An article by Adam Warburton ‘Sport, Competition and Fiery Debate’, with the comments and the associated discussion, have got me reflecting on other life experiences with sport, competition and any team events, and what else may be really going on beyond the surface level cheering crowds and uniforms.
What is it we crave and seek in the apparent unity of a sporting team, and is it really being delivered?
Whilst I was never really into sport, as participant or spectator, I had an interesting brush with premier league soccer in the UK. I lived for a time in a northern English city, once built around the cotton industry but now pretty deprived; a hardened and miserable place with the unenviable title of least recommended city to visit in the Lonely Planet, and across a variety of studies, also rated as having one of the lowest life satisfaction rates of the British Isles, as well as lowest average ratings for self-worth and higher misery ratings and associated suicide rates.
Even the residents, (many of whom are dear friends I remain in contact with today) were just as scathing about the city, prospects and quality of life, the saying “It’s Grim up north” was a lived daily reality for the majority – there were hearts of gold under it all, but life was hard, and people lived hard, with whole suburbs of ‘no go zones’ for the police.
My once wealthy ancestors had in the past been huge sponsors of the local premier league soccer in this city – and I’d often wondered why, what was the point? There was the obvious (although empty) gesture of being seen as ‘successful’ and showing off one’s status, but I had been told there was a belief in an old school benevolence – to ‘give back’ to the city that contributed to the wealth. I still didn’t get it as I wondered what a soccer team did for a city.
Then while I lived there, the team found a new uber-wealthy sponsor who poured money and resources into buying the best coach, best players etc., and again the team rose to the top of the league.
To give you a taste of the usual mood in this town, I remember my time there in my late teens. Wide eyed and 16 years old, fresh out of small town rural Australia, I walked past a woman in the street and smiled at her; she looked at me in bemusement with hardened disgust. “What the bloody ‘ell are you smilin’ at,” was her embittered response. This wasn’t an isolated incident, I soon learnt that spontaneous displays of joy were frowned upon in this place… but not so when sport was involved.
After the injection of cash from the club’s new patrons and the club’s subsequent win, this miserable town, where worth-less-ness was ingrained and multi-generational, transformed into a hub of celebration and partying on the streets.
People were more open and actually spoke to each other. There was a rare and tangible ‘pride’ and a sense of belonging in the populace; there was an appearance of ‘unity’ between different cultures, different classes, even peoples’ postures were more upright and gait more lively.
You might hold this up and say “that’s what sport offers, that’s the justification for my ancestors pouring resources into the club,” or even “there’s the value, self-esteem and (confected) joy for a downtrodden community.”
…. BUT (and it’s a huge but!), as it was gained through external circumstances or events (not internally reconnected to) and but a mere isolated display of unity, it was short-lived. Very short-lived indeed.
As soon as the elation of the premiership win was over, it was back to business as usual – shut down abject misery, possibly worse than before in reaction to the loss of the ‘high’.
It did not reconnect people to their own real worth, it distracted them from missing it for a short time.
So my revelation from reading Adam’s article, the comments and reflecting further, has been that not only does the competitiveness in sport and elsewhere in our society set us up from young to make us think our worth is external, not only does it divide us – country against country, city against city, suburb against suburb, ‘us’ against ‘them’, me versus you and ultimately me against myself – whilst tricking us into a false unity, it also provides an effective distraction from that which we are missing to begin with (the true unity we deeply crave) through entering into the whole ‘proving ourselves externally’ farce – what a doozy!!
I really appreciate the opportunity to reflect on this subject and to ‘real-eyes’ that it is the true connection that we are missing – between each other and within ourselves – and that this connection can never be made or maintained through ‘limited unity’ such that we find in competitive sport or any kind of triumph over another.
By Kate Burns, BA (Hons), Bellingen, Australia
Further Reading:
Exercise – it doesn’t need to be hard work
My Turnaround from Competitive Running to Connection with Me
Competitive sports: the pursuit of emptiness
504 Comments
Ah, this was my upbringing!! The ups and downs of the football season, the dreaded Sunday 5pm when most of the games would be finished because that is when you would know what kind of Sunday night it would be. There is still a familiarity of that connection now when I see and hear those around me talk about the football. To have been able to see it for what it is and detach from it was such a blessing.
There is no unity to be found in sport-only competition. Where there is competition there is always going to be someone who is crushed by having lost a game etc and this does not bring unity.
I also wonder if sport like this is still a true game of who is the best soccer player or would it be more correct to say who has the most money will have the most success?
Bringing something that relieves the tension or pain does not ask people to look at what is truly going on and truly heal. So that does give away that the soccer team was not truly supportive but actually hiding the issues that are there further away. Now people feel down when the team looses and up when it wins… the whole underlying discontent is ignored.
So much of life is about competition obviously as we have the opposite of divinity everywhere. What is fascinating is how often we turn to the opposite way of being.
What a crazy rollercoaster people can ride searching for a sporting high, or any other high for that matter, at the expense of our own innate and constant state of Joy just waiting for us to connect with it.
Belonging to a’ group’ at the expense of another ‘group’ is not unity.
I grew up in the UK too Kate, and always found that sport and soccer, in particular, was a common thread that seemed to bind everyone together. If you met someone in the street, a granny or a young child they would have a view and something to say about Liverpool, Arsenal or their favourite team. Yet as you so beautifully say, whilst this shared interest might have made us seem closer, it actually had a vicious, competitive, combative side, ‘I’m better than you’ – still tribe vs tribe. Your words make me realise how, although I have stopped following sport I still settle in my life for ‘similarity’ and shared things we do, instead of connecting and knowing beyond race, colour and skin, we all share an innate interlinking deep within.
I wonder if we were to bring deep honesty to our relationships with sport we might realise that the part we love about sport is not the competition, but the togetherness of sharing time with others, being amongst other people, having fun. And so sport then becomes a sharing of time, not the sharp edged competition that is far removed from the innate gentleness we were all born with.
Yes Kate, so true, that any joy ‘gained through external circumstances or events (not internally reconnected to) . . . is short-lived’. On the other hand, we can at any moment connect to the love that is within us and in sharing that with another we feel great joy. It is like an inner well that is our wellbeing and it is constantly there but so often we keep a lid on it. Sport ‘provides an effective distraction from that’ and experiencing this false joy gives us a temporary substitute which satisfies us but sets up a craving for more so we live from one high to the next with a dip in between. Connecting with our inner wellbeing is a steady, unexcitable state where we feel full-filled with no need to lust for more.
The achievement of goals including sporting prowess is often held highly by society, but at what cost? Once the deed is done, the goal achieved, what is left? Potentially a few days or weeks of basking in the glory, but then another goal and success is needed to feed the beast that says “your worth is dependent on what you accomplish, and not who you are”. Time for that beast to be eliminated.
This says it all, ‘BUT (and it’s a huge but!), as it was gained through external circumstances or events (not internally reconnected to) and but a mere isolated display of unity, it was short-lived. Very short-lived indeed.’ This will always be the case with these circumstances as you say Kate.
Kate, from my experience I agree with what you have written here, ‘this connection can never be made or maintained through ‘limited unity’ such that we find in competitive sport or any kind of triumph over another.’ At my local school I observe the children playing sports, they want to team up and play together but what happens is that the sport often becomes aggressive and the sides battle against the other team and often against each other, the winning team celebrate their win over the other team, this feels like a false high and does not last long and the victory over the other team feels disconnecting, It feels like there is a harness and no true feeling of unity and brotherhood.
It feels very cool and important to be exposing the divisiveness of sport. We are probably a long way from really realising and acting on this but every conversation is part of the turn around. Thank you, Kate.
Competition, jealousy, comparison and judgement all work hand in hand to barricade our connection with each other, and make the focus of live individualism rather than universality.
I think this is a brilliant examination and presentation on what is going on energetically with sporting competitions and spectators. Limited unity may have an appeal but it will never be the same as true universal togetherness.
We currently have the Six Nation Rugby Union being played and I was given a free newspaper and the hype in the National paper I felt was very intense. Then I went to the hospital and the same hype was there too amongst the staff and patients it’s as though something takes over people and suddenly from being friendly and polite, people get very nationalistic bordering on hate and aggression and all this poison comes out of their bodies to be expressed. So I wondered actually if all this friendliness and politeness is fake is it hiding something more sinister that we can seemingly let out when such games are being played and then gets pushed down until the next game gives people an opportunity to vent their feelings once more.
It is almost impossible to fathom the extraordinarily insidious nature of competition and its effect upon our society… That something so lauded should be so destructive gives us a very real readout of what is happening to humanity
How crazy that a cheap substitute to what we really crave is the total opposite to what we really need. Sport, competition is just like a drug that gives you a quick fix but then leaves you craving for more once it wears off.
Is it possible that this false sense of unity you’ve highlighted here Kate is one of the reasons why so many people in our society are into sports and keep coming back to it because we think the unity we feel is the real thing?
I have never been an avid sport follower although I did participate in some sports when I was younger, but for me it was the fun of playing the sport as I wasn’t into needing to win at all which is probably why I did not very often. From my experience though, it definitely brings out the worst from others, getting angry, throwing verbal abuse to another and even dragging young children into the need to win and pushing them to do better for the trophy or whatever. People change when it comes to needing to win, and it may look like there is camaraderie amongst teams, but how can you feel good about defeating another and making them feel less?
In my younger years I was into sport in a big way but in later years when I stopped playing cricket and football, I took up close harmony singing. A very innocent pursuit indeed. I loved the feelings of unity and brotherhood within the group and the harmonies we sang seemed to touch something very deep in me. Yet, once it was over, I always had a deep sense of emptiness within me and eventually I saw that this hobby was just temporarily papering over this emptiness. I have since then, realised that there is a very real harmony innate in us all and that the harmony I experienced through singing, nice as it was, was in fact a pseudo version of harmony. I wanted the real thing. I wonder how many of us settle for these pseudo versions in life. Pseudo love, pseudo joy, pseudo brotherhood – when there is in fact a reality that is these things that we can all reconnect to. The unity we feel through a sporting allegiance touches on something more real and true within us – but how many of us are willing to let go of what we feel we have in order to go deeper and find the real thing?
Brilliant article, what exactly exposes what sport does. It is a short lasting drug, that has to be taken again again to cover up the misery people feel in their lives.
It’s such a shame that we have to look outside of ourselves for distraction, when what we are truly looking for lies within and when that connection is made it is so much simpler to make the connection with others, without the need of sport or something else that can lift us momentarily out of the drudgery of many of our lives.
And that meeting of another from our within rather than an external distraction has a quality that is tangible and properly exquisite.
Kate, your concluding paragraph is a good summary of the blog and makes the important point that ‘true connection can never be made or maintained through ‘limited unity’ such that we find in competitive sport or any kind of triumph over another.’ This false high gives the illusion of connection but it is at the expense of the other side. It is indeed a very partial semblance of unity and, worse than that, it gives us a substitute for connection which relieves the pressure for a moment and therefore distracts us from feeling the pain of separation which would eventually bring us back to ourselves and God. Thus, when we hop from one such event to another thinking that this is ‘brotherhood’ we further delay our return back to who we truly are.
Great point here, when there are winners and losers any sense of unity can only ever be short term, I would even suggest that it is false unity in truth because of what it is based on. It doesn’t matter if it is a school sports day race or a huge and very costly olympic sprint, same, same…unity long term comes from seeing others as equal and knowing that we all equally have something to bring to the whole.
Love that phrase ‘limited unity’ in relation to competitive sport. It captures not only the bounded scope and exclusivity of the so-called triumph – that only a few get to feel the high whilst the many get to feel the low – but it also identifies the short-lived, unprolongable nature of the elation from a win, that merely returns all the pomp, ceremony and sense of achievement back into the original emptiness that stood behind it all along.
‘…any kind of triumph over another’ actually makes us feel sick inside and it is only the superficial conditioning that has us believe competition is healthy and a natural state of our being that tries to convince us otherwise. Being honest about the underlying malaise we feel is the start to undoing the conditioning we are incarcerated and divided by.
It’s a great piece of understanding to bring about sport and the desire for oneness and brotherhood. The fact we distort this is really an indictment on our way of living disconnected to our souls.
It feels like we are yearning to belong when we join a team, to have unity with one another. But sport does not bring unity at all, there appears to be a great deal of dissatisfaction, rivalry and competition with these groups of people. They have a common theme and interest but there is no true connection.
Thank you. It is well to remember that anyone acting in any way against another person is in truth seeking connection however ironic it may seem.
“What is it we crave and seek in the apparent unity of a sporting team, and is it really being delivered?” Such a great question and one that I would imagine is rarely asked. But what is it that people are craving? My sense is connection, people will go to great lengths, even if misguided, and it isn’t true connection, but see sport as a way to connect to family, their children…’go out to the football together’, they see the choices to support a team, a sport star also as a way of connecting to role models, when in fact they couldn’t be further from the truth. There is a lot we as a humanity still need to wake up and feel more honestly what is really going on.
It seems like we enjoy being together but the way we are together we are not really getting it right. Being with other people is a huge potential to have unity and to experience brotherhood but we usually destroy that potential with alcohol or activities that don’t really give room for any true quality.
It is true connection that we are missing, and yes, many use distraction methods to not feel this for short or long periods of time…’it is the true connection that we are missing – between each other and within ourselves’. Absolutely.
‘It did not reconnect people to their own real worth, it distracted them from missing it for a short time.’ This is a brilliant quote that dismantles the illusion that sport unites us in any way. Competition pits us against one another individually, in teams from different parts of our countries, as nations… it is the ultimate in divisiveness and it serves us well to see it as such.
It can on the surface, in an example like this be quite difficult to argue with the good a successful sports team does for a city, but scratch below the surface and look a little deeper at what occurs and we can actually easily see that sporting teams do little for the people in the towns they supposedly serve. There is an ugly attachment to the fortunes of the team and often a real hatred for teams and people from other cities and towns, particularly those nearby. It is a really false happiness that is created and one that is always short lived.
My perspective on this is that Sport is just like how I used to live my life, the ups and downs, the wins and the losses – it was a big rollercoaster that meant I was always unsettled and anxious about what was ahead. What has changed is my acceptance that life does not need to be this way, instead it can be consistant and whilst not perfect by any means and with lots of learnings happening each day the very foundation of the way I now live is what provides the unity within that I used to seek outside.
Competition in itself is not the root cause of our woes, but rather symptom that extends from our lack of connection. From our lack of connection, we lose our sense of self, which in turn leads to self worth issues, which in turn leads to a search outside of ourselves for an identity, which in turn leads to competition, as we seek to verify our own self worth by crushing that in another.
When we really love another we could not compete against them, competition is so far of the radar when real love of another is there.
Well said, Samantha. Actually does it even need to be as complete as love? If we respect, care for and appreciate another we cannot be in competition with them and then we have a chance to build loving relationships so far from comparison, vying for attention and lack of care. The ability to liberate ourselves from competition comes from our own sense of self worth and respect… as this builds we do not need to beat others for our own validation.
At school I can remember that I always wanted to be picked to be on the team and feel a part of a group and often felt left out. I didn’t like it when I was in the team because there was an unease with the feeling of competition. But I also felt alone (a ‘billy no mates theme’ that continued throughout my life until recently) when I didn’t get picked for a team, because I craved the unity to belong. Nowadays I feel much more of my connection to myself and I can stand alone connected and contented.