was no banner, no clock, no volunteers, no runners—nothing! “What time is it?” I asked my friend, as I was too tired even to pull the watch out of my pocket. “Tt’s noon,” he replied. Then I remembered the words on the entry form: “The race course will be closed at 11:30 am. No finish times will be awarded after that time.” “I don’t care!” I said, and a great wave of many emotions swept over me as I stepped over the line on the road, raised my arms, and loudly proclaimed to the sky and the empty campus, “I finished!”

And What | Learned From It

The pain | experienced during the last couple of hours of the Ottawa National Capital Marathon was unlike anything | had ever experienced, and | was unwilling to voluntarily inflict it upon my body ever again. Accordingly, | resolved to never again participate in another marathon!

During the following years, | regularly ran and took advantage of the developments that were swiftly occurring within the sport. Improvements in footwear, clothing, and paraphernalia; the availability of a plethora of running information; and a huge increase in the running population all contributed to my enjoyment of running. However, none of them was sufficient to expunge my painful recollections of my first marathon.

In 1993 | started to “run” marathons, not as a runner but as founder and race director of the Edmonton Festival Marathon. | did this because | and the others with whom | was involved felt that Edmonton, which had recently branded itself as “The City of Champions,” should host a marathon event like other major cities of the world. While | was deeply involved in the organization of the Edmonton events, | had little interest in actually participating in them. However, my resolve was slowly eroded by my acquaintance with the likes of Joe Henderson, Jeff Galloway, Richard Benyo, John Stanton, and other luminaries of the running world and their espousal of the “run/walk” technique, which | witnessed at the finish line on the satisfied faces of our runners.

Nineteen years after Ottawa, | finally worked up my courage and entered the 1995 Okanagan Marathon in Kelowna, B.C. | trained for and followed the “run/walk” method, and it really worked. The memories of the pain of 1977 were dashed, and | actually enjoyed the experience! Since then, | have participated in a number of painless marathons and even an ultra marathon. OK, the ultramarathon was painful and trust me, it’ll be more than 19 ie

years before | consider running another… oss

Editor’s Note: The Ottawa National Capital Marathon (now known as the ING Ottawa Marathon) was first run in 1976 with 147 runners. Today, the marathon and its tie-in events include nearly 30,000 participants. The course still features the most historic parts of the city but is open for eight hours. www.runottawa.com.

SPECIAL BOOK BONUS

The Question of Amateur Versus Professional Raises a Number of Issues. Part 8.

The first seven parts of Dr. Sheehan’s book appeared in our last seven issues.

Part Ill The Thinker

Fifteen BIGGEST AND BEST

“What manner of men are these against whom you have sent us to fight—men who compete in their games not for money, but for honor?” —Herodotus

“You can’t say this,” Avery Brundage, the world’s conscience in amateur sport, once stated, “because people won’t understand what you mean. But amateurism is a sort of religion.”

Brundage’s view of the Promised Land of track and field is the Ancient Greek Olympic Games. They were, he said, “idealistic, semi-religious and amateur.” It was only when victory became more important than taking part that the Greeks lost this Eden. Then the Greeks committed all the sins purists like Brundage see happening today: special training camps, recruitment and subsidization of athletes, awarding of prizes and special inducements. The result? The Games degenerated. They lost their purity, their simplicity, their idealism and finally were abolished.

The dogmas of amateurism are being tested now, but it is unlikely that the hierarchy of sport will give in to the demands for change. Facing this formidable opposition is a covey of athletes who would ordinarily be included among the saved. They fill completely Brundage’s definition of an amateur: “It is someone who loves, who has devotion to. An amateur athlete is one who loves sport. He works hard and punishes himself and makes the great sacrifices that every athlete has to make because he loves to play and he plays to win because it is fun to win. The professional plays because he’s got to win. It’s work. It’s a job.”

Most would-be reformers do not look on track and field as a job. Most do not want to be paid to perform. They want to be permitted to earn enough money to continue in sport, to take care of little items like wives and kids, rent and food. Money, they say, will not influence the true believer. A realistic attitude toward money is all they need.

Their program is simple. Let us, they ask, be permitted to pursue occupations that allow us to take advantage of our name. This is now against AAU rules. No one, for instance, can coach and continue in competition. The apostles of sport and physical fitness fail to see the positive effect on the student body and the track team of a coach who is also an athlete and in good physical condition. Instead, the athlete who is forced out of sport ends up fat, winded and a living indictment of Brundage’s true religion.

Point two asks for the continuing eligibility of track athletes who are professionals in other sports. Shot down by present rules are a number of world-class sprinters and hurdlers who play pro football.

Point three is the negotiation with private industry for financial support and sponsoring of meets. This is a sore point with track athletes. Even when they represent the US in international events, the employees continue to view their athletic activities as a hobby and give them no concessions.

The changes in the amateur code aren’t going to change athletes’ motivations. I suspect the day when money could buy anything, including athletes, has passed. We have a new breed of athletes who understand the social, aesthetic and spiritual aspects of sport. Like the ancient Greeks, they compete not for money but for honor.

“Amateurism keeps sports from being part of life,” Billie Jean King told a TV interviewer. “It restricts it to those who can afford it.”

Earning money, said Billie Jean, can bring back your self-respect. “I was paid under the table and found it very degrading.”

That is a strong case for eliminating the amateur status, but there are even stronger ones. The preservation of the idea of amateurism means the preservation of an obsolescent social structure of class and caste.

Professional sports were the province of the slaves in the ancient world and the lower classes in recent centuries. The professional athlete has been the Hessian of sports. The sporting career was accepted only by those who could make their way in society by no other route.

But now we see that sports is no less a profession than any other. There, as in more highly regarded professions, men give of themselves beyond what they are paid. And there, as in other more prestigious professions, men add something above themselves to what they do. There, as in more traditional professions, the only criteria are a person’s competence and his standing with his fellows in the game.

The amateur-professional debate, then, is not simply a matter of pay or no pay. It is much bigger than that. The problem is the double standard that protects the man unwilling to invest himself in his game from the man who insists on making the sport his reason for being.

When Frank Shorter, the 1972 Olympic marathon winner, went to his coach Bob Giegengack after three lackluster years at Yale and asked how he could become a good runner, Giegengack had a quick answer: “Give up skiing, drop the undergraduate glee club, eat the right foods and get nine hours of sleep a night.” There in one sentence is the difference between the dilettante, the superficial, unengaged, frivolous amateur and the athlete.

“Tam a perfectionist,” Billie Jean King said. What athlete isn’t? What amateur is? To let money determine who will pursue this perfection and who won’t is to remain in an age we would prefer to remember for other things than its unthinking acceptance of systems of social caste.

Eo * *

The discussion of the professional track tour seems to have centered on the question of financial feasibility. On that score, the International Track Association’s schedule seems to be an iffy proposition. But the ITA gets high marks in my book for its support of track as a professional activity.

In this age of the amateur, our need for professionals is desperate. Few seem to have the dedication, the know-how, the consistent performance that marks the professional. Too many of us lack the all-consuming interest which is the mark of the pro. Missing is the element of caring which characterizes the professional, be he plumber or pediatrician, lawyer or longshoreman.

We know there is no place in life for the amateur. He is the man unwilling to make that final commitment. And because he is unwilling to put himself on the line, he is always inept, inadequate and uncaring. He excuses himself by minimizing his sport, his work, his profession. It is, he implies, not worth the effort of a man. In the end, he is unwilling or unable to devote himself to any cause—to make anything his full-time pursuit.

We recognize this difference when as spectators we hold professionals accountable. Performance is expected of the professional. When not forthcoming, we feel free to boo him. No one ever boos an amateur. We cheer his effort. We put up with his incompetence. We admire his persistence. But we never boo him, as we could never cut up our daughter’s dramatic recitation or our wife’s number painting.

So I’m all for runners becoming professionals, although there are some I’m sure who might feel that being a miler is not suitable lifetime ambition, who might be disappointed their son isn’t a nuclear physicist instead, who cannot see sports as a profession.

I don’t hold with that. We are given our life empty and must be continually occupying it, filling it with what we can do best, specializing in that vocation which fits our body-mind-spirit design. There are some to whom this means being a miler, just as others become third basemen or heart surgeons. For them to know the mile is to know life. Without it, perhaps they would never live completely.

Professional track permits this. It makes possible what was open only to students and servicemen and those subsidized by family or friends—the freedom and time to pursue this vision.

Perhaps the idea of an individual dedicating his life to a quarter-mile track distresses you. It shouldn’t. Running is an art and a science. It embodies all we know about the physiology of health and much that we have yet to learn about

response to stress. It presents a challenge both physical and psychological and a sense of living at the height of one’s powers. It is an excitement at times, a contentment at others. The runner may learn breathing from an opera singer, flexibility from a ballerina and pace from a racehorse. He may explore the theory of pain, the values of nutrition, the possibilities of psychology, the influence of weather. He may learn about mechanical efficiency from the physicist, about his constitutional strengths and weaknesses from the geneticist and the anthropologist. He will find what all professionals come to know—that the specialist eventually ends up utilizing the knowledge of many other specialists. Not until a person becomes a professional and accepts the commitment it implies can he begin to realize his potential. Not until a person becomes a professional will his education be more than rapidly-vaporizing subjects. Not until a person becomes a professional will he do anything as if his life depended on it.

Michael Hughes

Eo * *

Nowadays, they call an athletic scholarship a “grant-in-aid.” In my day, an athletic scholarship was called a “free ride.”

The New York Times once ran exposes on how far a college will go to get an athlete’s signature on the dotted line. The Carnegie Commission had already told the country that organized athletics are overshadowing the intellectual life in American universities, and subverting the faculty and students and alumni from their true task.

The Carnegie report is forgotten and will not, I hope, be resurrected. It was based on the intellectuals’ mistrust of the body, the idea that learning is of the mind only. The Times series will end up as gossip—interesting but of no substance. And the athletic scholarship, the grant-in-aid, the free ride, will continue to be a most necessary fact of college life.

Iknow. [had one. Unlike the scenarios in the Times, the bidding for my services was quite simple. My high school coach trotted me out to Van Cortlandt Park one day to undergo the scrutiny of Pete Waters, the Manhattan College coach. Later, my coach told me Waters would give me full tuition at Manhattan. This was in 1936 when money was scarce. I went to Manhattan.

I’m not sure to this day what Waters saw in me—except perhaps that I was gaunt and hungry-looking. Whatever it was, I joined a half-dozen who looked exactly like me, and three years later Manhattan had the best cross-country team in the country.

Looking back, I don’t remember any soul-searching about receiving free tuition because I was an athlete, any more than I suspect athletes do today. I saw no distinction, for instance, between an academic grant or an athletic one. I had attended high school on an academic scholarship and felt much more comfortable with the athletic one.

If I was a college president, I would be more inclined—based on my own experiences—to give an athletic grant than an academic one. The true scholar tends to withdraw and thinks only of himself and his own little world. He couldn’t care less about the college and the rest of the student body. Even this would be acceptable if his path to perfection was visible to his classmates. But his lonely and secret journey never is.

The athlete, on the other hand, pays his way—and not necessarily in gate receipts. He brings excellence in highly visible form to the campus. Never mind that this excellence is in sport, even in a minor sport. Excellence has the same qualities whether it occurs in cross-country or throwing the caber or in nuclear physics. It comes about through discipline and hard work and persistence and reaching back for every source of energy you have hidden away.

This is the answer to the Carnegie Commission question, “What relation does athletics have to an intellectual agency like a university?” Athletics can set

a standard of excellence by which every department and every teacher can be judged. Students, once having seen the authentic teacher in the coach and the proper pupil in the athlete, have learned the first great lesson of education: the ability to tell what is first-rate from what is not.

* Eo *

Sport, wrote Baron de Coubertin in his “Ode to Sport,” is the delight of the Gods, a distillation of life, a source of beauty, justice, honor, progress and peace. The institutionalization of sport in the modern Olympic Games, he thought, would act to develop character and sportsmanship—something to be desired by every citizen.

Despite the events at Munich, I believe he was correct. The tragedy and the trivia of the Olympics there does not dissuade me from this view. Nor can critics convince me that the Olympics have somehow forfeited their place in society. The Olympics are and will remain one of the great social forces in the world.

“Few who have been touched by the spirit of the Olympics can forget it,” writes Professor Howell Maxwell. “It leaves a mark on all who have experienced its magic.”

That magic, the critics would have us believe, was missing at Munich. I doubt it. We had, if anything, the greatest athletic meets ever held. In men’s track, three of the most challenging events on the program—the intermediate hurdles, the 10,000 meters and the decathlon—were won in world record performances. Lyudmila Bragina lowered the women’s 1500-meter record three straight times.

Make no mistake. Athletes around the world had done their homework for this meet. They honored the Olympics by their feats of speed and skill and strength and endurance. Behind each of the record setters were hundreds and thousands like them, enduring denial and deprivation and pain and fatigue in their pursuit of Olympic gold.

Where, then, did the Olympics fail? The records were there, the competence and beauty of the athletes that brought a lump to your throat, a tear to your eye. What was the big complaint? A coach who misread the schedule? A silly argument about a pole?

Of course not. These are trivia. It was the tragedy—the intrusion of the men of Black September, leaving five of their own, 11 Israelis and a West German dead. How could anyone play games then? “Wasn’t it time,” asked Red Smith in the New York Times, “to put away the sand box?”

But the Games did go on. They went on because this bitter, murderous violence is exactly why we need Olympic Games. And we will continue to need the Olympics until we can accept the definition of a hero as one who is willing to die for a cause but not to kill for it.

Mourning the victims of these bloody quarrels should not deviate us, or the athletes, or those crotchety old men in the International Olympic Committee from our common cause—peace and brotherhood.

“Our aim,” said Avery Brundage as he was packing to leave the IOC, “‘is to set standards: standards of decency, standards of sport and standards of life.”

The Olympics have fulfilled that aim. They have become an institution, and like all institutions they reflect the society in which they exist. Materialism, greed, nationalism, incompetence, whatever characterizes our society must be seen to some extent in the Olympics. But since it is an institution with high ideals and standards, it has also suggested and even precipitated significant advances in our society.

This is the natural outcome of the continual upgrading of standards of decency, sport and life. If goals thought to be physically impossible are continually surpassed in sport, why then can’t we do the same things thought socially or politically impossible? Why should we allow war and violence and discrimination to exist?

And what about our abnormal nationalism? Isn’t it time to remove the flags and strip the anthems? Aren’t we beyond adding up each country’s loot in medals and honors? Maybe, but not yet. Each tribe, each nation adds to the human experience, increases the human possibility. It is right to bring something of what Robert Lipsyte calls “birth and breed and border” to this giant convocation of the human clan. We still need to know where we came from and who came with us. What we don’t need are anthems filled with war and killing, stirring passions hardly reconcilable with de Coubertin’s ideas of sport and beauty and peace.

There are men in the United States (and I include myself) who find the words “the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air” quite hard to stomach. Yet these same people may stand wet-eyed and transported during ““America, the Beautiful” or “This Land is My Land.” Is it too much to hope that the anthems, but not the flags or the ceremonies, will be changed when we reach Montreal in 1976 or Moscow in 1980?

Eo * *

“Mankind,” wrote Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, “is braced together in an effort to discover. And what does it seek to discover if not ultimately to super-, or at least to ultra-hominise itself.” Hominise is a Teilhardian word for a human prolonged beyond itself in a better organized, more adult form.

Now this is pretty heavy going for this child of Psychology Today and Sports Illustrated. But I suspect he’s right. In fact, the Olympics tells me he’s right. Man, says the Munich Olympics, is born to be a winner. He is born to be super- or at least ultra-hominised. The athletes I watched there convinced me it’s so.

Let those pessimists about man’s future look to the Olympics. Let those who think humanity is slipping backwards contemplate the ultimate becoming commonplace and new records, new ultimates, new heights of performance occurring every four years. And let those who despair of this generation watch this harvest of Americans and Japanese and Russians and Germans and Brazilians

and Kenyans who are on their way to becoming household heroes not nationally but internationally.

The Olympic imperative of Citius, Altius, Fortius (swifter, higher, stronger) has become part of the lives of these competitors. They have preserved in their heart and mind a passion for growth. They seek not so much to enjoy more or to know more but to be more.

All this should have an effect, should raise our sights to our own possibilities, should make us see that the Olympic year is not just for Olympic stars but for all of us who try to fulfill ourselves. The Olympic ideal is addressed to everyone.

Those of us who have long since left our childhood should not lose faith. “Wait until next year” is no hollow threat in the field of physical fitness or athletic endeavor. Twelve months can transform a lounge lizard into a physiological marvel. Three hundred sixty-five days can convert a basket case from booze, butts and baked goods into an endurance phenomenon.

And this is not merely subjective improvement, not simply a case of “feeling good” or having a “zest for living” or possessing “loads of energy.” This physical change is measurable by stopwatch and tape, oxygen capacity, muscle strength and muscle skills.

The improvement of Olympic records is a reflection of the improvements in technique, training, muscle development, diet and general regimen over the years. The meet is, in effect, a huge international fair of human husbandry (although no such field exists) where the best of everything that has been discovered in the field of human development and human potential is put to the crucial test.

Here we can learn under the accelerated and compressed circumstances of all-out, highest-level athletic competition what works and what doesn’t.

No wonder Pope Paul said that the sight of these strong, healthy and agile youths had reawakened in him “the hope of a new world based on fraternity and order” and that he had found in sport “an encouragement to the fullness of man, which makes him seek a perfection which goes beyond that which is merely physical.”

Sixteen WORK AND PLAY

To play or not to play? That is the real question. Shakespeare was wrong. Anyone with a sense of humor can see that life is a joke, not a tragedy. It is a riddle and like all riddles has an obvious answer: play, not suicide.

Think about it for a minute. Is there a better way to handle “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” or take up arms against “a sea of troubles” than play? You take these things seriously and you end up with Hamlet or the gang

who came back from World War II, wrote Wilfred Sheed, “talking about dollars the way others talked of God and sex.”

Neither of these ways work. Neither will bring us what we are supposed to be looking for, “the peace the world cannot give.” That is also part of the riddle. You can have peace without the world, if you opt for death, or the world without peace if you decide for doing and having and achieving. Only in play can you have both.

In play you realize simultaneously the supreme importance and the utter insignificance of what you are doing. You accept the paradox of pursuing what is at once essential and inconsequential. In play you can totally commit yourself to a goal that minutes later is completely forgotten.

Play, then, is the answer to the puzzle of our existence, the stage for our excesses and exuberances. Violence and dissent are part of its joy. Territory is defended with every ounce of our strength and determination, and moments later we are embracing our opponents and delighting in the game that took place.

Play is where life lives, where the game is the game. At its borders, we slip into heresy, become serious, lose our sense of humor, fail to see the incongruities of everything we hold to be important. Right and wrong become problematical. Money, power, position become ends. The game becomes winning. And we lose the good life and the good things that play provides.

Eo * *

If the common man has erred in this century, it is in his failure to realize the importance of play. The aristocracy never made that mistake. Aristocrats know that work is a luxury and play is a necessity of life. When money and position give the freedom to pursue the good life, work is seen to be a diversion, a distraction from the most basic and the most—to use Maslow’s word—actualizing human activity, play.

We are slowly awakening to this truth. Teachers now see the ideal learning environment is the environment of children at play. Physical education is being revived by bringing play back into its curriculum. Health and fitness, every medical journal is telling us, comes only to those who play hard and often.

And finally the theologians, always the last to learn, are starting to ask themselves if play might not be the primary activity of man. Theologian Gabriel Moran has called play, “one of the most intriguing and potentially fruitful interests of contemporary theology.” Certainly, a case can be made that the true object of life is play.

Plato spoke of man as “God’s plaything” and urged everyone to “make the noblest games the real content of their lives.” And in Proverbs we read, “His delight was in playing with the children of men.”

We have missed the point of all of this because we have not understood play. It is not, as we believed, simply a method of relieving tension and providing

relaxation. Nor is it a service activity preparing us for the more serious and important everyday world, the real world.

Play, as the true player knows, is the most real thing that he does. Indeed, one must play with a passionate involvement, play as if his life depended on it, if play is to mean anything at all.

One man’s play can, of course, be another man’s boredom. Anyone reading the Lawrence Shainberg article on Frank Shorter in the New York Times Magazine would realize that. Shorter’s idea of play is running 22 miles a day at a six-minutes-per-mile clip, occasionally interspersing these tortures with a series of agonizing interval quarter-mile runs. And the whole joyful routine ends in a marathon where he has to “redline” (maintain as long as possible the fastest pace one’s body can bear) and “‘go it on mind alone” (the task that confronts a runner when he has superseded the normal limits of his body).

Yet there can be no doubt this mixture of pain and pleasure is play. It exists of and by itself and serves no utilitarian purpose. Why does he do it? “There’s always the feeling of getting stronger,” Shorter told Shainberg. “I think that’s what keeps me going.”

That explanation may be inadequate for some, but for me it contains enough theological implications for a doctoral thesis. Strong is Anglo-Saxon for what the Romans called virtus, and from this Latin root comes man and virtue. The growing strength that Shorter feels is obviously as spiritual and intellectual as it is physical.

Shorter belongs to that group of people that William James said resent confusion and must have purity, consistency and simplicity. The marathoner is by most standards a peculiar guy. He has found freedom through the acceptance of rules, has cured his loneliness with solitude and has discovered the peace inside of pain. He is a blood brother to another peculiar guy, Henry David Thoreau, who spoke of his play (walking) in this way:

“If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and children and friends, and never see them again—if you have paid your debts and made your will and settled all your affairs and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.”

Even for the free man, life is a dangerous and difficult game. Man, the player, must train long and hard before he can move through life with the simple, certain, leisurely grace of the expert. Still, it is the only game in town.

* Eo *

That sport would be put under the microscope, analyzed and criticized was inevitable. We are living in an age when every human activity, every institution is coming under scrutiny, being evaluated, having to prove its reason for existence. The important thing for the athlete to do is not to take this outpouring too seriously, not to apply the generalizations of the philosophers, the psychologists, the sociologists to his own living of the athletic life.

The warning may be unnecessary. When one becomes a true believer, no argument, no rationalizations, no accumulation of facts is going to turn him away from his faith. But for those not yet convinced, institutionalized sport can be a stumbling block. Concentration on the past, failure to move with the times, authoritarianism and an excessive legalism can cause a man to quit a locker room as quickly as a cathedral.

We must distinguish what is primary in sport from what are its aberrations, what is essential to sport and what it is equally essential to eliminate or ignore.

The approach to take to sport, it seems to me, is the approach William James took to religion. “I wrote this book (The Varieties of Religious Experience),” he told a friend, “to make the reader believe that although all the special manifestations of religion may have been absurd, the life of it as a whole is mankind’s most important function.” The real backbone of the religious life, said James, was experience, not philosophy. No philosophy of religion, he contended, could begin to be an adequate translation of what goes on in the single private man.

Could you find any better antidote to the intellectuals’ attempts to rationalize you at play, give you motives for athletics, provide a reward for your sport? Sport defies their explanations. Man playing is almost as difficult a subject as man praying.

“T think, therefore I am” is the philosophy of the incomplete man.

“We are happy,” writes David Cole Gordon, “when, however briefly, we become one with ourselves, others and the world of nature.” Sport certainly provides such moments. The fact that they mostly defy description may cause outsiders and observers to doubt their existence. But all athletes know the truth of “I play, therefore I am.”

Some of the good things in play are physical grace, psychological ease and personal integrity. The best are the peak experiences, when you have a sense of oneness with yourself and nature. These are truly times of peace the world cannot give. It may be that the hereafter will have them in constant supply. I hope so. But while we are in the here and now, play is the place to find them—the place where we are constantly being and becoming ourselves.

Philosophers have hinted at this over the centuries. Now theologians are taking a hard look at the thought that we must become as little children to enter the Kingdom. If so, there is nothing more characteristic about children than their love of play. No one comes into this world a Puritan. If there is anything children care less about, it is work and money and power and what we call achievement. They live in love and security and acceptance. Nowhere in their world is the need to prove their right to exist, the necessity to be a success.

What happened to our play on our way to becoming adults? Downgraded by the intellectuals, dismissed by the economists, put aside by the psychologists, it was left to the teachers to deliver the coup de grace. Physical education was born and turned what was joy into boredom, what was fun into drudgery, what was pleasure into work. What might have led us into Eden led us into a blind alley instead.

Play, of course, says otherwise. You may already have found that out. If you are doing something you would do for nothing, then you are on your way to salvation. And if while you are doing it you are transported into another existence, there is no need for you to worry about the future.

* Eo *

In his “Assignment Sports,” New York Times sports columnist Bob Lipsyte expresses his disappointment with people who ask him, “What are you going to do when you grow up?”

“Anyone who says that,” claims Lipsyte, “is not too smart. Politics, religion, money, the law all play roles in sports. The world of sports is no sanctuary from reality.”

Lipsyte is, of course, right on. I suspect that, more often than not, politics, religion, money and the law are the real sanctuaries from reality, whereas sport is an immediate, engrossing human experience which involves man in his wholeness, completely realized in all his aspects.

Take the long distance runner. Here is the object of a phrase “the loneliness of the long distance runner,” which in many ways encapsulates all our false notions about sports. The lonely long distance runner stands for “my husband, the nut,” or “my roommate, the character,” or “my brother, the misfit.” He raises an image of some oddball who has confused his priorities and has settled into a permanent semi-adolescent state of isolation, unable to rise above the level of play and games.

Try again. Smith, the runner in that novel by Alan Sillitoe, was lonely only when he wasn’t running. “Sometimes,” he said, “I think I’ve never been as free as during that couple of hours when I’m trotting up the path.” There is no hint, you see, that his loneliness was part of his distance running. It may well, if we read his words correctly, have been the cure.

Thoreau had already spoken to us of the cure to be found in solitude. Thoreau was not lonely. He described himself when he described the sparrow hawk. “It appeared to have no companion in the universe and to need none but the morning. It was not lonely but it made all the world lonely beneath it.”

Like the soaring hawk, Smith finds his freedom—his escape from the loneliness of the reform school—in his running. Only when his running becomes a source of prestige and gratification to the superintendent, when he realizes he

is being manipulated, when his sport is being used in the “real” world, does his loneliness again intrude on him. Not the running but society thrusts him back into the lonely shell he had occupied.

Society, if we can believe sociologist Philip Slater, is presently engaged in thrusting all of us into a state of loneliness. Only Slater in his brilliant, bitter and often despairing book, The Pursuit of Loneliness, says we go there willingly and knowingly, carried along by our belief in the scarcity principle—the assumption that the world does not contain enough wherewithal to satisfy the needs of its human inhabitants.

Hence, Americans seek competition instead of community, and uninvolvement rather than engagement with social and interpersonal problems. The result, writes Slater, is that the returning traveler re-entering the United States is struck by the fanatical acquisitiveness of his compatriots. “It is difficult,” he says, “to become reaccustomed to seeing people already weighed down with possessions acting as if every object they did not own were bread withheld from a hungry mouth.”

Another sociologist, Dr. Whitney Gordon, found something similar in a study of Muncie, Ind. Muncie’s predominant social values, he reported, were the importance of work, of enterprise, of upward mobility, of material rewards. “ ‘Making it’ for the worker after the two cars is the color TV, and if he has that, a camper is a status symbol,” says Gordon. “ ‘Making it’ in the upper income groups is membership in the country club, travel abroad or a Cadillac.”

If that is reality, the long distance runner may indeed be seeking sanctuary from it. There is no scarcity principle in running. All can share without in any

way diminishing the other. It is moreover a universal language understood by all men, an endeavor in which all men can relate and instantly be brothers.

“Sports brings out,” writes artist-photographer Robert Riger, “the classic greatness and dignity of man. In the struggle and in the race there is an almost divine accord of beauty and grace.”

Can a plodder feel all this? Better, it’s my guess, than any politician, cleric, businessman or lawyer. What are they going to do when they grow up?

* Eo *

One plus the intellectuals give sport is its role in working off aggression and violence. It is, they tell us, one of those “moral equivalents of war” that William James said was so necessary. Championship bouts, Super Bowls, World Series, the Olympic Games all give us the opportunity to discharge our natural pugnacity. They provide safe outlets for the sadism and hate that seem to well up in us.

This concession is right as far as it goes. But it is incomplete. James also saw war as a school for the strenuous life and for heroism. It is a setting in which a man found he could withstand unimaginable hardships. It was a theater in which a man found depths of energy and endurance he never knew he possessed.

What James sought was not simply an alternative to violence, but some other human activity or life-style that would unleash man’s marvelous hidden energies. Athletics, he thought, could bring out these enormous subterranean resources without demanding that the athlete give up his moral notions. Sport could give us our chance for the strenuous life, let us experience the heroic, allow us to transform our military courage.

This is a long way from the dissipation of violence. It has to do with the way a life should be lived. Like Tolstoy, James was dismayed by the cerebral life—the life of conventionality, artificiality and personal ambition. Like Ortega, he came unstuck when he saw lives without purpose or project.

People outside of sport may only see the game, just as those outside of war only see the horror. Yet, in that horror a man may be better than he will ever be the rest of his life. And in that game a man may find what life is really all about. It is more likely that the critics are the ones who are living a life that is a game. Intricate and bright and clever, perhaps, but a game. They are only simulating life.

In sport, there is no such dalliance. The athlete is Ortega’s “noble man.” He always demands more of himself, lives under bondage to self-imposed tasks and imperatives and devotes his life to collaboration with others. He does this because he must, because sport exposes any less effort and throws a bright light on any failure of nerve.

But sport allows more than that. It allows for redemption. Everything is possible. You continually make your own life.

* Eo *

“The gut issue in the United States today,” writes Tom Wicker, the New York Times columnist, “is the lack of quality from top to bottom in American life.” Wicker’s plaint about appliances that don’t work, streets that are not cleaned, laws that are not enforced, and the general feeling that people either do not know or care about their work is not new.

The same problem was the theme of the McCarthy campaign in 1968 when he appealed for a revived sense of profession and vocation in modern society.

Now Cornell professor Andrew Hacker suggests that it may be too late. America, says Hacker, is going to hell in a wheelbarrow and there’s not much we can do about it. He bases his prognosis on our refusal to accept authority, a contempt for government and the loss of a moral consensus. “America’s history as a nation,” concludes Hacker, “has reached its end.”

Wicker, Hacker and a multitude of critics, journalists, sociologists and other observers may be right, but I suspect you may find the same thoughts in a recently excavated Egyptian papyrus and the collected works of Plato. The world has always been going to hell in a wheelbarrow.

That it doesn’t is because there are always men who lead us into the future. A few are astronauts, some are scientists, many are artists, a number are athletes, none are politicians. And of these men, the athlete is the most heroic.

“Athletes are very important,” writes British novelist Brian Glanville, “because they demonstrate the scope of human possibility, which is unlimited. The inconceivable is conceived and then it is accomplished.” They, perhaps more obviously than other men, fit Thoreau’s description when he wrote, “Some record only what happened to them but others how they happened to the universe.”

Bilke wrote, “People are wrong about the motion of the future. The future stands still. It is we who are moving in infinite space.” Which makes the gut issue in the United States today, when are we going to get off our butts?

Eo * *

We are constantly being warned to check with our physicians before beginning athletics. Play and games evidently can be risky business. What we are not told are the risks of not beginning athletics—that the most dangerous sport of all is watching it from the stands.

The weakest among us can become some kind of athlete, but only the strongest can survive as spectators. Only the hardiest can withstand the perils of inertia, inactivity and immobility. Only the most resilient can cope with the squandering of time, the deterioration in fitness, the loss of creativity, the frustration of the emotions and the dulling of moral sense that can afflict the dedicated spectator.

Physiologists have suggested that only those who can pass the most rigorous physical examination can safely follow the sedentary life. Man was not made to remain at rest. Inactivity is completely unnatural to the body. And what follows is a breakdown of the body’s equilibrium.