Philosophers — if they turn their attention to sports at all — tend to get all technical. It is a one-way street, since sports fans seldom have the rigour or the training to use the techniques of philosophy to analyse sports. The exception, British philosopher A.J. Ayer, a fan of the Middlesex cricket team and Tottenham Hotspur in football, didn’t bring the two strains together.
There are rules in sports, artificial but agreed upon. It is so much easier to carry the ball and drop it into a hole in the distance, but in golf you have to use clubs and follow a set of rules designed to make it difficult.
“Playing a game,” wrote the philosopher Bernard Suits in his elegant definition, “is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.”
“I know nothing of Suits’s personal life,” writes the philosopher David Papineau, “but it is hard to avoid the impression that his book was written by someone who never knew the joy of hitting a six back over the bowler’s head, or of hitting a backhand topspin crosscourt winner.”
Papineau’s book, Knowing The Score carries the subtitle What sports can teach us about philosophy (and what philosophy can teach us about sports ). It argues, it debates, it clarifies, it challenges, it connects apparently different entities, it digresses, it dips into other disciplines, it evokes Chomsky and C.B. Fry (among others) to shine a light on the subject while giving an insight into the nature of both sports and philosophy.
Above all, it is great fun, putting in philosophical context such matters as how Roger Federer decides in half a second what stroke to play or why it is moral for a baseball outfielder to fake a catch to deceive the umpire, but taboo for a cricketer to do so. Or why there are more family dynasties in motor racing but few in basketball.
Papineau’s analysis of cycling is a highlight. In a road race, a breakaway group may belong to different teams (or countries), but that small group will support one another to keep the larger group at bay and enhance their own chances of winning. As Papineau says, “You won’t understand cycle racing till you appreciate the complex dance of altruistic, mutualistic, and selfish motives that are in play.”
The book – a collection of essays on various themes - is equally for the philosopher who doesn’t care for sports and the sports fan who doesn’t understand philosophy. Papineau, author of Philosophical Devices: Proofs, Probabilities, Possibilities, and Sets has played tennis, soccer, golf, cricket, rugby, squash, hockey, apart from sailboarding and surfing. It is an unbeatable range. And the book is the richer for that. Papineau’s definition of sport is simpler too: “It is any activity whose primary purpose is the exercise of physical skills.”
That eliminates chess and bridge, but Suits’s definition, says Papineau, confuses games with sports and does not embrace non-competitive, rule-free activities.
Perhaps like pornography, sports is not easily defined, but we know it when we see it.
(Suresh Menon is Contributing Editor, The Hindu)
