To the Editor:
After more than 50 years, the same pain, though less intense, reoccurs when I turn my head to the far right. When that happens, I have flashbacks of the defensive goal line stand that caused the initial pain. I speared Oscar Brohm running off left tackle mid-thigh. He collapsed my cervical vertebra like an accordion.
With the flashbacks, I frequently remember the lessons I learned playing football: the rewards of hard work, delayed gratification (what you do in August pays off in October), self-confidence, leadership (I eventually became the team’s quarterback), judicious risk taking, the importance of decision making under urgent time restraints, sportsmanship (the only award I won that season was the sportsmanship award), and, most important, teamwork, which at times meant self-sacrifice for the greater good.
I found Mark Edmundson’s article on sports (“Do Sports Build Character or Damage It?” The Chronicle Review, January 20) to be 98-percent accurate. However, I disagree with his definition of “team” as an extension of “me.” Football is the ultimate team sport. The best quarterback in the world cannot function without a good offensive line. Successful plays are dependent on each player fulfilling his assignment.
To this day, I refer to both my family and office staff as “the team,” and when I enter an exam room to see a patient, I usually say, “How is the team doing today?” In my mind, we are all in this together, and whatever problems need to be solved can be addressed as a team.
Of course, I did not stop Oscar from scoring. But the important thing is, I got up slowly and played the next play. After that season, I did not play football again because of academic demands. However, I have always thought the decision to play one year of football was one of the wisest I ever made.
Martin Logsdon, M.D.
Dermatologist
Volunteer Clinical Faculty Member
University of Louisville,
Louisville, Ky.
From chronicle.com:
A well-written and thoughtful essay. It’s not fashionable among the intelligentsia to put forth a case for sports, especially football, but I think Edmundson has made a good one. One point that struck me is that, as much as many would like to remove thymos from the human character, the drive to excel above and beyond one’s fellows is part and parcel of the drive to succeed. We cannot have one without the other. While I’m not trying to equate the Super Bowl and the Nobel Prize, no one will convince me that competition is not just as significant in the latter as the former and that victory—triumph over one’s contemporaries—isn’t just as sweet for a Nobel laureate as for the winning Super Bowl quarterback.
marrion_banks
I’m reminded of a claim—rather wistful, it seemed to me—by Wayne Booth that sports, properly considered, belonged to the humanities. Edmundson’s wonderful piece goes a long way toward justifying that notion.
wlreed1
From the perspective of the small liberal-arts college where I teach, I suspect most of my faculty colleagues join me in seeing sports—particularly football—as a distraction at best. Many of our football players, and this is a Division III school, have a swaggering sense of entitlement that must have been engendered by too much deferential treatment in high school. It goes without saying that they tend to be among our weakest students. Seeking “power and standing—over others” and having “the punch in the mouth” as “part of your repertoire” are not commendable traits. If we must have sports at college, let’s stick with cross country and ultimate Frisbee.
lutoslawski
Do sports build the character of participants? Much of the time, yes.
But do spectator sports build the character of all those rooting, gear-festooned, tailgating yahoos, beer-sodden couch potatoes, profane commenters on sports blogs, cable-network programming executives, purveyors of “nutritional supplements,” shoe-company CEO’s, Division I boards of trustees and college presidents, recruiting vultures, athletic directors, greedy nomadic coaches, see-no-evil sportswriters, football-centered “families” such as at Penn State, and American higher education in general?
No.
pianiste
As an adjunct, I have absolutely no idea if the colleges I work for have a single sports team, nor do I care. If a coach sends a note that a student will be missing because of a game, I toss it. Pleas for special tutoring for athletes? Those, too, fall on deaf ears. Unless the student is going to be a professional athlete, then sports are just a fun distraction along the way to a college degree.
It’s wonderful that our society can indulge adult children through the age of 22 to play games to learn “valuable life lessons.” Most other cultures treat sports as a “club” concept removed from college. If sports are such a valuable educational experience, then American Legion baseball leagues should issues diplomas. Based on exams I review, the kid who works a part-time job at LensCrafters has far more experience understanding how to schedule their lives around competing responsibilities.
adjunctivitis
As an old ex-jock, I enjoyed most of this essay, but suspect most of that enjoyment came from missing the days when I was physically capable of participating in sports. My own school sports experience was miserable, even though I was always one of the 60 who survived the spring/fall cut routine. Coaches were usually ignorant, brutal men who were absolutely willing to sacrifice their players for career and political authority. Many of the other players bought into the internal competition games the coaches played, and nothing resembling a team spirit came from that.
My father, a basketball, football, tennis, and baseball coach, used to tell kids, “You can have a car or you can get an education—pick one.” I believe that is true for educational institutions. You can have a big-time football, basketball, hockey (at least in Minnesota) team, or you can have a university that provides excellent education opportunities for a reasonable price. Here in Minnesota, we recently wasted a few hundred million dollars of taxpayers’ money on a new football stadium for the University of Minnesota. In the meantime, our medical-engineering department is mired in corruption charges and the price of an undergraduate degree has skyrocketed.
When fools ask how a college can be “big time” without a football team, I always ask “How’s MIT’s D-I team doing?” In my opinion, that is the only great educational institution left in the United States, and when they need a Division I football team, I’ll assume we’re a fallen empire.
mnprivate
I think the author needs to distinguish between sports like football or soccer, in which your play depends on an opponent, and in some of which you even hit opponents, and those like crew or running, in which performance is much more about competing against one’s self, the opponent providing only a way to focus the self. (There are a variety of sports on this continuum—tennis, for instance.) I see Edmundson’s point about violence, and that it can be channeled productively. But I don’t know of many competitive runners or rowers who would say that their sport opens the door to a violent reaction after a car accident, for example. Competition—in football, too—ideally depends on digging into the self to find more, to just get up again, and football doesn’t have to be about violence—look, for instance, at Troy Polamalu’s ethic.
But it seems to me that in sports like football, the motivation to compete is too often channeled by bad coaches (as Edmundson says Bill Parcells did for Lawrence Taylor) outward against someone else, or toward aggrandizing the self at the expense of others, rather than inward toward a drive that can be transferred to other parts of life. And the money in it, at least at the college level, only exacerbates this problem.
gy555s