Sport

In previous chapters, I have approached sport by considering in some detail a variety of particular sports, using my own experience as a jumping-off point. I have done so in the conviction that the best way to understand sport is to immerse ourselves in the specifics of individual sports, letting more general points emerge naturally, rather than trying to work out from the abstract concept sport what sport is all about and why it matters. For one thing, the concept is vague and not susceptible to straightforward definition (it's a family resemblance concept). For another, what is interesting and distinctive about sport resides in the nature of the particular activities that are so classified. Indeed, I needn't have employed the general category Sport at all in this book; I could have simply discussed a series of activities – gymnastics, pole vaulting, tennis, windsurfing and so on. For a third thing, sport lends itself to narrative exposition, because there is an inherent drama to it; this is why sport enjoys the media saturation it does – it's a story of stories. Every game or match is a story in itself – it has a beginning, a middle, and an end – and the process of learning a sport has its own narrative arc (will there be success or failure?). Sport, play, stories: they all go together. Also, the sports a person engages in are part of the overall story of his or her life: how it starts, where it leads. This is certainly true of my life. Trying to discuss the meaning of sport by abstracting away from the details of specific sports strikes me as a fruitless procedure.