The Managerial Games

Lasch and The Importance of Unimportance in Sports

Christopher Lasch once offered the paradox that the value of sports lay in their lack of immediate importance, and that as they were taken increasingly seriously they lost their true social purpose.  The Classical age Greeks who invented athletics meant for their games to be a designated space and time wherein any victory was wholly arbitrary and had no larger material significance.  The only things one hoped to gain from victory were intangible and symbolic, fame and a tree-bough crown.  The idea of games was connected to the wider Classical ideal of ἀρετή but also σχολή, cultivated leisure that allowed for the setting aside of the immediate and tangible in favor of the transcendent.  Hercules’ founding of the Olympic Games was not one of his labors, but rather an act of religious devotion, sacred rest, a kind of Sabbath.

The reign of quantity under which we live in our managerial system has done to sport what it has done to everything else, stripped it of any real spiritual significance, quantified it, commodified it, homogenized it, and turned it into a vehicle for the system’s propaganda.  Sports are a business, and as with all businesses there are best practices and ROI to consider; a team is a machine, a system for generating revenue.  Games are content, content scientifically designed to push hormone-dispensing buttons in the brain for the purpose of retaining attention for the benefit of advertisers.  In a rootless consumer society, devotion to any team is a combination of attractive packaging and residual regional loyalties; no one associated with a team has any organic connection to the respective communities they represent.  One can see, as with stratigraphy, when a team came into being- does the team name have some ethnic, class, or occupational association?  It is probably old, and if the name is not regime approved, it is soon to be effaced.  The more bland and nonsensical the name is, the more likely it is to have emerged from some marketing firm.  Is Salt Lake City known for its jazz?

The biggest loss in this is what has been taken from children.  Young people, left to their own devices, will spontaneously form up into teams, play for hours without officialdom, and depart without giving what they have done a second thought.  They have an instinctive sense of fairness and will cease to participate if the play is uneven or dull.  Sports for them fill their natural function of a break from being forced to do things and the mundane world of homework and chores.  Adults, naturally, have snuffed this out.  From late childhood the cull begins; kids who show early gifts are singled out, grouped with other talented youths, and drilled through what would have been their free time.  The rest are ignored and left to their electronic amusements for other adults to exploit.  Then begins a relentless winnowing process involving ever-escalating amounts of time and money being spent with travel teams, private coaches, and recruiting events, all in the hope of the ascending the final rungs on the ladder, acceptance to play on an elite college team and a professional career. 

That the odds of this happening are slim is no barrier to hope, for in a way, there is a perverse faith in an echo of that ancient idea of transcendence through athletics.  In Ancient Greece, the greatest victors became objects of real religious reverence.  In our own society, those who make it to the big leagues are the modern equivalent of demigods, celebrities, and they possess a kind of mana or sympathetic magic which their devotees can access, provided they are willing to offer up themselves, or rather their time and energy.  In some quarters it is considered especially pious to ritually sacrifice one’s peers to access shoes bearing the name of some star, but the norm instead is private or small group reverence.

Only about a quarter of adults play any kind of sports, and when those which are played as an adjunct to drinking and gambling (i.e. golf) are factored out, almost no one does.  The reason for this is that same managerial calculation- as they cannot play at an elite level and profit thereby, a pursuit of athletics would have no point comprehensible to the average man.  Physical excellence, like everything else, is the province of experts, to whom one owes deference and reverence.  A lover of football is not a man who plays the game; that is for children and salaried employees.  He is instead a fan, consuming games rather than participating in them, from the safety and comfort of his Platonic man-Cave.  He wears another man’s name on his pristine collectable Chinese-made jersey while hoping to gain some vicarious sense of masculine achievement from his player’s success.  He eats his wings and drinks his light beer, once with friends but now alone, grey and pudgy and alienated from any sense of personal victory.

John F. Kennedy had many faults, but he was a prophet in his fears that America would become a society of voyeuristic spectators.  The white pill here is that this is one of the easiest fixes at any age.  Buy ball- throw ball; it’s as simple as that.  No one can be better than the best at some sport, by definition, but anyone can be better than himself, and in the end, this is the excellence that matters.  Turn off the TV, set goal, meet goal, repeat.  Become worthy. 

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