A Healthy Mind In a Healthy Body
by Michael E. Marotta
Thomas Edison once said, "I use my body just to carry my brain around." He died at the age of 82.
The mind-body dichotomy is common in cultures that call themselves "civilized." We Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Marxists and Objectivists elevate verbal learning and denigrate mere physical achievement. We fill stadiums, of course. Every four years we ogle the Olympic spectacle. And the other side of the dichotomy is the general truth that athletes are stupid. Mark Spitz—swimming hero of the 1972 Olympics—was too dumb to make a commercial.
On the other hand, growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, I knew that Jim Ryan, quarterback for the Browns, held a Ph.D. in mathematics. Even so, most of the places that advertise mens sana in corpore sano are gyms or yoga studios, not college math labs. Pack stadiums as we do for the Olympics, we do not televise the high school science olympiads—in fact, not all the participants' parents show up. Of course, the process of thought cannot easily be observed from the outside. Athletic achievements are compelling because they are visible. We cheer athletes because they give physical expression to the inner world of our aspirations.
Just as "art" might be almost anything, so, too, is "sport" a broad term: martial javelins and archery, herculean weightlifting, all kinds of running, figure skating, "gymnastic floor events" that are really modern jazz dance, wrestling (including judo and karate), croquet, golf, miniature golf, tennis, badminton, table tennis, billiards, pool, snooker, bowling, bocci, skittles, and penny tosses, as well as baseball, basketball, and several games named "football." We race many classes of automobiles, motorcycles and horses. X-games are the extreme sports of Generations X and Next: skateboarding, snowboarding, skyboarding, motorcross, mountain bikes, and rollerblading, all of which grew out of roller skates, bicycles and surfboards. Whether a particular athlete's achievement reflects your own deepest values depends on who you are on the inside. Your relationship with yourself defines what you will find inspiring.
I participate in sports. I am seldom a spectator. I do it for fun. I take it seriously. A few summers back, I worked for a software firm that had a softball team in a city sandlot league. I used my lunch hours to drive to a batting cage and spent a few dollars every day to hit ten or twenty balls. I even used the cage to practice fielding. I stood way off to one side or way too close and then chased the ball, catching it before it hit the ground. To me, baseball is one of the truly rational sports. Baseball is democratic in several ways, is a child of the Industrial Revolution, and was the first professional American sport to bring down the color barrier.
To me, a good sport demands many skills, rewards individual effort, rewards agility rather than aggression, demands intelligence, insight, and foresight, and rewards memory and integration. A good sport does not penalize for physical size and can be played equally well by men and women together. A good sport rewards teamplay and cooperation, but like any collective benefit, that is secondary to me. I also appreciate the loneliness of the long-distance runner.
All sports are not created equal. Billiards and bowling require little physical skill and almost no mental alertness. One of their peculiar advantages is that they can be played drunk. Everyone I know who shoots pool in a bar (including me) says that he does it better after a couple of drinks. In the movie The Hustler, even Minnesota Fats downs a shot to help his game. Bowling is another game that gets better with beer.
Golf demands the precise performance of one very limited skill: hitting a ball with a stick. The ball is not even moving. Rather than walking, you ride in a cart or you pay some kid to haul your stuff for you. The courses are poisoned with herbicides and insecticides. (To be fair to golf, my nephew—a jock with college degree in history—can tell the tale of a grueling round at St. Andrews.) Table tennis and miniature golf also fail to challenge and reward the whole person.
Australian Rules Football is another rational sport. It is a little hard on the girls if they are not into playing seriously with the boys, but with all the checks and tackles, it rewards agility more than mere muscle mass. Australian Football (called "Speedball" in American gym classes) lets you pass, punt, bounce, throw or run with the ball. Plays form quickly. The game demands a fluid intelligence in space and time. The range of plays allowed makes Aussie football much faster and more challenging than soccer. For all of its positives, soccer falls short by prohibiting the use of the hands; run, kick, run, kick, run, kick ... only American "football" is worse.
In fact, American football is probably evil. Essentially a form of military combat, with defensive and offensive "squads" and tactical "platoons," American football divides labor into mindless repetitions of linemen bashing each other while executioners blitz the backfield. After everyone is dead on the ground, all play stops—no need for players to tire themselves out. Just in case you do not know what to do—and the plays are supposedly complicated if one follows all the scribbles on the TV screen—you huddle before each play to get your orders, and needn't worry about having to think for yourself.
Basketball has a few virtues. It does penalize short people, and seven foot tall players are common (although this year's NBA Most Valuable Player, Steve Nash, is only 6'3" [168 cm]). The game has appropriate penalties for overt aggression. It is a small squad game that lets individuals stand out. Its main shortfall is that only a narrow set of skills is needed to play. Although running, dribbling, passing, and shooting are a good mix, and the constant running is demanding, the ease of the game is the reason that scores like 112-110 are common. The victor is determined in the last half of the last quarter, and the difference between winning and losing is less than one percent of the score's total.
Mens sana in corpore sano comes to us from the Roman satirist Juvenal. Like many other good traditions, America inherited its sense of fair play from the British. Sports are something one plays during school for many reasons—and the emphasis is on "reason." Classical studies at the British schools reinforced the ancient idea that if you want your body to carry your head around, you need to take care of your body.
In some Greek cities, it was against the law to not go to the gynmasium. Greek armies were citizen armies. Competitors in Greek Olympic footraces wore a full panopoly of bronze armor. At the battle of Plataea, the Persians thought they had the advantage. Arrayed in a valley plain, they forced the Greeks to march overhill to get to them. The Persians thought this would tire the Greeks out. They were wrong. And when the Greeks crested the hill and saw the Persians sprawled out before them, they ran two miles downhill, crashed into the Persian center, drove the ranks back on themselves, collapsed the wings, and routed the host. The men who took care of their bodies kept their heads.
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