Sport, Gameplaying and Sportspersonship

This week you will explore issues of responsible action in the field of sports and esports.
Concepts such as Sportspersonship, patriotism, partisanship are employed as a means to
allow you to reflect on your own attitudes to responsible thought and action.
Frist slide:
*role model
2nd slide:
* C.L.R. James:
• Incredible writer from Trinidad.
• Heavily involved in politics around the world. Major body of work in sociology,
politics, history, race studies.
• Also interested in sport.
• His book, Beyond a Boundary, about cricket in the late 1800’s argues that you can
learn more through the sports than any other social phenomenon.
• More people watched cricket than went to art galleries.
• James writes that British culture used sport, especially cricket, to teach certain
values.
• However, the great practitioners of the sport evolve the game, the way they respond
to the challenges that the sport presents change the behaviors of the future
participants who mimic them.
• The stiff upper lip.
• The barefoot bowler.
• The athlete wrestling with time and physics, but also with culture.

* Are cheaters playing the game?

• One way to define sports is to consider the activity as an attempt to overcome an
obstacle through an inefficient means.
• Hence cheating is employing a more efficient means.
*What about stretching the rules?
• The value of ‘competition’ in sport is contested. Does sport provide a ‘moral
laboratory for creating courageous leaders, or does it produce narcissists who only
care for winning. The answer is clearly somewhere in the middle.
• Consider the idea of gamespersonship (different to Sportspersonship)

* Leslie Howe on Gamespersonship:

• Howe compares gamespersonship to seduction in that it is the target of the
behaviour who determines if it is successful or not.
• “If the gamer’s behaviour is within the rules, it cannot be unfair, and the competitive
failure of the target is not the result of unfair advantage. It is because the target did
not pass one of the fundamental aspects of competition: the test of psychological
strength and preparedness.”
• In this sense sport is about not just skill but character.
* Simone de Beauvoir - The Second Sex:
• Women are defined as men’s Other. (consider the W in WAFL)
• One is not born, but rather becomes a woman.
• The social world turns women into an object. They are denied transcendence.
• Transcendence is the freedom to recreate yourself.

* Sport and Nationalism

• There is a difference between nationalism and patriotism.
• Patriotism is a kind of loyalty to one’s origins, not made by choice.
• Some sports’ writers suggest that patriotism might look like a fairly innocuous idea in
most cases, but it allows emotional manipulation of a group.
• Consider Bulgaria vs England at the 2020 Euro Cup.

*Philosophy in the Bleachers

• Santayana – Philosophy in the Bleachers
• Amateurism matters. When only focused on performance the roundedness of
character is left behind.

After reading Claudia Rankine's essay on Serena Williams, and after considering the content
of the sports and morality lecture, reflect on how race, gender, or social expectations of
athletes can show up moral problems in contemporary society (refer to Rankine's essay in
your response).