Team sports merely glorify violence, greed

Michele Landsberg

Team sports merely glorify violence, greed

Okay, don’t take it from me. I’m prejudiced against aggressive team sports. My father was a football player who spent his adult life predicting the weather from the pain in his bashed-up knees. I grew up listening to his roars of approval (“kill ‘em! Smash that S.O.B.!”) as he watched TV football. Naturally, I defined my ideal of masculinity in absolute opposition to him.

But quite aside from my personal biases, consider the mounting evidence that organized sports and the sports mentality – from little kids’ leagues to college teams to TV spectacle – have become a major cultural pollutant.

The New York Times reported that college athletes are more likely than other students to commit gang rape, and less likely (because they are heroes) to be charged or convicted.

The Village Voice last week observed that Super Bowl Sunday is “the worst day of the year for domestic violence.” And everyone has noticed, and commented on, the disturbing overlap of sports and military lingo.

My question is: why do we put up with it? Why do so many mothers meekly transform themselves into hockey handmaidens, sacrificing sleep, leisure time and family meals so that their sons can grow up in that belligerent culture? Why do we condone our spouses’ or children’s massive TV indoctrination into glorified aggression and greed?

I called John McMurtry, once a professional football player (for the Calgary Stampeders) and now a philosophy professor at the University of Guelph and one of our most incisive analysts of sport. He reminisced about the thrilling freedom of “shinny” and other spontaneous forms of youthful sport, which he called “the amnesiac subcurrent of our national life.

“But the more there are external pay-offs – fame, glory or money – the more extreme the pathologies that are generated by the imposed structure,” he said. “I mean things like violence, hatred, cheating, drugs and authoritarianism.”

McMurtry has written about the “striking similarities between football and political fascism: Mass-gathering hysteria, absolute obedience to higher authority, fawning idolization of the powerful…violent aggression against opponents…” He noted that football, like fascism, grounds itself in “the property-seizing principle.”

‘Cool hatred’

McMurtry rejects the idea that violent games are a necessary outlet for “natural” male aggression. “What organized football did to me,” he wrote, “was make me suppress my alienating, vicious form. Spontaneous desires for free bodily exuberance and fraternization with competitors were shamed and forced under…and in their place were demanded armored mechanical moves and cool hatred of all opposition.”

Fans are not spared this sinister warping, in McMurtry’s opinion: “The whole show just further develops and titillates the North American addiction for violent self-assertion.”

In a way, our team athletes are offered up to the crowds as human sacrifices. McMurtry remembers winning the most cheers when he physically damaged an opposing player.

Jim Christoff, a Toronto teacher and former pro football player, agrees. “The average life expectancy of an NFL player is 53 years,” he wryly points out. He advises parents not to let their kids join hockey teams, and sent me a batch of amazing quotations. Here are a few:

Stephen Crane, author of the powerful Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage, explained in an 1897 letter to a friend, “Of course, I have never been in a battle, but I believe I got my sense of the rage of conflict on the football field.”

Red Smith, a famous New York sports writer, decried the repellent “carnival of nationalism” surrounding the Olympics. He wanted flags, anthems and all team sports eliminated.

George Orwell wrote wistfully about the lost fun of childhood athletics. By contrast, he wrote, in any organized team game “the most savage combative instincts are aroused.” Sport is “mimic warfare…an unfailing cause of ill will. Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence…”

“Watching well-advertised strong men knock other people around, make them hurt, is in the end like other tastes. It does not weaken with feeding…It grows,” McMurtry wrote in an article 20 years ago. The decades have witnessed the truth of his remarks.

Any thoughtful person watching the current sick intertwining of jingoism, war frenzy and commercialized sports must be troubled. This is a twisted religion.

“If you can’t beat ‘em in the alley, you can’t beat ‘em on the ice,” said Conn Smythe. For those of us who do not believe in beating anyone, the question must be: how can we delegitimize this North American ceremony of blood and conquest?

McMurtry says his two athletic sons refuse to participate in any institutionalized sport. That seems like a sensible beginning. Now and then, when you observe youngsters amusing themselves without an audience or a prize, you can see the real spirit of sports: the fun, the exhilaration, the joy and self-forgetfulness of a physical challenge freely undertaken.

Written by Michele Landsberg sometime in the mid-1980’s for The Toronto Star

Michele Landsberg is an award-winning writer, social activist and feminist who wrote a column for the Toronto Star newspaper.

In 2006, she was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.