...an Artsy/Intellectual Type who Actually Loves Sports
Posted by Steven Wingate at 1/11/2008 10:13 PM and is filed under phrenes,Eugene Ionesco,Writing,National Football League,thumos,Sports 
“We should go to the theatre as we go to watch football, boxing, or tennis. Indeed, a sporting match gives us the most exact idea of what the theatre is in its purest state: live antagonism, conflict, the motiveless clash of opposing wills.”
Eugene Ionesco, Notes and Counternotes
Ionesco was right, and here’s how I know for certain. Last Saturday I got some bad news: I had failed to get the job at R_______________ in C__________, a gig I really wanted in a city I much desire to live in. I sat at the computer, checking email obsessively as I had been for the past week, when a new one came from my prospective future boss. Jen (that’s my wife) looked over my shoulder, carrying Landon (that’s baby #2) as I pumped my fist and clicked it open. Despite your qualifications we are sorry that... sure a candidate like you will have other offers….
What’s a guy to do after that? Ten years ago I might have gotten shitfaced at a bar with the guys, but ten years ago I never would have gotten a whiff of a job like this. And now the guys, with a few exceptions, have kids like me and are unlikely to rush out to a bar under any but the most carefully planned circumstances. Fortunately for me it was NFL Wild Card Weekend, and I managed to catch the second half of the Steelers/Jaguars game with a couple beers in my fridge. A great game. Comebacks. Counter-comebacks. Great plays galore. Scintillating moments of elemental human drama in which individuals transcended their circumstance, established their true identity, justified all the effort they put into becoming themselves, and stepped forward as leaders.
Sounds like Schindler’s List, doesn’t it? Or even Shrek the Third? But it was real, and it unfolded with a drama that would have felt forced coming from even our finest dramatists. I won’t go so far as to say that there’s a lot for writers/artists to learn from sports, but I will say that they both speak to the same elemental energies within us. I get the same visceral thrill from reading the great passage in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary where Charles Bovary botches an amputation as I do when I watch a tight end make a one-handed grab in the end zone. A beautifully executed two-on-one in hockey (my sport for almost thirty years, until my body broke down) can fill me with the same breathless sense of beauty as the arias from Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3.
Do I exaggerate? Maybe a tad. But the same emotional organs—and yes, I’m intentionally referencing the Homeric thumos and phrenes here—that allow us to receive and appreciate a well-turned artistic narrative are at work when we appreciate a competitive athletic event. This is because a good game is a well-turned narrative—it just happens to be a narrative turned live, as we watch it, by those participating in it, whereas the artistic narrative is turned by the force of someone one who, we hope, has assimilated many great narratives over the course of his or her life.
So why, in the face of this fundamental similarity, did my sports buddies never want to go see art films? Why couldn’t I get my artsy buddies over to watch the Super Bowl? Somewhere along the line, Homo sapiens has created a division between these spheres: all the jocks keep away from the weirdo, over-sensitive artsy types, and all the artsy types keep away from the Neanderthal-ish, unimaginative jocks. And I give credit to the species, rather than to that bogeyman known as Western Culture, because I can’t imagine the situation being any different in ancient Greece or Phoenicia or Sumer than it is today.
But if we think about the nature of the narrative experience in both art and sports—especially in the way that we perceive them as spectators—we’ll see that this distinction is useless and counterproductive. When you watch a movie and nothing happens for half an hour, you pop it out of the DVD player. After you give a novel a hundred or so pages and decide that you’re bored with it, you put it away. If you watch your favorite team on TV and they’re losing—or winning—43-0 halfway through the game, you quickly find other things to do. That’s because in each case the conflict, the will, and the antagonism that Ionesco talks about have been drained from the narrative, rendering it ineffectual. I would go so far as to say that narrative’s function is to work our thumos and phrenes, our emotional organs, and that if it does not do so then it will never succeed as narrative.
Surely some scholar has dug into this, and written about it with great erudition. Where are you, scholar? Can you tell me why I’m feeling the way I’m feeling? Are there others like me out there?
P.S. — In all my years of being into art and sports, I’ve only met one person who could see the elemental connection between them the way I do: Mark McNulty, my old hockey buddy from Boulder, Colorado, who once saw a copy of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea in my hockey bag and started a conversation about it. He read two of my early novels and wrote notes on them. He could talk Camus. He could talk Kafka. Last I heard, Mark was in Iraq. Hey Mark, if you’re out there in the desert Googling yourself and come upon this, email me so I know you’re alive. I call your folks’ house every once in a while to check, you know.
Eugene Ionesco, Notes and Counternotes
Ionesco was right, and here’s how I know for certain. Last Saturday I got some bad news: I had failed to get the job at R_______________ in C__________, a gig I really wanted in a city I much desire to live in. I sat at the computer, checking email obsessively as I had been for the past week, when a new one came from my prospective future boss. Jen (that’s my wife) looked over my shoulder, carrying Landon (that’s baby #2) as I pumped my fist and clicked it open. Despite your qualifications we are sorry that... sure a candidate like you will have other offers….
What’s a guy to do after that? Ten years ago I might have gotten shitfaced at a bar with the guys, but ten years ago I never would have gotten a whiff of a job like this. And now the guys, with a few exceptions, have kids like me and are unlikely to rush out to a bar under any but the most carefully planned circumstances. Fortunately for me it was NFL Wild Card Weekend, and I managed to catch the second half of the Steelers/Jaguars game with a couple beers in my fridge. A great game. Comebacks. Counter-comebacks. Great plays galore. Scintillating moments of elemental human drama in which individuals transcended their circumstance, established their true identity, justified all the effort they put into becoming themselves, and stepped forward as leaders.
Sounds like Schindler’s List, doesn’t it? Or even Shrek the Third? But it was real, and it unfolded with a drama that would have felt forced coming from even our finest dramatists. I won’t go so far as to say that there’s a lot for writers/artists to learn from sports, but I will say that they both speak to the same elemental energies within us. I get the same visceral thrill from reading the great passage in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary where Charles Bovary botches an amputation as I do when I watch a tight end make a one-handed grab in the end zone. A beautifully executed two-on-one in hockey (my sport for almost thirty years, until my body broke down) can fill me with the same breathless sense of beauty as the arias from Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3.
Do I exaggerate? Maybe a tad. But the same emotional organs—and yes, I’m intentionally referencing the Homeric thumos and phrenes here—that allow us to receive and appreciate a well-turned artistic narrative are at work when we appreciate a competitive athletic event. This is because a good game is a well-turned narrative—it just happens to be a narrative turned live, as we watch it, by those participating in it, whereas the artistic narrative is turned by the force of someone one who, we hope, has assimilated many great narratives over the course of his or her life.
So why, in the face of this fundamental similarity, did my sports buddies never want to go see art films? Why couldn’t I get my artsy buddies over to watch the Super Bowl? Somewhere along the line, Homo sapiens has created a division between these spheres: all the jocks keep away from the weirdo, over-sensitive artsy types, and all the artsy types keep away from the Neanderthal-ish, unimaginative jocks. And I give credit to the species, rather than to that bogeyman known as Western Culture, because I can’t imagine the situation being any different in ancient Greece or Phoenicia or Sumer than it is today.
But if we think about the nature of the narrative experience in both art and sports—especially in the way that we perceive them as spectators—we’ll see that this distinction is useless and counterproductive. When you watch a movie and nothing happens for half an hour, you pop it out of the DVD player. After you give a novel a hundred or so pages and decide that you’re bored with it, you put it away. If you watch your favorite team on TV and they’re losing—or winning—43-0 halfway through the game, you quickly find other things to do. That’s because in each case the conflict, the will, and the antagonism that Ionesco talks about have been drained from the narrative, rendering it ineffectual. I would go so far as to say that narrative’s function is to work our thumos and phrenes, our emotional organs, and that if it does not do so then it will never succeed as narrative.
Surely some scholar has dug into this, and written about it with great erudition. Where are you, scholar? Can you tell me why I’m feeling the way I’m feeling? Are there others like me out there?
P.S. — In all my years of being into art and sports, I’ve only met one person who could see the elemental connection between them the way I do: Mark McNulty, my old hockey buddy from Boulder, Colorado, who once saw a copy of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea in my hockey bag and started a conversation about it. He read two of my early novels and wrote notes on them. He could talk Camus. He could talk Kafka. Last I heard, Mark was in Iraq. Hey Mark, if you’re out there in the desert Googling yourself and come upon this, email me so I know you’re alive. I call your folks’ house every once in a while to check, you know.
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