Spilled milk and burned toast: extrinsic pressure and sporting excellence

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the dynamics of extrinsic pressure in sport and its relation to athletic excellence. We argue that psychological pressure exerted by activities extrinsic to sport can be relevant to success or failure in it, such that how one manages extrinsic pressures can transmit to failure to perform in sport and thus be a determinant to victory, with no reason to think failure mitigated by the non-sporting nature of one’s other behaviour. To make this argument we offer a series of examples to test intuitions about what constitutes sporting excellence and what constitutes sporting failure. On the basis of these examples, we offer a categorization of pressures in sport and argue that psychological pressure from almost any area of life may be relevant to competition, whether intrinsic or extrinsic to the sporting contest. We substantiate this claim by proposing a framework for adjudicating the relevance of extrinsic pressures to sporting performance by appealing to the internal goods of each sport and their contribution to flourishing.

KEYWORDS:

• Sporting excellence
• psychological pressure
• extrinsic pressure
• internal goods
• flourishing
• trash talking

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge and thank the editor and two anonymous referees for comments made on earlier drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Kershnar (2018), who argues that what is allowable in sport are those actions admitted by the various sports’ conventions, also considers and ultimately rejects this position.

2. This categorization differs from that commonly found in the psychology of sport, where competitive, organizational, and personal pressures are often demarcated to help analyze resilience in performance. (See for example Sarkar and Fletcher 2014; Fletcher, Hanton, and Mellalieu 2006.) Our categorization differs insofar as we use it for normative purposes.

3. See for example Hardy, Bell, and Beattie (2013).

4. As an example, we might consider the 1972 Olympics in which many athletes felt little drive to compete after the terrorist kidnapping and murder of 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team.

5. For an overview of extrinsic pressures in the psychology of sport, see Sarkar and Fletcher who discuss ‘personal stressors’: ‘environmental demands associated primarily and directly with personal “non-sporting” life events’ (2014, 1423). This includes what we refer to here as both exigent and quotidian extrinsic pressures. See also Bernier et al. (2011) for more on distraction models.

6. Fletcher et al. define stress in similar terms to this, as ‘an ongoing process that involves individuals transacting with their environments, making appraisals of the situations they find themselves in, and endeavoring to cope with any issues that may arise’ (2006, 9).

7. We do not here presume a maximized conception of practical rationality, adopting instead a view of practical reason as compatible with a conception of human beings as fallible epistemic agents deciding from non-ideal epistemic positions (cf. Morton 2012).

8. As an example of this, consider how performances by professional athletes might be affected when they find themselves at the centre of trade speculation on social media because of purported tensions with the team’s new coach.

9. Of course, in the case where mitigating factors do obtain the pressure could become exigent, and thus demand different consideration. We discuss this in section 6.

10. Summers (2007) discusses this idea in the context of trash talk but does not develop it as a broader notion of extrinsic pressures.

11. This addresses Dixon’s objection (2007, 102) that it would be absurd to expect professionals in non-sporting fields to resist trash talking as a test of excellence. Dixon’s objection though ignores other forms of trash talking that would not justify cognitive overload (see Johnson and Taylor 2018).

12. Though not of course achieving the same sporting excellence given the lesser achievement of physical and cognitive skills (though consider our discussion of ‘relative’ performance in section 6).

13. To better see this position, consider a case where a hobbyist makes the grand sacrifice but fails on the course: the choice seems ridiculous, unlike the case where the Masters competitor makes the sacrifice for the sake of possible victory. This said of course, not all is always equal: non-sporting concerns could justify the hobbyist’s action despite the lack of sporting achievement. We thank a reviewer for encouraging this point and discuss it further in section 6.

14. Consider for example Fraleigh (1984), McNamee (1995), Simon (2000), Loland (2004), Russell (2007), Morgan (2009), and Dabbagh and Edgar (2020) amongst others. For a defence of this sort of perfectionist account of sport’s value which also criticizes alternative approaches (especially subjectivist accounts as seen in sport psychology), see Bloodworth, McNamee, and Bailey (2012). It should be clear here of course that if performer theories of sport are rejected then our argument will not be found compelling.

15. Cf. MacIntyre, who states that the internal goods of a game ‘can only be identified and recognized by the experience of participating in the practice in question. Those who lack the relevant experience are incompetent thereby as judges of internal goods’ (2007, 188–189).

16. Upholding goods internally can be understood in terms of the values underlying Russell’s ‘broad internalism’ (2007), and his related earlier stance that ‘rules should be interpreted in such a manner that the excellences embodied in achieving the lusory goal of the game are not undermined but are maintained and fostered’ (1999, 35).

17. One might wonder how to adjudicate the exculpatory claims of an athlete who justifies their sporting failure by appeal to cognitive overload from a practice unknown or with which one is unfamiliar. There are at least two ways in which some adjudication might take place. First, one might simply draw on moral imagination about those other practices, allowing one to presumptively assess the place of those values in an overall schema. Second, one might draw on a well-founded trust in the reports of those unknown practices’ practitioners, which could be based on their compelling articulation of the activities’ values, their reasonable evaluation of other practices with which one is also familiar (thus providing some basis for comparison), or their belonging to an established community behind the practice whose history and membership indicates the likely genuine value of its goods.