No Contest (15 page)

Competitive games obviously are different from the competition we find in most other realms of our lives. “To live with the hope of immediate success and fear of immediate failure in an enterprise which has no significance beyond itself is a totally different thing from living permanently on the brink of that abyss into which competitive industry throws its failures,” as John Harvey put it.
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Still, the fact that competition is so unpleasant—often the source of considerable anxiety—in other contexts is worth keeping in mind as we ponder the question posed by this chapter's title. The pressure to be a winner on the playing field is not totally different from its counterpart in the office, so we are entitled to a measure of skepticism as we consider the prospect of competing for enjoyment. In any case, there is no denying that this country's most popular recreational activities are structured so that one individual or team must triumph over the other. Sports, in particular, are competitive by definition,
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while, in practice, the extent of their competitiveness is such that George Leonard referred to our “overblown, institutionalized, codified worship of winning.”
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Just as competition is the salient characteristic of sport, so is sport, in turn, a prominent feature of American life. The vernacular of football and baseball has leached into the language. We take for granted the astonishing fact that results of various competitive games automatically qualify as “news”; indeed, every daily newspaper and local television news program in the country reserves space or time to report on the results of these pastimes. Certain sporting events are among our most popular forms of entertainment, with the Super Bowl being watched in some forty million households each year. Sociologist Harry Edwards once set out, rather playfully, to determine “the relative impact of sports as opposed to politics.” At the height of a hotly contested mayoral election in New York City, he stopped 150 passers-by and asked them, “Who is going to win?” Thirty-four people named one of the candidates and most of the rest said, “The Mets.”
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Even if the story is apocryphal, finally, it may be worth thinking seriously about the college administrator who once said he wanted a university that the football team could be proud of.

 

THE QUESTION OF PLAY

 

Except for the people who depend on them for their livelihood, sports, like all other forms of recreation, presumably exist for no other reason than to provide enjoyment. Thus we are led to ask whether competition truly represents the most enjoyable arrangement we can imagine in a recreational setting. Let us narrow the question by first considering the phenomenon of play, which might be thought of as enjoyment in its purest form. (The next section will address the larger question of whether we need to compete to have fun.) As I noted in chapter 2, one of the classic works on the subject, Johan Huizinga's
Homo Ludens,
goes so far as to suggest that play and competition are virtually synonymous.
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Other students of play, such as Roger Caillois and Jean Piaget, have treated competition as a kind of play, if not its prototype. I want to challenge not only Huizinga's extreme position but even the weaker claim that competition and play are compatible. To do so, it makes sense to begin by defining play.

A review of the literature
⁵
discloses considerable overlap—which is not to say consensus—among previous efforts. Huizinga, who goes on to argue that play is the touchstone of civilization itself, offers a rather broad definition. He proposes that play is “a free activity standing quite consciously outside ‘ordinary' life as being ‘not serious,' but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly . . . occurring within certain limits of space, time, and meaning, according to fixed rules.”
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The critical part of this definition, I think, is the reference to freedom. Play must be chosen voluntarily, and it is chosen because it is pleasing. Other activities are commended to us because of their utility, their instrumental worth. Play, by contrast, is intrinsically gratifying; it is an end in itself. We do not play in order to master a particular skill or to perform well, although these may be adventitious results. The master aphorist G. K. Chesterton perfectly captured the spirit of play when he said, “If a thing is worth doing at all, it is worth doing badly.”
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Results will not matter, in other words, if we love what we are doing for its own sake. (That this idea seems peculiar, if not unnerving, to us is evidence of how little room our worldview makes for play.) Play represents a “process orientation,” a concern for what one is doing in itself, as opposed to a “product orientation,” in which one's activity is justified by what it contributes to some other goal. Play, quite justifiably conceived as the opposite of work, has no goal other than itself.

This is not to say that play cannot turn out to be useful or cannot be encouraged for heuristic purposes. Adults, who are typically less process-oriented than children, often read serious business into children's play. It is seen as (1) an opportunity for the player to experiment with roles and cultural norms, develop the ego, and enhance a sense of personal competence;
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(2) an opportunity for the player to work through unconscious fears;
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(3) a diagnostic tool by which the psychotherapist can gain access to the child's inner life; and (4) a way to instill certain values in a child.
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The player, though, does not engage in play for these purposes—or for any purpose except to have fun. As soon as play becomes product-oriented or otherwise extrinsically motivated, it ceases to be play.

Two final points need to be made about the nature of play. First, while we sometimes speak of play as relaxing, it tends not to be homeostatic (that is, motivated by a need to produce a state of rest or balance). On the contrary, the person at play delights in seeking out challenges and overcoming them.
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Second, while all human behavior is in some sense rule-governed, and while we can and do play within specific structures, the tendency of play to be free suggests that it is also more or less spontaneous. Thus, rules, while not precisely inimical to play, may frustrate its purest expression. An activity might be said to approximate play in inverse proportion to the extent to which it is rule-bound.

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Huizinga was probably not the first and certainly not the last to complain that “with the increasing systematization and regimentation of sport, something of the pure play-quality is inevitably lost. . . . The real play-spirit is threatened with extinction.”
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He wrote that in 1944, and books lamenting sport's fall from grace, as it were, are still being published regularly.
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The diminution of playfulness is often high on the list of grievances. It is said that our leisure activities no longer give us a break from the alienating qualities of the work we do; instead, they have come to resemble that work.

The chief reason our recreation is like our work is that it has become more competitive. But sports, by definition, have always been competitive. By virtue of this fact, sports never really qualified as play in the first place. Although it is not generally acknowledged, most definitions of play do seem to exclude competitive activities. First, competition is always highly rule-governed. “If the participants do not mutually define themselves as opponents, rules are mostly irrelevant,” writes Frank Winer.
¹⁴
(To be precise, they are not
always
irrelevant in the absence of competition. We will see shortly that noncompetitive games, too, can have rules. Still, rules tend to be more numerous and more rigid in competitive activities.) Second, competition often is motivated by a search for approval, which is an extrinsic motivator and thus irrelevant to play. Third, and most important, competition is goal-oriented striving
par excellence
. Novak is quite right to insist that “play is to be played exactly because it
isn't
serious; it frees us from seriousness.”
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Competition, though, is very serious indeed—unavoidably so. Consider the following passage from Joseph Heller's novel
Something Happened,
in which a school gym teacher is complaining to the narrator about the behavior of the latter's son:

 

“I try to give him a will to win. He don't have one. . . . He passes the basketball deliberately—he does it deliberately, Mr. Slocum, I swear he does. Like a joke. He throws it away—to some kid on the other team just to give him a chance to make some points or to surprise the kids on his own team. For a joke. That's some joke, isn't it? . . . When he's ahead in one of the relay races, do you know what he does? He starts laughing. He does that. And then slows down and waits for the other guys to catch up. Can you imagine? The other kids on his team don't like that. That's no way to run a race, Mr. Slocum. Would you say that's a way to run a race?”

“No.” I shake my head and try to bury a smile. Good for you kid, I want to cheer out loud . . . for I can visualize my boy clearly far out in front in one of his relay races, laughing that deep, reverberating, unrestrained laugh that sometimes erupts from him, staggering with merriment as he toils to keep going and motioning liberally for the other kids in the race to catch up so they can all laugh together and run alongside each other as they continue their game (after all, it is only a game).
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Contrast the whimsical, mischievous, other-affirming, spur-of-the-moment delight depicted here with the grim, determined athletes who memorize plays and practice to the point of exhaustion in order to beat an opposing team. Clearly competition and play tug in two different directions. If you are trying to win, you are not engaged in true play. Several investigators have come to just this conclusion. M. J. Ellis, in his study of play, writes that “feelings of power, trophies, or money for the winners . . . are extrinsic to the process. To the degree that competition is sustained by extrinsic pressures, it is not play. . . . In this sense, competition and play are antithetical.”
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Similarly, Günther Lüschen remarks that the more sport is extrinsically rewarded, “the more it tends to be work; the less it tends to be play.”
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But we do not even need to point to the trophies and the money: The very experience of having beaten someone else is extrinsic to the process itself. The presence of this reward structure in competition disqualifies it as play.

Here, too, is sociologist Harry Edwards:

 

The bracketing off of play from the activities of daily life predisposes it to restriction within nonutilitarian bounds. Thus, none of the following actors could be considered as engaging in play: the office worker or executive who takes part in a badminton match [substitute “squash” or “handball”] in order to relax and take a break from the rigors of work; the professional participant in football; the high school and college football participants who see themselves as preparing for a college athletic grant-in-aid or for a professional career; persons who engage in such activities as card games with the goal of winning or gaining financially; or participants in checkers or chess.
¹⁹

 

Edwards inexplicably stops short of making his generalization explicit: the point is that
any
activity whose goal is victory cannot be play. Another perspective is provided by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's study of the “flow” experience—a sensation of total, unselfconscious involvement that is associated with play. Csikszentmihalyi comments that if basketball “is not as flow-producing as composing music, for instance, that is at least partly because its competitive structure fails to isolate the activity from everyday life, making concentration and the loss of ego relatively more difficult.”
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William A. Sadler, finally, notes that sports not only are not isolated from daily life (as play must be), but they actively train participants for that life as it is lived in our society.

 

Athletes often are well aware that what they do is not play [he writes]. Their practice sessions are workouts; and to win the game they have to work harder. Sports are not experienced as activities outside the institutional pattern of the American way of life; they are integrally a part of it. . . . In other words, the old cliché is true: “Sports prepare one for life.” The question which must be raised is: “what kind of life?” The answer in an American context is that they prepare us for a life of competition.
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Competitive recreation is anything but a time-out from goal-oriented activities. It has an internal goal, which is to win. And it has an external goal, which is to train its participants. Train them to do what? To accept a goal-oriented model. Sports is thus many steps removed from play.

The argument here is not merely academic. Even when they do not talk explicitly about play, apologists for sport like to argue that it offers a “time out” from the rest of life. No matter how brutal or authoritarian sports might be, we are supposed to see them as taking place in a social vacuum. This claim has the effect of excusing whatever takes place on a playing field. (While governor of California, Ronald Reagan reportedly advised a college football team that they could “feel a clean hatred for [their] opponent. It is a clean hatred since it's only symbolic in a jersey.”)
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It also has the effect of obscuring the close relationship between competitive recreation and the society that endorses it.

That relationship, as Sadler saw, is reciprocal. Sports not only reflect the prevailing mores of our society but perpetuate them. They function as socializing agents, teaching us the values of hierarchical power arrangements and encouraging us to accept the status quo. In a 1981 study of children's competitive soccer and hockey programs in New York and Connecticut, Gai Ingham Berlage was even more specific: “The structural organization of [these] programs resembles the structural organization of American corporations. . . . The values stressed in children's competitive sports are also similar to corporate values.”
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It is hardly a coincidence, then, that the most vigorous supporters of competitive sports—those who not only enjoy but explicitly defend them—are political conservatives (Michael Novak, Spiro Agnew, and William J. Bennett are among those quoted in these pages) or that interest in sports is highest in the more politically conservative regions of the country.
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