You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
would you chant the glory of games,look never beyond the sunby day for any star shining brighter through the deserted air
We may acquire a fundamental psychoanalytic insight into sports if we proceed exactly as if we were at an athletic event, ideally a football game or a tennis match, and fix our gaze carefully on that all-important object, the ball. After reading Tim Gallwey's The Game of Inner Tennis, anyone would agree that the ball is. But is what? That is our question.
If we watch the ball, any ball, for a while, we are impressed by how little the ball can do for itself. It seems poles apart from Aristotle's prime mover, Thomas Aquinas's unmoved mover, and Maslow's self-actualizing ego. The ball is completely at the mercy of the players, who are completely at the mercy of the referees or umpires, who are completely at the mercy of the rules. To all these external forces, the ball can only react; yet the ball is all-important to the game —it transforms the player who has it; the greatest star in the world cannot win without it. Yet the ball itself is powerless to act for itself.
The ball is helpless. It is carried, stroked, nudged, shot, kicked, flung, paddled, batted, bounced, and hugged throughout the various contests, as if every effort were being made to overcome this obvious fact. The ball soars, flies, sails —it can do anything so it seems —until at last it comes to a stop.
The ball informs us that sports, at some level, involve helplessness. Not true, we may say: Sports are about everything but. They are about