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.

Gladiators, Rome and American Football

Football starts again. College and high school games launch this weekend and millions will watch and enjoy the proud, violent and compelling American sport. In the frenzied discussions of the game, commentators and fans alike will talk about the modern American gladiators, the American football player. I think this is a mistake. Just as I do not believe they should be called warriors, they should definitely not be called gladiators, and here is why.

Grappling to make sense of the suicide of football legend Junior Seau, Takeo Spikes, a fourteen-year NFL veteran, spoke of modern football players as gladiators. “We are so prideful in the way people view us as modern-day gladiators, how tough we are, how we can fight through anything and keep it all inside.”

Spikes described being a gladiator as a way to manage the internal and external pain. Football players grind it out for pride, career and money. They know that when they stop, someone else will immediately take their place. They are expendable, just like gladiators.

I was thinking about this image of football players when I recently wandered through the ancient Roman Coliseum. I was struck by how familiar it felt. Inside arches hovered over concourses similar to any modern stadium. You could see where the hawkers sold their wares and food. The cool stone kept out the heat. If the glorious marble facade had remained and gleamed in the Roman sun, it could have been any modern football stadium like Cowboy Stadium.

Outside I would have found ticket scalpers and huge crowds jostling to get in. Inside the ticket sections would segregate by wealth and class except for the section set aside for the Vestal Virgins. The wide oval track swept the arena. The ruins revealed the labyrinth beneath the stadium for special effects and to house the exotic animals used in hunter games.

Every city of the Roman Empire had its own amphitheater and games. The games represented the pulsing heart of the Roman Empire’s self-image as a martial society. The games displayed courage, bravery, physical toughness and martial skill in battles to the death. The spectators carried a powerful voice in whether gladiators would live/die after their battles.

The gladius remained the standard Roman military sword for four hundred years. Their title derived from the symbol of Roman conquest underlined the symbolic seriousness of the games. Gladiators epitomized the martial soul of Rome and fought for life and death, just as every Roman army and soldier had.

A gladiator could fight and lose, but if he fought with skill and courage, the crowd often saved him. In fact the gladiator owners preferred that gladiators live to fight another day and save their investment in their slaves.

Gladiators were slaves. Businessmen owned them. Gladiators attended schools for years before they were allowed to compete and graduated to different levels of competition. People rooted for their schools or colors as much as individual gladiators. In desperate times units of gladiators fought as soldiers.

The sport was built on slaves, outcasts, criminals—a person could be sentenced to the games—or barbarians from the provinces. The underclasses provided the recruitment pool. Gladiators could gain wealth but they started at the bottom and used the violence of the games to escape.

Roman citizens were not allowed to be gladiators. To “volunteer” for the arena, citizens gave up their rights and took on aspects of an indentured servant.

Successful gladiators could be amply rewarded. They were treated as celebrities. Gladiators were feted and recognized on the streets. Artists drew them and created statues of them. Their images appeared on jewelry. Some drawings emphasized their scars and wounds to glorify their toughness. Groupies hung around them.

I remember a line from a novel, “where there is blood, there is money.” The speaker was commenting how blood sports always attracted audiences even when they were illegal. Football hovers on the edge of this. Every recent defense of football begins with “football is a violent and dangerous sport.” Correct. 

Most of football’s blood, however, flows from internal injuries, but seldom on field death.

Modern Americans worship football as a metaphor for their martial past and future. Battle imagery saturates media coverage of the games. Many football games begin with flyovers of military aircraft.

The American empire centers its metaphorical identity as solidly in football as the Romans did in gladiators.

Despite this symbolic similarity, football players are not gladiators. Remember, Romans gloried in gladiators’ willingness to kill each other as entertainment. Romans gorged on the violence, bravery and slaughter of the games.

Americans also confuse sport and entertainment with their identity. But football is not mortal combat. It is certainly not even resemble war with its ritualized resets for each play.

Football does have schools and training. It thrives on colors and loyal following. Only the elite of the elite survive to play college or professional football. But players do not really risk death on the field. Most know that they will suffer injuries but can barely envision the later life crippled by accumulated leg, knee and back injuries. Modern football players also have the option of an education to carve out a different life when they leave football. Roman Gladiators seldom lived beyond 35, and the vast majority died in their twenties. They remained slaves at the end of their brief careers. American football players have a different, slower physical fate awaiting them.

We don't want football players to be gladiators for another reason. Modern historians believe the games represented an assertion of Roman superiority over the barbarians, slaves and underclass. After all they slay each to entertain jaded Romans.

The contestants were NOT ROMAN CITIZENS. Desperation and lack of freedom drove most gladiators. The Romans in the stands could feel a clear superiority gladiators who died for them, even if they admired the skill. As the gladiators would salute, "Ave, Imperator, morituri te salutant" (we who are about to die salute you). 

Gladiators risked life and health to entertain the Roman masses. They risked life and health to prove to the masses that the Romans were superior to them. They risked life and health to enact values that masses no longer possessed but believed their society did.

My friend and mentor Hubert Locke hates football. He believes the young minority males who make up the majority of football players are reduced to being American gladiators. Hubert sees no glory or joy, only the assertion of class superiority and the loss of talent and energy that could be devoted to better aims for those young men. He views football and its glittering circus as a false dream for the poor and dispossessed to find a way out risking their bodies to entertain the masses. Part of what he says is correct.

As Rome declined, the game grew uglier and meaner. The games died out because the society could not afford to support them or the giant arenas. Then, of course, the barbarians conquered Rome.