Cheating to Lose, While "Winning" Off the Field

Returning to our sports week, I found that the film Eight Men Out (1988) presents a slightly different take on the “winners vs. winning” question raised by the majority of the other films.  Eight Men Out is a dramatic retelling of Major League Baseball’s Black Sox Scandal, one of the most infamous conspiracies in sports history.  Eight players on the 1919 Chicago White Sox, considered the best team in baseball at the time, were banned for life for intentionally losing the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds.  The film demonstrates how White Sox players were motivated to throw the series by a mutual dislike of miserly team owner Charles Comiskey.  They are approached by gamblers who inform them that they could win more money by throwing the series than they could if they played it out and won.  Eight Men Out follows the scandal from the initial conception, through the best-of-nine series and to the trial of the eight players after sportswriters and owners become suspicious.

            In her article “Sport, Education, and the Meaning of Victory”, Heather Reid discusses the distinction between “winners” and “winning” as well as the importance of virtue in sport.  Reid takes her analysis back to Aristotelian Virtue philosophy, explain how participation in athletics was considered to be a demonstration of arête, or virtue.  Reid argues that we as a society see winning as important because of the similar virtues associated with excellence, such as courage discipline or justice.  However, Reid also mentions how many modern athletic programs only focus on winning in terms of numbers instead of the character-building aspects.  According to Reid, if these values are seen as unimportant, the pursuit of victory in our athletic programs should not be as integral a part of our educational foundation.  In our class discussion, after discussing the definition and “point” of sport, we considered Reid’s points and questioned why winning is seen as so important.  The general consensus was that an honorable participation in sport helped foster a sense of community and that everyone should want to win even if it is not the best indicator of a team or athletes performance.  The drive to win can help us better ourselves for the future, but as Eight Men Out presents, throwing away those values for a material trophy is useless and detrimental.

            However, Eight Men Out presents a slightly different perspective than some of the other films we focused on.  It seems like much of our discussion concerns how athletes conduct themselves on the field of play, whereas Eight Men Out is equally about the players’ virtues on and off the field.  When we talked about “winners” vs. “winning,” we are comparing a virtuous appreciation of the sport as opposed to purely giving attention to the final score.  However, from a certain perspective, some athletes purely obsessed with winning might deserve a slight bit of respect for their drive and determination on the field.  Eight Men Out presents a situation where the “winning” is not even taking place on the field.  It is a similar situation to a player playing dirty in order to win a game, but instead, they are sacrificing every bit of their dignity on the field for a slight personal gain off the field.  In today’s world, some of the biggest names in sports are being accused of using steroids for personal gain.  However, those athletes are still cheating to win, whether it be for personal numbers or their team.  Instead of cheating to win, the 1919 White Sox cheated to lose.  Based on Reid’s analysis, there is absolutely no virtue to be found in the case of the Black Sox Scandal. 

            I think Eight Men Out is a solid, historically accurate depiction of one of the darkest moments for America’s National Pastime.  Naturally, some of the characters personalities are emphasized for dramatic effect – Charles Comiskey is made into more of a villain to demonstrate the players’ unhappiness with their pay, as are the gamblers.  However, the film does a great job of portraying a lapse in athletic virtue both on and off the field, taking all the importance of “winning” out of the actual sport and inserting it into a scenario of pure personal gain.  If you like baseball movies, I would definitely consider Eight Men Out, especially since the Black Sox Scandal has become such a notorious benchmark for the sport’s history.   

Hoop Dreams: a Life in Pursuit of Excellence

Hoop Dreams is one of my absolutely favorite films of all times. The first time I finished watching it, I just kind of stared at the screen for a while, taking it what I had just seen. The film tells the story of two boys from inner city Chicago who dream of making it to the NBA. First, of course, they have to make it through the ups and downs of high school. The film takes you through a roller coaster of emotions, showcasing the hardships, both on and off the court, that the boys have to face--a 90 minute commute to school, drug addiction, and poverty, just to name a few. Like I said, after I finished watching the movie, I thought about what I had seen: two boys working their asses off to play basketball and, hopefully, find success.

Immediately after this short period of reflection, I googled what had become of William Gates and Arthur Agee. Neither made it into the NBA, but both of their Wikipedia pages gave good hope that both men were doing well in life. Gates graduated from Marquette University and became a real-estate agent and senior pastor at a church. Agee received a basketball scholarship and graduated from Arkansas State University. He then made a clothing line and started the Arthur Agee foundation (named after his late father) which encourages kids to see their parents, and not sports athletes, as their heroes.

Heather L. Reid questions what the point of athletics is and what winning actually is. While I found that all to be interesting, she mentioned something that I found to be a lot more though provoking.

"The definition of winning in sport is clear and quantitatively measurable — unlike "winning" in other areas of life, such as love or happiness, where success is not so easily measured." 

The lives of both Arthur and William were tumultuous at more than one point. Despite the fact that Arthur worked hard to remain at St. Joseph's, his mother could not pay for tuition and he had to change schools. Despite the fact that William was having a great season and pushing himself hard, he injured his knee, severely affecting his game play. It is quite evident that life can be incredibly unfair sometimes. Like Reid said, you can't measure your successes and failures in life. It is impossible to say that you've either lost or won. Despite how hard you "practice" or prepare yourself in life, something bad can happen and ruin everything. Interestingly enough, the motto of Arthur's clothing line is "Control Your Destiny". Of course, it is possible to work hard and prepare as best as you can for whatever life may bring, but this is only to a certain extent. 

Sports can be seen as a controlled, quantifiable version of life. In her essay, Reid uses the Aristotelian concept of arete to defend the importance of sports. While many people might believe the "point" of sports is to win, Reid believes that engagement in athletics adds to one's virtue. By constantly working to improve oneself in the sports arena through virtues such as habit, courage, and strength, an individual is promoting his or her overall excellence. These virtues are not just applicable on the court, of course, but are completely applicable to every day life. This is kind of obvious, of course. The difference between life and sports is that sports has a defined set of rules and a clear measure for winning and losing. 

Reid makes it clear why everyone loves a winner: 

"victory requires a knowledge of oneself that is rare and difficult to achieve as well as the discipline to maximize individual potential without stopping short of or overstepping one's limits. The recognition of ones' limitations must be tempered by a realistic yet ambitious drive toward maximum performance, this is a balancing act central to all forms of human excellence that can be learned through sport."

Clearly, the skills that one learns as an athlete can and should add to his or her overall virtue, or being. Arthur and William, while at many points in their life dealt with struggle and hardship, clearly found success within themselves. Just because they didn't make it to the NBA or win every game they played in does not mean that they are not winners. The sheer fact that they are progressing, moving forward in life, and generally being "virtuous" individuals shows that they are truly winners--both on and off the court. 

The Longest Yard and Appreciating Sports

    The Longest Yard tells the story Paul Crewe (Burt Reynolds) and his prison football team. Paul used to be a professional quaterback, but threw a football game and has not played for several years. After getting thrown in prison for domestic abuse, among other things, Paul gets coerced into creating a prison football team so that the semi-pro guard team can have a tune-up game before their season. He sets about recruiting a team to play with, although he is skeptical of their ability to take on the guards. As the movie continues, he builds trust with key members of the community and eventually finds enough talent to create a solid team. At halftime of the big game, the score is close enough to warrant worry from the warden. He tells Crewe that this was not supposed to be a close game and demands he throw it, blackmailing him by threatening to frame him for murder. Crewe plays terribly and takes himself out, the guards by this time just abusing the prisoners. After a talk with Pop, who assures Crewe his life sentence he got for punching a guard was worth the punch, Crewe goes back in and leads the team to victory.

            The story in The Longest Yard is easily relatable to Reid’s article “Sport’s, Education, and the Meaning of Victory”. The important aspect of the movie does not revolve around winning the game, although that is a large part. Instead, the real story centers on Crewe’s growth in the prison community and the relationships he builds. This gets symbolized in the end when he goes back into the game and stops throwing it, breaking from his earlier character. Making the football team in the prison has built his character. But even while the movie does show the community and character-building aspects of sport, Paul Crewe was a professional quaterback before and at the beginning of the movie has very few positive characteristics. While is funny and likeable, he also clearly acts spoiled and hits his girlfriend. 

But as Reid points out, sometimes sports get too overemphasized. For instance, one of the inmates says to Crewe that they prisoners do not dislike him for any crime he may have commited but the fact that he threw a game was “un-American”. This points out a disturbing trend in society to forgive athletes for some grevious societal offenses, turning a blind eye. People like Ben Roethlingsberger and Kobe Bryant get charged with rape and sports media quickly glosses over these charges. Coaches are charged to win and the character-building side of sports gets put as a lesser priority. Paying fans, after all, care more about wins than they do how much the team builds character. Youth sports function differently than this, but with professional sports to look up to they occasionaly fall into this trap. 

             This moves the discussion to why we do and follow sports idols. Does it have more purpose than just building character? In “John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Sport”, David Schwartz looks at how we view sports. According to Mill would sports be a higher or lower pleasure? I think that sport can be considered an art form, as Schwartz suggests. In fact, the more you know about a sport the more you can appreciate a creative or beautiful play, just like the more you know about chess the more you can appreciate a clever move or the more you know about painting the more you feel about a classic piece of art. For instance, I can not appreciate baseball very well for I only played a little of it and did not grow up watching it. You can see this in “Federer as a Religious Experience”. David Foster Wallace knows the ins and outs of tennis and can appreciate the play of Federer on a much deeper level than I ever could. His explanation even makes me appreciate not only the play of Federer, but the complexity of the sport even more. On the other hand, years of experience playing soccer and basketball helps me watch it with more understanding. I see an incisive pass from Messi or Lebron to cut through the defense I know the skills and complications involved in such a play. It is simultaneously appreciating the intelligence and athletic ability of the player, for a beautiful play requires many things, just as a piece of music does.   

             This is perhaps why sports movies are so popular. They show most of the positive aspects of sports, the amazing plays, the community and character building. We appreciate determination and grit as much as we do skill and ability, showing that we have not completely thrown the positive aspects of sports away just yet. 

Win it Like Beckham

Most sports movies use the pursuit of victory as the driving force of their plots, and Bend it Like Beckham (2002) is certainly no exception. The premise is simple enough: Jesminder “Jess” Bhamra (Parminder Nagra) has played soccer informally all of her life, but when she is approached by Juliette Paxton (Kiera Knightly) with an opportunity to play in “proper matches,” her parents strongly disapprove. The narrative tension, of course, stems from Jess's conflicting desires: to play the sport she loves and to please her parents by following her culture's traditions. The philosophical tension that the film presents, specifically with regard to sports, is between winning and being victorious – a distinction explored in great detail by Heather L. Reid in her article, “Sport, Education, and the Meaning of Victory.”

As Reid states, the ultimate aim of sports programs, both within and separate from education systems, can be summed up in “one word: winning.” Yet Bend it Like Beckham seems to understate the wins and losses of the women's soccer team, focusing more upon the obstacles faced than the results achieved. The high and low points of the film's narrative never align with the outcome of the games. The team's defeat in Germany, for example, was not immediately followed by any sort of wallowing. Instead, the women go out and celebrate. Reid addresses this as well, saying that even after a loss, the game could be termed “a moral victory, a personal victory, or some such qualified win.” The plot does not take a turn for the worse until the romance-related (read: non-sports-related) conflict between Jess and Juliette begins.

Alternately, the technical “wins” of the team do not always mark a positive point in the narrative arc. In one successful game, Jess is actually shown a red card and forced to leave the field. This particular case depicts a team win, but not a personal victory in the case of our protagonist. To Reid, victory requires “the discipline to maximize individual potential without stopping short of or overstepping one's limits” (emphasis mine). In this instance, Jess oversteps her limits by shoving another player, thereby participating in unsportsmanlike behavior.

At first, it may seem that Beckham does not acknowledge victory within sports at all by suggesting a clichéd notion that the biggest victories occur off the court/field/track/etc. Indeed, the film does not exactly subscribe to Reid's “almost universal plot of sports stories and movies: athlete begins by losing miserably or suffering a terrible setback; athlete pledges his allegiance to the goal of victory nonetheless, athlete trains tirelessly in pursuit of that goal; athlete achieves victory.” For Jess, the trajectory is similar, but the goal is quite distinct. Her aim is not to win, but simply to be allowed to play. The act itself is her victory, not the potential future victories of that act.

However, at the end of Beckham, the film seems to elevate the women's final “win” to a “victory” by way of montage, drawing attention to both the challenges that were overcome and the elation that this particular success brings. The individual clip is hard to track down, but it begins around 1:24:00 in the video below, if you'd like to view it for reference.

The entire film builds up to this victory, and it represents a huge number of smaller wins: the successful compromise made by Jess between family devotion and athletic pursuits, the American scout witnessing the women's talent, the repaired friendship between Jess and Juliette, and the complete openness between Jess and her father about where she actually is, what she's actually doing. The movement from mere wins to ultimate victories cannot occur until Jess has been honest with her parents, and honest with herself, for that matter. Her passion for soccer pushes her toward that honesty, just as Reid argues: “From sport we learn to be honest, with ourselves and with others, about what is possible, what is inevitable, and what can be achieved.” For Jess, since her gravitation towards soccer is inevitable, gaining approval from her family becomes possible and is eventually achieved.

During the final few minutes of Bend it Like Beckham, Jess's father delivers a powerful line which speaks directly to the difference between wins and victories. “I don't want her to make the same mistakes her father made, accepting life, accepting situations. I want her to fight. And I want her to win.” In terms of the film's conflict itself, this line proves that she already has. 

The Rocky Road to Peace

As humanity became what it is today, many things changed.  One such change is the emphasis on peace, and as such less war.  Though there are still wars fought, there is nowhere near as much as there was hundreds of years ago, when groups such as the Romans went on huge conquests to gain land and power.  As a result, people's natural instinct to compete with others could no longer be satisfied through war, and so sports are now used as an alternative.  As such, every sport match is similar to a 'war-in-miniature,' and perhaps that is why sports have become so popular.

This parallel can be seen especially present in Rocky IV, because even though it is about a boxing match between Rocky and Drago, it is really about the American hero versus the godless Russian.  This movie came out in 1985, and so it was right around the time of the Cold War, and suggested that America was the better of the two sides, through the contrast in the two characters as well as Rocky's eventual victory.

In an essay written by Heather L. Reid, "Sport, Education, and the Meaning of Victory," Reid says that winning is not only about physically besting an opponent, but rather about winning in conjunction with virtue.  Lance Armstrong is an example of when these two factors were not both present; he did win the Tour de France a record-breaking amount of times, but now that he has admitted to using performance-enhancing drugs, the virtue is gone, and so nobody really considers him a "winner" anymore.  In contrast, Rocky IV shows an example where both aspects are present.  Rocky is out training hard in the outdoors, and it is just through his blood, sweat, and tears that he is able to get stronger.  The russian, Drago, however, is just always using gyms and machines, all while taking orders from trainers and very possibly cheating as well.  This contrast not only emphasizes what the film wants to portray about America as opposed to Russia, but also makes it all the better when Rocky finally pulls through and wins the boxing match.  Not only did he win, but he won in the most virtuous way possible, and so even the Russian spectators came over to his side in the end.  This also portrays America beating the Russians in general, which is exactly what Americans wanted to see at the time.

The similarities to war aren't limited to cross-nation conflicts either, even in games between state teams or even just high school or college ones, people love to use their sports teams to gain a feeling of superiority over one group or another.  Though this may seem a bit silly on the surface, it is doubtless that countless fans share in the victory of their favorite teams, and as such feel ratified themselves.  Sports are a much less bloody way to get these feeling out that war, and so hopefully through organizations such as the Olympics there can be an even greater worldwide shift towards sports to take out violent feelings, and less actual killing.

(I am only allowed to make this text small or large, normal is apparently broken)

Winning Vs. Winners: Virtue in Sport

In her work “Sport, Education, and the Meaning of Victory”,  Heather L. Reid discusses what it really means to “win.” Of course, on the surface the answer is obvious – winning is besting the other playing or team according to the rules of the game. In a baseball game more runs are scored, in football more touchdowns, and on the track a faster time must be recorded in order to record a victory. However, if winning was such a simply defined objective, it’s unlikely that our culture would put such stock in the “winners” that we revere in the world of sport today. Clearly, “winning” and being a “winner” are something different.

In the film Rudy, the plot focuses on a young man with a passion for football but without the skills or grades to make the Notre Dame football team. However, through months of dedication and personal sacrifice he is eventually able to suit up with the team and play in a game for one final play. The movie paints him as the ultimate victor in this case, and the crowd and his teammates certainly agree as they carry him off the field on their shoulders. However, by traditional standards, Rudy isn’t a winner at all. He’s small, not particularly talented, and has a football career that lasts for one play, hardly one that contributed to the success of his team. By all accounts, Rudy should be ranked at the bottom of his team, not portrayed as a victor. Rudy’s ability to overcome the bonds of the traditional definition of winning without overcoming the bonds of his physical limitations points to there being an aspect to winning that is more powerful than just succeeding in physically besting an opponenent.

According to Reid, we see true winners as people who are able to have both virtue and physical prowess in their victory, and we label virtue as a more important quality than physical victory itself. Our most revered sporting heroes are not just athletes who have shown incredible physical talent, but also people that we look to as role models and examples of chivalry and honesty. Indeed, when an athlete is found to have been using drugs to enhance their performance we’re not only disgusted with them, but apt to take away any status of “winner” that they previously possessed. Lance Armstrong, perhaps the most famous case of substance use in athletics of our time, has been stripped of all his victories that labeled him as one of the most prominent and successful athletes of our time. Interestingly, Lance could likely still be a dominant athlete in the biking arena. However, due to his dishonest history, society is unlikely to label him as a winner despite his physical abilities. The same phenomenon would occur if an athlete was convicted of illegally betting against themselves or even of doing something dishonest off the field.

In Rudy, the audience still sees Rudy as a victor because he has all the exemplary qualities that our society looks for in a victor, even though he doesn’t have the physical skills usually required to find success. In fact, his ability to stay his course, work hard, and improve despite his shortcomings actually increases the extent to which we see him as a victor. If not necessarily a victor in relation to the game of football at the college level, he is in every way a victor when it comes to overcoming his own previous limitations, both on the field and off. To do so required perseverance, dedication, and faith in himself in the face of adversity. Our society looks for all of these qualities in a star athlete, and is able to translate “star athlete” status to Rudy because of these parallels.

Reid also discusses the idea of “justice” in sport, and how sports are an arena that people revere for its ability to show a person’s bare potential and skill in a way that is honest in (almost) every way. No matter the claims or arguments that are made for one’s athletic skill, Reid writes, the only way to truly know someone’s ability to succeed is to have them prove it on the field in front of a crowd. Perhaps that’s that reason that our culture (and culture’s across the world and history) have worshipped sport to such an extent, for its ability to strip away the facades of rhetoric and persuasion and instead showcase people at their bare talent. It’s likely for this reason that people are so shocked and disgusted when a person is found to be not virtuous in their play because it is a perversion and a direct violation of the principles that sport is built on. Reid talks of how we hold our athletes to higher moral standards than our business tycoons of equal levels of success because sport is seen as a much more than just “winning” or turning a profit. Instead, to be a “winner” one must exhibit first virtue, then physical talent.

For a classic example of a revered "winner", and someone close to home, check out this video of our recently retired staff member Dave Wottle:

Virtue in High School Sports

Every synopsis of the documentary Hoop Dreams is about the same: the film follows two African American boys, from equally rough neighborhoods, as they pursue their dreams of becoming professional basketball players. However, while following these two young men, William Gates and Arthur Agee, real issues of race and social class begin to take a central role. Both boys are accepted to the prestigious St. Joseph's High School, which has a nationally renowned basketball program. Gates makes the varsity team as a starter, Agee makes the freshman team. Both of them try to rise to the academic challenges of their new school, and both of them are on scholarship. However, when their scholarships are in jeopardy at the end of the year, William is lucky enough to have caught the eye of a wealthy St. Joseph alum who offers to pay for his schooling. Arthur does not receive any offers, and despite his family's best efforts, has to transfer to public school - what appears to be a major blow to his dreams of being a basketball star.

The film continues to develop in this way as we watch both William and Arthur deal with very real issues while holding onto their dreams. In Heather L. Reid's essay "Sport, Education, and the Meaning of Victory,"she makes claim that the value of sports in education has not changed since Ancient Greece - sports are still about developing an individual's virtue, or aretê, as the Ancient Greeks would say. She defines aretê with 4 virtues: self-knowledge, courage, discipline, and justice, and states that the role of sports in education is to help students attain these characteristics. My middle school softball coach might take solace in the fact that although we didn't win a single game in 3 whole years, we were some of the most self-knowledgable, courageous, disciplined, and just 8th graders in the league - we just had no hand-eye coordination.

However, she believes that it's okay for winning to be the goal of high school sports, so long as the primary aim is aretê. Reid states, "Schools subscribing to this philosophy may still hire and fire coaches based on their ability to win, but should only do so to the extent that such wins are manifestations of the winning virtues the coach is actually instilling in his or her athletes." 

It's evident in Hoop Dreams that for St. Joseph's basketball program, winning and aretê are one in the same. When William first joins the varsity squad, his coach explicitly tells him that his goal isn't just to make him into a great basketball player, but a well-rounded and virtuous human being, and it's obvious by the way the St. Joseph's team sat in complete silence on their bus to an away game that they're exceedingly disciplined. But this aretê comes at face value, as seen in the injustices of Arthur's dropped scholarship, and in the way William's coach later exploits his talents. Arthur's parents are both heartbroken and outraged when they discover that their son will be unable to attend St. Joseph's for another year. The coaches didn't think Arthur was developing as a basketball player, so his scholarship was retracted. Though of course no one from St. Joseph's comes out and says this, Arthur's parents and us, the viewers, understand that this is the case - a pretty unjust thing for a program that's supposedly built around virtue to do. 

William runs into trouble when he suffers a knee injury and his grades begin to slip. Once the star player, William receives very little support during this time when he is of no use to the team. Both his knee and his status eventually recover, but his coach's lack of virtue becomes evident once again as he begins to put William on a pedestal for the rest of the team. We see that during one practice where the coach didn't think the players were working hard enough, he asks William, in front of the whole team, if he thinks they're giving their best efforts, and tells the team to do what William does. This blatant favoritism is hardly in alignment with justice, but since William is the top-scoring player, he receives special treatment. 

Reid's assertion that the true goal of school sports remains developing aretê is clearly not the case in Hoop Dreams as Arthur and William are merely disposable depending on their athletic success. Reid states that, "schools are in the business of making better people, and their use of athletics for profit rather than education would amount to egregious exploitation of the very people they profess to serve."  This quotations seems much more appropriate to the story of Hoop Dreams. While sports certainly serve a purpose, if all school sport programs function the way St. Joseph's did, that purpose is not aretê.

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.

WEEK NINE: Sport

This week's theme is "Sport."  There are three required readings, each of which are linked below:

• "Sport, Education, and the Meaning of Victory" by Heather L. Reid
• "John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Sport" by David T. Schwartz
• "Federer as Religious Experience" by David Foster Wallace