What Is Sport?

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this paper, I am going to present a condensed version of my theory of what sport is from my book The Philosophy of Football. In that work, I took my starting point in Bernard Suits’ celebrated, though controversial view that a game is “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles’ and a sport is a game that involves physical skills with a wide following and a wide level of stability. In the monograph, I carefully work through Suits’ theory showing which clauses of the analysis can be kept, which have to be amended and which should be rejected, while adding other elements to provide an adequate understanding of sport. Here I will not follow suit. Instead, on the scholarly issue of situating my view in the literature, I confer my reader to the book, and instead focus on presenting my own positive view of what sport is and my reasons for holding it. Sport is an extra-ordinary, unnecessary, rule-based, competitive, skill-based physical activity or practice where there is cooperation to fulfil the prelusory goal of having a competition, where mere sport participants endure or tolerate the implementation of a sport’s constitutive rules, whereas sport practitioners also aim at fulfilling sport’s lusory goal of winning, minimally not losing, whichever sport competition they partake in. I present the idea that sport is a social historical kind and how we should understand that before addressing my suggested analysis of sport and how it fits our concept of sport and sports as we find them practiced by us.