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Essays - Competition in Sports

Excerpt from Christopher Bates Doob's Sociology an Introduction, 6e.

Rick was the all-American boy--a star football player from a small southern town who went to play for a major college power. Soon, though, he found his life was no longer his own. Rick explained:

It was a life Rick could not tolerate. With one year of eligibility and the certainty of a professional career, he transferred to a small college where he felt playing would be fun again.

While young athletes in the crucible of sports competition usually do not drop out, particularly if they are successful, an examination of evidence reveals significant difficulties. In this section we analyze competition as a value in American culture and then focus on competition in sports, considering how this value impacts in organizational activity and people's lives. We also consider future strategies.

We begin historically. This country started with unique economic and political conditions giving early business leaders a distinct advantage over their European counterparts—the opportunity to pursue money-making ventures without rivalry or opposition from an established nobility; location in the New World away from dangerous rivals, making it unnecessary to develop a strong military presence that could have rivaled the capitalists as leaders; no central church that could have created a set of beliefs that might have challenged capitalism for ideological dominance within American culture; a relatively weak central government originating from separate colonial territories and thus unable to rival the strong, growing capitalist class (Domhoff 1990, 12–13; Mills 1956, 12–13).

These four factors are negatives, focusing on qualities the American culture lacked compared to its European rivals. The absence of these factors cleared the path for what Robin Williams Jr. described as a culture where the values of the business man dominated national life (Williams 1970, 455). In his famous book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber (1958) provided a consistent argument, indicating that the Calvinist distinction between those individuals designated by God to be saved or damned in the afterlife served to encourage people to strive for economic success in this world, thereby proving to themselves and others that they were destined for salvation at the next level. Thus, Weber declared, the American work ethic was rooted in a religious fervor, which soon declined as Calvinism lost its hold in the new land. However, at least ideally, Americans were expected to approach work with a sense of moral virtue: They might play tough, but they would play fair—by the rules, at least ideally.

With this focus on the importance of work, individuals' worth lay in their accomplishments, not in their intrinsic qualities as people. By emphasizing results, American culture became more concerned with ends than means, for instance lionizing big-business leaders who engaged in violent, illegal tactics (the "Robber Barons") and organized-crime personnel (Williams 1970, 455).

Many Americans, in fact, honor and enjoy competition, sometimes brutal competition, and sports seem to be widely considered a prime showcase for it. Sport stars often represent the epitome of success on the job, those who have used physical skill, discipline, and often intelligence—in recent years we seem to hear more about the latter as a part of big-time sports—to defeat others in direct individual or team competition. In a world where most of us lead fairly prosaic work lives, these top athletes represent a dramatic contrast. Some of the year's highest television ratings come for such major sporting events as the Super Bowl and the World Series. The superstars in the most popular American sports—Michael Jordan, Shaquille O'Neal, Charles Barkley, Dan Marino, Deion Sanders, and Ken Griffey Jr.—are famous, wealthy, and widely marketed. Some middle-class, primarily white mean spend four or five thousand dollars to attend week-long fantasy baseball or basketball camps where they can receive instruction from and associate with their childhood heroes.

Let us move beyond a broad conceptualization, however, and analyze how competition actually unfolds in the sporting world.

In examining values, Robin Williams Jr. (1970, 453) observed that the analyst establishes the significance of a given value by assessing the impact it has on its society, both in a general sense and in terms of particular individuals or groups within the society.

Alfie Kohn (1986, 84–86) has been more specific, indicating how the value of competition has affected American society through sport. Kohn suggested that organized American sports have trained participants to accept a goal-oriented model focused on winning through competition. Implementation of the model involves two steps: to establish the organizations that maximally prepare athletes for successful competition and to prepare the athletes to accept and implement this model. Let us consider social-scientific analysis and research on these two issues.

Whether college or professional, big-time sports emphasize highly organized, efficient systems. At the professional level, competitive success requires a high level of funding and organization so the team can sign and integrate top players. Yet while funding is important, sensitivity to organizational effectiveness is critical. For partially overlapping twenty-year spans, the New York Yankees and the New York Giants had well-financed teams but lacked the management personnel either to choose top-level performers or to pick those who would blend effectively into their current teams. As a result these wealthy organizations produced embarrassingly poor long-term records. In contrast, one might consider the dramatic case of the 1995 Houston Rockets, the defending champions of the National Basketball Association. In the midst of the season, the team was floundering, and top administration realized that if they did not make a trade, their season would be unsuccessful. Ultimately they gambled on an aging but talented guard named Clyde Drexler, whose contribution played a major role in the team's surprise repeat as champions. Of the trade the coach said, "[I]f we didn't make it, I don't know if we would have even been in the playoffs" (Wise 1995, 27).

In big-time college sports, administrators and coaches have often cheated to promote a successful program. In the 1994 film Blue Chips, the basketball coach realized his only hope to return his team quickly to national prominence was to permit wealthy alumni to bribe top recruits into signing letters of intent committing to his team. At the end of the film, the coach, whose conscience in true American fashion would not permit him to forsake the rules, confessed his recruiting sins at a press conference. In reality, recruiting violations happen frequently. One study of professional football players, for instance, indicated that about a third admitted they had received illegal payments during their college careers (Sack 1991).

Within teams the coaches are the bosses. "If we are going to win, we must all be following the same plan," the head coach explains. "I construct the plan, and you guys carry it out." At both the professional and college levels, coaches vary widely in how much control they impose and how fiercely they impose it. Interestingly some of the most controlling, ferocious coaches are found working with juveniles. Don Sabo, a former college player, indicated that as an 8 year old he went through the initiation rites of having his flesh pricked with thorns until blood was drawn, had hot peppers rubbed into his eyes, and was punched in the gut again and again—all to toughen him up and to maximize his development as an "animal" (Sabo 1995, 228). Sabo noted that in sport systems there prevails "intermale dominance, in which a minority of men dominates the masses of men" (Sabo 1995, 229).

The acceptance of pain is a significant element in the brutalization process. Athletes are often socialized to live with pain and the risk of injury, conceding that it is the only viable choice if they want to play (Nixon 1993). Their coaches encourage them to take the emotional arousal—the insecurity, anger, and even rage they often feel because of pain—and direct it toward their opponents (Sabo 1995, 229). For many coaches, players' introspection is hardly a priority. They seem to believe that insightful, balanced athletes are less productive than their animalistic counterparts.

Closely related is the ever-present emphasis on violence in sports. To be violent is to be tough and manly—the epitome in many people's minds of the highly competitive athlete. Coaches often find it unseemly to suggest otherwise. Consider the following commentary from two prominent baseball managers, whose teams were engaged in a series of games eleven days after Jim Leyritz of the New York Yankees had been hit in the arm and face with a 96 miles-per-hour fastball thrown by Randy Johnson of the Seattle Mariners:

How, we need to consider, do such systems affect individual athletes?

Pawns in the System?

Athletes play roles in their coaches' systems, which obviously vary in the demands they make. In systems requiring individuals to play with extensive pain, the impact can be numbing, stifling awareness of their bodies and stunting emotional expression (Sabo 1995, 228).

With increasing time in a brutalized system, athletes are likely to find that it becomes more and more difficult to separate a fierce approach to the game from their approach to the rest of life. Playing in a big-time college football system, one athlete noted that

Once the transformation process is initiated, Dr. Jekyll increasingly becomes Mr. Hyde. In sociological terminology a brutally competitive team setting can brutalize athletes' sense of self.

We might wonder whether athletes perform at top levels without becoming brutalized. Certainly some affirmative indications exist. One study of 678 collegiate athletes at three Division I schools found that most of the athletes were more focused on achieving their personal goals than on winning. One significant finding, which was consistent with other research, indicated that male athletes were more concerned with winning than their female counterparts, who seemed more concentrated on their personal standards of excellence (Weinberg et al. 1993).

Some top athletes set high standards in this regard. For over a decade, Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Heike Drechsler were the two top women long jumpers in the world. In their many meetings, competition was tight—victories measured in half inches and centimeters—and yet they never exchanged a cross word or made a negative comment about each other in the press, remaining friendly rivals who chatted and showed each other pictures of their children. Noting that some of the sprinters engage in trash talk, Joyner-Kersee commented, "It's a comedy act sometimes. It is entertaining. But I try to be for real. You can't talk up a gold medal, although some people think you can" (Vecsey 1995, B13). The idea is to focus on one's own performance, recognizing that competitive jabs at one's opponent are not an effective way to enhance it.

As we move toward some action proposals, let us quickly review the substance of this section.

Historically American culture has strongly emphasized the significance of work, with competition toward achievement and success integral to that emphasis. In modern times major college and professional sports have been arenas in which the development and glorification of competition have occurred. We examined the organizational context of sport competition along with the individual athlete's role in such a setting.

There appear to be two broad courses of action: I will just mention the first and then develop the second at length. First, either because of what they consider the contribution competition makes to participants' growth and/or because the value appears so prominent in our cultural tradition, some observers will conclude it would be unwise, impractical, or some combination of both to de-emphasize athletic competition.

Others who enjoy and value American sports feel that college and professional systems are often destructive for participants and are a negative representation to the society at large. So what can individuals do? We consider several options.

The militant opponents of competition might consider widespread replacement—the development of games that stress cooperation and not competition. For instance, instead of seeking to move one's marbles faster than the opponent, cooperative Chinese checkers involves a coordinated movement of marbles so that both players reach their home sections simultaneously. Cooperative bowling involves the challenging task of knocking down all ten pins, with each participant taking a turn and contributing at least one pin to the total (Kohn 1986, 94).

The problem with the purely cooperative approach is that it represents a clear case of throwing out the baby with the bath water: To escape competition, opponents discard a lengthy tradition of Western sport. A more practical course of action for initiating reform seems to be a focus on one's individual performance. Let us consider some of the actions sport practitioners and athletes themselves might pursue.

At the organizational level, it would be interesting to examine the role of cooperation in current competitive sport. Generally American athletes are socialized to consider their opponents as enemies, and from the high-school to the professional levels, newspaper articles that can fuel a heated rivalry are tacked up on team bulletin boards. However, what about exploring cooperative activity between or among teams? The most institutionalized example appears to be team cycling. In the course of such international events as the Tour de France and the Tour of Italy, the members of different teams engage in temporary alliances to break away from the pack or to catch up with the race leaders. American athletes might find it revealing to analyze what literally is a foreign way of relating to opponents during sport contests. Another organizational issue worth studying involves the orientation and style of women's teams. As we noted earlier, female athletes tend to be more focused on personal performances than males. It is likely that women's teams are often less brutally competitive and perhaps more cooperative with both their own team members and their opponents than men's teams.

Finally consider the individual athlete's focus on performance. Speaking from several years of personal experience as a race walker who sometimes enters competitions, I can say that it is a revealing journey in self-discovery to set athletic goals. Why, athletes need to ask themselves, do I want to pursue this sport? What will I get out of it? What, if anything, will I lose by doing it? Friends and perhaps professionals, such as therapists or sport psychologists, can be helpful sounding boards for goal setting. Then there is implementation. Athletes must come to grips with the realities of their lives—the demands on their time and energy as well as their capacity both in training and in public performance to approximate their goals. How, they can wonder and assess, will they respond to both self-motivated and others' pressure to perform?

The discussion of competition in sport raises many important, stimulating issues.

• The functions and dysfunctions of competitive sport at both the professional and amateur levels.

• Specific topics involving competition in sport where sociologists could provide constructive investigation and useful recommendations.

• Prospects for significant changes within sport systems, ranging from those in primary schools through those at the professional level.

Sources: Ira Berkow. "Take Me Out to the Beanball Game," New York Times. (June 11, 1995), sec. 8, p. 7; William G. Domhoff. The Power Elite and the State: How Policy Is Made in America. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1990; Alfie Kohn. No Contest: The Case Against Competition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986; C. Wright Mills. The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press, 1956; Howard L. Nixon II. "Accepting the Risks of Pain and Injury in Sport: Mediated Cultural Influences on Playing Hurt," Sociology of Sport Journal. 10 (June 1993), pp. 183–96; Kathy B. Parker, "'Has-Beens' and 'Wanna-Bes': Transition Experiences of Former Major College Football Players," Sport Psychologist. 8 (September 1994), pp. 287–304; Don Sabo. "Pigskin, Patriarchy, and Pain." In Paula S. Rothenberg (ed.), Race, Class, and Gender in the United States: An Integrated Study, 3rd ed. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995, pp. 227–30; Allen L. Sack. "The Underground Economy of College Football," Sociology in Sport Journal. 8 (March 1991), pp. 1–15; George Vecsey. "Great Rivals Don't Need Trash Talks," New York Times. (February 3, 1995), p. B13; Max Weber. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Trans. Talcott Parsons (1930). New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958; Robert Weinberg et al. "Goal Setting in Competitive Sport: An Exploratory Investigation of Practices of Collegiate Athletes," Sport Psychologist. 7 (September 1993), pp. 275–89; Robin M. Williams Jr. American Society, 3rd ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970; Mike Wise. "The Addition of Drexler Pays Dividends for Rockets," New York Times. (June 10, 1995), pp. 27+.

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