Sports and the Natural World

Sports were born in nature where humans practiced the skills needed to survive in the wild. Just as pups practice joyfully pouncing, fighting, herding and pulling, young humans played everything from throw, catch, run, to hide and seek or treasure hunts honing their skills. They play and learn with a innate joy and satisfaction that inscribes the learning. Outdoors created sports as it has evolved and provides a critical aspect to athletic endeavor that is often missing when we sanitize or move competition inside.

Wild nature plays no favorites. The uncontrolled physical world  serves up chaos and unpredictability. Play in nature requires intense cognitive and perceptual skill as well as physical and mental adaptability. Athletics grew from this play into competitions linking and sharpening survival skills. Early sports evolved with the satisfaction of refining skills through competition outside in nature. Intrinsically people competed not only against themselves and others but against the vagaries of untrammeled nature.

Being outside in uncontrolled world intensifies the challenge of athletics. Nature plays no favorites and throws surprise and serendipity at humans. It ambushes humans with wide ranges of conditions that demand strength and preparation but also adaptability. The ability to compete under different conditions—heat, cold, humidity, rain, snow, sun and shadows, wind and beyond--all challenge people to develop sophisticated situational awareness of their environment when they compete in the “open.” As conditions change, humans need to adapt their skills on the fly to achieve their goals which puts more pressure on adaptive intelligence.

Nature does not value perfection, nature values selection and adaptation. Men and women who compete in real nature learn this. 

Outdoor action adds layers of complexity and surprise. Any simple action such as  running, throwing, catching or jumping require  added attention and revision in light of unexpected conditions. A golfer's swing must adapt to sun, shadows, humidity, wind direction as well as length and condition of the grass and roughs. Athletics in the natural world adds a dimension of test and challenge that is lacking when sports move indoors into more controlled and staged environments. We lose something even as we gain in spectacle and predictable execution.

Indoor sports in general such as track, volleyball or soccer differ acutely from their outdoor siblings. The indoor games tend to be faster with more regular and precise hitting given how controlled indoor conditions are. Indoor competition permits a level of execution and skill where protection from the vagaries of nature will not throw off a leap, hit, routine or run. Inside may amplify crowd noise and other participatory aspects of the game and fans, but it minimizes the extraneous impacts.

The move to indoor sports and climate and condition controlled obsessions minimize the impact of nature and serendipity on athletics. It strives towards a Platonic ideal of perfect form unleashed by perfectly controlled conditions that foster flawless execution. In this model, getting rid of wind, rain, sun, snow, temperature even humidity will create as close to frictionless ideal conditions as possible. These laboratory conditions permit a higher chance to achieve perfection. Pure form and technique unfold with exactitude untouched by the eddies of the natural world. 

This impulse to produce platonic conditions lies behind domes and similar buildings such as modern swimming pool design. The domes obviously have huge economic aspects and during their heyday permitted the illusion of perfect conditions. Domes also permitted baseball and football and sometimes basketball to cohabit the same fields. At the same time dome sports sobered and took away so much from games meant to be outdoors. Indoor play  eliminated the natural conditions that gave levels of excitement and test to sports. Indoor domes staged games but made them less real.

Disgust with this hyper-controlled approach to staged sports helped account for the growth of modern X sports that sought unmediated relations to nature such as surfing or snowboarding. These modern new sports that have evolved to embrace nature again. Most extreme sports grew up as embracing snow and concrete and differences. Parcours takes not only the natural world but also the lived city landscape to carve out a challenge on the run. This stresses cognitive training, scanning and pattern recognition far beyond what predictable weather and climate controlled situations demand.

I can understand the impulse to minimize the impact of nature on athletic competition for three reasons:

1. Indoor creates a different sport. Indoor volleyball becomes fundamentally different from outdoor volleyball just the same with soccer, or track or swimming.
2. Moving indoors makes sense when the basic skills of the athlete will be compromised or endangered by moving outdoors. Not having swim meets or soccer fields during lightening storms makes sense. Similarly asking gymnasts to compete outdoors endangers them given bar and beam and other exercises. The danger in addition compounds the inability to perform with precision and delicacy that is required of the sport. 
3. Indoors or artificial elements might make sense to level the playing field or make it possible to compete more for simple reasons. Artificial grass fields make strong sense at so many lower levels of sports so that sports can be played with consistent integrity and level during rain and dry weather. Often the economic or weather requirements of grass make it uneconomic and unfair. Keeping fairness also matters in areas such as grooming ice or snow to ensure that the advantages of the draw do not only go the starters. Artificial fields matter to level the field across a season so that later teams on a day or during the season have equal and reliable fields to play on. All these involve attempts to limit outdoor nature on sport makes sense for reasons of danger, a different sport and a level playing field.

Domes symbolize this drive to escape nature of economic reasons. Ironically domes generate their own "weather." Air currents in the fan-based domes could be notorious. The ceilings made it hard to see and track balls while many of them played like pinball machines on the field and early generation grass. In addition they changed the entire noise dynamic of crows and atmosphere and in the old Kingdom balls regularly careened back after hitting the hanging scoreboard.

Done right, modern stadium construction permits best of both worlds. Baseball can cover itself for rains and be open for the rest. In baseball simple rain, unlike soccer and football, compromises the skill sets such as gripping a ball to pitch or holding onto a bat to swing. The rain and slipperiness can make the game dangerous for both batters and fielders. So the technology developed to permit the best of both worlds. 

Other sports, however, such as soccer and American football are built to stand the assault of weather conditions. In fact athletes revel in their ability to play in all conditions. I remember, not fondly, sinking in the mud on the side as our children played mud bowl soccer games. Thankfully in these areas artificial turf makes games possible. I can remember sitting in blinding snow storms "watching" Michigan and Ohio State slug it out in a unique midwestern approach to the game. Neither wind, rain, snow, heat, cold stop these games, although tornadoes might.

More interesting the reality of natural conditions generates real regional styles and challenges. Wild west coast pass happy offenses grew as much from weather possibilities as cultural proclivities. In the upper midwest, however, is much easier ito build a game around running and defense which thrive in  25-degree weather and snowy conditions. Similarly hot weather teams headed to cold weather and vice versa pose unique acclimation problems for teams that extend the range of their tasks and preparation. Home field advantage can vest as much in weather as fandom. The University of Washington teams would wait for sun conditioned warm California teams to travel to the misty wet northwest. Both the south and the Midwest touted and waited for out of region battles with their home field weather advantages.

I see this aspect of sports as fundamental to a deep split in philosophy and how one approaches sports and life. Plato would love domes and closed centers or pools that have exact temperatures and minimum waves and no wind. The first swimming Olympics in open water would appall him. For him the essence of sport lies in the approach to perfection of form. The essence lies in execution of form in space in time.

It's the difference between what an experiment looks like on a frictionless plane and what happens in real life. For Plato excellence would be expressed in how close to perfection in execution and precision one can come.

For Aristotle excellence consisted in how one adapted pursuing ends to the conditions a person faces. This approach generates  supple and intelligent virtue. Achieving a goal and win depended not just upon endless practice and preparation but also upon the ability to engage surprise. This can be what the opponent throws at you, but also the conditions that nature throws at you. This is life.

Sports Ethics: Winning Ugly

A win is a win. This is a fundamental maxim of competitive sport. But a second level of discussion always occurs around how a team wins. Teams can win well; games can be well fought and competitive; teams can give up; games can be one sided, you get the picture. Games won by cheating carry a particular moral stigma and if discovered are discounted; but I have always been fascinated one kind of win—winning ugly. This weekend I witnessed several ugly wins and got a sense of what it means.

The UW football team managed to beat the California football team but not for lack of trying to lose. UW “won ugly” by the assessment of its coaches, players and fans. I recall one sequence where four turnovers occurred in eleven plays and another play where four simultaneous penalties cancelled each other out. The team won but it was an ugly win.

Now ugly is one of those interesting words with a cavernous etymology. It emerges from references to the frightening and horrible and fearful in life. Later versions add a moral meaning of profoundly morally offensive and wrong. By the 15^th. Century it had taken on its reference to appearance as something “frightful or horrible” in appearance which set such events apart from the normal run of things that appear unpleasant or unattractive. To be ugly means something really has to be frightful or horrible.

These links bring an ugly win back to its roots in dread and fright. An ugly win despoils the line and form and smooth technique of a sport that provide the aesthetic and performance core. This violation of the internal logic of the sport is reinforced by the external appearance that lacks the smooth crisp precision and power of watching a well-played game.

Remember despite all this the team wins. This accounts for the interesting nature of the word. The team wins but players leave relieved and worn out rather than exhilarated. Many are disgusted or angry at their play, but they still won. This is the type of game coaches breath a sigh of release and at best say, “we can learn a lot from this game.”

Winning ugly means that the quality of play was low by the standards of the sport. The team may “win” but it did not demonstrate fine skill or excellent form. To be blunt, they played badly. Their technical execution was sloppy and not crisp. This lack of execution permeates their fine individual skills as well as messy coordination on schemes and play. I have talked about this moment for an individual when I discussed what it means to have to “grind it out” when a player does not possess his or her best stuff. People have to step up even when they do not have their best skills at hand.

The counterpoint here is when we know a player or team is at the top of their game. We can see the smooth flow and crisp execution and admire and enjoy the sheer virtuosity and skill unfolding before us on the field. Coaches, players and fans have an idea in the back of their mind of what great or perfect form looks like. Sometimes one team will hits their stride or at rare times both teams will be competing at their highest emotional, physical and intellectual level. Those games we remember for their sheer force and beauty.

I believe ugly play moves beyond the failure of execution and the inability of players to discover and deploy excellent form in their assignments. As my example from the Washington game suggests, ugly wins are also riven with mistakes. Teams and players are literally beating themselves in ugly wins.

Ugly wins are larded with an excessive number of penalties, fouls, turnovers, and saturated with errors of the mental and physical varieties. These errors and penalties further disrupt the flow and smooth performance of the game. They take away accomplishments like runs or points scored or give the other team advantages like a penalty kick or an extra man on the field or free throws or loss of a down. The point is that a team starts to beat itself by cumulative errors. The self inflicted errors like off sides in football or steps in basketball or double faults in tennis add up, each one undercutting smooth execution, giving the other side an unearned advantage and denying the team a chance to gain an advantage.

These add up to a form of sloppiness that can be contagious. It can play out as frustration that leads players to try too hard which in turns undermines smooth flowing execution. Errors and mistakes generate anger or frustration with each other, and players can turn on themselves rather than focus upon the other team. The internal cooperative schema can be thrown off, and this lack of synchronicity leads plays to start to not trust each other which in turn leads to more sloppiness as players try to do too much or jump too quickly or mistake hurrying for quickness.

Yet amid this disorganization and mistakes and failures, a team can pull it together just enough to win, and they came to win. Winning when you are playing ugly draws upon its own particular strength and trust that grinding it out also requires. Jim McLaughlin the coach of UW VB team had a similar straggling match this weekend that his team pulled out despite its errors and lack of cohesion. As he put it, “sometimes you've got to just kick, bite, and do whatever you have to do to find a way to win, and we did. Utah played well and we faced some adversity and didn't back down, so that's the good part."

Ugly games possess neither beauty of form nor execution. People labor and stumble and willfully grind out their assignments. Nothing comes easy or flows. It is not pleasant to watch the sport of such a game. Fans and players alike are just glad to get off the field with a win. Their relief comes from an exhaustion that can only come battling incessant mistakes, crumpled confidence and fixing them on the fly. Ugly wins are born usually of desperation and drawing deep. The team hangs on to win, but it does win.