Great Throughts Treasury

"Sometimes it's so vulgar that it's not particularly good for religion. But if religion is in everything, it has to be in the vulgar stuff, too."

"Religions are built upon ascesis, a word that derives from the disciplines Greek athletes imposed upon themselves to give their wills an instincts command of their bodies; the word was borrowed by Christian monks and hermits."

"Sports are not merely entertainment, but are rooted in the necessities and the aspirations of the human spirit? Sports do provide entertainment, but of a special and profound sort."

"Sports are religious in the sense that they are organized institutions, disciplines, and liturgies; and also in the sense that they teach religious qualities of heart and soul?they recreate symbols of cosmic struggle, in which human survival and moral courage are not assured."

"Sports are the high point of civilization?along with the arts, but more powerfully than the arts?"

"Suppose you are an anthropologist from Mars. You come suddenly upon some wild, adolescent tribes living in territories called the United States of America. You try to understand their way of life, but their society does not make sense to you. Flying over the land in a rocket, you notice great ovals near every city. You descend and observe. You learn that an oval is called a stadium. it is used, roughly, once a week in certain seasons. Weekly, regularly, millions of citizens stream into these concrete doughnuts, pay handsomely, are alternately hushed and awed and outraged and screaming mad. (They demand from time to time that certain sacrificial personages be killed.) You see that the figures in the rituals have trained themselves superbly for their performances, the combatants are dedicated. So are the dancers and musicians in tribal dress who occupy the arena before, during, and after the combat."

"That just further underscores that this is not authorized."

"The basic reality of all human life is play, games, sport; these are the realities form which the basic metaphors for all that is important in the rest of life are drawn. Work, politics, and history are the illusory, misleading, false world. p. xii"

"The British are an older, wiser culture, given to a certain matter-of-fact toughness and pragmatic amorality."

"The choice to remain faithful to the drive to question (the fertile source of the experience of nothingness) brings with it an obscure joy. For to be faithful to that drive...is to be constantly expanding one's horizon, constantly losing one's life, and constantly regaining it. It is to be as alert to other persons, to situations, and to events as one can: to their fragility and terror, as well as to their obscure coherence and often veiled beauty. To be faithful to the drive to question is to accept despair as one's due, to accept risk as one's condition, and to accept the crumbs of discovery as joy. [...] The darkness is habitable...Those who accept the darkness as their lot are instantly secure, not through some newfound solidity but through the perception that insecurity is man's natural state, a truthful state, a healthy state."

"The ear, not the eye is the organ of human fact. And also of thought. The ear is personal (it carries tone and voice), holistic, stimulative. The eye distances, makes flat, kills, tames. To hear a great mind lecture is to have access to his though?and to his heart and seat of judgment?that reading his books does not supply. The liturgy of the churches, is, wisely, centered on the spoken Word. So ought the liturgies of sport to be?The eye is the most superficial sense. Television, the medium of the eye, cheapens us."

"The great [athletes] attempt what the good ones let go by."

"The heart of human reality is courage, honesty, freedom, community, excellence: the heart is sports."

"The human spirit needs roots, because the pretense of infinity?The human body cannot bear infinity."

"The Lord God, the creator of Judaism and the God of Judaism and Christianity, empowered our minds and gave us the ability to question."

"The most satisfying element in sports is spirit. Other elements being equal, the more spirited team will win."

"The politicization of almost everything is a form of totalitarianism. The preservation of parts of life not drawn up into politics and work is essential for the human spirit."

"Then again, Christianity seems to have done quite well by mixing worship and commerce. Religion is like yeast in dough... It's in every part of life, so for it to show up everywhere is only natural - in commerce, politics, sports, labor unions and so on and so forth."

"There are not many activities that can unite janitors, cafeteria workers, sophomores, and Nobel Prizes winners in common pleasure."

"There is a new female recognition (something men have always known) that there are important lessons to be learned from sports competition, among them that winning is the result of hard, sustained, serious training, cool, clever strategy that includes the use of tricks and bluffs, and a positive mind-set that puts all reflex systems on go. This knowledge, and the chance to put it in practice, is precisely what women have been conditioned to abjure."

"There is no rage like that of the pacifist insisting on nonviolence."

"Those who have not known the rigors of competitive team athletics do not easily find other social and institutional frameworks in which such skills in self-knowledge may be experienced and perfected. That is why there is a special comradeship among former athletes, a bond of thrust within which athletes understand one another swiftly and with few words. And why there is a silent tension between athletes, who have known these fires, and non-athletes, or anti-athletes, who have not. The latter seem not to live as gracefully with defeat, humiliation, or self-betrayal, they seem less conscious of their own complicity in weakness?in other words, with their own sense of being sinners. They pretend more. They have been defeated less."

"Thus the insight most lacking in traditionalists is that intelligent and practical persons, acting freely and on behalf of their own practical wisdom, can in their free exchanges generate a spontaneous order, a form of catallaxy superior in its reasonableness to any order that might be planned, directed, or enforced from above."

"To keep cool, to handle hundreds of details and call exactly the plays that work, to fights one?s way through opposition to do what one wills to do, against odds, against probabilities?these are to practice a very high art, to achieve a few moments of beauty that will delight the memory of those who watched, or listened, or read, for all their lives. What we mean by [sports] legend is what we mean by art: the reaching of a form, a perfection, which ordinarily the flesh masks, a form eternal in its beauty. It is as though muscle and nerves and spirit and comrades were working together as flawlessly as God once imagined human beings might."

"To win, one must defeat both the other team and Fate."

"Tradition lives because young people come along who catch its romance and add new glories to it."

"We are equal in the eyes of the Creator. But not to each other,"

"We are expected to sympathize with Larry Csonka when he abandons the Miami Dolphins for the World Football League and $3 million. I have to think of my family, he says. His family was not starving. If ballplayers cannot say no to money, if they will take the highest offer they can get and move away accordingly, they invite contempt. What they do is understandable enough, but wrong. It flies in the face of the rootedness and the fan?s identification with them which gives their professional inner power. If they think so little of their profession, why shouldn?t fans? p. 306"

"We can talk about human dignity, but where is it?"

"Yet I would be astonished if [my childhood sports friends] and all the millions of others like us didn?t still watch? Namath, Unitas, and all the Sunday heroes with exquisite pleasure, admiration, and beauty-scorched memory. What we wished to do, strove for?what do I mean? still strive for, still emulate?they do as gracefully as gods. We were for a season gods, or at least boys with dreams; we still are. We went to our limits, as they go to theirs; and if theirs exceed ours, we regard them not with envy but in brotherly participation."