Sports and Academe
by Alec Mouhibian
UC Santa Barbara — “where the education is higher” and where I’m a sophomore — is not a sports school, which is too bad.
The ultimate challenge of any university is to prepare its students for the real world and all its challenges. Relevant academic courses do this by providing an education in knowledge and ideas that are either abstractly or potentially useful. Meantime, we the Santa Barbarians are in the ivory gates, insular from reality, and we’re supposed to prance around for four years in search of our inner, gooey selves.
A competitive, popular sports program would add a very healthy balance to the atmosphere. Sports presents the lessons of life in compact, dramatic, exciting form. Fulfillment of purpose through hard work, within the boundary of immutable rules; the ass-teething demands of reality; bitter failure and glorious triumph that’s only possible with bitter failure — on display for all to see and feel in the here and now.
Those of us who are into soccer got a taste of that feeling a few weeks ago when the UCSB Gaucho soccer squad almost beat Indiana to win the NCAA championship. They lost, despite outplaying the lucky bastards, thanks to a few limp legs at the end. Nonetheless, their fine performance this season gave the thousands of Gaucho fans who attended the final four a spirited buzz that hasn’t been felt by people at my school for a long time. For that, they deserve our appreciation and submission.
My coeds shouldn’t have to like soccer to join me in giving kudos or bending over. I know many of you think it’s a pussy sport, but that’s probably because all you’ve seen of it are yelping soccer moms and halftime snacks. Or you might have caught twenty minutes of some World Cup game involving Germany, and the Germans are notorious for playing soccer a little too much like they have sex: slow and boring, but efficient and well-managed, finally scoring once in the end. Neither case is exactly exemplary of how great the game can be.
Anyway, I’m not out to make converts, and I acknowledge that football and basketball are much more exciting to watch. In fact, UCSB badly needs a football team. No school, no matter the success of its other programs, can claim to be athletically respectable without one. It’s like having one breast. Could be the finest, most voluptuous breast in the world — but something would still be missing.
How sad it is that the very reason we need a football team is the same reason we don’t have one anymore. The moral and metaphysical absolutism of football — a particular play is good or bad, a pass is complete or not — directly challenges the postmodern agendas of those with power in my university, who reject the existence of any certainty or truth. They want funding to go to the promotion of their relativistic dogmas, or in the case of the decrepit Women’s Center, to classes that deconstruct the evils of the penis. Imposing a false dichotomy between the mental and the physical, they lack any understanding of an art form that was invented at the same time and by the same culture as tragedy and philosophy.
Combine those crusades with Title IX legislation and there you have it: the discontinuation of football in my school in 1992 and the failed initiative to revive the program in 1999, despite popular support.
Too bad, indeed.
Some of the arguments against a sports-focused atmosphere are just silly. Those who complain that popular athletes are treated as better people ignore the obvious fact that they are better people. Carrying the burden of your class schedule is one thing. But how is it any tougher than carrying the burden of 50,000-plus people’s well-being, as it depends on your every move?
At a deeper level, the prime purpose of academe is the pursuit of truth. Which is premised on exactly the type of possible certainty that sports symbolizes, and that its haters, through an ideology that undermines their own profession, oppose.
Congratulations to the Gauchos in cleats for a fine academic achievement.
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[Postscript: This article, in addition to its other points, implies a follow-up to the comments I made on a recent art thread about what good pop-culture can teach miserable "high"-culture. Sports epitomizes the type of passion that all art can and should inspire in its fans. A simple comparison illustrates the contrast: was America (as a whole) nearly as mournful of Susan Sontag's death as it is excited about the NFL playoffs?]
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