What’s missing from modern sports

My late granddad—who knew how to have fun—and his brother Summie at the Alabama Polytechnic Institute, now Auburn, September 1945. From the auburn University Libraries.

One of my favorite discoveries since dipping my toe into Substack is Ted Gioia, a jazz critic who writes frequently and with great insight on a number of cultural topics I care about. I had planned to write about his “worst writing advice in the world,” and may yet, but over the weekend he shared a post that surprisingly helped give form to an intuition I’ve felt for a long time.

I say “surprisingly” because, as far as I can recall, over the last six years and 600+ posts on this blog, I’ve never written about sports. Here goes.

In a post called “I Say Forbidden Things About Sports,” Gioia tackles a host of problems with the culture of sports generally and college sports specifically, among them corrupt recruiting practices, the wildly out-of-whack priorities of coach pay, the physical devastation meted out to ever-growing numbers of young athletes, the sociopathic lust to win, and the creep of the corporate profit-maximizing motive into the world of the university—a phenomenon not limited to the gridiron. All of these are perversions of what sports are supposed to be about.

No argument there.

The one place where I think Gioia misses something is the single place in the essay where he is most dogmatic. After cataloging some of the failures of college sports, Gioia presents his “Six Intrinsic Benefits of Sports”:

Again, no objections. This is an excellent list. I have three kids who just started youth basketball and it’s already been a fantastic opportunity to teach them all six of these things, just as my parents taught me through baseball.

But when Gioia writes “End of story—there are no others,” I have to point out one thing missing from the list, the one that I think provides the basis for all the others: fun.

Remember when sports were fun? The language does. The words play and game, the language of the schoolyard, linger vestigially, suggesting the former place of sports in our culture. Sports were not always so serious. Even the word sport and its derivatives are suggestive, not only as a noun (sportsman, he’s a sport) but as an adjective (a sporting chance, sport fishing) and verb (sporting a new haircut, children sporting in a field of flowers). Take a look at the history of the word sometime, and at the many, many ways it’s used now. If you wanted to get high-falutin’ about playing games, you ventured, of necessity, into Greek—athlete, athletics, athleticism.

Gioia is absolutely right about those six benefits, but I’m not sure those benefits are why people play sports—or not why they used to, anyway. Kids don’t play basketball to bond, they play basketball and bond. Kids don’t play baseball to learn restraint and how to follow rules, they learn restraint and how to follow rules in order to play. They don’t lose at tennis to learn to accept defeat gracefully, they accept defeat gracefully so that they can play again and, just maybe, win. And they want to play because it’s fun.

Ed Poss (1927-2017)

The gratuitous, for-its-own-sakeness of sports and games is important, I think. And once that goes, the other knock-on benefits—teamwork, sportsmanship, hard work, grace in defeat—will not last.

Look around. What most strikes me about modern sports is how not-fun it all is. The vitriolic demands to fire coaches, the wrath at defeat (sharply parodied here), the punishing training, the increasingly obscene smacktalk, the psych-ward obsessiveness of sports commentary, the gleeful Schadenfreude when a rival loses, perhaps above all the gambling—none of it is fun. I watch the ways in which people I know participate in sports, either as fans or players, and wonder, Are you enjoying this?

And the not-fun of college and professional sports is oozing downward all the time. Read this essay by Tim Carney for an eye-opening look at this trend through his experience with his son’s travel baseball team. The task for those who want to enjoy sports despite modern sports culture and who want our kids to enjoy sports too is simply to keep it fun. That’s my goal, at least.

There’s a lot more to unpack here, I’m sure. Visit Gioa’s Substack, subscribe, and read the whole post. It’s worthwhile food for thought. When I first read it Saturday I went to the comments to see if anyone had suggested fun as a possible seventh—and most important—intrinsic benefit for Gioia’s list. There was a brisk back-and-forth going on there, but not a mention of fun. A telling omission. I’m glad to say I checked again this afternoon and at least three other people have raised the point I’m making here.

Glad to know I’m not alone. Maybe we could start a team.