- Valson Thampu
I have for long wondered why sports stars are loved and cherished universally. After all, what they do has no bearing on improving our life in any material way. Yet they are deified. Sachin Tendulkar, for instance, was called the god of cricket. Messi and Ronaldo, like Pele and Maradona before them, enjoy a similar status. Why? Why do they have an appeal that transcends man-made barriers and divisive labels?
We are now in the spell of the FIFA world cup, the largest football extravaganza till date in history. Significantly, it has eclipsed even the epic fury of the Iran war! Perhaps this conjunction -of war and sports- is not a mere coincidence. How else will we know that humankind has a deeper, happier affinity to play than to fight? Remember Krishna leela –the play of Lord Krishna? What, do you think should be preferable: the vulpine intrigues of the court, or the spontaneous self-expression of human person as play?
From a superficial point of view, sports involves the perfection –the attainment of the highest potential- of the body. Athletes, for instance, are characterised by an order of discipline, earnestness, commitment to excellence, and personal wholeness, rarely achieved by others, often including the religious.
Consider now the commonplace assumption that sports is the extravaganza of the body marvellous. As one who flirted with sports and games early in life, I can vouchsafe that no worthy achievement in this sphere is possible without the passionate participation of the whole person in the given sporting activity. Don’t we speak of court craft, mentally controlling the opponent, and achieving inspired performances on the field? The perfection alone of the body, necessary though it is, will not do. Excellence pertains to the whole person. Mental dullness suppresses excellence even in the best- developed body. Also, no half-hearted participation will do. The first Commandment in sports could well be a parody of the first of the major Commandments: You shall participate with your ‘whole soul … whole heart…. whole mind… whole body’.
The athlete who excels, therefore, mirrors the wholeness of being, which is the core spiritual goal. The appeal of an athletic genius goes even deeper than that.
When our physical dimension is in sync with the intellectual and the intuitive, a third dimension emerges. It is similar to water resulting from the synthesis of Oxygen and Hydrogen. The emergent third dimension is radically different from the two constituent parts. The emergent dimension in the instant context is play. As Friedrick Schiller said, man is fully a man only when he is playing. When this play, or leela, quotient is lost, aggression steps in to fill the vacuum.
This happens even in competitive sports. Racquet abuse, is a familiar example of it. Football hooliganism it’s more virulent variant. If you have watched Pele or Maradona, or Muhammad Ali, you could not have missed the play-quotient in their genius. Why else did Ali ‘float’ like a butterfly in order to sting like a bee? Maradona’s ‘hand of God’ goal belongs to the same genre. The charm of South American football is its playfulness. Every dribble is a dance. Every pass, a piece of mesmerising mischief. If you were to face Pele, as he sneaked the ball between your legs, you would, in all likelihood, laugh in your secret moments.
When the play-quotient evaporates from play as sports is professionalised – in effect, commercialised and colonised by Mammon- it ceases to be sporting. Then defeat is death. A match is a war. Being gracious in defeat is out of the question.
This is true, alas, also of other spheres of life. What is conspicuously absent from our present political culture is this playfulness. Consequently, it has become a grim battle. Oppositions parties seem enemies. For the good of the nation, they have to be eradicated. Elections are conquests. Not surprisingly, the distinction between the mainstream and the proverbial ‘lunatic fringe’ is fading.
Most Christians are unaware of the playfulness of Jesus. Why else were the children at home with him? Remember how he dealt with the ‘expert in Jewish law’? Told him a story! (That’s how we treat children, no?) Or, how he processed the hypocrisy in the trick question that the Pharisees and the Herodians posed to him: Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caeser? If Jesus were serious us, he wouldn’t have said: ‘Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s; and to God, what is God’s’. I can almost see Jesus’s chuckling under these words! Think, again, the manner of his dealing with the moral police of his day; gleeful that they caught a ‘woman in adultery’. No humourless person could have thought of the ‘first stone’! Some of them, from whose hands the stones dropped unawares, would have, later in the day, burst out into side-splitting laughter in the privacy of their homes.
Well, then. The World Cup is, for at least some of us, not just about winning a trophy. It is more fundamentally about being reminded of the need to attain personal wholeness, which alone enables us to be victorious in the game that matters: the World Cup of Life.
