Mastering The Useless: An Excellent Sporting Life
Sometimes we take the sporting life far too seriously and try to use it in the service of this or that ideology. I want to praise those sporting life people that excell at doing those things that are totally useless. Let me praise bird-watchers and skate-boarders and let me praise tree-climbers and naked ramblers.
In our everyday lives we all labour along with many a good purpose. Indeed we must to survive. We must work hard at our organised lives that involve all manner of plans and aims and needs. Life has always been that way and I guess life will remain like that for the foreseeable future. However there is, surely, much more to the good life than plans and aims and the satisfaction of basic needs.
Is it not one great characteristic of the sporting life that it can be totally useless and yet still well worth the effort?
But so many do not want to allow our sporting lives to be simply useless. Far too many demand that sport is to be used, in some way or another, so that sport becomes a tool or a useful contribution to society or to the infamous self-esteem of the equally infamous individual. For many people and organisations a useless activity is a waste or, even worse, a kind of crime. For many a useless act is a danger and it smacks of anarchy. For others a useless act is a bad sign and it smacks of a lazy body and a lazy mind. Heaven help us from these spoil sports.
Governments from all over Europe just love to boast about providing funds for this or that socially concerned sporting initiative in the community. Oh how those politicians love to boast about their funding schemes that contribute to the greater good of society. Politicians also love to to sit upon sporting comittees and contribute to the clean living ideals of the nation state. Sport is good for the national identity or at least good for votes.
Management Training types are full of sporty words like teamwork and competitiveness. The market itself loves to promote sporting lives and it even does so as it praises the natural energies of unregulated capitalism. Ice hockey is often used as a model of the good market life itself.
Social workers and the vast hoards of therapy gurus also wish to get into this sporting life market. Sport here is another tool to be used for psycho-socialising the deviant population. Related to this we have, of course, the work of the military. Sporting activity for the military provides physical fitness, discipline and above all something to do so that the population has little or no time to simply sit down, be lazy, and think about life itself. Keep them all busy is the key.
Under Stalin styled Communism in the old Soviet Union even mountain climbing was a communist tool. Then the climbing team would need to get each and every one of the members to the top before claiming success. Even climbing a silly mountain was hijacked as a political ideology. Even the totally useless was made useful.
I fear for the birdwatchers and the tree-climbers and the skate boarders. How much longer do these useless sporting lives have left before they too are hijacked.
I take confidence however from an old fashioned song about bird watching. The song goes like this :-
”Standing on the corner, watching all the birds go by
Standing on the corner giving all the girls the eye.
Can’t you think of a better occupation
Matter of fact,
Neither can I.
Standing on the corner watching all the girls go by
Standing on the corner giving all the birds the eye...”
There are many ways to enjoy the sporty life are there not.
Steve Bowles
