Suffering in sport: why people willingly embrace negative emotional experiences

ABSTRACT

Nearly everyone agrees that physical pain is bad. Indeed, if anything merits the status of a platitude in our everyday thinking about value, the idea that pain is bad surely does. Equally, it seems clearly true that emotional suffering – despair, loneliness, grief, disappointment, guilt, shame, lovesickness, and the like – are all bad as well. We are strongly inclined to pity and feel sorry for those who suffer emotionally in these ways; we are motivated, at least some of the time, to do what we can to alleviate their suffering. Given this, it might seem curious that pain and suffering are so integral to sport – whether one is a participant or a spectator. There’s nothing particularly puzzling about pain and suffering that is inadvertently related to sport – as when an athlete injures her hamstring and has to miss her chance at Olympic glory, or when supporters face the misery of getting up at 6am because an away game has been scheduled to start at noon. But there does seem to be something curious about the extent to which pain and suffering are voluntarily embraced by participants and spectators, as the quotation from Nick Hornby aptly illustrates. Why do people willingly engage in something that brings about so much suffering? In this paper, I’ll attempt to answer this question.¹

KEYWORDS:

• Suffering
• sport
• virtue
• communication
• self-esteem
• social standing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The fact that people willingly embrace pain and suffering in sport is also the topic of an excellent paper by Jeffrey Fry (Fry 2006). Some of Fry’s suggested explanations will be discussed later, although space prevents me from considering all of the interesting things he says in his paper.

2. Hume, D. (1779), Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part 10, p. 42 in the version by Jonathan Bennett presented at www.earlymoderntexts.com.

3. For much more detail on this, see my book Suffering and Virtue (Brady 2018), Oxford University Press, especially Ch. 1.

4. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/tough-mudder-the-obstacle-courses-for-adults-that-are-now-worth-250m-8603427.html.

5. Some hold that this is part of the definition of game playing. Thus Bernard Suits write: ‘Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.’ In Suits, B. (2005), The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia, Orchard Park, NY: Broadview, p. 55. Thanks to Nathan Wildman for the suggestion and the reference.

6. To say that suffering is a condition on the value of the activity for a subject is compatible with the activity having intrinsic and independent value. My thought is that without suffering, the activity wouldn’t have (as much) value for the subject herself. It is, after all, perfectly possible for us to recognize that something is valuable – such as free jazz or gardening or ballroom dancing – without such things being (of much) value to us, since we don’t care about or for such things. On my view, suffering plays the same role as a condition of value as caring does.

7. These are not the only possibilities. Fry (2006, 251), drawing from parallels with religious experience, that athletes sometimes embrace pain and suffering because it promises to enhance personal well-being and be a part of ‘soul making’. Space prohibits me from addressing these very interesting options. But even if such explanations capture some cases, the idea that embracing pain and suffering has significant communicative value arguably captures more, and so constitues an explanation that has wider scope. Or so, at least, I’m inclined to think.

8. A weaker claim is that such advantages are mere side effects of something that does have adaptive value. This is not the time to engage in an argument for the stronger claim, and so I’m happy to admit that the evolutionary account is at this stage simply a suggestion. Thanks to a referee for this paper for pushing me to clarify this.

9. See also Fry (2006), p. 251, who quotes Lance Armstrong on the epistemic and revelatory value of suffering.

10. Leknes and Bastian (2014), ‘The Benefits of Pain’, Review of Philosophy and Psychology 5, p. 65.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid.

13. Taylor (1985), Price, Shame, and Guilt: Emotions of Self-Assessment, New York: Oxford University Press.

14. Tracy, Shariff, and Cheng (2010), ‘A Naturalist’s View of Pride’, Emotion Review 2(2): 163–177.

15. I’m not claiming, of course, that participation in specific sporting activities like endurance cycling and MMA has been selected for. Instead, the claim is that a motivation to engage in painful and arduous activity has significant adaptive value, and that has plausibly been selected for. Endurance cycling and MMA are very recent forms of painful and arduous activity, and so that’s why the evolutionary story is appropriate here.

16. For a fascinating take on such ceremonies, see Jean La Fontaine’s Initiation, Penguin Books, 1985.

17. Some of the ideas in this paper were developed as part of the Value of Suffering Project, funded by the John Templeton Foundation, which ran from September 2013 - May 2016 (Grant ID 44167). I’d also like to thank Alfred Archer, Nathan Wildman, Paul Gaffney, and an anonymous referee for this journal for helpful comments on an earlier draft.