I was a painfully unathletic child, more likely to be found in a ballet class than on a baseball diamond. I could neither dribble nor shoot a basketball, an especially excruciating deficiency for a black kid growing up in the inner city. Football (the American version) was my particular nemesis. Not was the game itself frightening and dangerous, but the rules and scoring were incomprehensible. As a lifelong resident, however, of one of the most football-crazy cities in a football-crazy nation, the annual site of a game billed as "the biggest rivalry in sports," I did eventually fall in love with football. My entry into the sport, as so often was the case for me in pursuits that others engaged with via visceral instinct, was both intellectual and philosophical.
Whole volumes could be written, whole volumes have been written, about the ethics of American college football, a gladiatorial pastime whose unpaid participants risk on a weekly basis both their health and (due to the prevalence of concussions) their sanity, to the obscenely exaggerated enrichment of millionaire coaches, administrators and other more-or-less parasitic entities. This essay, however, is about the aesthetics of college football, both a more rare and a more rarefied subject of inquiry.
There is undoubtedly a concept of "beauty" in sport, but it can be elusive and counter-intuitive. Some sports have clear artistic elements: figure skating, for example, or gymnastics. How is it, however, that people can call a sport as brutal as football or as unadorned as boxing beautiful? The concept may be easier to identify in the breach. In football, for example, one often hears of an "ugly" win. But what makes a win ugly? One clear answer is cheating; an ugly victory is often one not won fairly. By extension, however, an ugly win can be one where the letter of all rules is followed, but the spirit of them is abused. An example is the deployment of timeouts specifically to interfere with the other team psychologically, which is both legal and common, yet hard to call admirable.
No real sports fan ever complains long or loud about an ugly victory by his or her favorite team, but such games are neither long remembered nor treasured in the same way as the beautiful games. So what makes the difference? If ugliness is marked by rules broken or abused, then beauty, one might assume, is intimately bound to following the rules, both in the letter and in the spirit. Is it beautiful, then, to follow rules? If we look at the arts, we see so many of them are in fact rule-based sports, from the hundreds of rules of musical theory allegedly followed by Bach and Beethoven, to the synchronized steps of a choreographed dance, to the complex patterns of rhythm and rhyme in a traditional poem. But why? What is it about rules that calls forth beauty?
In her book Centering, ceramicist Mary Caroline Richards opines on why things made from clay are more beautiful than those made from plastic. The clay, she says, is versatile, but limited. There are things it cannot do. To take a heavy chunk of mud and make it seem light and graceful, or to hold together in complex shapes, takes real artistry. In contrast, the plastic is too pliable and compliant. Because it can do or be anything, nothing it is or does comes as a surprise or a triumph.
The beauty of a traditional form poem is much like the beauty of the clay. A poet once said of the rigid and repetitive poetic form called the sestina that writing one was like trying to dance in a full suit of armor, and that the goal, therefore, was for the end result to seem as light and as graceful as possible. Here, I would venture, we glimpse a certain affinity with football, whose players could fairly be described as dancers in full suits of armor (although not, perhaps, to their faces!). The key is that the addition of the rules takes a simple act and makes it difficult. The challenge, then, is to overcome these artificial difficulties, or rather, to transcend them. In doing so, you reach a destination not accessible via the most direct path.
The goal in a sestina is to communicate something new and fresh. What makes it difficult is being forced to repeat yourself at artificially established intervals. The goal in football is to travel roughly a hundred yards. It is not an insignificant distance, but neither is it a prohibitively long one. It is a distance that any reasonably healthy adult could easily traverse on foot. What makes it difficult is the fact that you also have to successfully transport a ball with you, all whilst a entire team of freakishly large, musclebound men in padded armor does its level best to take it away.
Entry into the end zone, therefore, is admission to a place that can only be reached against opposition, passage through a door that cannot open without people trying hard to keep it closed. The poetry in a touchdown is success against the odds. A beautiful game is one where both teams play their best, each pushing the other to a higher standard—competition as collaboration. The art of the athlete is a moment of fulfillment of the highest demand against human physical potential. Such are the aesthetics of football.
Chris Sunami writes the blog The Pop Culture Philosopher, and is the author of several books, including the social-justice oriented Christian devotional Hero For Christ. He is married to artist April Sunami, and lives in Columbus, Ohio.
Wow, a pretentious article on football. Can you endeavor to pen a surmise on the internal reality of ping pong.
Thanks for the interesting piece, Chris. Here’s an alternate take on the notion of an “ugly game,” one that I think is also plausible based on how the phrase is used among players, coaches, and pundits.
Whether or not a game is ugly is often determined by execution. A poorly executed game, where receivers don’t run their routes properly, linemen miss their assignments, miscommunication occurs between the quarterback and the rest of the offense, etc., is typically understood as ugly. I’ve seen numerous games that were considered “ugly.” There really wasn’t any cheating or egregious rule infractions involved. It just involved a lot of poor play, and still eking out a win in spite of that.
So, you might think that perfect execution figures largely into the aesthetics of football, as well as any other sport. This seems to matter more for players and fans when it comes making aesthetic judgments about games.
This should not even be a discussion given the inherent abuse existing in this organization, Young men routinely (mostly black) give up there cerebral lives forever for a few years of games and riches while the rich white men (yes, white) who know the risks these young men face, ignore it so they may reap financial riches. This is a barbaric enterprise and it should never be considered in terms of beauty or aesthetics.
Hi Laura,
There are several assumptions in your claim that are worth examining.
First, there is a distinction between a sport and the institutions that govern the sport. Many might agree that the NFL exploits its players and participates in other less than worthy practices. However, this seems separate from the game of football itself. It seems to me that judging the aesthetic merits of a game is to be done apart from contingent facts about how the game is governed at a professional and semi-professional level.
Suppose we separate the game from the institution. At this point, would you say that football, as a game considered in itself, is an immoral activity? It would seem to follow, if I understand your line of reasoning correctly, that if football is immoral, all other sports that are either directly or indirectly combative are immoral. This would include hockey, rugby, lacrosse, wrestling, judo, boxing, MMA, etc.
Suppose further that football is indeed an immoral activity. There is a further presupposition to examine, one regarding the connection between morality and aesthetics. Would you agree to the following claim?
Anything that is immoral cannot be beautiful.
1. Look up Alan Dundes essay In to the “endzone” for a “touchdown”. you will find a very different interpretation of American Football.
2. Australian Rules Football (I think)
3. The only critique of American Football that I know of is Steve Almond’s (but it is a thorough one).
* Australian Rules Football (I think) is actually a beautiful game to watch (and exciting).