Sport, fiction, and the stories they tell

Abstract

The article is intended to reveal important similarities between fiction and sport. I build on Jonathan Gottschall’s discussion in The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human by celebrating the significance of stories and their ‘witchy power’ and by examining factors that demonstrate similarities between fiction and sport. I suggest that an unmistakable semantic, structural, and cultural kinship exists between the two. This argument requires a discussion of play theory, play resources and constitutive rules, the semantic power of problems and the uncertainty they produce, and the role of ‘frames’ in bringing problems to life. I conclude by noting the unique frame capabilities of ‘the big game’ and zero-sum dichotomous sporting motifs.

Keywords:

• Sport
• literature
• stories
• problems

Acknowledgments

The author expresses his gratitude to Paul Gaffney who read an earlier draft of this paper and provided suggestions that strengthened it in significant ways. The poem ‘Mantle’ was used in this essay with permission of the author, William Heyen.

Notes

1. Not only is the general comparison unflattering for humans, but animals show superior physical and sensory capabilities on many fronts.

2. It is also well-known that novelists, playwrights, actors, and other artists often introduce progressive or counter-culture values to their work. Art, far more than business, is a cultural location for reading and hearing ‘alternate voices.’

3. There is, of course, irony in this claim. Things that are unimportant, say, in a material sense, may be unusually important in another sense. Neither completing the reading of a novel or finishing a game necessarily produces anything, but at the same time, this may have much to do with their charm and their ability to capture our attention.

4. Huizinga was also heavily critiqued by Caillolis (1961), Suits (1977), and others for presenting a play definition that was too broad, one that allowed Huizinga to find play ‘under every rock in the landscape.’

5. The term intentionality is used in a technical sense here. It refers to Husserl’s claim that conscious acts and their objects are correlates. Wondering, for instance, gives us things as wondered about. The intelligibility of these act-object dyads provided a foundation for Husserl’s phenomenological analyses, that is, interrogations (through a series of reductions) of the sense or meaning of such conscious events.

6. Fink also insisted that the play world can ‘reflect back’ on our mundane affairs. Play experiences, in other words, can inform us of how everyday life works, what our lifeworld means. Thus, while the play world depends on our daily strivings for material, the relationship between the two, for Fink, is reciprocal.

7. It could be argued that abstract sports are superior to literal sports. Perhaps more gamewrighting, more crafting, and more idealizing goes into the invention process, thereby creating a better game. I am not convinced that this is the case, but it is an issue for another time.

8. See, e.g. Ellis (1973) for a description of these theories.

9. This analysis works for children’s youth league games as well. As the day approaches for the game, tensions rise, excitement builds. Children, just as fans of the ‘big game,’ have to wait for the game. Even casual golf games among friends has us getting up in the morning with a different level of anticipation and has us looking at our watches as the hour approaches to leave the office for the course.

10. A possible exception is the situation where reading was interrupted and one is compelled to get back to the story. One could set a time for this return and a rough parallel with anticipating the start of the game could be encountered.

11. This is not to say that we do not change and that our own life experiences may not affect the meanings we receive when returning to a novel we read previously. But this is true of everything we do and is not structurally unique to fiction. My argument is that sport is different in this regard.

12. It is difficult to find any sporting league or institution that does not measure success simply by victories and defeats. That is, no more credit is given for blowout victories in contrast to close outcomes. Even ties are regarded as failed contests. See, e.g. Torres and McLaughlin (2012).