{"id":579,"date":"2011-06-03T13:04:57","date_gmt":"2011-06-03T17:04:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gadflyonline.com\/wpblog\/?p=579"},"modified":"2012-07-15T19:57:21","modified_gmt":"2012-07-15T23:57:21","slug":"ruthless-warriors-and-professional-athletes-no-anachronisms-here-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/ruthless-warriors-and-professional-athletes-no-anachronisms-here-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Ruthless Warriors and Professional Athletes\u2014No Anachronisms Here"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Let me make you a little list and see how it strikes you: the NBA, warrior rites, the NFL, Roman battles, SportsCenter, Beowulf.<\/p>\n

\u201cHmm,\u201d you say. You may see the words \u201ctestosterone,\u201d and \u201cmanliness\u201d blaring between the lines\u2014or\u2014you may see two parallel worlds. Those worlds would be the meritocracies of the age-old and world-famed archetypes of WAR and SPORTS.<\/p>\n

But let me pause and add some qualifiers: ancient war and modern sports. Modern sports are not akin to modern war. There\u2019s a long history of disagreements between warriors and armies, including the Tokugawa Samurai killed by the organized military and the Scots and Native Americans cleared out of their territory with much bloodshed. With all the triggers and detonators of modern warfare, or to put it in the words of Dr. Walter B. Cannon, Professor of Physiology at Harvard in 1915, the \u201cstupid routine of drill, or any other deadening procedure,\u201d is no parallel to modern sports in all their raw and physical glory. \u201cWar and the preparations for war nowadays have become too machine-like to serve as the best means,\u201d he says, of pumping out that \u201cfierce anger, an emotion of intense hostility, followed at once by wild physical exertion, in which muscles, eye, and brain work together.\u201d Aka adrenaline. Face it: modern sports get the adrenaline flowing better than Army basic training camp.<\/p>\n

Warriors\u2014just like sports stars\u2014rise through raw and violent success in battle, (not by respecting the chain of command). And speaking of brash and heady violence, the NFL values physical trauma for the same purpose as does the warrior. In an exploration of why the league has not, until recently, done little to curb abounding concussions, sports psychologist Sharon Chirbin says, \u201cthe culture of football rewards acts of toughness and bravery over a player’s health.\u201d A nonpartisan independent study conducted by Children Now on the topic of sports broadcasting concluded that to gain respect the (almost exclusively male) athlete has \u201cto be a winner, he must be willing to compromise his own long-term health by showing guts in the face of danger, by fighting other men when necessary, and by \u2018playing hurt\u2019 when he\u2019s injured.\u201d<\/p>\n

In both the NFL and the NBA, \u201cfighting\u201d despite severe physical injury and pain is considered admirable, much like East African Warrior Maasai boys (under 12) today who are still part of a warrior culture\u2014they herd sheep despite dangerous predators and can begin to prove their honor by killing a lion alone, invariably suffering much violence in the process. Like these Maasai boy-warriors, the athlete \u201cmust avoid being soft; he must be the aggressor\u2026on the \u2018battle fields\u2019\u2026his aggressiveness will win him the ultimate prize: the adoring attention of beautiful women and the admiration of other men\u201d (Children Now).<\/p>\n

I do not think many of us would be hard pressed to recall some male acquaintance of ours nearly growling at a football or delivering the deathblow to a soccer ball with all the fury and concentration of Mel Gibson in Braveheart. Even sports commentators use war terms such as \u201cbattle, kill, weapons, taking aim, fighting, lance through the heart, battle lines are drawn,\u201d and the like, on an average of nearly five times per hour on major sports broadcasting networks. Yes, if it talks, acts and walks like a warrior, it must be one; and we cheer them on, generating 250 billion dollars in sports industry revenue annually. We\u2019re that obsessed with winning in the name of things as surprisingly not-antiquated as \u201chonor\u201d and \u201crespect.\u201d But while sports heroes may not have their praises sung in poems, they don\u2019t have to sweat it\u2014there\u2019s the Hall of Fame to preserve their legendary careers.<\/p>\n

So let the war drums roll.<\/p>\n

Rack up those feats (points)! Else Goliath (LeBron James) and Samson (Kobe Bryant) will lose to Hercules (Michael Jordan) in the toss-up for greatest-(legend)-of-all-time. Warriors do it like this: Beowulf fights the dragon, Coriolanus against Aufidius, and Brady vs. Manning.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>In fact we\u2019re so desperate for modern \u201cwarrior\u201d heroes that, in the fashion of gladiators, \u201csports announcers often frame team games as individual one-on-one contests between two well-known individual players.\u201d This favoring the heroes over their team names happens twenty-nine times in a typical sample viewing of NBA games. \u201cThese messages are promoted, in varying degrees, in the NFL games, NBA games, MLB games, Extreme Sports, SportsCenter shows and in their accompanying commercials.\u201d It\u2019s fairly pervasive.<\/p>\n

And just like the little-known Joushitai women samurai who fought during the Boshin War, women athletes receive very little coverage on sports programs\u2014below three percent. And what of these three percent? They are presented in stereotypical ways: close-ups of cheerleader chests and supportive sideline spouses. Even women athletes in the WNBA only averaged 437,000 viewers for playoffs compared to the NBA\u2019s 4.15 million last year; women are still on the sidelines.<\/p>\n

Women at home or in bed (most of them) and men at war with glory at stake. Some things don\u2019t appear to be changing much. At least not for the athlete serving as a reincarnation of the archetypal warrior-hero. Nietzsche said man wants danger and play. Looks like we\u2019ll find a way\u2014no matter the culture and age\u2014to combine them.<\/p>\n

Slay a buffalo, or destroy the rival team, it\u2019s clear you\u2019d be satisfying the same deep urge to\u2014well, to what? Continue aggressive and violent traditional male behaviors? Achieve adrenaline release? Though the male psyche isn\u2019t totally mapped out yet, one thing\u2019s clear: no matter what way you spin it, you\u2019re more or less looking at the same guy. He\u2019s just wearing a baggier loincloth these days called a team uniform.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Let me make you a little list and see how it strikes you: the NBA, warrior rites, the NFL, Roman battles, SportsCenter, Beowulf. \u201cHmm,\u201d you say. You may see the words \u201ctestosterone,\u201d and \u201cmanliness\u201d blaring between the lines\u2014or\u2014you may see two parallel worlds. Those worlds would be the meritocracies of the age-old and world-famed archetypes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":580,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,214],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=579"}],"version-history":[{"count":27,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3046,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579\/revisions\/3046"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/580"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}