It surprises me that it has taken me this long to write about this on this blog. I think the Winter Olympics when they were held here in Vancouver in 2010 burned me out, and the Stanley Cup Riot the following year was, well, the frosting on the cake. I did a lot of blogging during the Olympics, not in a forum but as a series of e journals.
What has triggered me to write on this today was the morning radio program, the Early Edition, on CBC Radio One. The host is a former sports broadcaster and has a tendency of giving excessive air space to commercial sports on this program. There is absolutely nothing in the way of arts or culture programming by the way.
I have never been interested in team sports. I used to play them as a child, informally. With friends or at school in gym class we played soccer, rugby, football and floor hockey. I never cared for any of it, especially hockey, a game that I have particular loathing for to this very day which I suppose makes me a bad Canadian.
Of course talking about sports becomes inevitable since we live in a jock culture which is an oxymoron (dumb cow anyone?) if ever there was one. My distaste towards team or professional sports has rather a long and complicated history and I will try here to keep things short and simple.
I suck at sports. Too fast, too hard, too violent and too competitive. I have always lacked the coordination and the team instinct to do well at sports. Physical activity has never been a problem. I hike and walk several miles every day. I would prefer to sit around and chat with people instead of throw or kick a ball or slap with a stick a piece of hard rubber disk. Dialogue and conversation are the way I interact.
Outside of the personal there is another factor. Team sports derive from our paleolithic origins, when our forebears had to work as teams to kill a mammoth or fight other tribes which is also the early origin of modern warfare. See where this is going? I long ago in my early twenties had an argument with a friend when we saw a soccer game from the bus we were riding home. She sneered disparagingly (she was a fine art student so she had the disparaging sneer honed to, well, a fine art) and I said well it gets the aggression out of their system, I suppose, and she countered that playing these kinds of violent sports only heightens and reinforces their aggression. We did have a rather nasty argument about the philosophy of this as young students in their early twenties can often have with each other. And, I forgot to mention, that I actually do like soccer and am myself looking forward to the World Cup which starts in another week or so.
I think what got me particularly mad at my friend is that she was right. This form of competitive and violent team sport reinforces aggression and this is never in the long run a good sign for the wellbeing of society. Oh yes, you could say that sports help develop team work and camaraderie and foster cooperation and social integration and yadda yadda yadda and yes to an extent this is true. But there is still the need for a common enemy or rival in order to do this and this is where I really begin to lose interest.
What is this need for an enemy? Here we are some twenty millennia out of the cave and we still need to slaughter each other, at least symbolically. In the meantime our governments keep beefing up the military and brainwashing the masses with propaganda and even more heinously they're doing this to children with a current program of idealizing the occupation of Afghanistan and idolizing the "fallen" as heroes and role models and the beat goes on.
If it wasn't for the fact that many countries are still armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons we could shrug this all off, but it goes without saying that the First World War, and much more so, World War II with its carpet bombing of German and Japanese cities and the nuclear holocausts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought warfare to its historically most terrifying, brutal and destructive apogee. Factor in Capitalism, especially voracious global capitalism and Bob's Yer Uncle. Competitive and violent sports mirrors and fosters this kind of thinking.
It is unfortunate that professional sports have become such a lucrative and powerful industry. With millions fastened to their TV sets for the Grey Cup or the Stanley Cup or the World Cup (never mind here that I actually like soccer) sports heroes are elevated to a near divine status, especially in countries like Spain, Brazil and Argentina. They are paid ludicrous sums of money (four million a year for top professional hockey stars) and, well, let me give you a little salutary example from a film by one of my favourite directors, Pedro Almodovar. The English language title of the film is "Live Flesh" and in one scene two male characters were in the middle of a confrontation because one of them was having an affair with his wife. A soccer game was being broadcast on the TV. Suddenly their favourite soccer hero scored a goal and just as one was getting ready to punch the other they suddenly embraced like long lost brothers and shouted out ecstatically "He's a god!"
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