Sportsmanship as Statesmanship
This is a project that has been ruminating in my head for years—it is somewhat orthogonal to my dissertation—but still an important and personally meaningful project for me. I grew up playing one racquet sport or the other. At eight, I was ceremoniously handed a full-sized squash racquet—I remember distinctly that it was a Head i110, which was almost the same size as me, and thus began a lifelong fascination with busting balls. But the explanations, the reasons, I found for the importance of sports seemed to be somewhat incidental and unreflective of my time spent on various courts. It was always about team building, about learning how to play well with others: important skills, no doubt, but still quite unsatisfactory as explanations.
Here I try to look at the importance of sports from a different angle: good judgement, practical wisdom, the kind of level-headed prudence that finds condemnation from almost every position on the spectrum. Add to this the disdain for sports among some of the faculty and the graduate student population around me: you aren’t going to be a professional, so who cares? I defend here the virtues of amateur sportsmanship, perhaps projecting some, for I am but a lifelong amateur.
For more technically minded readers, I examine in depth the role of sports and of the amateur sportsman in political education for Aristotle. This is very much a work in progress but an important one nonetheless. Aristotle’s discussion of the polis kat euchen, the city according to prayer, of Books VII–VIII of the Politics includes a significant section on schole—leisure—as a key component of the continual habituation that renders a citizen fit to rule and be ruled. While excessive athleticism breeds the desire to win at all costs, as epitomised by Alcibiades, sportsmanship conditions and habituates citizens through the continual exercise of judgement and moderation in the pursuit of a goal while permitting a certain indifference to outcome. The kind of moral formation and instinctual knowledge that sportsmanship can provide is perhaps epitomised by the Duke of Wellington, who famously remarked that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. This paper argues that not only does sportsmanship encourage Juvenal’s “mens sana in corpore sano”, it also creates pathways of phronetic reasoning and restraint that are reliable under duress. Through Aristotle it argues for the importance of sportsmanship as a school for statesmanship, creating amateur sportsmen that dominate the psyche of the life of citizens.