Mr. Lewis has come up quite frequently recently. It turns out that reading one of his books has triggered an entry that I would have posted on Thursday had my poor little gerbil not died
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Re: The value of sportsubersecretOctober 22 2004, 17:07:10 UTC
There is, indeed, an aesthetic to sports (even team sports, maybe especially team sports). This is why you hear guys in your office (okay, maybe not *your* office) going on about how a play was the most beautiful thing they've ever seen. Something is beautiful in sports when a player demonstrates that he had a grasp of the entire "playing field" (or court, or whatever) and capitalized on his implicit understanding of his situation and the abilities and limitations of his opponents to achieve some desired outcome. A team is playing beautifully when it is playing in harmony--when all the players are clearly anticipating where each will be at any given time, when they know how to move to get free of defenders, etc. It was when I suddenly found I had an implicit grasp of basic music theory after years of reading music that I first understood this about sports. All of a sudden I started seeing patterns, chord progressions, and so on, and suddenly I realized that true composers don't think in notation; they implicitly (usually explicitly also) understand music, and the notation is just a standardized way of communicating it. Similarly, a coach can draw X's and arrows on a chalk board, and there are some kids who'll never see more than X's and arrows--who'll never grasp the underlying concept that he's trying to communicate. But when it finally clicks for a person and they start perceiving a football field the way the coach does, all of a sudden a lifetime of X's and arrows makes sense. Most people in my church have this kind of understanding of sports, and I can listen to them talk and know they're talking about something I just can't see.
Re: The value of sportslhynardOctober 22 2004, 18:43:55 UTC
I always took the phrase "that was a beautiful pass" to be a sad corruption of a word I value very highly. I see no resemblance at all being the beauty of a pass and the beauty of a flower. I don't think I ever shall.
I don't think there is any inherent beauty there. If there is any beauty at all in it, I think it is attached value, not inherent. It is a "beautiful" pass because those who care enough to watch and analyse it know the complexity of the pass. So they therefore value that pass.
...Unless "beauty" is "harmony", which I don't think it is.
But this is an issue where I freely admit I may just be completely blind to it, and maybe you and J. are right.
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I don't think there is any inherent beauty there. If there is any beauty at all in it, I think it is attached value, not inherent. It is a "beautiful" pass because those who care enough to watch and analyse it know the complexity of the pass. So they therefore value that pass.
...Unless "beauty" is "harmony", which I don't think it is.
But this is an issue where I freely admit I may just be completely blind to it, and maybe you and J. are right.
Reply
Actually, guys in my office are -- for the most part -- just as into sports as in any other office.
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