As I promised in my last post, this one will look at the question of sport as ritual.
It helps to start with a definition.
According to the folks at Dictionary.com, a ritual is an “established procedure for a religious or other rite or an observance or set form of public worship.”
Anthropologist Evan M. Zuesse expanded these ideas, saying we can understand as ritual those “conscious, voluntary, repetitious, stylized and symbolic actions that are centered on cosmic structures and/or sacred presences.”
While these notions are a good place to start, they don’t really get at the full scope of the matter. For that, I’m turning to the descriptions offered by the neuroscientist Andrew Newberg and the late psychiatrist Eugene D’Aquili in their "The Mystical Mind."
Their considerably more technical definition points out that ritual is a “stereotyped or repetitive behavior” done over and over that results “in some greater coordination between individuals towards some common goal or purpose.”
While their version offers less religiosity, it provides a deeper level of biological coherence. As I previously mentioned, in nature, ritual is everywhere (see Why We Crave Ritual). By expanding their definition to include causation, Newberg and D’Aquili have provided a foundation that holds true for the dance or bees, the howling rites of wolves and the religious ceremonies of humans (and many other examples as well).
How the dance of bees begets the sacred rites of humans is a topic for another place (if you’re curious, I give a complete run down in Chapter 27 of West of Jesus: Surfing, Science and the Origins of Belief), but for our purposes the point is that ritual has to be the repletion of a certain type of behavior (which our games clearly are) and those behaviors have to have a point.
So what is the point of the ritual of sport? That depends on which side of the political spectrum you fall on. In his excellent "Sports Illusion, Sports Reality", journalist Leonard Koppett offers these excellent ideas:
For the political right, sport represents the glories of American democracy: competitiveness, loyalty, preoccupation with success, insistence on fair play, and physical exertion. These are, of course, substitutes for free-enterprise, traditional family values and a Puritan work ethic, but that’s mostly beside the point.
Centralists, meanwhile, take a intermediate position. While sports might be the real ‘opiate of the masses’ they’ve also done tremendous good in breaking down the color barriers, providing collegiate opportunities for black athletes, creating tremendous economic benefits and offering plenty of free entertainment (via television).
And this list goes on. Religious fundamentalists find our games a ‘sin-free’ pastimes,‘ while personal fulfillment advocates’ see spectator sports as a good first step: a way to turn watchers into participants.
No matter the meaning, what’s really going on here is an after-the-fact glomming on. As Koppett points out, “Sports reflect social conditions, they don’t cause them.”
Still, this doesn’t seem to matter. As in most sacred rituals, the experience is personal, the meaning societal. What is important is that our games have become substitutes for our religions.
