Review - In Praise of Athletic Beauty
by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
Belknap Press, 2006
Review by Tony O'Brien, RN, MPhil.
Nov 21st 2006 (Volume 10, Issue 47)

Professor of Literature Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is a sports fan. Not only a sports fan; Professor Gumbrecht is a fan of sports fans, so much so that he has written In praise of athletic beauty to describe, and to make respectable, the hours spent watching baseball, football, tennis and other sports. Dissatisfied with the academy's somewhat elitist dismissal of sport as just another capitalist banality, Gumbrecht wants to argue that there is more to the roar of the crowd than mere tribalism. To Gumbrecht, the current mass appeal of sports represents more than the manipulation of the masses by advertising corporates. There is something almost transcendental about sport; some aesthetic quality that unites us with the Greeks, the Romans, even with the gods themselves as we admire the movement of a body, or revel in the million to one victory.

Gumbrecht has the ordinary sports fan in mind as an audience. Perhaps the 'educated' sports fan might be more accurate; someone with a passing familiarity with history, and the interest in seeing sports in historical context. One thing is clear: Gumbrecht is not providing an academic defense of the many 'readings' of sports of which he is so critical. Sports, in Gumbrecht's view do not need such a defense; they have the intransitive quality of being 'for themselves'. Gumbrecht describes the attraction of sports as "a fascination in the true sense of the word -- a phenomenon that manages to paralyze the eyes, something that endlessly attracts, without implying an explanation for its attraction." The writing is clear and approachable. There are no footnotes or references, and no attempt to engage with any theory of sport. The book is littered with references to great sportsmen (mainly) and women. There is plenty to hold the attention of the reader.  In praise of athletic beauty is a paean to what sports fans already love: sports.  

Gumbrecht takes a multilayered approach. Not content to merely describe sports as possessing aesthetic qualities, he reaches back to the 18^th century, and further, to find words suited to his task. Gumbrecht finds an appropriate language in Kant's views of the beautiful and the sublime, and the Greek ideas of agon (competition) and arete (striving for excellence). He devotes a long section to the history of sport, showing the emergence in different historical periods of activities recognizable as sports, but noting also the discontinuities that are a feature of these developments. In a section titled 'Fascinations' Gumbrecht develops his own taxonomy of what it is that captivates the sports fan. This is the most rewarding section of the book, as Gumbrecht applies himself to the development of an aesthetics of sports. While some may disagree with Gumbrecht's categories (bodies, suffering, grace, tools, forms, plays and timing) they are effectively employed in discussing the allure of sports. You could perhaps ask where are speed, and strength. What of the Olympian's "Citius, Altius, Fortius"? But Gumbrecht has his eye on the aesthetic, and for that, the physical attributes necessary for the perfect play are not the point. Gumbrecht recognizes that it is not intentionality alone that produces beauty, or even art (how many well intentioned attempts at art fail spectacularly?). He also recognizes the aesthetic qualities of practices and performances that simply happen to possess those qualities (as does sports), rather than strive consciously for them (as does art). In the final section Gumbrecht expresses his gratitude to the players he has never met, but who created the inspired moments that have Gumbrecht and others in their thrall.      

Gumbrecht is extremely critical of commentators he refers to as "people who deem themselves to be cultivated". This group is held to exercise a conservative stranglehold on what may be deemed aesthetic experience, allowing only "a limited set of canonized objects and situations", and certainly not sports. Gumbrecht rails against political and sociological interpretations: "Counter to many academic (and highly incompetent) "readings" of sports, athletic competitions do not express anything, and therefore do not offer anything to read." According to Gumbrecht, academics are more likely to make pompous gestures than to ever concede a "whiff of reality" or a "grain of intelligence." Gumbrecht traces this reluctance to praise sports to the Enlightenment legacy of criticism: a "reduction in the range of permissible discourses" that makes praise (especially of sports) not just unfashionable, but a reversion to pre-enlightenment intellectual values. So in addition to developing an aesthetic of sport, In praise of athletic beauty is a critique of class privilege in declaring what may be claimed in the name of "culture" or "art". Notwithstanding his critique of academic writing on sports, and his views on the effect of the Enlightenment on academic writing, Gumbrecht opts for analysis as his method. His goal is to "lay open the complexity of sports" as a music critic does with music.

In addition to praising the grace of the body, Gumbrecht is also in awe of the crowd. The rapture of the crowd is in many ways its own end. Gumbrecht describes his experience in walking away from sports fixtures feeling intoxicated, the effect of the crowd having induced a form of ecstasy. The crowd contributes its own exhilaration to individual fans' appreciation of the "beautiful move". Fans may find themselves, like Proust's narrator at a performance of La Berma, feeling that: "the longer I went on clapping the better La Berma's acting seemed to have become".

At the risk of proposing that Gumbrecht should have trawled the Internet for every possible example in support of his thesis, I want to mention one that is relevant to my own context, and that seems to fit well with Gumbrecht's analysis. For good reasons Gumbrecht makes much of the performances of Jesse Owens at Berlin in 1936. Not only did Owens steal the show from Hitler, he was as graceful and complete an athlete as you could hope to see: lithe, elegant, rhythmic, totally focused. He also apparently had very little appreciation of himself in aesthetic terms; he seems to have been modest and almost bemused by his achievements. Another athlete at the Berlin games was quite different. Jack Lovelock, from the isolated West Coast of New Zealand, won the 1500 meters with a performance that left commentators gasping. Harold Abrahams, broadcasting for the very stiff upper lipped BBC lost all composure, shouting: "My God, he's done it. Jack, come on! ... Lovelock wins. Five yards, six yards, he wins. He's won. Hooray!!". The Manchester Guardian declared: "It was a race magnificent beyond all description ...There never was such a run nor such a runner." Of course such hyperbole is the very stuff of the sports commentary. But even Lovelock himself thought of the race not merely as sport, but as art. His diary records: "It was undoubtedly the most beautifully executed race of my career, a true climax to eight years of steady work, an artistic creation." A mythology has grown up around Lovelock that accords him heroic status. His early and unexplained death in a New York subway added to the myth of an athlete who some say ran the perfect race and, like the deified victors in the ancient games, could not live easily in the company of mortals.

For a non-American, there is a forgivable bias in Gumbrecht's work, towards those sports that dominate in the US. I hate to say it, but Joe Di Maggio and Babe Ruth are just names to me, along with all those soccer greats who Gumbrecht invokes with admiration. Still, Gumbrecht does enough by using the examples he is familiar with to invite readers to apply this scheme to their own sporting interests. There will be few English cricket fans who would struggle to recall a beautiful cover drive. For rugby fans the well timed sidestep contains all those elements Gumbrecht ascribes to the perfect play. Gumbrecht is right to argue that a play of exceptional quality earns the admiration of most fans, not just those concerned with the success of the home team.

So, how successful is Gumbrecht? I was left with the sense that however much it may be possible to praise sports as beautiful, that's not the whole story. There seems to be some validity in the argument that sport is a product of capitalism, even if we accept that products of capitalism (like painting or sculpture) might still be beautiful. Gumbrecht is convincing in arguing that sports can be admired and enjoyed for the beauty they express. The magical play, the perfect form of the gymnast, the rhythmic perfection of the distance runner remain, no matter what other readings might be made. Gumbrecht might take comfort from observing that the arts world has recently seen a proliferation of prizes, competitions, live performances and sponsorship, a case of art imitating sport, perhaps.

There is a class of sports fan who is probably less concerned with the aesthetics of the game and simply enjoys the rush of competition. Such a fan will carry on with or without encouragement from Gumbrecht. More reflective sports fans will take pleasure in Gumbrecht's analysis, pleased to find something more to enjoy at the baseball or in the football stadium.  

Gumbrecht has laid down something of a challenge to his academic peers to take sports seriously in aesthetic terms. Whether or not they rise to this challenge may be of little interest to Gumbrecht. Whatever that outcome, In praise of athletic beauty gives sports fans something to cheer about.

© 2006 Tony O'Brien

Tony O'Brien, RN, MPhil, Senior Lecturer, Mental Health Nursing, University of Auckland, a.obrien@auckland.ac.nz