Is Sports Just Entertainment?

Super Bowl mania descends on us, and the endless stories about the bowl clog sports and mainstream media outlets. I am always struck this time of year by how much of the coverage casually refers to the game as “entertainment.” A quick Google search culls over 934,000,000 references linking the two. It comes out in a different but telling way when athletes talk about themselves. Some athletes use to deflate the obsessive American hero worship that plagues by saying “I’m just an entertainer.” They don’t say, “I’m just an athlete”—being an athlete matters too much to them. They don’t say “It’s just a game”—the game really does matter. By refocusing on entertainment, the athlete like many commentators who dismiss things as “just” or “mere” entertainment downplay its worth by hinting it does not really matter too much.

I think this is a mistake. 

To entertain can involve activity worthy of respect and attention. Many domains of human excellence and achievement have their own inner logic and beauty and deserve respect, but they also entertain. This entertainment can bring joy and appreciation to us. The link between sports and entertainment matters.

James Carville famously remarked “Americans view politics and sports as entertainment.” I for one have no problem with being entertained by an activity. We use the word entertain to cover a huge range of experiences such as reading literature, attending concerts, conversing with a friend, playing or watching a game. Being entertained can involve appreciating an activity and its form, and beauty and structure. It can involve pleasure, but far more such as delight or being transported or learning.

Being entertained can arise from serious endeavor and being entertained does not reduce to pleasure. One can be entertained by tragedy or serious conversation or plays or endeavors like a political campaign. People can experience pain and sorrow as well as exhilaration or delight from entertainment.

The deep roots of the word entertain derive from two areas. The Indo-European root “ten” means “hold” or “grab.” These meanings continue through the French tenir to English. “Enter” suggests gathering together and inviting one inside to be together. The root of entertain points to people gathering together where they find their attention held by the actions or people or object they engage.

Being entertained does not just mean to be amused or charmed or even pleased. Entertainment does not require pleasure or happy endings. Art can entertain. People can entertain. Spectacle can entertain. Competition can entertain. But none guarantee that we made happy by it.

Being entertained means that we are grabbed; our attention is focused and we attend to what is before us. We can see, hear and experience in a visceral way. Good entertainment pulls us into the emotional, cognitive and perceptual possibilities of an experience. A book a play, a symphony, a class, a game, a conversation can entertain us.

All these experiences require is human attention and openness to experience. Entertainment can be a trifle for our amusement, but it can elicit profound emotions such as a symphony, rock song or a play, novel or inspiring lecture. All entertain but they capture our attention and interest at different levels. This engages us, and the level of engagement opens the possibility of learning or changing from the experience. At the least, entertainment can divert us and permit us to appreciate an experience, but it offers more. Entertainment can influence or change us. The key becomes the level of engagement from us that it captures from us.

I think that sports can be entertaining in all these ways because it can arrest out attention, engagement and influence our emotions. It can provide delight, sorrow, ecstasy, sadness or even boredom. It can call forth intellectual and emotional interest, study and attention. Almost any aspect of life can do this for people interested in a domain. The mimetic arts like dance, theater, and music evoke this reality with extreme clarity and power. Sports live in that same family.

What makes the entertainment of sports so compelling is that sports competition is open ended—we do not know and cannot predict the outcome. This means that every sport competition possesses an edge of uncertainty and risk—it is why I cannot watch when my team is trying to make a free throw with one second left or a field goal kicker is kicking a game winner with two seconds left.

The sheer uncertainty can compel attention and heighten interest and passionate engagement. I do not want to deny the capacity of scripted and predictable outcomes to entertain and educate us. Rereading a book, re-listening to a record or re-watching a movie can provide endless satisfaction and appreciation as well as being a Rorschach test of who we are at different times. But the possibility of the unexpected and the new adds luster and interest to entertainment. Sports possesses a reality and real time component that scripted life and works can never provide.

Art introduces competition all the time. Ancient Greece from which we inherit both our art and our sport connected them both with beauty— they conducted competitions for plays, dance and sculpture. They played war games from which western sports developed. Today we regularly stage juried art shows and competitions in all areas of art and production. Products and artists boast of winning awards at shows. These competitions with winners and losers supplement the competitive market place where over time products but also artists discover if people will spend money and time to appreciate, use and be entertained by their creations.

Sports can carry this uncertainty and competition to logical extremes, but we experience it in many areas of life. Every time a symphony or drama is performed, the script interacts with the unique interpretive power of the performers. In classical music credenzas permitted and encouraged improvisation and virtuosity among performers. In jazz the basic themes and structures open up to improvisation that defines the art. Live performance even of scripted art entertains in a unique and powerful way with the edge of risk and creativity that accompanies each new performance even of well-known classics.

Entertainment is quite consistent with powerful purpose and commitment. We see this in drama and performance art and in live human performances such as courts or war or politics or market competition. We can see it when painters or dancers or composers push established boundaries and rules to create new forms or reinvigorate old forms. None of these has guaranteed outcomes and all can entertain and engage by virtue of the uncertainty and risk and unpredictability of the competition.

Sport games synchronize a powerful narrative in a controlled way. Human life is rife with ambiguity and unknown outcomes. We constantly embark on risk ventures at work and at home. Competitive athletics both regulates and intensifies this driven contrast through games with rules that determine winners and losers within limited space and time. Winners and losers are clear and celebrated. But then the next game, the next competition, the next season begins again, just like life. Coach Nick Saban won his third national championship in four years in football and put it well, “I will have one day to enjoy this, then it begins again.”

John Rocker, one of the true knucklehead of recent baseball history, offers a different take. Defending the use of steroids in baseball he suggested that baseball and all sport really are just entertainment. "When people are paying their $80 to $120 whatever it may be to buy their ticket and come watch that game, it;s almost like the circus is in town."..."They wanna see some clown throw a fastball 101 mph and some other guy hit is 500 feet. That's entertainment."  It may be, but it is not athletics, just look at the World Wrestling Federation.

We can be entertained by sports in so many ways just as we can by art, people, politics, markets and the rest. I want to insist that being viewed as just entertainment does not denigrate sport just as it does not denigrate movies or drama or dance.

The ancient Greeks understood that each human practice involves skill and a unique form of beauty. Competition in sport or playwriting or inventing can breed excellence in achievement. It can push masters beyond themselves and motivate young artists and athletes and entrepreneurs to innovate, adapt and produce greater accomplishments. The Greeks also insisted that each practice possessed a unique dynamic and virtues and beauty that can earn our appreciation and respect.

Sports entertain us; just don't call it just entertainment.

Net Sports: The Logic of Volleyball & Tennis

The NCAA Volleyball championships ended this week with a dominant performance by the University of Texas team. Their women played a superb power game while displaying uncanny and tenacious digging defense as they cruised past Oregon. The tournament games represented the epitome of the logic of net games where a net separates the two teams or opponents as in tennis.

The separation created by the net creates a dynamic different than contact team sports because it prohibits opponents from physically impacting a player to throw that player off his or her execution. This insulation from physical impact whether a tackle, block, bump, grab or check that dominates football, soccer or modern basketball means that that no one can lay a body on you and knock you our of your rhythm or skill by sheer physical impact or violence. This displaces the role of intimidation and forces players and teams to rely more on intellectual strategic and tactical misdirection to throw players out of their games.

The separation from physical buffeting permits a premium focus upon skill and form without the need for massive muscular or mental ferocity to fight through the physical assault upon body and form in contact sports. This freedom from physical intimidation permits focus proficiency and minute gradations that are often impossible to sustain in execution in “contact” sports.

I cannot emphasize enough how net sports channel strength and skill development into pure form and coordination rather than the type of strength, aggression and ferocity needed to fight through contact sport. This is not football with its violent and planned collisions and it is not basketball or soccer with its “incidental” but endless contact (I won’t even talk about hockey with its legalized brawling). The open space of net sports permits players to execute in space and time free of the manhandling of contact. It also, like baseball, isolates a very fine-grained form of evident responsibility for one’s actions in coordination with others.

It also leads to a different mental mind-set. The physical structure of the court amplifies this. Unlike flow sports that move from one basket/goal/end zone to another and can expand the field of play, the field of play remains rigidly circumscribed. Players have nowhere to go with no movement away from their spot to the other end of the court of field. Each player has responsibility for the space they control and intricate moving relations, almost balletic, with each other once action starts. This circumscribed court emphasizes and rewards quickness and lightening pattern recognition and reaction time over pure speed that open fields or sprints to the other end of a two ended field requires. 

Players possess autonomy in their space. They are responsible for their side of the court as in tennis or their part of the court in volleyball. It requires players to play both offense and defense but in the same space with the same patterns rather than moving suddenly to the other end of the field to reposition. Although like football and other reset sports, it permits the player or team to reset after each point and prepare for the play rather than the pure flow sports such as soccer or lacrosse or water polo. This permits players and coaches to develop superb and unfettered skill sets because no one is physically disrupting their actions. It means plays and schemes exist with a relative clarity of purpose and execution. This enables a form of beauty that can exist almost unsullied such as the perfection of a serve or beauty of a return at full extension or a magnificent dig that requires immense physical courage and skill and body control all at the same time. The athlete’s body exists alone in space and time unimpeded by contact with other opponents.  Net sports isolate responsibility in a visible and inescapable manner since no one is disrupting them.

This capacity to execute plays without opponents contact puts a premium upon speed and precision and almost unconscious situational awareness of where teammates are. At the same time the attack/defense dynamic moves from one of pure strength and bullying through or towards the goal and relies upon reaction and throwing off the anticipated system and flow of the other team. Because the opponents cannot use physical strength or bullying, teams and players have to rely upon skill, tactical placement, disturbing rhythms and immense speed and precision in their response.

The placement of the ball dominates the movement and tactics. The serve, the return or in volleyball the serve reception that then gets the ball to the setter determine almost everything. The teams must move incredibly fast given the speed or placement of serves and adapt quickly and in a meticulous choreographed manner.

Offense and defense depend upon the mind and patterns recognition and incredible speed of reaction. This is true of all elite one on one competition, but the net court remains fixed and static. All this occurs in a defined area that cannot be expanded through movement up and down the court. This closure of the court intensifies the speed of reaction time and minimizes the time to see the pattern and react.

Sometimes players are strong enough to simply overpower the other side with blistering serves or power hits that move so fast they go over or through blocks. But more often, players must place the serve at a precise spot with differential speed or spin. The serve seeks to throw the receiver off their best return. In tennis a fine serve forces the returner to a weakened or misplaced return that in many ways determines the point that may not end until five hits later. Likewise in volleyball serve receive remains stunningly important. If the receiver cannot get it to the setter in the right place, the set will be off either in terms of space or position on the court. This throws off the entire scheme; again the point may be over even though it takes five or six hits to get there.

Placement, speed, deception, misdirection all matter in direct competition team sports but they reach their purest form in net sports because the opponent does not have the option of pushing or blocking or checking someone out of the way. Opponents must draw each other out of position with tactical insight and physical or psychological misdirection. The mind and skill must win, not just physical disruption.

Because of this structure the serve dominates net sports in unique ways almost equivalent to the importance of the pitch in baseball. The baroque techniques and rococo gyrations of table tennis serves highlight this domination and importance to incongruous extremes.

Because of the structure as both a net sport and a reset sport, the serve and serve reception overwhelm all other aspects of the sport. Serves are the one moment when the player is alone, unfettered and has complete control of their actions, much like the pitcher in baseball.

The primacy of the serve places immense emphasis upon developing complex, powerful and intriguing serves. Sheer speed is not enough. Elite defenders quickly master the speed serve. Players need accuracy and diversity. If a defender only has to master one serve reception, they can anticipate and pounce. Volleyball manifests this in unique ways because six separate players will serve, and each player can bring a unique skill, rhythm, and speed to the game. Raw power serves may be the most fun but can be the most predictable. On the other hand floaters that land in defender’s chest or exactly between two zones or a drop serve the slices into the back of a players hit can force maximum extension and deflate the serve return. This displaces the offense set up and can be far more devastating than a big booming serve. Of course the most fun lies in the ACE where a serve blows past or forces an error by the receiver and the player or team win the point without any return. Aces can be tactically demoralizing, bring in the spectators and win points without exertion of the rest of the team. They can tempt some players or teams to over rely upon them, but when they occur, can be beautiful.

No one interferes with the serve—it remains just you and the ball—that’s it. Along with pitching, serving represents one of the purest moments in all sports. It isolates the athlete, the athlete’s skill and the requirements of a situation. For instance the type of serve will change depending upon the serve reception skill of the opponent; it will change depending upon the rhythm or expectation built up at that point in the game; it will change depending upon one’s own capacity to hit aces; it changes depending upon how important the point is and how much pressure is upon both server and receiver; it changes depending upon the noise or excitement or stress emanating from the spectators and fans. Elite serving requires immense situational awareness, exceptional self-control and superb skill. Modern rally scoring amplifies this because missing a serve gives a point to the other side as well as returning the serve to the other side in volleyball, while in tennis it gives away a point when all the advantages are on one’s own side.

The situational pressures exist in the mind. In net sports, the mind and discipline remain supreme, I don’t care how supremely skilled or focused an athletes is the unexpected surprise and intimidation of physical contact, legal or illegal, designed to destroy a person’s concentration or skillful execution changes everything. It emphasizes another kind of bigger/faster/stronger to fight off physical battering.

The structure of each cluster of sports generates their own logic of completion and excellence.  Parallel competitive sports like swimming or a reset sport like football or volleyball/tennis have their own dynamics and logics. And these shape the type of training and person and dynamic and action. The net sports present their own logics of execution, precision and, above all, intense initiating and reactive intelligence.

Beauty & Violence: The Lure of Football

Football is far and away the most watched American spectator activity. It anchors  large domains of American culture especially for males and proves to be the only reliable way to get males 25-45 to watch television.  Midway through the college football season, my Washington Huskies have lost 14 players for the season, four of their five offensive linemen are out for the count. My fantasy football league is decimated. One of the most important pieces of news each week is how many players are out for the next game--injuries and violence permeate the game and are factored into the very press releases each week.

With this daunting remind of the violence and controlled force that permeate the game, I want to remember why watching football can be more than a celebration of violence and domination. A melding of force and beauty flows through the game that offers a unique and intoxicating American sensibility.


Common academic wisdom faults American violence and worship of militarism as the main cause for football obsession. Histories point out that football's first defenders touted it as a way to train men for war. After World War I whose static and reset battle fields startling resembled football, the defense of football as a way to build character and instill military virtues in men became even more strident and self aware. In the fifties and sixties the academic narrative insists that football became the symbolic and active response to a creeping "momyism" that was undermining the masculinity of American males. It also perpetuated the bipolar view of the endless cold war with Russia. The commentaries around football reeked with cold-war images that merely extended football's natural tendency to promote itself as a surrogate or preparation for war, take your pick.

This all may be somewhat true, and it is certainly entertaining to read left wing diatribes and textbooks. If you can ignore the jargon, however, there  might be more here than covert militarism and sexism. I believe there are more things at stake in watching football and for those who do watch the game, it goes beyond just enjoying team victory, violence and domination.

Lynn Swann is my number one evidence. My sister reminded me that he exemplifies the power and beauty of the sport. Watching him run, weave and catch a ball against opposition reminds me of ballet, a violent, armored ballet. If you think of the Greek ideal of athlete as one who contests and masters skills and deploys them in competition, Swann demonstrates how the mind, character and skill weave together into moments of sheer ferocious beauty amid violence.


Evan after intense tackles, Swann held onto the ball. How a player holds and protects the football itself involves practice, effort and unrelenting focus and technique. At the very moment of triumph, the catch, the other team tries to not just tackle but knock the ball out and take the triumph away. Holding on after the catch can demonstrate courage, focus, strength and technique as well as the catch.

Swann was a fierce competitor who helped lead the Pittsburgh Steelers to three super bowl wins. He played against defenses designed to stop him. Here is another dimension of football. It is a reset sport, which is why it really is not like real war at all. It stops the play, lets everyone go back to the huddle, plan and then execute again. This reset permits strong and smart coaches to watch for tendencies and call plays and try to outthink and outanticipate the other team. The whole game resembles a complex match of move, countermove and counter counter moves.

The other dimension that Swann epitomize is that football is not just about brute force or violence. Within the matrix of physical strength and swirling violence of player on player, individuals possess skill and speed and pattern recognition that permits them to excel amid the organized but chaotic violence of the field. Football is a field of combat, in no other team sport do players violentaly assualt each other so directly and consistently.


In football the strongest and most violent do not always win. Technique, misdirection, pattern recogniztion, speed can all compensate for and usually win over sheer brute physical force. What can be fascinating is how the other team is trying to aggressively disrupt your technique and formations, so that players must exhibit focused attention and physical courage to keep the form from disintegrating under the physical assault of other players. This is where Swann's catches surrounded by chaos capture the tantalizing power of football.


I still remember when Swann appeared on Mr. Rogers and demonstrated to my six year old how a great football player danced ballet and used the focus and beauty of ballet to augment his own technique and achievement. Swann also showed off his uniform and helmet but reminded the children that beneath lay a commitment to form and technique.

At its best the game demonstrates how force can be melded with technique governed by thought in competition against other trained and thinking opponents. The substructure may be controlled violence, but the superstructure can embody form, beauty and mind.