The Sportsman and the Well Lived Life

These displays of upper body strength are a wonder to behold.




Amazing as they as, however, I wonder how important it is that they do not actually accomplish anything. The Guinness Book of World Records contains accounts of many things that in themselves are impressive but that more broadly considered are utterly pointless. Sitting on a pole for a very long time comes to mind. After initially admiring the record holder's stamina, or whatever, one cannot help but ask if this is the best use of the fellow's time.

Much of what passes for sports strikes me the same way. Much of modern athletic competition combines the awesome and the trivial--rare human ability combined with fruitless endeavor. But it has not always been so. Many athletic competitions have their origins in agriculture and warfare. Consider the Scottish highland games. Large men throwing things and pulling ropes are practicing competitively what they ordinarily they do on their farms. Consider also the Olympic Games. Traditionally, what do you see? Running. Throwing the javelin. Wrestling. Riding. Shooting. Each of these games, in its original conception, was a display of strength and skills in public competition that were useful in vitally important enterprises. The athletic achievement was not ultimately for its own sake but had reference to these larger, life-sustaining activities.

Those activities--subduing the earth by one's labor and subduing one's enemies in battle--face daunting challenges and so require awesome human accomplishments when done well. We celebrate those accomplishments, and thus also encourage them, by these competitions.

Athletics are healthy both physically and psychologically. I knew a man for whom golf was an antidote to depression. It keeps my parents young and limber. Athletics are also good for the character of the young, when done properly. Wrestling in high school impressed good habits of discipline in me. It is said that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. Athletics can be serious business.

But athletics becomes trivial when it becomes merely entertainment, amusement, diversion. Though baseball played at its best involves amazing feats of skill and strength, it is of no consequence whether the Yankees or the Red Sox wins the World Series. (Put aside your partisan passions and admit it.) The same is true of the the feats of upper body strength in this video. Yes, they are astounding, but to what end? It is true that they are beautiful, and that is good in itself. It brings out more fully the glory of God's creation. That's wonderful, but God calls us to put his marvelous creation to godly use.

Why do we celebrate these isolated acts of strength and skills without context? Perhaps we no longer believe in ends, but we still can't help be impressed by the means by which we once pursued those ends.

Athletics of this sort remind me of what has become of art. We have removed it from the churches and great houses because so many of us no longer believe in church and great families. So too, now that agriculture and war are mechanized, we can appreciate the yeoman and the warrior in isolation of what called forth the heights of their achievements. We can appreciate their virtuosity without their virtue.

Art has become abstract not only in its form, but also in its placement (if that's right way to put it). We deprive it of any meaningful setting. It goes straight from studio to gallery, unless one turns a living room into a gallery. Art used to serve a function. It used to communicate a story or remember a relative or a person of great accomplishment. It helped us see the special beauty of a landscape or even of a beggar child. What I'm questioning is the value of athletics when it becomes so self-referential, so self-sufficient that it becomes comparable to art-divorced-from-life.

Am I being overly pragmatic in all of this? Disgracefully utilitarian? What about beauty for its own sake? It is possible, however, to appreciate the aesthetic aspect of a beautiful act or artifact and still set it to work in something that has a larger meaning. It's not so much utility that I have in mind, as it is some larger meaning or narrative, or the affirmation of an important truth, as art does when it is done well.