Five years ago I began writing
about athletics, culture and ethics. At the time I served as the Faculty
Athletic Representative for the University of Washington and found myself
enmeshed in the lives and demands of the extraordinary men and women athletes
at the UW. As I worked with them I begin to think hard about the nature of
athletics as an endeavor and wondered about its worth and role in American
culture.
I began writing to give myself
a space to reflect on these issues. I wanted to write in the English essayist
tradition. I loved writing about this world of passion and achievement. It
offered so many windows into life and its demands and challenges. The world
also revealed the undertows of cheating and moral failure that afflict all
human achievement.
I loved writing about a wide
array of topics that sports opened up. I appreciated the chance to reflect upon
these issues in a dialogue with my friends and colleagues as well as the many
thoughtful athletes and administrators whom I met through intercollegiate
athletes.
I am not a sports writer or
commentator but a management and ethics theorist who wrote out of love of what
I was doing and thinking about. I was writing essays that tried to find new
insight and awareness through reflection on athletic activity.
Athletics and sports manifest
as a cyclical world starting anew each competitive season. Each season and each
year provide Bach like theme and variations on what has gone before. The
structure of many achievements as well as scandals often resemble each other. A
good sports writer and commentator like Roger Angell and Frank DeFord finds ways
to return and renew their discussions each year even when they have written
about the similar points often.
I realized a couple months ago
that I had pretty much written what I had to say. Whole new and interesting
challenges face the world of competitive athletics as well as the seasonal
variations and arc of stories of competitive struggle and achievement as well
as tragedy.
Having had my fun and
exercised my passion and judgment engaging these topics, I think it is time to
say goodbye to folks who have read my essays over the years.
I deeply appreciate the
individuals who read them. I deeply appreciate the folks who have contacted me
to help further my own thinking on this world. I deeply appreciate the chance
to have written about something I care deeply about. Most importantly I
appreciate the men and women who participate in this world and lent me time in
their lives to listen and learn.
Thanks and goodbye.
Pat Dobel
