The Nature and Meaning of Teamwork

Abstract

Teamwork in sport presents a variety of special challenges and satisfactions. It requires an integration of talents and contributions from individual team members, which is a practical achievement, and it represents a shared pursuit, which is a moral achievement. In its best instances team sport allows members to transform individual interests into a common interest, and in the process discover of part of their own identities. Teamwork is made intelligible by the collective pursuit of victory, but moral requirements importantly condition that activity. To some extent, the dynamic of team sport instantiates a basic experience of human sociality.

Keywords:

• Competition
• Integration
• Individualism
• Community
• Development
• selfhood

Notes

1. See articles by R. Scott Kretchmar (1975) and Steven Skultety (2011).

2. There is no suggestion here that individual sports are in any way inferior to team sports, they simply present different challenges and have different dynamics, and so the question of integration does not apply.

3. Mark Wadach, Junior Varsity basketball Coach at Bishop Ludden High School in Syracuse, NY, sometime during the 1974–75 basketball season. I am certain that this is a nearly verbatim quote, at least in all the essentials. In any case, I use this remark as representative of the issue I want to explore.

4. Aristotle does not believe that the life of virtue is necessarily happy primarily because he has a profound appreciation for the contingencies of the practical order. He says in Nicomachean Ethics Book VII: ‘But those who assert that a man is happy even on the rack, and even when great misfortunes befall, provided that he is good, are talking nonsense, whether they know it or not’ (1153b19–23).

5. To some extent this contrast is similar to that drawn in business ethics between a ‘stockholder’ and ‘stakeholder’ conception of the corporation. The former define the being of the corporation in terms of its profit-seeking purpose, with all other considerations derivative (as long as one obeys the rules); the latter places the corporate manager in a multi-fiduciary role, answerable to the many values and interest that contribute to the operation of the corporation, and privileging none of them in principle.

6. Lombard is often reported to have said that ‘Winning is not the most important thing; it is the only thing’. This is quoted in Robert L. Simon’s Fair Play (2009, 17) although, as Simon points out, Lombardi later disputed the accuracy of the quote.

7. See Kant’s discussion in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, especially the Preface and Section I.

8. In this regard, see the discussion of ‘slave and master morality’ by Friedrich Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil (1989).

9. Quoted by Grant Wahl, Hard Return, Sports Illustrated, June 30th, 2008.

10. I am thinking of teams like the New York Knickerbockers of the early 1970’s, which were composed of some great players but very few of them could have succeeded as individual stars. Furthermore, the blending of diverse personalities and backgrounds, as detailed in Bill Bradley’s Life on the Run (1976), make the team dynamics even more remarkable and appealing.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul Gaffney

St. John’s University, Department of Philosophy, 8000 Utopia Parkway, Queens, NY, 11439 USA.