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Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Coaches Should be Professors,
and Football Should Be One of the Arts


Frank Deford, at NPR, writes.

SOS inserts.


'Sport is not considered art. Instead, it is invariably dismissed as something lesser — even something rather more vulgar — than the more traditional performance activities. [Not considering something art is not the same as diminishing it. Most people don't diminish sports relative to the arts. They put the two things in different categories. And some sports are violent -- their very nature is violence -- which is not the same as vulgar. I don't say football, for instance, is vulgar. I say it's primarily violent, and that it appeals not to the aesthetic but to the violent sensibilities of its audience. If military strategy and battlefield skill with weaponry is an art, football is also an art. Singers and dancers aren't trying to move a ball down a field by injuring the person in their way.]

Now Gary Walters, the athletic director at Princeton, has spoken out that sport should be granted equal educational prestige with the likes of drama and art and music. [Getting a little foggy already. What does "art" mean in that list? Painting? Painting's not a performance art.]


"Is it time," he asks, "for the educational-athletic experience on our playing fields [to] be accorded the same ... academic respect as the arts?" [Here the significant distinction is between simple daily life, which incorporates into it all sorts of experiences we can call educational, and the forms of education which are specific to universities. The sort of education you get playing a game has nothing to do with the sort of education universities provide. This is one reason we call sports extra-curricular.]

Walters validates his advocacy with unique credentials beyond the Ivy League. He went to the Final Four as playmaker on Bill Bradley's last team. He was chairman of the national Division I basketball committee this year, the maestro of March Madness. This is all to say that he brings the broadest perspective to college sports, and it mightily irritates Walters that sport is only considered a "distant cousin" to the arts. [Nothing in this paragraph is relevant to the argument Walters and Deford are trying to make. What is Walters' educational background? Does he have a degree in art theory?]

Well, apart from simply being so sweaty, I think that sport has suffered in comparison with the arts — or should I say: the other arts — because it is founded on trying to win. Artists are not supposed to be competitive. [Not true. Artists are both supposed to be competitive,and are competitive. Architects compete for commissions. Writers compete for subsidies. Singers and instrumentalists are always competing for prizes.] They are expected to be above that. We always hear "art for art's sake." Nobody ever says "sport for sport's sake." [We never hear art for art's sake. That went out a century ago.]

I also believe that sport has suffered because until recently, athletic performance could not be preserved. What we accepted as great art — whether the book, the script, the painting, the symphony — is that which could be saved and savored. But the performances of the athletic artists who ran and jumped and wrestled were gone with the wind.

Now, however, that we can study the grace of the athlete on film, a double play can be viewed as pretty as any pas de deux. Or, please: Is not what we saw Michael Jordan do every bit as artistic as what we saw Mikhail Baryshnikov do? [An instant replay of a move an athlete's coach told him to make in one particular moment in order to gain two points is not the equivalent of a dancer interpreting a ballet.]

Of course, in the academic world, precisely that place where art is defined and certified [It's not in academia that art is defined and certified. Art pre-exists academia, and has evolved its own traditions, forms, and meanings. Academia elaborates on these, certainly, and chooses among artworks -- finding some more valuable than others -- but transforming football into an art is not a matter of finding a bunch of professors who'll agree to say that it is.], sport is its own worst enemy. Its corruption in college diminishes it so and makes it all seem so grubby. But just because so many ersatz students are shoe-horned into colleges as athletes and then kept eligible academically through various deceits, the intrinsic essence of the athlete playing his game should not be affected. [Why not? We respond to the artistic expressions that we have. Those that seem corrupt and inauthentic, those undermined by their intrinsic falseness, are rightly rejected in favor of those modes of art that seem to us authentic. Just because we can imagine an ideal Division One football game unshadowed by squalor doesn't mean we should enshrine that ideal as an art. Admiring our inexistent ideal football team is not art appreciation. It's mental masturbation.]

As Walters argues, "Athletic competition nourishes our collective souls and contributes to the holistic education of the total person in the same manner as the arts." [This vacuous language tells you all you need to know about Walters' ability to argue his case. Holistic, total, and totally holistic. Oprah Winfrey Show here we come.]


Certainly, there remains a huge double standard in college. Why can a young musician major in music, a young actor major in drama, but a young football player can't major in football? That not only strikes me as unfair, but it encourages the hypocrisy that contributes to the situation where those hidebound defenders of the artistic faith can take delight in looking down their noses at sport. [We don't look down our noses, and we're not hidebound. We are awed by a billion dollar industry exclusively devoted to entertainment which has installed itself on our university campuses.]

So, yes, Walters' argument makes for fair game: Is sport one of the arts? Or, just because you can bet on something, does that disqualify it as a thing of beauty? [Does sport intend to be beautiful? Artistic activity is aesthetic activity. It intends beauty. Does football?]'