Does Our Lucrative Sports Culture Take Away a Boy’s Humanity?

What a delight to learn that my 14-year-old grandson and a bunch of his friends had organized their own recreational league basketball team that includes no adult coach and no practices. It’s meant purely to have plain old fun without the pressure that “adult” expectations impose. Even the team name they chose has no “adult” meaning - like the already passé “6,7.”

Their games aren’t pretty by “organized sports” standards, but these boys are sure enjoying a freedom from all that. It reminded me of their childhood play and a real nostalgia not to give “play” up no matter how “grownup” these boys were supposed act.

If you were a boy, you remember that at some point playground culture became sports culture. If you were able to enjoy the first, that didn’t always mean you could succeed at the second. Play morphed into competition as early as society could get us to internalize the idea that we were vying with other boys for affirmation and the emblem of “manhood.”

The boys who were “real boys” (those most likely to grow up to imitate “real men”) were the best at competitive sports. They were “winners.” They were the idolized who most successfully internalized the competitive spirit that our culture needs to keep its economy and military going.

Internalizing that model of manhood is how most of us actually came to believe that “competition is good.” We’ve built a society so dependent upon competition that it’s hard to even imagine how we could live well without it. So, we embrace justifications for it.

It’s an unquestioned basic truth men and women are supposed to accept as they both value manhood, even if what competition is good for is not human relationships but production and profits.

It’s sure “good for business.” It can produce lower prices and cheaper goods, more sales and faster computers, larger portfolios and bigger empires. Its current cost, however, is our humanity.

On top of all that, a competitive attitude toward others remains a key ingredient promoting homophobia in the U.S. even though an imported, non-US TV series, “Heated Rivalry” challenges this with its depictions of same-sex romance.

Valuing competition enforces a level of human separation. For most men it keeps them disconnected and competing at another man’s expense in order to get society’s “rewards.”

Male sports culture is one place we learn all this. We also learn who the “losers” are. If we didn’t master sports’ skills, we not only were left out, but were picked on by other boys.

If we couldn’t throw a spiral pass if our life depended on it, stood out in right field praying that no one would hit the baseball there, didn’t want to punch or get punched, or threw a ball “like a girl,” we were targets of competitive “manhood.” If we were the youngest, smallest, thinnest, heaviest, or most gentle and caring boy in the class, we could even expect “fag” jokes from the other boys.

It could have started even before this sports culture hit. The elementary school playground usually had bullies who lived out insecurities on “weaker” boys. It was full of boys who had internalized masculinity’s “beat or be beaten” requirement for acceptance. In most cases, the boy who tried to remain in touch with his fuller humanity was just out of luck.

And if a boy came to realize that he “liked” boys, even fantasized about them (maybe even those who fit the culture’s “real man” image), confusion was added to fear. Whatever those feelings meant (and who was there to explain them until liberation movements), they set a boy apart even further from the ideal man.

If we could face it, we were all afraid of failing manhood's test on that playground. Some of us remember the fear. Others buried the fear under the role of the bully or sports star, or by staying inside and mastering the subjects of the mind, such as reading and math in which “real boys” are measurably behind girls.

As children entered the “grown-up” world of men, even the mental world had its own competition, somewhat replacing physical accomplishments, though it never fully erased the manhood lessons of the playground.

Of course, “real men” can’t admit such fear, even to themselves. But it was there. And it’s still there on athletic teams at all levels. It promotes the homophobia and the gay bashing that continues in so many sporting venues.

I’m convinced that the level of competition in sports today still requires homophobia, the fear of getting close to your own sex. Teamwork for men means the ability of one group of men to bond together to beat, defeat, or kill other men, whether that’s on the athletic field, the battlefield, or in business or politics.

And true winning as currently defined is always at another man’s expense. This means that though we are “improving” the “level” and opportunities for women’s athletics, they must be kept separate from male activities. “Beating a girl” is an insult for “real men,” not an accomplishment. And look at all the fearmongering about transgender men in “women’s” sports.

I am not talking about play, but sports culture. Play is free, fun, a letting go of oneself and one’s ego. It’s the child-like activity that doesn’t concentrate on techniques, talents, abilities, performance and the evaluations of others. It gets caught up in light-hearted, “unproductive” enjoyment.

When I refereed soccer, one of the pleasures of the kindergarten level was the not-fully-conditioned players coming up to me after a playful game and asking “Who won, ref?”

But, admit it, how often do we begin a game in play and realize that we’ve flipped into the issue of winning and losing, of “beating” the other person. Well, that’s this conditioning.

Sports are the opposite of play today. They are either the big business of college and professional athletics or they’re farm leagues for younger children that provide competition for future players on the “next level.” And sports betting has made it more cutthroat. 

This culture needs homophobia and transphobia. You just can’t treat people this way and be really close.

It’s an attitude carried over into our most intimate relationships. Play is the key to good sex, not techniques, talents, consumer products. and comparisons and competition.

Play takes place when we’re comfortable with ourselves. And it’s childlike.

But everything in our society works to take that out of us, and the hurts of the playground and the demands of our athletic system are part of what changed us to keep us from just playing and connecting on a win-win human level.

The boy who was “left out” because he didn’t fit was actually the one most in touch with his humanity. He was also most aware that sports culture was trying to tear his humanity from him to prepare him for what our fear-driven society, not human beings, need.

If that boy could have been able to fight all that, he would have been the one on the field with real courage, the real hero. Often he did fight as long as he could, against all the odds.