Art and athletics: Twins separated at birth?

I think you're looking at the end product, as it were, of sports and forgetting how it got there, sort of.

Yes, professional sports are played in front of large audiences. Professional athletes are the tiniest, most insanely minute subset of athletes you can imagine.

Competitive sports also makes up a giant classification that includes tons of sports that rarely have any spectators, like many sports in the Olympics, or that aren't team sports, or that aren't big-deal team sports in whatever place, like field hockey or lacrosse in the U.S., which do have spectators, but it's hardly about the spectators, as there may be a few dozen of them (also might be more, depending, but...)

However, even if we're talking about professional sports played in the U.S., those athletes spend 90% of their athletic lives working in front of no one but other athletes and coaches and possibly parents. Hockey practices take place, largely, at four in the fucking am. When is the last time anyone told you they attended the most amazing t-ball game, you just have to go with them to the next one? No one. It's parents, sitting around waiting to go home. Most athletes never make the big leagues, but they may still play.

Most athletes who make the big leagues? Still play -- to exactly no one. Hockey is the sport I'm most familiar with, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that you can pop in to any of the hundreds upon hundreds of rinks that dot Canadian cities, midnight on a Friday or Saturday and the chances are damn high you'll find someone who played at a professional level playing midnight pickup hockey, with no one watching.

Also, not for nothing, but critical reception by the audience does not, in any way, depend on primarily aesthetic judgments. I left that for last because I have kind of no idea what you mean by it. Dominic Hasek was an incredible goaltender. He looked ridiculous in goal -- he referred to himself as a flopping fish, and he was not wrong. He didn't follow convention, as many great players don't, but he was amazing. No one cares how you look doing the job if you get the job done. There have been baseball pitchers and batters with fucked-up stances and throws, basketball champions who ran funny, etc., no one cares.

Someone performing Hamlet has to perform the lines, as does everyone else on the stage. Someone playing left field has to play his or her position, but what that entails specifically is different every game, because nothing is scripted. One game you might do nothing special; one game you might make a catch that'll end up on a highlight reel in the Hall of Fame. Never can tell. Different, see.

I see a connection, but it's not in whether there's an audience or not. For me it has to do with craft, with the 'mastery' to one level or another of a set of techniques until it becomes your own--that's when you have created something, and in my mind that's when you have become an artist. But I see art (or creativity) in a lot of places--anywhere where one begins with craft but brings something new to it. OP, you mentioned Ali-in my mind, the perfect example of art achieved through athletics. I don't know how you can watch any sport and not see the art in it.

And let's not forget that there's a level of athleticism in many arts--writing is probably the least of them, though God knows there's quite a bit of endurance involved. Musicians are a good example, singers, dancers of course, maybe stage actors. I think it's an interesting subject. What is art? might be the first question

cornflake said:

However, even if we're talking about professional sports played in the U.S., those athletes spend 90% of their athletic lives working in front of no one but other athletes and coaches and possibly parents. Hockey practices take place, largely, at four in the fucking am. When is the last time anyone told you they attended the most amazing t-ball game, you just have to go with them to the next one? No one. It's parents, sitting around waiting to go home. Most athletes never make the big leagues, but they may still play.

Most athletes who make the big leagues? Still play -- to exactly no one. Hockey is the sport I'm most familiar with, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that you can pop in to any of the hundreds upon hundreds of rinks that dot Canadian cities, midnight on a Friday or Saturday and the chances are damn high you'll find someone who played at a professional level playing midnight pickup hockey, with no one watching.

Also, not for nothing, but critical reception by the audience does not, in any way, depend on primarily aesthetic judgments. I left that for last because I have kind of no idea what you mean by it. Dominic Hasek was an incredible goaltender. He looked ridiculous in goal -- he referred to himself as a flopping fish, and he was not wrong. He didn't follow convention, as many great players don't, but he was amazing. No one cares how you look doing the job if you get the job done. There have been baseball pitchers and batters with fucked-up stances and throws, basketball champions who ran funny, etc., no one cares.

Someone performing Hamlet has to perform the lines, as does everyone else on the stage. Someone playing left field has to play his or her position, but what that entails specifically is different every game, because nothing is scripted. One game you might do nothing special; one game you might make a catch that'll end up on a highlight reel in the Hall of Fame. Never can tell. Different, see.

Click to expand...

Lol, I read this and all I could think was, "wait, those are all parallels. More than I would have thought of, in fact."

For every thousand-yard stare at a T-ball game, there's another parent silently suffering through a child's piano recital. It's only when the performers/athletes are GOOD that people insist others need to see them, and I've been invited to plays and pro-sporting events in roughly equal measure.

As far as the ratio of people who find an audience vs. those who don't, I find that to be roughly similar as well. There's precious little difference to my mind between mastering a baseball pitch or a musical one. Both activities involve countless hours of practicing, either alone or in teams, to master one's craft and develop seamless teamwork with one's peers. And a pick-up game serves the same niche of fun and socialization as a jam session.

Even when it comes to Hamlet, and learning one's lines, that may be how the end result is supposed to look, but that doesn't mean things work out that way. I've done a lot of performing, and every performance of the same show is different, with different issues that require quick thinking to overcome. That person playing left field has a certain way things are supposed to look, too. Catch the ball when it comes their way, judge correctly where it needs to go, and flawlessly throw it to that location. Each time is different, but it's contained within a fairly strict framework, much like jazz music or improv. comedy.

And sports definitely have their equivalent of "Hamlet," too, where the end result is supposed to be identical and striving for a uniform perfection every time. Off the top of my head, diving, gymnastics, running hurdles, equestrian jumping/barrel racing, there are tons of them.

Both require physical and mental training. Both take countless hours of practice to achieve. Both are used for popular entertainment and both have rabid fans and haters. The odds of making either one into a career are low and the competition high, because people love doing both and will gladly do both for free, just for the sheer joy of the activity. And I'd say athletes crave an audience just as much as artists. When you dedicate so much time and energy to mastering something, who doesn't like the opportunity to strut their stuff and get some applause? (Rhetorical question, there are certainly people who eschew the limelight, but even then, the quiet fisherman probably has a few photos of big catches to show off, and that shy poet likely has a piece or two to share).