Rocky, Sports, and the Greater Good

David Schwartz, in his analysis of Mill’s Utilitarianism, links the distinction Mill made between higher and lower pleasures and contemporary sports. While this distinction, as Schwartz points out, was at first made to silence critics who wanted to place humans on the level of nothing but pleasure-seeking animalistic creatures, Mill’s distinction made it so that “a higher pleasure can never be duplicated through the simple aggregation of lower pleasures.”

            At first, this appears to lend that contemporary sports, or in the case of Rocky IV, boxing, are nothing but lower pleasures that are confined to brute physicality and the pleasures that come from those areas. This, however, is not true. Most sports, including boxing, require much mental stimulation and intellectual activities. Boxing is not just throwing punches at the other boxer repeatedly, but rather takes a long, arduous thought-out processes of planning a way to approach the match as well as strategizing a certain type of boxing against a specific opponent. In the case of Rocky, this was Ivan Drago, the physically superior Russian.

In order for sport to be considered a utilitarian good, there needs to be a way to combine the physical aspect with the higher pleasures of intellectual activity. Aside from the planning and process of the athletes themselves, the venue of sports can be seen as a good for spectator. Certain, as Schwartz points out, there is something more than just physically impressive when seeing professional and top-tier athletes perform. They can even be appreciated as aesthetically beautiful in two ways: as an act of beauty in nature, and as an act of cultural accomplishment. Certainly, this is the case in Rocky IV. First, in the terms of the sport being seen as an act of natural beauty, the two boxers physically, in their stature and appearance as well as movement, are aesthetically pleasing on their own but also, in their movement around the ring and interactions between the punches and breaks, can be appreciated like “the movement of a deer,” as Schwartz alludes to.

More prominent, in Rocky IV, however, is how it shows sports as an act of cultural accomplishment. Rocky IV, released in 1985, certainly is a piece of film directed to those who experienced the Cold War and negative feelings and fear towards Russia. Rocky IV not only prays on this view of the Soviets as the enemy, but puts Rocky against him playing the stereotypes up even more. Rocky trains in Russian territory but in a completely different manner than Drago. Rocky does all of his training through hard, physical labor performed in the wilderness and outdoors, whereas Drago is trained with high-tech equipment and a strict regiment imposed by his trainers who observe and design every aspect of his life. Throughout the film, this distinction between the honest, hard-working American and the physically superior, cold, and calculative (and possibly cheating) Soviet is prayed upon, and reaches a culmination at the end of the match, when Rocky defeats Drago. Not only is this a fairly thinly veiled allusion to the superiority of the United States over Russia, but even the Russians, throughout the match, switch their allegiance from the hero, Drago, to the American, after seeing him fight with such a hard-nosed, “blue-collar” type of attitude. Rocky IV, in this sense, portrays sport as an act of cultural accomplishment, which would be defeating and conquering the Soviets.

Sports also show a sense of cultural accomplishment on a more basic level. Simply put, they show the advances of one’s culture and its value’s through the rules set forth in the sport and how it is perceived by the people, such as baseball being “America’s Favorite Pasttime.” By achieving such a name, the sport is shown as being something that is revered by the people and holds a level of something more than just a physical game, but something that is culturally appreciated and valued at a higher level, as well as the knowledge and thought that is required to understand the game and watch it.

Sports then, through the view of Mill’s definition of Utility, can be seen as something greater than a mere physical contest and pleasure, but also as an aesthetically, intellectually, and culturally valued good.