Professor of Literature Hans Ulrich
Gumbrecht is a sports fan. Not only a sports fan; Professor Gumbrecht is a fan
of sports fans, so much so that he has written In praise of athletic beauty
to describe, and to make respectable, the hours spent watching baseball,
football, tennis and other sports. Dissatisfied with the academy’s somewhat
elitist dismissal of sport as just another capitalist banality, Gumbrecht wants
to argue that there is more to the roar of the crowd than mere tribalism. To
Gumbrecht, the current mass appeal of sports represents more than the
manipulation of the masses by advertising corporates. There is something almost
transcendental about sport; some aesthetic quality that unites us with the
Greeks, the Romans, even with the gods themselves as we admire the movement of
a body, or revel in the million to one victory.

Gumbrecht has the ordinary sports
fan in mind as an audience. Perhaps the ‘educated’ sports fan might be more
accurate; someone with a passing familiarity with history, and the interest in
seeing sports in historical context. One thing is clear: Gumbrecht is not
providing an academic defense of the many ‘readings’ of sports of which he is
so critical. Sports, in Gumbrecht’s view do not need such a defense; they have
the intransitive quality of being ‘for themselves’. Gumbrecht describes the
attraction of sports as "a fascination in the true sense of the word — a
phenomenon that manages to paralyze the eyes, something that endlessly
attracts, without implying an explanation for its attraction." The writing
is clear and approachable. There are no footnotes or references, and no attempt
to engage with any theory of sport. The book is littered with references to
great sportsmen (mainly) and women. There is plenty to hold the attention of
the reader.  In praise of athletic beauty is a paean to what sports fans
already love: sports.  

Gumbrecht takes a multilayered
approach. Not content to merely describe sports as possessing aesthetic
qualities, he reaches back to the 18^th century, and further, to find
words suited to his task. Gumbrecht finds an appropriate language in Kant’s
views of the beautiful and the sublime, and the Greek ideas of agon
(competition) and arete (striving for excellence). He devotes a long
section to the history of sport, showing the emergence in different historical
periods of activities recognizable as sports, but noting also the discontinuities
that are a feature of these developments. In a section titled ‘Fascinations’
Gumbrecht develops his own taxonomy of what it is that captivates the sports
fan. This is the most rewarding section of the book, as Gumbrecht applies
himself to the development of an aesthetics of sports. While some may disagree
with Gumbrecht’s categories (bodies, suffering, grace, tools, forms, plays and
timing) they are effectively employed in discussing the allure of sports. You
could perhaps ask where are speed, and strength. What of the Olympian’s "Citius, Altius, Fortius"?
But Gumbrecht has his eye on the aesthetic, and for that, the physical
attributes necessary for the perfect play are not the point. Gumbrecht recognizes
that it is not intentionality alone that produces beauty, or even art (how many
well intentioned attempts at art fail spectacularly?). He also recognizes the
aesthetic qualities of practices and performances that simply happen to possess
those qualities (as does sports), rather than strive consciously for them (as
does art). In the final section Gumbrecht expresses his gratitude to the
players he has never met, but who created the inspired moments that have
Gumbrecht and others in their thrall.      

Gumbrecht is extremely critical of commentators
he refers to as "people who deem themselves to be cultivated". This
group is held to exercise a conservative stranglehold on what may be deemed
aesthetic experience, allowing only "a limited set of canonized objects
and situations", and certainly not sports. Gumbrecht rails against
political and sociological interpretations: "Counter to many academic (and
highly incompetent) "readings" of sports, athletic competitions do
not express anything, and therefore do not offer anything to read."
According to Gumbrecht, academics are more likely to make pompous gestures than
to ever concede a "whiff of reality" or a "grain of
intelligence." Gumbrecht traces this reluctance to praise sports to the
Enlightenment legacy of criticism: a "reduction in the range of
permissible discourses" that makes praise (especially of sports) not just
unfashionable, but a reversion to pre-enlightenment intellectual values. So in
addition to developing an aesthetic of sport, In praise of athletic beauty
is a critique of class privilege in declaring what may be claimed in the name
of "culture" or "art". Notwithstanding his critique of
academic writing on sports, and his views on the effect of the Enlightenment on
academic writing, Gumbrecht opts for analysis as his method. His goal is to "lay
open the complexity of sports" as a music critic does with music.

In addition to praising the grace
of the body, Gumbrecht is also in awe of the crowd. The rapture of the crowd is
in many ways its own end. Gumbrecht describes his experience in walking away
from sports fixtures feeling intoxicated, the effect of the crowd having induced
a form of ecstasy. The crowd contributes its own exhilaration to individual
fans’ appreciation of the "beautiful move". Fans may find themselves,
like Proust’s narrator at a performance of La Berma, feeling that: "the
longer I went on clapping the better La Berma’s acting seemed to have become".

At the risk of proposing that Gumbrecht
should have trawled the Internet for every possible example in support of his
thesis, I want to mention one that is relevant to my own context, and that
seems to fit well with Gumbrecht’s analysis. For good reasons Gumbrecht makes
much of the performances of Jesse Owens at Berlin in 1936. Not only did Owens
steal the show from Hitler, he was as graceful and complete an athlete as you
could hope to see: lithe, elegant, rhythmic, totally focused. He also
apparently had very little appreciation of himself in aesthetic terms; he seems
to have been modest and almost bemused by his achievements. Another athlete at
the Berlin games was quite different. Jack
Lovelock, from the isolated West Coast of New Zealand, won the 1500 meters
with a performance that left commentators gasping. Harold Abrahams,
broadcasting for the very stiff upper lipped BBC lost all composure, shouting: "My
God, he’s done it. Jack, come on! … Lovelock wins. Five yards, six yards, he
wins. He’s won. Hooray!!". The Manchester Guardian declared: "It was
a race magnificent beyond all description …There never was such a run nor
such a runner." Of course such hyperbole is the very stuff of the sports
commentary. But even Lovelock himself thought of the race not merely as sport,
but as art. His diary records: "It was undoubtedly the most beautifully
executed race of my career, a true climax to eight years of steady work, an
artistic creation." A mythology has grown up around Lovelock that accords
him heroic status. His early and unexplained death in a New York subway added
to the myth of an athlete who some say ran the perfect race and, like the deified
victors in the ancient games, could not live easily in the company of mortals.

For a non-American, there is a forgivable
bias in Gumbrecht’s work, towards those sports that dominate in the US. I hate to say it, but Joe Di Maggio and Babe Ruth are just names to me, along with all
those soccer greats who Gumbrecht invokes with admiration. Still, Gumbrecht
does enough by using the examples he is familiar with to invite readers to
apply this scheme to their own sporting interests. There will be few English
cricket fans who would struggle to recall a beautiful cover drive. For rugby
fans the well timed sidestep contains all those elements Gumbrecht ascribes to
the perfect play. Gumbrecht is right to argue that a play of exceptional
quality earns the admiration of most fans, not just those concerned with the
success of the home team.

So, how successful is Gumbrecht? I
was left with the sense that however much it may be possible to praise sports
as beautiful, that’s not the whole story. There seems to be some validity in
the argument that sport is a product of capitalism, even if we accept that
products of capitalism (like painting or sculpture) might still be beautiful. Gumbrecht
is convincing in arguing that sports can be admired and enjoyed for the beauty
they express. The magical play, the perfect form of the gymnast, the rhythmic
perfection of the distance runner remain, no matter what other readings might
be made. Gumbrecht might take comfort from observing that the arts world has
recently seen a proliferation of prizes, competitions, live performances and
sponsorship, a case of art imitating sport, perhaps.

There is a class of sports fan who
is probably less concerned with the aesthetics of the game and simply enjoys
the rush of competition. Such a fan will carry on with or without encouragement
from Gumbrecht. More reflective sports fans will take pleasure in Gumbrecht’s
analysis, pleased to find something more to enjoy at the baseball or in the
football stadium.  

Gumbrecht has laid down something
of a challenge to his academic peers to take sports seriously in aesthetic
terms. Whether or not they rise to this challenge may be of little interest to
Gumbrecht. Whatever that outcome, In praise of athletic beauty gives
sports fans something to cheer about.

© 2006 Tony O’Brien

Tony O’Brien, RN, MPhil, Senior
Lecturer, Mental Health Nursing, University of Auckland, a.obrien@auckland.ac.nz

Categories: Philosophical