What Is Sport: A Controversial Essay About Why Humans Play Sports

By Rob Alpha

Rob Alpha (B.A. Social Psychology) examines the origin of sports and subliminal drive that inhabits all humans to play and enjoy sports. We practice sports for a variety of reasons such as health, socializing, passion, performance, etc...but what are the natural and fundamental reasons why we are so passionate about sports in our society? In this book you will discover the deepest origins of our passion for sports as individuals and also why society embraces athletes and sports more than ever. Beware, this essay is thought provoking , unconventional and suited for an open mind . It is an interesting exploration in opening new avenues towards better understanding ourselves and the fundamentals of human behaviour.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781483555232

Book preview

SPORT

Introduction

Though this is absolutely not the goal, I know some readers will be shocked and will disagree strongly with the opinions and ideas expressed in this book. I respect and value each person’s opinion. This book has no religious or propagandist intentions, but it may not be suitable for young readers as it contains references to sexual behavior and sexual language. References to sexual behavior and terminology are respectful and explained from a biological and behavioral perspective and is most certainly not meant to be pornographic or demeaning to anyone. This book does not intend to be academic or pretend to address academic principles of human behavior. Think of it more as a casual conversation about an interesting subject.

This book is simply an essay (the verb essay means to make an attempt. Think of this as an honest attempt), a new and different take on sports and human and social behavior. It is a discussion, an exploration of my own views, a combination of my collegiate and university studies, my personal knowledge and life experiences blended with psychological and sociological ideas and theories that have been discussed and debated over the past 100 years.

I would like to start by thanking you for purchasing and reading this book. I hope you find it entertaining and interesting as much as I found it enjoyable to write. I hope this book will broaden our visions and understanding of human behavior and result in interesting discussions and explorations of how and why we desire, symbolize and act out those drives that compel us.

I have been interested in animal and human behavior since I was a child. My grandmother was one of my key influences as she noticed my budding interests and bought me every book imaginable on insects, birds, fish, mammals, as well as every extant issue of the National Geographic magazines, a periodical that seems like it will never disappear as long as there are dentists with waiting rooms!

As I grew older I started exploring and reading more and more about animal behavior and its similarities to human behavior. Before studying social psychology in university, I fulfilled my childhood dream of going to Kenya and Tanzania, renting a jeep and roaming the African savannah and jungles, exploring the wildlife and observing animal behavior in its purest, and sometimes most brutal, forms.

As a student, I was very interested in psychological and group behavior. I often noticed correlations between animal and human behavior. This passion lead me to read many books from great thinkers such as Carl Jung, B.F. Skinner, Carl Rogers, Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud, Konrad Lorenz, and so many more interesting specialists in the field of psychology, social psychology and various behavioral sciences.

After finishing my degree, my passion for sports drove me to start a company in the sports industry, a company that is still doing well today. But, despite my professional responsibilities, I continued studying and reading psychology, sociology, and animal behavior as a passion and hobby. And yes, it can be difficult to explain to people who jump out of airplanes or wrestle alligators for fun that reading and study are hobbies every bit as pleasurable as more extreme forms of enjoyment. In fact, as we shall see in the following pages, thinking about ideas, producing symbols, playing with forms of expression and language can be some of the most enjoyable and arousing activities we humans engage in.

Human beings are meaning-making animals. We are always making things that signify: poems, cities, clothing, paintings, rituals, etc. Here is where the sports come in: I was always a huge sports player and fan throughout my life. Basketball in high school and university, hockey, soccer, golf more and more as I get older, football in high school, beach volleyball (also, I must admit, for the girl-watching, a virtual sport in itself), tennis, fitness, baseball, snowboarding, ping pong (yes when I played it, table tennis was called ping pong because sometimes we just got things wrong back then!). I played pretty much everything and loved it all.

I have become reasonably good at most sports but not dominant in any because I wanted to practice them all and had limited time and, to be frank, limited talent! Trying so hard to become very good at sports made me admire male and female professional athletes all the more as I realized the enormous talent, hard work, determination and perseverance it takes to become an elite athlete.

I love sports; they are utterly fascinating and a great stage where human talent is showcased. Individuals display breathtaking skills developed over a lifetime and, in team sports, players demonstrate how collective synergy and cooperation can produce great and sometimes unexpected championships. Sports tell incredible stories almost every night; every country in the world plays and loves some kind of sporting activity.

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?

These are some of the questions I will explore in the following chapters. But prepare yourself for a different type of explanation. Out of the box thinking might be an understatement here, but I am certain that even if you disagree with my ideas, you will find them interesting.

***

Special thanks to my family, friends, students, colleagues and those with whom I have had many interesting discussions on this and related subjects. Good conversations with good company and a nice bottle of wine are priceless (except for the wine, which I prefer to be pricey!). You have been my first audience and one of the reasons this passion has become a book. Thanks to all the people who vehemently disagree with my ideas. I respect and value your opinions, which often move me forward with understanding psychosocial behavior, take me out of my comfort zone (for which I am grateful!) and lead me out of traditional paths and into interesting ideas.

This book may seem controversial and provocative but I believe that it helps us understand part of the origins of human behavior and begin meaningful discussions on this subject of why we practice sports (and possibly pursue many other activities and projects in our daily lives). If you disagree, at least have some fun reading this book. I will gladly discuss with you by email and (with the speed of product and system development in these times), with all the millions of other communication techniques that no doubt will be introduced in the next few days!

ONE

Why were sports created?

Why were specific sports created? This is an important question that will help us better understand the usefulness and popularity of some specific sports that exist today.

First, let us examine a typical definition of sport:

A sport is an organized, competitive, entertaining, and skillful activity requiring commitment, strategy, and fair play, in which a winner can be defined by objective means. Generally speaking, a sport is a game based in physical athleticism. Activities such as board games and card games are sometimes classified as mind sports, but strictly speaking sport by itself refers to some physical activity. Non-competitive activities may also qualify, for example though jogging or playing catch are usually classified as forms of recreation, they may also be informally called sports due to their similarity to competitive games.

What we can glean from this definition is that sports is a rule-bound, structured and meaningful activity. A game is not a chaotic explosion of action; it is understandable, readable. Games not only happen before our eyes; they tell us a story.

In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Commander Sisko, the intrepid Starfleet officer and baseball fan, explains the enjoyments of a baseball game to an uncomprehending alien. Notice how the unfolding of the game is a meaningful and significant event:

SISKO: In the end, it comes down to throwing one pitch after another, and seeing what happens. With each new consequence, the game begins to take shape.

ALIEN BATTER: And you have no idea what that shape is until it is completed?

SISKO: That’s right. In fact, the game wouldn’t be worth playing if we knew what was going to happen.

JAKE PROPHET: You value your ignorance of what is to come?

SISKO: That may be the most important thing to understand about humans. It is the unknown that defines our existence.

A game, like a story, unfolds before us, and we follow it with intense interest. We know, at some non-rational level, that what is being revealed to us in a game is important. It

matters.

Some sports popularized in the Greek and Roman eras such as running, discus, javelin, wrestling, long jump and others are still popular worldwide. Sports have evolved throughout thousands of years but sports created in the last two hundred years are particularly successful. Why have some of these relatively new sports become so widely popular? What is their appeal?

It is certainly true that, in the last decades, media coverage and huge corporate and marketing engines that promote and sell these sports have contributed to their explosive growth. Other reasons that contribute to the popularity of sports are the outstanding athletic performance and impressive abilities that modern athletes demonstrate, skills that create a strong fan following whose admiration borders on hero-worship. In addition, the creation of sport programs and leagues everywhere has dramatically increased