Nathaniel

Shockey

Read Nathaniel's bio and previous columns here

March 3, 2008

Even Without a Ball, Some Sports Have Inherent Value

In high school, my friends and I made fun of track and field, because shouldn’t all sports focus on a ball? I ended up rowing for my college crew team.

Luckily, my high school friends were 3,000 miles and several years away at that point. But still, my hypocrisy nagged. Not until finally tackling Herman Melville’s Moby Dick last year did I finally gain a decent perspective about the whole thing. I’ll explain.

Most rowing boats, or “shells,” consist of four or eight people, and a coxswain (pronounced “coxin”), whose job is to organize and conduct the activities of the boat, much like an orchestra conductor. The difference is that, instead of silently guiding the individuals with a wide array of facial expressions and body movement , the coxswain yells at the top of his/her lungs insightful things such as “Row faster!” “Pull harder!” or on the unfortunate occasion, “Turn around!”

Anyway, after about 200 pages of information about whaling and six pages of plot, Captain Ahab’s ship, the Pequod, finally happened upon some sperm whales. They lowered several boats and, to my delight, the first mates of the Pequod also happened to act as the coxswains of the smaller boats intended to more closely chase the whales.

At one point, Stubb, the second mate, yelled to his rowers, “Why don’t you break your backbones, my boys? Why don’t you snap your oars, you rascals? Bite something, you dogs. That’s it – that’s it! Long and strong. Stop snoring, ye sleepers, and pull. Why in the name of ginger-cakes don’t ye pull?” Aside from the language being a few hundred years past, this excerpt wonderfully captures the essential nature of rowing.

What I finally appreciated after reading this passage and many others like it is that rowing, like track and field, represents a primitive skill. And anything that so effectively connects a person with humanity’s physical development is valuable.

On Saturday, I attended a strongman competition. Believe it or not, my wife and I have a friend about the size of two-car garage who participates in this sort of thing.

We showed up fashionably late with our Starbucks coffee cups and tiny digital camera, and quickly discovered that most of the guys there were even bigger, balder and more tattooed than our friend. There was even a strongwoman who I didn’t meet and probably would not want to for fear of getting crushed by any sudden movement. Although it would have been a nice photo op, I stopped short of asking the participants to stand close to each other holding a couple of giant dumbbells.

Instead, I stood to the side making insightful remarks.

“Do you think these guys prefer red wine or white?”

“Wasn’t that guy over there in Wild Hogs? And come to think of it, that guy next to him, too?”

“Let’s play, ‘Find the accountant.’”

At one point, my wife tried to point out this giant dude who was attempting to break a world record, and I sincerely asked, “You mean the bald guy?” She thought I was being sarcastic, but I was only having a brief mental lapse.

But more importantly, our friend won, dominating four out of five events for his weight class. He took it all a bit more seriously than I did, which, upon reflection, probably helped him win. And now that I’ve had time to think about it, I wish I had taken it more seriously right from the beginning,; not because he’s my friend, and not even because I should have outgrown my childish, high school ways; but because the strongman competition, like rowing, like track and field, is entirely primitive. They even cheered each other on in the same brute way that Stubb and my college coxswain’s did. “Don’t quit, you sissy! Lift! Lift!”

And unlike either of the aforementioned events, the strongman competition is as relevant to society now as it has ever been. Until manual labor becomes a thing of the past, and we consequently all become blobs of fat with overdeveloped mouse skills, people of physical strength will continue playing an important role in society.

I’m a sports fan, and I would argue that sports that focus on a ball are objectively more entertaining to watch. But since when has entertainment replaced value? It never has, even if some of us have made it so in our minds. For that matter, perhaps we should nix the phrase “entertainment value” from our vocabulary for containing an inherent contradiction. At the very least, we might learn to appreciate those among us whose physical gifts, at one time or another, served a practical purpose. We might realize that some activities, especially those that celebrate the useful potential of our amazingly crafted bodies, ought never to be considered outdated.

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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