By Robert Royal
When great people you have known are dead, their influence on you takes a different form. Parents and extended family and even their friends – if you've been lucky enough to have had them in these troubled days – assume an almost mythological status. We didn't need Freud or Jung to spell this out. Most of us already knew it in our bones. Much of later life, then, becomes a series of starts and stops in conversation with persons dead and forgotten, then remembered, again and again, as we make our way through our own dusty days.
T.S. Eliot got it just right in "Little Gidding":
what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
You may be wondering by now, dear reader, where all this is headed. I won't keep you in suspense. It's the necessary prelude to a subject dear to many hearts: the seriousness of sports.
This past weekend, like a momentary alignment of bright planets in a clear night sky, we saw the opening of the Winter Olympics and the Super Bowl. And the dear shade who has been speaking to me (d'outre-tombe, as the French used to say, before they became Sadducees) is the great James V. Schall, S.J., one of the founders of this site, and author of the seminal essay "On the Seriousness of Sports."
Thanks to the hospitality of Denise and Dennis Bartlett, our two families and the Great Schall (as we used to kid him) passed many a pleasant occasion eating, drinking, and watching sports. And for all the warmth and camaraderie, I have to confess that it's taken me a long time to understand one of the great Jesuit's remarks, which I encountered both in print and in person (and sometimes challenged face-to-face). As he puts it in the essay mentioned above :
the closest the average man ever gets to contemplation in the Greek sense is watching a good, significant sporting event, be it the sixth game of the World Series, the center court at Wimbledon, or the county championship of his daughter's volley ball team.
If this doesn't bring you up short, good for you, because Schall himself admits that it's a "startling theory, but one held with tenacity."
It takes some effort to "get" this. Like many people, I like playing and watching sports of different kinds, this side idolatry. But the crass commercialization of the NFL, the gangsterism of the NBA, and the wreck of college football (and loyalty to a college itself) by the "transfer portal" and NIL payouts to "student athletes," all present serious obstacles to the grasping of Schallian Contemplation. (The designated hitter in baseball is beneath human consideration.) But let's look further.
He specified that he was speaking of contemplation "in the Greek sense." So if you balk at comparing it to Christian asceticism and contemplation, you are right to. This is not that. This may even pose a serious distraction from that. So what's the truth here?
As usual, Schall digs deep for reason and revelation:
• Plato's Laws states that when games are played and enjoyed in a city in a regular way "the serious customs are also allowed to remain undisturbed.
• In the Politics, Aristotle sees play as " a cure for the ills we suffer in working hard, " but sports are even more helpful in that they provide time and space to do things just for their own sake.
• St. Paul, in the famous passage (1 Corinthians) is not ashamed to compare spiritual training to " fighters at the games " who run for a mere perishable wreath, while Christians strive for eternal life.
Schall observes, "Such analogies, such reflections, from such sources ought to cause us to wonder a bit about sports."
Indeed, because sports are one of those things that have appeared in every human society, even well outside our Western tradition, often with great significance. As I learned doing a bit of research into the Mayans before Columbus, for example, several tribes had a kind of "ball game" that resembled...
