Football

I’ve never been a fan of American football (or soccer). I see it as a monumental waste of time and energy, whether as a lazy, couch-bound spectator acting out their masculinity by proxy, or a pampered player (and the latter seems to apply especially with British soccer players). It’s purely a consumer’s hobby these days, as best as I can see, one more facet of a degraded materialist society. The rules have made the game tame, constrained and formulaic, just a field for (non-white) showboaters more than athletes – or warriors. Non-white and thus inconsequential, bar our money wasted on training them. I compare modern day games to what I re-read in the Sparta essay:

To promote competitiveness and fighting spirit, and to accustom them to violence and teamwork, hordes of Spartan children were made to compete with each other in a violent ball game which was a variant, much freer and brutal, of rugby. The players were called sfareis (ballplayers). We can imagine those little-shaven heads delivering each other wild jolts in every possible way, colliding, dodging and trying to fight for coordination, obtaining possession of the ball and taking it to the agreed target, beyond the opponent’s territory and over the bodies of the opponent. We almost can, also, hear the thuds, the screams, the coordination signals, the creaking of the elbows, knees, punches, the headers, the tackles and sprains there must have happened in that game that transformed characters and personalities and leaders as a smith.

I can imagine a little of the latter, in my own humble fashion as I played amateur rugby in a team at school and always looked forward the most to the violence; the satisfaction of tackling another young player to the floor or pushing them back to defeat in the scrum (although once I stabbed in the leg during the process, and another team member had their neck broken). It gave a very primal sense of elation, especially if the game was going well. I sense this attitude is missing from the more formal games. As Eduardo rightly points out, these Spartan children, from birth and then from age 7 years in the Agoge, were tougher, more mature, and more disciplined than many adults today, their training infinitely harder than that of any modern day military. That’s the purpose to contact sport in my eyes: warlike aggression and teambuilding, not just mindless strength-sapping entertainment, with the players continuing to squabble behind the scenes, or to engage in drama for the cameras, the fans hardly having moved from their seats, save to fetch another beer so they can continue applauding their highly-paid racial enemies.