One of my favorite diversions during the Winter Olympics involves tracking the popular opinion of curling. The overriding conception seems to be that it’s just plain silly. A New York Post article deems curling the “weirdest” Olympic sport and an episode of The Simpsons parodies it as Homer views a group practicing curling and quips, “They come here on Saturday night to sweep the ice? Losers.” Upon realizing many consider it a sport he says to Marge, affectionately, “It’s got bowling for me and sweeping for you.”
Certainly, in American culture, the sport/game/activity of curling is “weird.” It’s not normal: people sliding big rocks (termed “stones”) along ice while teammates frantically sweep, steering the stone towards a specific place on the ice. But before we cast stones, it’s worth looking at our own culture’s celebrated activities.
Take basketball, for example, in which people bounce a ball repeatedly and then try to throw it through a circle. In golf, participants use awkward sticks to hit a ball down a stretch of grass into a hole. And on Sundays, millions watch groups of men try to get a ball made of pig epidermis onto a particular patch of grass. Silliness abounds, with track-and-field athletes running around in circles and throwing sticks and hammers through the air, and another, from the winter Olympics: skiing through snow and then projecting a bullet through a sheet of paper.
Quite a silly group of activities. And aside from the skiing-and-shooting endeavor, their respective practitioners hone skills useful only in achieving success in that endeavor. To avoid seeming as though my own athletic forte eludes reproach…
I happen to be (or, at least, was) very good at preventing a rubber ball from entering a floating rectangle. So good that Stanford University offered to pay for a majority of my education if I promised to keep balls from entering the floating rectangles on their campus. I happily agreed. Now, after thousands of hours of practice, this skill I possess has afforded very little utility in my life. Though, while on a camping trip in high school, I successfully transported everyone’s gear across a small stream, keeping it off the water just as I did in my rigorous water polo training. And a few months back, I prevented a projectile (wooden block) hurled by my one-year old son from hitting the television. Dada 1; Knox 0. It saved us the cost of replacing the TV, and I think I impressed my wife a bit in the process.
It must be, then, with all of the time, emotion, and resources invested in the sporting institution—especially at the youth level—something lies much deeper than the actual skills being tested. The level of seriousness aligned with activities like throwing a ball through a circle seems rather ill-fit.
Smith College professor Albert Mosley once made an analogy at a philosophy conference that has always stuck with me. It has that Monty Python humor to it, though also sheds great light on a topic that we commonly take for granted with very real ramifications. He has us imagine the great success which short people would have at climbing into small holes. Were we to host youth Entering Small Holes tournaments, short people would travel from all over to compete. Young people would devote great portions of their time to this venture. High-level coaches could recognize talent early, discovering parents who maintain exceptional body types for such ventures—“Oh, yes, his mom and dad aren’t even five feet tall, this kid’s got a real shot at greatness.” 1
Mosley intentionally chose an outrageous analogue to force us to respond, “But what a waste of time. Look what that kid could’ve accomplished if he spent just half that time on his studies. What use will climbing into small holes serve him when he’s forced into early retirement along with the 99% who don’t go on to the next level?”
We need to be mindful of this as we continue to set sports schedules, policy, and leagues for children. A cut-off must loom in the near future at which point a focus on silly skills yields diminishing returns in the face of what the student-athlete gives up in order to perfect such skills.
Yet, on a positive note, with this in mind we can better frame the sporting experience in two ways. First, we recognize on one level, these sporting objectives we pursue are not matters of life and death: they encompass play (and even a bit of silliness). So all of the negative side effects of the “winning is everything” mentality can more easily dissipate. And, secondly, despite all of this—actually, because of it—we must push deeper to recognize the profound fruits available to those who do decide to engage whole-heartedly in the sporting life. The particular sport must be about more than just the stated objective. If you reduce any activity, it can seem pretty silly—the importance of an endeavor lies in the value-framework beneath it.
This morning, I made a long-distance toss of an empty egg carton into the recycling bin: a skill I attribute to my days spent throwing balls through circles. And now, I’ve got to stop hitting these keys making letters appear: our family has friends coming over and we’re going to take turns trying to get a bunch of beanbags to end up inside the hole of a plank of wood. It’s serious stuff.
1Mosley makes the analogy in order to address a tangential issue. He argues that black athletes are stereotyped as being exceptionally good at certain sports and thusly forced into those sports at an early age. Though because people gravely over-estimate the opportunities to reach the next level as an athlete, he is concerned about the harm done to this demographic both socially and also personally, as many athletes forgo a focus on education in order to pursue activities of limited utility such as running around in a circle, etc.
A version of his original paper, “Racial Differences in Sports: What’s Ethics Got to Do with It?” can be found in Jan Boxill’s Sports Ethics: An Anthology.
