Last week I wrote about violent sport — specifically, the validity of mixed martial arts — so this week I’d like to continue defining the parameters of “sport” by framing its other extreme: sports that require a minimum of physical exertion, and thus teeter on the balance of being simple games. What is a game, and how does it differ from a sport?

There exists such a tremendous interplay between these two terms — “Let the games begin!” “Give him a sporting chance” — that it’s easy to understand the difficulty of ruling a pastime out of the sporting arena. Even by a straightforward definition of “competitive physical activity,” wherein some aspect of the opponents’ physicality yields a winner, you open yourself to some pretty extreme fringe elements — darts, for instance: only marginally more physically demanding than Tiddly-Winks, but requiring a similar, physical ability to aim precisely at the target. And billiards, which requires hand-eye co-ordination but is far less physically taxing than Dance Dance Revolution.

And then of course there’s poker. Its inclusion in the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network (ESPN) line-up might be justified solely under the “Entertainment” portion of the network’s name, if not for ESPN’s fairly straightforward mandate: to broadcast sports-related programming 24/7. By virtue, therefore, of broadcasting the World Series of Poker, they imply that the pastime is at least sports related.

This classification has interesting ramifications: Certainly, any poker player who claimed to be an athlete on account of their participation in poker events would be laughed out of the room. But if they said “Poker is my sport,” the matter becomes a little more complicated: presently, poker has been included in, at the very least, the “sporting lifestyle” — perhaps because of its reliance on statistics, the bread-and-butter skill-set of dedicated sports fans; or perhaps, in a truly extended definition of physicality, because good poker players are those who can control their bodily responses enough to hide their hands; and who can likewise parse the body-language of their players.

I mentioned DDR above, but the inclusion of video-games in a much broader sense makes the notion of sport even more complicated. Guitar Hero and Rock Band, for instance, have been a culture-wide phenomena marked by extensive tournaments among the gaming community — right alongside Super Smash Bros. tournaments and a variety of competitive RPG events. Both DDR and Guitar Hero are also more physically taxing than either darts or billiards; and yet if pitched to ESPN for coverage, there isn’t a chance in hell top producers would agree to a TV show that involved watching a screen within a screen. And if you’re holding your breath for international competitions in either video-game category, as precursors to a bid for them to join the Olympic Games, don’t: As far as mass media and international sports commissions go, video-games won’t be joining the ranks of “sport” any time soon.

The logical conclusion, at this point, is to acknowledge that for a pastime to be culturally accepted as sport, one key variable (missing from the present definition of the term) is required: watchability. And not just by those who likewise partake in the pastime, but also heavily, pointedly by those who don’t. Here, then, lies the seat of the sports mythos: A sport is a competitive physical pastime with a narrative that garners the interest both of formal competitors and amateur observers. In short, we as a society need to want to follow the careers of individual competitors or teams, and the statistics that bind their competitive play, in order for the sport to be considered as such.

For this reason, mainstream sport is made and maintained by our narrative choices — both those constructed by media representation, and those which, regardless of media reputation, are accepted and enhanced by popular opinion. Popular opinion saw the controversial rise of professional wrestling, easily on account of the narratives the franchises provided, and even though the events are quite scripted (thus creating excessive tensions among viewing and non-viewing audiences). Popular opinion now sees the rise of mixed martial arts, despite mainstream reluctance to report on its events. And various other trends — for billiards, for poker, for paint-balling — similarly see attempts at sustained narrative, perhaps despite the lack of popular favour, in the form of ESPN broadcasts.

So there is a constant set of negotiations at work, absolutely, in the creation and maintenance of mainstream sport. But underlying these negotiations exists one incontrovertible reality: In a culture which endorses competitive pastimes far more physically taxing than many of the activities that make it to sports channels or mainstream news pages, social narratives play a key role in deciding, ultimately, what is and is not a “sport.”

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Check back next week for a discussion about contemporary intersections between sport and socioeconomic class. Many thanks for interest!

Both champions, belted tight,
stepped into the ring, squared off at each other and let loose,
trading jabs with their clenched fists then slugged it out—
flurries of jolting punches, terrific grinding of jaws,
sweat rivering, bodies glistening—suddenly Euryalus
glanced for an opening, dropped his guard and Epeus hurled
his smashing roundhouse hook to the head—a knockout blow!

The Iliad, Chapter 23, 763-8

By now, fans of mixed martial arts should be used to mainstream news articles decrying their sport: Like taxes and death, the knee-jerk condemnation of fighting competitions like the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) is just another of life’s little constants. Just last weekend, James Christie of the Globe and Mail wrote the most recent of these critical pieces, published under the cheery, nuanced title, “WHY IS THIS CALLED A SPORT? BLOOD GORE ULTIMATE FIGHTING CHOKE PUNCH KICK PUMMEL FIGHTING CHOKE PUNCH KICK PUMMEL.” I kid you not.

The context for articles like these is clear: MMA competitions are illegal in Ontario, and many people would like to keep it that way. Their reasoning is similarly straightforward: They regard the competitions as bloodbaths without merit, and bloodbaths without merit should not be condoned. Strategies for furthering this argument include repeated mentions of UFC’s “no-holds-barred” beginnings, selective anecdotes about matches that spilled excess amounts of blood or yielded “sore winners,” condemnations of the sport from notable public figures, and reminders that the sport, by virtue of not having boxing’s exemption under the prize fighting category, is still illegal under Canadian federal criminal law.

The most common counter-arguments are therefore moored in reaffirming how different UFC has been since owner Dana White became president of the franchise in 2001, meeting bloody anecdotes with instances of clear sportsmanship, pointing out instances of similar violence in other, legalized sports, matching the condemnation of some public officials with the approval of others, and noting all the states and provinces that have legalized the sport to date – including Quebec, with BC tentatively moving in that direction.

None of these counter-arguments are ones I want to make, however, because in their reactive tendencies I find they all permit one implicit argument to slip by uncontested: The conviction that violence — the kind that can be sustained throughout five to thirty-year fighting careers for enough members to sustain the franchise’s label in turn — requires no skill. It’s an attitude that emerges every time someone says UFC is “just two guys beating the shit out of one another.” And it exists in hand with the notion that fighting is always the most debased thing a properly civilized person can do.

Consider, for instance, Christie’s own introduction to the theme: “The Ultimate Fighting Championship,” he writes, “is the sports world’s version of a traffic accident. It’s a bloody, brutal, violent spectacle, and people can’t help but look.” He then adds: “Learned social behaviour tells us it’s uncivilized to watch as men pound each other into pâté inside an octagonal cage, let alone cheer madly as a losing combatant turns into a hematoma.”

Were it not for one crucial little phrase in the latter sentence, I would agree wholeheartedly with Christie’s sentiment: We are conditioned to consider it uncivilized to watch as men “pound each other into pâté,” and it is uncivilized to “cheer madly as a losing combatant turns into a hematoma.” But even if pâtés and walking hematomas were the actual results of MMA fighting, there is absolutely no evidence to presume it is “learned social behaviour” to recoil from combat that occurs in a prescribed space — say, “inside an octagon” or “on the ice” or “in the ring” or even “within a war zone.” And as these examples themselves infer, there is plenty of social evidence to the contrary.

At the beginning of this post, I cited a passage from The Iliad (Robert Fagles’ gorgeous translation): specifically, from the end of the volume, when after all fighting is completed, and Hector’s defiled body returned to the grieving Trojan king, Achilles’ armies gather to partake in “funeral games” — chariot and foot races, boxing and wrestling, archery and sword-fighting, shot-put and spear-throwing. Though all these competitions are distinct matches, the fact that Ajax competes consecutively in four of them — wrestling, sword-fighting, the foot race, and shot-put — puts him in strong contention for the world’s oldest documented mixed martial artist.

And yet it is the placement of these funeral games — both within the context of the story and in the greater sum of human knowledge — that I find most intriguing, especially when one takes into account contemporary reactions to competitive violence. In The Iliad these games are presented as successors to war: when peace has been restored the natural social order joins honouring the dead with the pursuit of non-lethal aggressive sport. Meanwhile, Ancient Greek philosophy and literature still greatly inspire and motivate contemporary thought — as do many similar, ancient writings from equally brutal societies — and yet we have long grown comfortable with picking and choosing which parts of such ancient cultures represent true enlightenment, and which others can be discarded without pause.

So it is that we can proudly trace democracy’s history back to the later Ancient Greek era (500 to 400 BC); and in the same token decry as primitive and degenerate the competitive violence (as seen in The Iliad, 850 BC) that can be found at all stages of human civilization, in all cultures — and which, in the form of organizations like the UFC, sees more regulations and cultural protections than any preceding mixed fighting competition.

Again, my argument has nothing to do with whether the UFC is more or less violent than it used to be; more or less violent than its predecessors; or even more or less violent than other, legalized modern-day sports. Another day, in another article, I will deconstruct the mythos of MMA icon and “hero” Royce Gracie, whose victories in early, no-holds-barred UFC set the stage for a present-day competition in which grappling skill regularly defeats raw strength. But today I want simply to confront the argument that violence arises not from talent but from the lack of it, because if I have to hear the words “just two guys beating the shit out of one another” much more, I might be moved to a little jab-jab-cross-uppercut-flying-heel-hook combination of my own.

On one level we all know fighting well, and for a sustained period of time, requires a great deal of training. We all know there’s conditioning and strength training, to say nothing of specialized training for stand-up, wrestling, and ground-game, required to compete. We all know this training requires an awareness of one’s opponent’s strengths and weaknesses, the building of alternate game plans, and the ability to work within the rules of the game, even in times of great physical, emotional, and mental duress. And most of all we all know that anyone who disdains the contest as “just two guys beating the shit out of one another” likely wouldn’t last twenty seconds themselves in the octagon.

So why the dismissal of all the training that goes into competitions like these? When Stephen Harper famously claimed “ordinary people don’t care about the arts,” he played into a long-standing discourse about anti-intellectualism in contemporary culture — a discourse which consistently places artists alone on the side of intellectualism; and sports, more often than not, antithetically on the other. But is there not also a measure of anti-intellectualism at work when one so readily overlooks the discipline required to succeed at this particular physical pursuit?

The question becomes especially curious when one considers two further key points: first, that the pursuit of sports is heavily steeped in statistics, logistics, and general strategy (to say nothing of science’s role in performance enhancement); and second, that another pastime fixated just as heavily on the pursuit of physical excellence — beauty and fashion — is instead regarded by the media as a crowning achievement of contemporary culture.

Now, this is not to suggest the pursuit of fashion should also be struck from our social endeavours: rather, it’s to point out that even a surface reading of human history reveals the many conflicting drives that account for human nature and social interest, all of which persist through to the present day. We aspire towards self-improvement, and social development, yes. But these aspirations in no way negate the equally human desire to test ourselves in high-stress scenarios; to “feel alive” and “at our prime,” or to watch and admire others pursuing the same.

In fact, quite the opposite: we’re a risk-seeking species, and it’s a good thing we are, too. If we hadn’t been, we never would have flown. We never would have confirmed the existence of electric current. Enslaved peoples the world over would never have overcome their oppressors. Women would never have rallied for their rights. As a species, we would never even have charted the globe, let alone forayed into outer space.

Does this mean I expect the next great invention or discovery will emerge from UFC? Not necessarily — though advances in sports therapy may well yield rehabilitation benefits for the general population; and the development of sports materials (clothes, drinks, foods, training equipment) may find similar, external uses after emerging for MMA competitors.

But I do expect that the same instincts that drive us as a species into war and peace, into innovation, and generally into excellence at whatever our individual passions are, can only be expected to emerge in the component sports — all legal! all socially accepted! — of mixed-martial arts.

And if we can accept boxers who strive to be the best they can be; and wrestlers who strive to be the best they can be; and Muay Thai fighters, and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu fighters, who similarly strive to be the best they can be, without raising a stink about their respective disciplines, it can only be the height of disingenuous thinking to claim that the combination of these combat forms is somehow inferior (both ethically and with regard to skill) to any individual — and I stress the word here — martial art.

Now doesn’t that just make you want to punch something?

Kayseri, Turkey. September 17, 1967. When George Orwell wrote that serious sport is “war minus the shooting,” he didn’t go far enough: Sport is war — and on top of firearms, the 1967 Kayseri Atatürk Stadium disaster saw bats, knives, and even rocks used to bring about the deaths of 44 spectators, with figures ranging from 300 to 600 more in wounded. This wasn’t even an international event: at odds were the inhabitants of two Turkish cities, Kayseri and Sivas, joined in attendance at an amateur soccer game — a far cry from the great ideological weight placed on hockey games between Soviet Russia and the U.S. during the Cold War, and yet just as dangerous in its fanaticism.

Unsurprisingly, Orwell derides sport for its nationalistic tendencies; not just terming it “war” but also referring to a particularly Hobbesian breed of the beast: his aforementioned declaration, for instance, nicely rounds out a quotation that reads: “Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence.” This seems in all respects too unfocussed a criticism: For one, without sport what remains to serve as a measure of such “fair play”? In what next channel does that all-too-human impulse to vie over arbitrary lines in the sand emerge?

A spectator brawl over a chess game seems unlikely in a world where soccer and boxing matches provide outlet enough for these tendencies, but what if we were ever to eliminate other forms of conflict? Again, it’s no surprise that the man who wrote 1984, and therein argued that by suppressing language one could similarly suppress thought, believed here too that the elimination of sport could also suppress the underlying need for human contest.

Those used to drawing lines in the sand might be surprised, then, to learn that it’s a noted feminist (and Nobel Laureate), Doris Lessing, who holds precisely the opposite engagement with the fact of human competition, and all its brutish tendencies: in a CBC Massey Lectures series entitled Prisons We Choose To Live Inside, she writes that “in times of war we revert, as a species, to the past, and are permitted to be brutal and cruel. It is for this reason … that a great many people enjoy war. But this is one of the facts about war that is not often talked about.”

What Lessing goes on to champion is a deliverance from war through the acceptance of all its practice says of us — our strengths and our weaknesses as a species. It does not lie with the demonization of all wartime acts that we rise above our baser instincts, she argues, but with the courage to be honest about those seeds of blind allegiance, prejudice, and violence under pressure that exist within us all. And if these tendencies can be channelled to less catastrophic ends — statistics and strategies of game play supplanting, for instance, those of wartime combat — there is still room for barbarism, and occasional fatality, yes: but on a scale incomparable to the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, already lost in global conflict.

So sport is war: but what manner of it? With what overarching outcomes? The history of war influences our study of art, philosophy, politics, religion, sociology and psychology; and of course, our study of history itself. To suggest that the study of war could not also teach us anything about ourselves is absurd. So what, then, of sport? If it is war in its own right — in its machinations, its allegiances, its processes, and its narratives — can we not likewise learn a great deal about ourselves, and our species, from the study of sport’s own ancient and contemporary histories?

This is ultimately the question I wish to explore in this forum. But I will add another, more metaphysical point besides: Just as history is itself narrative — or many narratives, to be more specific — so too does the representation of sport create the bulk of its meaning, and its truths. As such, studying how various media are used to convey the truths and meanings of sport can help us understand just how these very different interpretations arise. One instance of this relative meaning has particularly haunted me these past few months: a proud owner of this photo, which depicts Muhammad Ali standing triumphant over Sonny Liston in a first minute, first round knock-out victory, I was struck by my first encounter with a cropped alternative of the shot, seen here.

Though much of the story in both photos remains the same — Ali’s towering triumph, the physical ceding of victory in Sonny Liston’s body posture — there are also profound subtle differences. In the latter, the ring is a passing backdrop; in the former, the white padding of the corner, a clear secondary focal point, creates a bigger context for the win: Ali not only dwarfs Liston, but also the realm in which the whole contest took place — a good reminder that this fight was not simply a stand-alone victory, or even the tale of an underdog; but instead part of the on-going saga of Ali’s domination over the entirety of the sport (in his weight class). In the latter photo, this meaning-set is replaced by another, which utilizes the isolation to tell its own story: In the lean vertical slice of the photo there exists only Ali and his conquest — an intense shot that narrows the whole of the moment instead to a single blow, and a singular victory; and in so doing fixes the viewers attention wholly on the spectre of Ali himself.

Another remarkable distinction arises in the prominence of the photojournalists in the former photo. Indeed, the grim-faced photojournalist in the far right champions a whole line of photographers (of which only one, obscured head is seen in the latter shot), and in so doing reminds viewers that the moment itself required someone — or many someones — to capture it: Without the storytellers (who here look somewhat epic in their own right, for all that the first photojournalist regards the scene with prominent impassivity), there would be no epic iconography of Muhammad Ali’s devastating win. The former photo therefore tells a more contextualized story of Ali’s win, while the latter refuses to allow the viewer’s attention to drift from the commanding presence of Ali all on his own.

These, then, are the subtle intrigues of sports narrative: Though final statistics are not easily varied, the littlest thing nonetheless affects the telling of each conflict. And as such, the power of representation becomes integral in the rise and fall of franchise fortunes, of collective interest in different sports, and of the legendary or heroic status of athletes therein.

And while there will surely always be a great many who pursue their love of sport as existing in vehement opposition to art, the loves are not dissimilar, or even antithetical. Some sports aficionados will refuse any subtleties of interpretation and meaning; and furthermore disdain observations about varying representations of sports narrative as a waste of time: But ask these same diehards about their favourite sports — the history of home teams, or players, or rulebooks, or costumes, or franchises — and you will invariably encounter a narrative response; and in it, a telling example of how all human customs have the capacity not just to highlight our strengths and weaknesses as a species, but also to relate our individuality: our personal truths.

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Please join me next Tuesday as I tackle the most potent of contemporary sports narratives: The history and social positioning of mixed martial arts, with an emphasis on the UFC franchise and outsider response to its mythology.

In the meantime, a question — the first, I hope, of many — and an invitation for your feedback on what sport means to you. Thank you for reading!

#1. What was your first memory of sport?