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ABSTRACT
Amateur and professional sportspersons, Bernard Suits proposed, are differentiated by their attitude towards their sport. For the amateur, competition is a game done for its own sake, while for the professional, it is a game, but it is one that is done for a further reason. It follows that in competing, amateurs are playing, while professionals are working. But what should one say about the training that both amateur and professional do in preparation for competition? Competition is an athletic game which can be engaged in as play or work, but is training a game, play or work? This article hopes to offer starting answers to these questions.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Jon Pike and two anonymous referees.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Compare Meier (Citation1988) who holds that all sports are games, including those Suits’s classes as performances.
2. A further worry is that the distinction between amateur and professional is so historically unhappy that it should be jettisoned completely. Thus, Papineau (Citation2017, 265) writes, ‘I won’t go so far as to say I reach for my gun whenever I heard the word ‘amateur’. But give me a crusade to keep sport pure in the name of amateur values, and I will show you a hypocritical campaign designed to further some selfish interest’. While I share Papineau’s sentiment, given that we make this distinction in practice, it needs to be philosophically explored, and this article does that.
3. Meier (Citation1985, 70) calls these auxiliary rules.
4. It should be noted that, as quoted, ‘games require practice’ (Suits Citation1988b, 2). So training will involve playing games. But this is a case of a game being training, rather than training being a game.
5. Compare Meier (Citation1988) who holds that in the context of sport and games, it is sufficient for play, and not merely necessary for it, that an activity be autotelic. And Feezell (Citation2004) who makes play those autotelic activities that are voluntary and separate from ordinary life. For an account of autotelicity, see Schmid (Citation2009).
6. And it makes it play according to Schmid (Citation2011).
7. ‘Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry. If the game of push-pin furnish more pleasure, it is more valuable than either’ (Bentham Citation1825, 206).
8. ‘It would be absurd that while, in estimating all other things, quality is considered as well as quantity, the estimation of pleasures should be supposed to depend on quantity alone’ (Mill Citation2014, 11–12).
9. For a different account of what this amounts to than Suits’s realizing capacities, see Russell (Citation2005).
10. Compare the life project of Percival Bartlebooth in Perec (Citation1978). (For a short description of this, see Auster (Citation1987).)
11. For such an apprentice practitioner, training (or chess for MacIntyre’s intelligent 7-year-old), might then be classified as enjoyable work, ‘[They] enter the work activity primarily for the external objective, but something else that is good (or even better) also comes along. Therefore, the doing, the pursuing, the process, turns out to be enjoyable as well’ (Kretchmar, Dyreson, Llewellyn and Gleaves Citation2017, 32).
12. See Pike (Citation2013). <https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/the-running-blog/2013/feb/27/not-running-for-charity> (accessed 29 January 2019).