The Spiritual Meaning of Sport
Amanda Smith: Today, for Easter and Passover, the spiritual meaning of sport. Has sport become one of the western world's most successful institutions because it fulfils a role in our search for meaning?
Hi, I'm Amanda Smith, thanks for your company on The Sports Factor.
Where also today, the lighter side of sport. The Melbourne International Comedy Festival has just got under way, as always beginning on April Fool's Day, and one of the festival comedians is Sue-Ann Post. In the past, Sue- Ann's derived a lot of her stand-up material from her Mormon childhood in New Zealand. But for her new show, called 'G-Strings and Jockstraps', she's turned her attention to sport.
COMEDY GIG/LAUGHTER
Sue-Ann Post: You see because I have a bit of a theory that women invented sport to get men out of the house. Because as I said you know, I grew up with five brothers, and aren't they useless? You know, if it's raining and they're indoors, it's just 'Uh duh, uh duh, there's nothing to do, I'm bored, gonna punch you in the head, I'm bored! I'm bored!' So I had this vision of 300 years ago of this woman who invented golf in Scotland on a wet day when 'I'm bored! I'm bored!'. And finally she just got this little ball and she said 'Well go! Hit this around the backyard!'. 'But what with?'. 'Oh I don't know, a stick!'. 'Right.' And he's gone, and he's got into it, he's whacked it round the backyard, stupid, for the whole afternoon. And finally 'Oo, I'll dig a little hole and try and knock it in, oo, I'm on to something here! Come on Jock, look at this! Fantastic, excellent!' Right? And the wife's inside just going 'Oh beautiful'.
And I pursued the theory a bit further and thought not only that maybe women invented sport, but maybe there's a correlation between how long it takes to play the game, and how much the women of that culture like their men. So you know, darts, only takes 40 minutes, they probably like their blokes. Footy? A couple of hours, yes, OK. Golf? Well you're getting into the whole afternoon there. So then, what does it say about the English, who invented cricket? Takes five days to play.
LAUGHTER
Oh yes. See ya.
APPLAUSE
Amanda Smith: Now Sue-Ann Post is not only making jokes about sport in her show for the Comedy Festival, she's also doing it. She's now in serious training in the sport of hammer throwing, that curious and ancient sport where you throw a heavy metal ball that's attached to a wire as far as you can. But why the hammer throw? Sue-Ann Post.
Sue-Ann Post: Well it's something I did 14 years ago just before I turned 20, because I used to be a jock at high school, shotput and discus, and I thought 'Oh no, I've got to do something physical before I get old!' So I joined an athletics club and they had the hammer there, and that was much more interesting than shotput. But there was no point in pursuing it then, because New South Wales was the only state that let women throw the hammer. And then just last year I was watching the Commonwealth Games with my girlfriend and went 'Oh my God! Female hammer throw, it's made it to the Commonwealth Games, cool'. And then I watched this Aussie girl throw a couple of metres more than I used to, and win gold.
Amanda Smith: Yes this was Deborah Sosimenko wasn't it, who threw something like 66, 67 metres?
Sue-Ann Post: Yes, 66, something like that.
Amanda Smith: So what did you used to throw?
Sue-Ann Post: Well I think I was up to about 45, 50 metres with just a standing throw. Never quite perfected the spins which is what I'm working on at the moment.
Amanda Smith: Well what was the attraction of taking up hammer throwing again as an adult, Sue-Ann?
Sue-Ann Post: Just for a joke. For a funny story to tell on stage, and it got a bit serious a bit quickly. Especially when I went out, picked up the hammer for the first time in 18 years, threw 31 metres and the club record was 24. It was like, maybe I've still got it.
Amanda Smith: Well Sue-Ann, certainly you are a big strong woman, I guess you're by way of physique naturally endowed for this sport?
Sue-Ann Post: Yes, I know this is not a visual medium, but listeners, I've got shoulders like a Mallee bull and legs like a piano. I was genetically designed to chuck stuff a long way.
Amanda Smith: Well apart from brute strength, is there actually a lot of technique involved in hammer throwing?
Sue-Ann Post: Heaps, heaps of technique. Like the footwork, it's quite unnatural to spin your foot the way you have to. And timing, of course timing is important in everything, including comedy, and also hammer.
Amanda Smith: Has this made a difference, getting involved in sport now in your mid-30s, has this made a difference to you? I mean since you gave away shotputt hammerthrow and stuff when you were younger, has this made a difference to how you see yourself now?
Sue-Ann Post: Completely. I've always been a bit of a freak and people have been a bit scared of me physically, because I'm so big. But now you put it in context, I throw the hammer, and suddenly my body makes sense to people, and it's the ideal shape for it. And people go 'Yes, you're a hammer thrower, that makes sense.'
Amanda Smith: How serious are you about this as a competitor?
Sue-Ann Post: From all my years of jockdom there's a very wide competitive streak in me. I don't know how feasible it is taking it up at this late stage, I don't know how long it will take me to get the spins happening. The coach said you have to do it five million times till you can do it without thinking. I don't know how realistic it is, but I intend to throw my all at it, because it's not often this late in life you get a second chance to do something you've wanted to do since you were a kid.
Amanda Smith: Sue-Ann, how do other hammer throwers you're training with, who themselves may have been training and sweating away for years and years, how are they responding to you?
Sue-Ann Post: Well they've barely talked to me so far. I haven't done that many sessions with the squad, but I think there's a real (and I don't blame them at all), a bit of a sneer, like, 'Oh, funny girl, reckon you can do this, do you?' And I completely understand it, and I've been at great pains to go, 'Look, it's OK, I'm just coming along for some funny stories and maybe something else, we'll see.'
Amanda Smith: Well what are your aspirations? The hammer throw for women is not an Olympic event, but as you mentioned, it is a Commonwealth Games event. What about Manchester Commonwealth Games in 2002?
Sue-Ann Post: Oh look, I think it would be perfect because - I'm not sure exactly which comes first - but pop over to Manchester, compete in the Commonwealth Games, then just pop over to Edinburgh and make people laugh at a show there.
Amanda Smith: At the Edinburgh Festival?
Sue-Ann Post: At the Edinburgh Festival. That would make me laugh, you know it's either, 'OK, just off to chuck stuff now', or 'Yes, thanks for me medal, now I'm going to make people laugh. Bye.' See I'm purely doing this because it makes me laugh so much I fall out of bed at night. I still cannot say the phrase, 'elite athlete' without cracking up.
Amanda Smith: Why?
Sue-Ann Post: Because it's such a joke that I could possibly even be one!
Amanda Smith: Sue-Ann Post - athlete and comedian - a unique career combination I think.
And now to the sacred in sport. This Sunday, St Kilda is playing Melbourne in the Australian Football League competition. That's the Saints versus the Demons, a miraculous bit of luck or planning for an Easter Sunday match you'd have to say. And according to sociologist John Carroll sport has risen in its significance for people in inverse proportion to the decline in church attendances.
John's the author of a book called 'Ego and Soul: the Modern West in Search of Meaning' and in it, he talks a lot about sport in relation to that search for meaning. In particular, John Carroll rejects the idea that sport is a once-noble pursuit that's been commercialised and debased into just mindless entertainment.
John Carroll: I think you simply have to go to a football match or watch golfers, or watch Olympic performances to see that something is being conducted here of deep seriousness. There are obvious cues that this is not consumerist: the weekly pilgrimage today is hardly ever to church, the weekly pilgrimage is to the weekend football match, the sacred turf. The stars of football especially are talked about in semi-divine terms.
But I want to suggest (and this is not original to me but I've used a sort of terminology) that what's going on here is that the sportsman and the sportswoman are striving for a sort of form, such as Plato talked about a long time ago, a sort of form in which miraculously a harmony of body, mind, and the task at hand is achieved. Now things like training and exercises and all the things that various sports people do, are very important to achieve form, but anyone who takes part in sport at any level knows that training doesn't do it. Training is a sort of preparatory exercise, but there are times when you're in form, and there are times when you're out of form. A golfer suddenly finds that from nowhere there's this harmony moving through his or her body, and the ball goes just exactly where you want it to go. Two minutes later it's gone. But it's like an act of God, or it's like (to use traditional religious language) it's like a state of grace. This euphoric sense of union, of harmony, where I and the world around me are suddenly this sublime one-ness. As much as that, losing form is a state of damnation, it feels terrible, it feels like a curse has descended upon the person or the team. And all of this looks like fairly traditional religious experience, although of course the context is completely secular. And this is the main reason that sport has so captivated the west. I mean in the last 30 years sport has become more and more and more significant in every western society, not just Australia. Something very important is going on here, and to a degree I think it can be plotted in an inverse ratio to the decline of church attendance.
Amanda Smith: Tell me more about the idea that you suggest that 'sport is pioneering in the way that modern societies seem to like their religion'.
John Carroll: Well I think, and this is another one of my central theses, we're moving back to what the classical world, the Greeks and the Romans, used to call anima mundi. A view that anima, soul, is present in ordinary, everyday things, obviously in other humans, but in other creatures, in the phenomena of the everyday world, in the midst of which we move. I think the west generally is moving back to this sense of, not a personalised god like the Lord God up above, of the Christian churches, but much more a sense of the sacred all around, and the sacred inhabiting the world in which we move if we have the right relationship to it.
In this context then, sport is one of the most successful ways of just taking up a simple everyday activity which has no utilitarian value, it doesn't save lives, it doesn't help the underprivileged, it doesn't do anything useful. In fact this is one of its strengths in this context because you can't pretend you're doing something useful with sport. And if you look at it rationally, it's a total waste of time. The endless jokes about golfers and why do you ruin a beautiful view hitting this silly white ball around is all of course true. But it neglects anima mundi, the sense that we live in a potentially enchanted world if we have the right relationship to it. Sport is becoming one of the avenues, in some ways the main avenue, to finding the right relationship to it.
Amanda Smith: You also talk, John, about sport being the most prominent form of western meditation. What do you mean by that?
John Carroll: Well this comes back to what I was talking about, about form. It's like meditation in the sense that meditation is usually a form of practice, whether we're talking about the east or the west, and both the east and the west have got their own aesthetic disciplines of meditation. Meditation is a way of focusing mentally so as extraneous thoughts don't distract, you don't rush through your mind, you're not worried about where you're going to get your next meal. But your attention is complete and undistracted on the task at hand. Now I'm suggesting that sport in all its forms is a means for exactly the same sort of focus, and when it's achieved there is this strange transcendence of my ego and its petty worries, there's this strange union with something bigger. There's something bigger, I don't think we can say much more about it, and sport doesn't want to, and I think at that level too, it suits the modern world. We're very wary of saying too much more about whatever it is we're in communication with.
Amanda Smith: What about sport in relationship to work and status? These days professional sports people have a kind of celebrity status, or heroic status even, above and beyond that say of film stars nowadays or political leaders.
John Carroll: That's obviously true. It's a risk for sport that the money and the status and the celebrity distract from I think the real reasons that I've been talking about that move people about sport, that why sport is serious for them. I would say, though, about work, that westerners are still very much under the thrall of the Protestant work ethic. And we've taken in the belief that for all of us there's a serious central life activity, and for most people this is work, which once you've discovered it, you should throw yourself into it body and soul, carry it out to the best of your ability and that in doing that, you will somehow transcend the secular facts of having to earn income. Now in the contemporary western world the figures that most obviously fulfil the work ethic are the sporting stars. I mean, they subject themselves to extraordinary Spartan rigours of training, six hours a day, eight hours a day, seven days a week. And this is like religious practice of the Middle Ages in terms of the denial of almost all human pleasures for the sake of carrying out the sport to the best of your ability. I think we if we look then at the imagery in which the sporting star, man and woman, the imagery in which they are portrayed, we see almost an idealisation of the work ethic. These are the people whose central life activity really means something; these are the people who are almost heroes of work today, although what they do is not actually work in the traditional sense. So at this level there's a strange conjunction with a belief that work can save us, although we're not quite sure what 'save' means in that context, and sport.
Amanda Smith: John Carroll the author of 'Ego and Soul: The Modern West in Search of Meaning'.
Now of course it's not only Easter-time at the moment, it's also Passover, the Jewish festival commemorating the liberation of the Israelites. And for ages, a Jewish friend of mine has been on at me to do something about why Jews are not very interested, and not very good, at sport. And those are her words, not mine. Well according to Dr George Eisen, who's a Jewish sports scholar, this is definitely a perception that's prevalent among both Jews and non-Jews. Ask anyone to name Jewish achievers of the 20th century, and the list will include musicians, writers, comedians, scientists, but probably not athletes.
Now George Eisen was a keynote speaker at a conference on Jews and sport, that was held in Berlin towards the end of last year. And he says that attitudes of the Jewish diaspora to sport involve a complex interlocking of religious, cultural, economic and nationalist factors that, rightly or wrongly, result in this perception.
George Eisen: It is partly true and partly is not true. If I would say 'ambivalent' is a better word. Ambivalent about the role of sport. There are two camps: one who tries to prove desperately that we are the people of the muscle, the other group argues that we are people of the book. I think we cannot discard the idea that Judaism, its evolution from the physical to the mental, took 2,000 years. After all I think some of us who also dabble in ancient history remember that the Maccabee Revolt was precipitated partly because the Jewish priests, high priests in the temple, built a gymnasium next to the holy temple. So it's a creative tension between Jewish perceptions of sport, and how important is sport.
Amanda Smith: Now in a journal article I've read of yours George, you mention a scene in a movie called 'Airplane', where (and if I may just describe this scene) it's where a flight attendant asks a passenger 'Would you like something to read?' The passenger says, 'Do you have something light?' and the flight attendant replies, 'How about this short leaflet: Jewish Sports Legends?' Now you suggest that this dialogue is probably the brainchild of a Jewish comedian. So the idea of Jews being not very good at sport is one perpetuated in this scene, and by Jews themselves? Why is that?
George Eisen: It is indeed ingrained in Jewish consciousness, there is no doubt about that. Part of the reason is like every religious doctrine, Judaism promotes a certain hierarchy of values. No doubt about this, that in this official hierarchy of values, education is the number one priority. But it's maybe true that there's a different rationale why Jews want to participate in sport. Jewish tradition traditionally deplores that it would be an end in itself, and that's an important qualifying statement. Always education, sport, exercise, should lead to a betterment of the human being.
Having said that again, it's very interesting to quote, and I love to quote this since, everybody's read 'The Sun Also Rises' by Hemingway. He describes in very derogatory terms the Jewish boxing champion of University of Princeton. He's great in boxing, but he's doing it for the wrong reason, according to Hemingway. He's not subscribing to the masculine ethos which American men should. So he always remains an outsider, no matter that he is the boxing champion. And he refuses to go fishing, he refuses to go hunting, he almost throws up when he sees the bullfighting, which was so close of course to Hemingway's heart. I think Hemingway exemplified in the 1920s the American ideal of masculinity. So he accuses the boxer that he participates in order to be accepted, not because he's a true sportsman.
Reader: Robert Kahn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. He cared nothing for boxing, in fact he disliked it, but he learned it painfully and thoroughly to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he'd felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton.
There was a certain inner comfort in knowing he could knock down anybody who was snooty to him, although, being very shy and a thoroughly nice boy, he never fought except in the gym.
In his last year at Princeton he read too much and took to wearing spectacles. I never met anyone of his class who remembered him. They did not even remember that he was middleweight boxing champion.
George Eisen: I think I love this little literary criticism, because it provides an interesting mirror both for the Jewish perception and the Gentile perception on why Jews participate in sport.
Amanda Smith: Nevertheless, why does that perception persist, do you think?
George Eisen: I think one of the cardinal points that I found in my research about the question of how were they perceived, it's a very fascinating issue. I found that Jewish presence in the Olympic Games are overwhelming, not only Mark Spitz let's say, who is the most successful perhaps athlete.
Amanda Smith: Yes, now he's the person who, if you ever ask anyone 'Name a Jewish sports star', everyone will say 'Mark Spitz', but they won't be able to name too many others.
George Eisen: This is the fascination for me, that how we are trying consciously to negate a very important part I guess, of Jewish history. Now when we're talking about anti-Semitism, the argument that Jews are not capable to achieve superior performances is obviously a fallacy. Now should we argue, 'Yes they do, no they don't', the numbers are immense. I was reading an article about the Jewish presence in basketball. What was the reason that Jews were so predominant in the '20s and '30s in American basketball? Was it because (and this reason was given by a sports writer in the '30s) because they are the Semitic race and their response is very quick, a little bit shyster, so to speak in Yiddish, so they are stealing the ball much easier? But it was much simpler, I mean what's happening now that African Americans are so good, it's a pretty straight explanation. Basketball is an inner-city sport. Jews were the absolute ultimate inner-city people until the '20s and '30s and then they moved to the suburbs, and African Americans moved into the cities. So we're dealing with socio-economic class, residence, many complex issues. Are they still good in basketball? No. Why are they not? Partly because they are out in the suburbs, partly because sport is not needed any more for social integration, psychological acceptance.
Amanda Smith: Now as well as Jews having a dominant presence in American basketball in the 1920s and '30s, they were also big in boxing at that time. George Eisen explains why with a term he calls, 'ethnic succession':
George Eisen: Ethnic succession is the very logical replacing of each different ethnic group in housing, in sport, in occupation, in many other areas of life. You find boxing clearly exhibits this, whoever is at the bottom of the socio economic scale, let's say the United States to take an example, the ultimate ethnic society. You find that the first boxers were Irish, at the bottom; the second ones were Jews, then Italians, and by the 1940s, 1950s African Americans took over. And you find now that the bottom of the socio-economic scale is the Hispanics moving in in a larger number. That's what I mean about ethnic succession.
Amanda Smith: So George, tell me how a Nazi ideal about sport comes into what you're talking?
George Eisen: One of the fascinations for me is about the evolution of the idea of genocide, and specifically the Holocaust. In order to kill, commit genocide, commit a Holocaust, you need to dehumanise the person from a normal human being, until you arrive to a 'musselman' I use the term, which is Holocaust lingo, a skeleton, that is not resembling any more a fellow human being. And sport played a very vital role in that. In the Warsaw ghetto even Hitler Jugend, 17-year-old kids, went into the ghetto and made old people do push-ups and sit-ups in the mud, humiliating the individuals, robbing them of their human dignity. I remember distinctly, I don't know if you read the book 'Schindler's List' by Keneally -
Amanda Smith: Yes, 'Schindler's Ark'.
George Eisen: I saw the movie, and also read; and he was describing a 55-year-old woman who is running the race of her life in order to survive, because the Nazis selected those who were still able to be slave labourers, and whoever came last or the five last, they shot every time. So here is a 55-year-old woman running for her life, rubbing red cabbage in her cheeks to look more healthy.
MUSIC
Reader: As they reached the Appellplatz, prisoners were told to strip. They were lined up naked and run back and forth in front of the doctors. The prisoners would run, the physicians looking for signs of disease or muscular weakness. Men with dislocated backs, women with chronic diarrhoea, red cabbage rubbed into their cheeks to give them colour - all of them running for their lives and understanding that it was so.
Young Mrs Kinstlinger, who'd sprinted for Poland at the Berlin Olympics, knew that all that had just been a game. This was the true contest. With your stomach turning and your breath thin, you ran - for your golden life.
MUSIC
George Eisen: So sport and exercise had a very important role of demeaning, reducing the human being, torturing the human being. In Auschwitz there are haunting paintings by Alfred Kantor of the torture of the prisoners, by making them pull loaded wagons back and forth, senselessly. And under the picture he wrote, 'They call it sport'.
Amanda Smith: Dr George Eisen, who was one of the keynote speakers at a conference called Jewish Sport and Jewish Community, held in October last year in Berlin, which is where I was speaking to him from.
And Michael Taft did those readings from 'Schindler's Ark' by Tom Keneally and 'Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises' by Ernest Hemingway.
And that's The Sports Factor for this week. I'm Amanda Smith, thanks for your company. Hope you'll join me again next week. Cheers till then.
THEME
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