Monthly Archives: September 2019

September 17, 2019 · 8:33 am

Football: A love letter

Stephen Mumford’s short monograph on football(soccer) is a philosophical love letter to the game. His goal is to explain, from a philosophic point of view, why football has such a hold on us. Worldwide, it’s the most popular game and this has given rise to any number of theories of why that is and what that means about the world or about the game. Mumford takes a stab at this by using philosophy to examine the nature of the game itself.

While I think Mumford does a great job of pulling at these pieces and examining the nature of soccer, I ultimately think the project itself was doomed from the start. I guess that’s because I’m a sport pluralist: much of what he says about soccer can be said about other sports. I love soccer (though clearly not as much as Mumford); I’m just not convinced of soccer exceptionalism.

But that said, this book is delightful. Mumford takes on the familiar idea of soccer as “the beautiful game” and examines the aesthetics of football and how they relate to the playing of the game itself. I particularly found the chapter on space and how that works in soccer to be one of the most interesting chapters (maybe because much of it was novel to me). The last two chapters, Chance and Victory, explored important philosophical questions about sport and games.

The book is short, 121 pages. There are no footnotes and only short bibliography. The audience of this book is, I think, someone who enjoys sports/soccer and also has a taste for philosophy. That doesn’t mean it won’t appeal to professional philosophers and academics (it appeals to this one); I think it can. It might also be a good book to introduce a more traditional philosopher to the richness of the philosophy of sport.

Nizkor (We Will Remember)

September 6 is the anniversary of one of the worst days in Olympic history: the 1972 terrorist attack by the PLO terrorist group, Black September, against the Israeli Olympic delegation at the Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany. On September 5, the Israeli Olympic delegation was taken hostage in the Olympic Village. Two Israels were killed fighting back during the hostage-taking. The next day, the remaining nine Israelis were murdered after a failed attempt at the rescue of the hostages.

Nizkor (We Will Remember):

The names of the Israeli athletes and coaches murdered in 1972 at the Munich Olympic Games:

David Mark Berger.
Ze’ev Friedman.
Yossef Gutfreund.
Eliezer Halfin.
Yossef Romano.
Amitzur Shapira.
Kehat Shorr.
Mark Slavin.
Andre Spitzer.
Yakov Springer.
Moshe Weinberg.

Sport and Society

This week in Sports Ethics we look at some questions about the relationship of sport and society. Such questions could encompass a whole course on its own, my focus is more specifically on two main questions:

How has sport influenced society? Specifically, how does it unite people, bringing them together in positive ways? How can it, on the other hand, be divisive and negative?
Assuming sport does impact society and social relations, how should it be (and should it be) used for social goals?

To spur the discussion we watch the documentary The 16th Man about the South African Rugby World Cup in 1995 and we read selections from Jane Leavy’s biography on Sandy Koufax and Jonathan Eig’s Opening Day about Jackie Robinson. We also look at Pam Sailors’ journal article: “Zola Budd and the Political Pawn.”

When I first start teaching Sports Ethics, the tone of this discussion was always much more positive. Sport was seen by my students as nearly universally a positive force. More recent instantiations of the class have been more divided (particularly during the peak-Kap era). I am curious how this year will be.

I am excited to rewatch (again) The 16th Man in preparation. It’s a great documentary: it is emotional moving and informative, while also entertaining and compelling. I think the fact that it is focused on South Africa and on rugby, gives my US students some distance that helps think more critically about the questions regarding sport and society. With Koufax and Robinson, since it’s about baseball, it is much more familiar. That helps too, in a different way. The mix of these –with their contrasts and comparisons –helps underscore the ways sport influences society.