A TV commercial I’ve seen too
many times says that sports are more than a game. That was certainly true for
the soccer World Cup just played in Russia. Enormous crowds at home in every
country watched each game as if national survival depended on victory. Hundreds
of thousands of French people crowded the streets of Paris when their team won.
It’s hard not to connect national pride with athletic triumph. If the US had a
team in Russia, I would have rooted from them over everyone else.
The physical skills of
individual players and the intuitive coordination of team play were spectacular
to watch. But I was disappointed in an important aspect of these matches.
Fighting for control of the ball always involved pushing, grabbing arms and
pulling on jerseys, all strictly forbidden by the rules. Everybody appeared to
consider this behavior a normal part of the game. Feigning innocence and
surprise when they were caught in flagrante delicto was even more
blatant than the “who me?” gestures of NBA players called for fouls.
Winning was more important
than sportsmanship.
I just spent a weekend in
Chicago watching a different sport at a high level with a different sense of
fair play. My son’s team was playing in the USA
Ultimate Frisbee National Masters Championships, for men over 33 and
women over 30. Ultimate is a lot like soccer – playing on a soccer-sized field,
passing the disk from one player to another trying to get it into the end zone.
But the spirit of the game is
entirely different. Even at these national championships, there were no
referees. Players were expected to make their own calls for the slightest
infraction of the strict rules against physical contact. Disagreements had to
be settled by mutual consent on the field, sometimes with the help of neutral
official “observers”, mostly by discussion among the players.
The whole atmosphere of
competition was based on mutual respect. Players congratulated the other team
on good plays and helped each other up from the ground. After the game, the
usual congratulatory line-up of the teams was just the beginning of
acknowledgment of opponents. The two teams formed a circle with their arms
around each other and presented gifts, usually cans of beer, to athletes on the
other side, often selected for their fair play and good spirit.
These were serious
competitors. Teams of 15 or 20, which had made it through two levels of
regional play, traveled from all over the US for three days of competition.
The dominant sense of fair
play and mutual respect is maintained by constant reference to the “spirit
of the game”, as in these quotations from the “Official Rules of
Ultimate”: “Ultimate relies upon a spirit of sportsmanship that places the
responsibility for fair play on the player. Highly competitive play is
encouraged, but never at the expense of mutual respect among competitors,
adherence to the agreed upon rules, or the basic joy of play.” I watched many
games over the weekend, and the number of infractions against this form of
sportsmanship was minimal.
The words about the spirit of
the game (SOTG) on the website of USA Ultimate are a primer about good behavior
more generally: “Treat others as you would want to be treated”; “Be generous
with praise”; “Go hard. Play fair. Have fun.” “SOTG is about how you handle
yourself under pressure: how you contain your emotionality, tame your temper,
and modulate your voice.”
Ultimate frisbee developed as
a popular sport in the heady days of youthful rebellion against all forms of
convention and authority during
the late 1960s. The insistence on sportsmanship without referees was
natural to teenagers who disdained what they felt was the heavy hand of the
older generation. Yet the determination of ultimate players to prevent their
ideals from being distorted by conventional sports culture is remarkable.
Not only has the spirit
remained in force for half a century, but ultimate players have fought against
the typical gender stereotyping of sports culture. Gender mixing and equality
has been taken naturally from the start: like all frisbee tournaments, these
Masters Nationals invited men’s, women’s and mixed teams on an equal basis. The
players’ organization, USA
Ultimate, recognized the bias towards men’s athletics that permeates
sports around the world and has determined to counteract it. The players’
organization endorsed “gender equity” in 2008, as
a reaction to outside media broadcasters, who preferred to display only men’s
games. Knowing that they could not control the broadcast content of third-party
media companies, USA Ultimate decided on a policy of encouragement and
persuasion. The media companies, including ESPN, are now broadcasting men’s and
women’s games equally at the college and club levels. USA Ultimate has
instituted programs to specifically encourage more girls and women to play and
form teams, since there are still more than twice as many males as females who
are members.
By staying true to their
countercultural roots, ultimate players have discovered that hard competition
does not automatically mean animosity and cheating: “Time and again, great
teams and star players have shown that you can bring all your competitive and athletic
zeal to a game without
sacrificing fair play or respect for your opponent.”
Given the constant
lamentations about the
end of civility and an epidemic
of bad manners in modern life, ultimate’s SOTG might offer a better
path. Some sports are more than just games.
Steve Hochstadt
Springbrook, WI
Published in the Jacksonville
Journal-Courier, July 31, 2018
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