Point of View: To Play Is to Be

I read a review of two sports books in The New Yorker recently and there was not once the mention of joy, though, admittedly, it was the business of sport — the money in it — that was the subject, not the headiness of play per se.

One book predicted that the commercial bubble would one day be pricked given the fact that television viewership is minuscule for sports on a day-to-day basis save for football, which all the major networks air. Still, the deflation of the commercial sports bubble remains hard to imagine — especially in this country — just as it is to think that our empire may one day be attenuated. (“Forever,” our stamps say, though nothing, we know, is forever.) 

The reviewer seemed rather dismissive of sport as a productive way to spend one’s time, which annoyed me, a sportswriter, though that may be to misread him: Televised professional sports and blindered fans were presumably the main thrust. 

Still, it rankled when he said sport, as opposed to art, produced nothing, and trotted out trash-talking quotes from Maxim Gorky and Fran Lebowitz (whom I fondly remember as having refused to yield at the East Hampton Cinema when ordered by a priggish fellow ticketholder to put her cigarette out) in his defense.

To the contrary, sport — at least when it comes to the participating in it rather than the watching of it — produces not nothing, but joy. 

It’s self-evident that there’s joy — at least to me, who’s written of people running, walking, pedaling, swimming, climbing, swinging, kicking, punching, leaping, skating, catching, passing, shooting, dribbling, grappling, riding, fencing, and dancing for the past 40 years. And, at times, there’s transcendence too. No less a one than Stephen Hawking said the other day, concerning the envisioned mission to Alpha Centauri, that he believed transcending our limits was what made human beings unique. 

To move freely, to play is a great part of life. I would even say that to play is to be.