidated as a quasi-institutional concept with the use of this term
for school games in the Nineteenth Century. Its earlier meaning had
been more 'playful'. Why is clay-pigeon shooting a sport and not a
game? Why is a sprinter a sportsman but the hundred metres dash not a
game? In these cases the competitor simply strives to attain a target.
Even where the path between start and finish is strewn with obstacles,

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Anthony Skillen

as in steeple-chasing or rock-climbing or, saving decency, fox-hunting,

there are not the ingredient interactive contestations characteristic of,
say football, tennis, cricket or even snooker. (How about golf?) At the
other end, chess and Monopoly are games all right, but hardly sports.
They are competitive and cerebral, but lack a physical, sensory-motor,
dimension. Why, then, is boxing, despite being called 'the fight game',
not what we would, in another tone of voice, call a game? Or wrest-
ling?—'Let's play boxing' would be an invitation to a shadow-spar with
theatrical grunts. Ordinary, living language, which is capable of seeing
that some games are not 'just games' to the professional or for that
matter, to that quite different animal, the fanatical addict of victory, is
sensitive to nuances that defy ready categorization.
Though practice often lends it weight, the view of competitive sport
as essentially a vicious rage for conquest is a jaundiced and superficial
one, sustained by a bogus historicism attaching sport intextricably to
cut-throat capitalism or militarism. It was not an arbitrary focus that
led Piaget to observe children's unrefereed games as the best index of
the spontaneous growth of the moral sense43. With its dialectic of skill,
co-operation, forbearance, courage, enterprise and luck, sport is a
microcosm of life in many of its major aspects, nor is its moral dimen-
sion reducible to that of being a good sport in victory or defeat. At any
level, sporting activity involves the pursuit of quality, the struggle to do
well, a 'technical' achievement requiring a measure of dedication,
enterprise, attention to detail, capacity to relax,44 and self-subjection,
not only to hard work, misfortune and defeat, but to criticism. Hannah
Arendt's Homeric men of 'action' were, of necessity, an aristocracy, and
there is, as far as I can see, no getting away from some sort of hierarchy,
grades, levels or divisions, in sport, as long as it is taken seriously. But it
is a travesty to ignore, not only the delights and achievements at every
level of sport, but the non-Nozickian satisfactions intrinsic to sporting
achievement, in victory or defeat, through doing one's best in a com-
petitive context. Now of course this sort of satisfaction presupposes a
culture in which such self-excellence is recognized and validated (I still
remember my high school sports master, Brian Downes, whose best
athletes at one stage held the half-mile record in every age division in
the New South Wales Schools Championships, shouting with excite-
ment as the slowest runner in the class broke three minutes for the first
and only time). In a culture in which only the (boys') first team gets an
outing and only victory counts, you are scarcely going to get the sort of

43
The Moral Judgement of the Child (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1932). Chapter I: 'The Rules of the Game'.
44
See William James' lecture 'The Gospel of Relaxation' in Talks to
Teachers (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1917), 37.

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 Sport: An Historical Phenomenology

thing I am advocating. Nor, to look at the other side of the decadent

coin, are you going to get it in environments where sport is reduced to
non-competitive exercises, for fear of 'creating losers'.45 This approach
is the ludic equivalent of preventing one's children from mixing in case
they should be on either end of bullying, or of banning discussions in
case someone has to endure the 'humiliation' of being shown to be
wrong. It is a protection from reality and an excuse for avoiding the task
of developing a culture which is as tough and tender as a decent human
culture has to be. At the other extreme, populist swimmers with
contemporary soda streams deride de Coubertin's 'aristocratic' and
'elitist' celebration of the 'amateur ideal'. These pro-sport buffs do not
seem to appreciate that only an elite can make money out of a few
spectacular sports and that, if sport is to be a central part of a worth-
while and active popular culture its 'age quod agis' ethic has to be
amateur and sustained by sporting ideals in according priority to doing
one's best within the letter and spirit of the code—who, after all, can
afford referees and linesmen and appeal committees?
There is a tendency to think that because sport is properly peripheral
to the main businesses of life and because its achievement is pleasure, it
is humanly and morally unimportant. But it is precisely because of its
contrast with the more utilitarian side of things that it has the import-
ance in people's attention that it has. In sports we have arenas where
human qualities are not subordinated to other ends but are expressed,
tested and exhibited to be enjoyed, judged and admired for their own
sake. In suggesting this humanist and implicitly universalist account, I
am of course, taking issue with reductive forms of historicism and
utilitarianism for which sports are seen essentially as functional ancill-
aries of ruling orders and as instances of statist, capitalist, racist and
sexist regulation of life. In this article, with no apologies for an 'ideal-
ism' which a longer account would seek to knit back into a more material
account of their evolution, sport's universal claims have been urged
through a demonstration of the continuity of its organizing values, from
Homeric to modern times. In assuming a living familiarity with sport-
ing ideologies in the present century, then, I am appealing to a recogni-
tion of continuity.
Only a fanatic would elevate sport into a be-all-and-end-all, and the
world is littered with depressed crocks seeking drearily to maintain a
dreamy after-glow of 'glory days'.46 Similarly, the viciousness associ-
ated with winning at all costs, exacerbated but not originated by

45
Even in aerobics sessions the public acknowledgement of pulse-rate
changes functions to foster among pounding hearts a gentle emulation.
46
A Bruce Springsteen song about wallowing in such memories.

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Anthony Skillen

professionalism,47 and the thuggish sexism consequent on the historical

exclusion of women from the very field of the public pursuit of excel-
lence as physically active beings, present ugly faces of the dominant
culture of sport. At the same time, while today more and more couch-
potatoes plant themselves in front of televised images of sporting
excellence, fewer and fewer, young or old, play sport. This implies a
substitution of fantastic images for genuine practice,48 a replacement of
sport as popular culture by sport as identificatory spectacle. Sport is an
arena of freedom and beauty that is part of the forces resisting the
reduction of pleasure to consumption and compensatory dream. This
article has 'assembled reminders', however, that the very fantasy-
energy invested in sport is rooted in its actually enduring practical
ideals.49

University of Kent at Canterbury

47
'Professionalism' conceals a great variety in ethos. Some professional clubs
tend towards mere business outfits imposing purely monetary incentives,
while others are more deeply permeated by a spirit of solidarity and tradition.
A 'tourist's' account of English Rugby League clubs, Simply the Best, by
Adrian McGregor, (Australia: University of Queensland 1991) is revealing of
this issue of 'true professionalism'. I, for example, am frequently struck by the
respect and understanding among professionals in contrast with an adolescent
triumphalism common among amateurs.
48
In Brave New World 'experience surrogates' that prefigure 'virtual reality'
machines give fantastic adventure experiences to citizens whom real risks
would reduce to a wreck.
49
Colin Radford, Michael Irwin, Walter Chamberlain and Jack Kyriaco
have helped in the preparation of this article, as has Radford's 'Utilitarianism
and the Noble Art', Philosophy, 63, 1988. This article addresses from a
different perspective themes discussed in Mary Midgley's 'The Game Game',
(this journal, Vol 49, 1974, pages 231-253.

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