Mark Baur's Blog

Well, my intention with this post is to talk about something towards which I have a pretty inflexible disposition, in order to make a different point altogether.  First, though, in order to brace myself for the passionate responses this might elicit, it seems appropriate to come clean about all the bias I know to be bringing to the matter, and acknowledge that there is likely much more besides.  I will attempt to briefly contrast two forms of football, the American and the Rugby version (never mind the Association’s game…), and then see where that leads.

Regarding personal biases then, I should say that I consider a rugby match to be, in some way, a moral affair, i.e. that it is a venue for morally good sport, somehow distinct from the basics of athletic contest.  Gadamer wrote:

…the variety of mental attitudes exhibited in playing various games, and in the desire to play them, is the result and not the cause of the differences among the games themselves.  Games differ from one another in their spirit.

In my experience, this “spirit” in rugby adjudicates itself harshly, honestly, and — yes — justly.  I could expect of no one to share my sentiment, such as it is, on faith — since that is how I offer it.  And yet, mere aesthetic preferences seem generally insufficient to account for the devotion of the sport’s adherents.  That something similar could be said of any sport, on behalf of every fan, I am well aware…but remember, I want to dispense with my own prejudices!  Also, my dabbling in the gridiron game beyond high school (walked on, quit) does not speak in favor of objectivity.

At any rate, the sporting news — and ongoing debate — that triggered this present riff is concerned with a certain decision made by a certain coach that, for my purposes, highlights the critical differences between these two footballs.  In the stream of statistics, analysis, and talk — oh, how America has mastered the art of sports talk — a flood of noise entirely out of proportion to the two minutes of play it concerns, the essence of the game (or at least of this particular game) becomes that of a solitary chess master, calculating the risks and rewards of every move.  In this intentionally negative light, I see where most of my interest was lost.

My point, though, is slightly different.  The art of American football, so to speak, lies in the nearest possible approximation of a fundamentally unattainable design — in every play, along every route, in the timing of every run, pass, and block.  Insofar as the collective executes against the design, the game is realized.  Rugby, in this comparison, is vastly more fluid.  Its art is discursive, fundamentally imperfect, a constant negotiation of individual decisions against a shared goal with only limited room to accommodate design.  Each sport, then, depends upon, and is a product of, a series of affordances (enforced by rule, enabled from within, or based upon expectations) that become indistinguishable from, and indeed are essential to, the “spirit” of the game.  Thus, it would be quite unrealistic to assume the constitutive order of the one to be in any large measure transferable to the other, whatever similarities may at first seem apparent.