How sports can be beautiful.
Many wonder why I spend so much time watching sports on television. It’s for the same reason other people go to art galleries (though not to feel hip and better than other people … the other reason people go to art galleries). Certain moments in sports are just beautiful.
It’s not just the stories that are beautiful, though they certainly can be. No, I mean that certain physical acts of athletes on the field or court are aesthetically beautiful.
Take some examples: an alley-oop is inherently beautiful, especially when a forward takes a back-door cut and meets the ball at the hoop. I also like the long pass, thrown to a receiver’s back shoulder that he jumps and spins around to catch. The instances in baseball are fewer, but if you’ve ever seen a shortstop snag a hard line-drive out of the air, you’ll know that baseball has its high points too between all the stoppages.
It’s beautiful when a basketball player drives from the wing, slips right past a defender who isn’t quite ready for him, and dunks the ball home. Something about it seems unstoppable, inevitable. One of the most delightful recurring images in sports is a pump fake that takes a defender all the way off his feet — particularly great because it can happen in two sports, football and basketball.
A good runner can make the most beautiful plays on the football field. Any time a running back breaks a big run, he’s broken several tackles that by all reason should have taken him down, which is why it’s so hard to run the ball in video games. When a hit causes a running back to lose his balance momentarily but the back regains his feet, this can beautiful. There was a running back for the University of Washington whose career highlights always included a run where he was knocked up in the air by low hit to the legs and then landed on his feet and kept running. The coincidence of luck, balance, and awareness made this amazing play beautiful.
Cornerback is another position ripe for this kind of aesthetics. Sure, jumping a short route and taking it back for a touchdown is ripe territory, but just as beautiful is playing a fade route perfectly. Especially on a taller receiver it takes a turn of the head at the perfect time and a perfectly timed jump to knock away that ball.
But this beauty in athletics isn’t limited to the big-time sports. In tennis, a well-timed, devastating volley that puts the ball well out of an opponent’s reach is satisfying. Every sport has its beautiful moments. Hell, even soccer has its moments, though they are fewer. There’s a reason almost every soccer commercial includes a bicycle kick or a diving save by a goalie. There’s really nothing else beautiful in soccer.
All of these moments are visually pleasing. Beauty is not the ultimate goal of most athletes, but it does result from some of their exertions. Sometimes this beauty results from their athleticism, but generally the most beautiful plays are smart plays or plays made with skills developed specifically for the game. It’s nice when a quarterback has the arm strength to throw a rocket across the field, but it’s beautiful when he has developed his pump fake to the point that he can take defenders off the ground with it. A running back can run as fast as he wants, but it’s his balance that makes his run noteworthy. Sure, the tennis player has to be fast to get into position for his killing volley, but he also has to be smart enough to know where the ball will be so that he can be there ahead of time and have control over where his shot goes.
This is the problem with soccer. I’ve pointed out the plays in soccer that are beautiful, but they are much less common than great looking plays in other sports. Most soccer proponents (dirty commies if you ask me) put a large portion of their argument into the fact that soccer requires greater athleticism, and it’s true to a certain extent.But it’s not athleticism, for the most part, that makes a sport beautiful. Soccer players are left to rely on the odd bicycle kick to keep things attractive, but how often does a player have the chance to run up to the goal, get facing the other direction, and then have the ball passed to him so he can do a back flip and by some miracle hit the goal?
Sports get fans interested by playing into their local partisanships and, in the most extreme cases investing large pieces of their self-worth in these teams. I’ll admit that I do invest large chunks of myself in the wins and losses of certain teams. But an equal draw for me is the beauty of sport. So when people ask why good athletes get paid so much more than good car manufacturers, I’ll tell you that it’s because they can do something beautiful — much more beautiful than a Ford Mustang.
Andrew Rist ’09 (arist@fas) sometimes has trouble distinguishing between loving and being in love with sports.