Culture and sports
By Michael Tan
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 00:32:00 08/27/2008
There was a time our education department was called the Department of Education, Culture and Sports, or DECS, which I thought captured more fully the idea of what education should be.
I’m taking off from that earlier name of the education department for another reason: This is to look at how culture and sports are related. With the 2008 Olympics over, and our athletes coming home without any medals, we’re going to hear the usual lamentations about our neglect of sports.
I suggest we deemphasize winning for now, and get on working out realistic goals that fit us—as a people and as a nation. We can start by looking at the countries that did well, and how their victories reflect differences in culture.
Basketball
We start with the most obvious link, a “sports culture,” i.e., what a particular society considers to be sports. Many of the athletic events we see today have specific origins: e.g., judo (said to be from Japan, although the game belongs to a wider tradition of martial arts that come from Chinese Buddhist meditative traditions).
If it’s the Olympics we’re aiming for, we need to excel in one of the internationally recognized sports, and we have some choices here. I sometimes think if the Spaniards had stayed on into the 20th century as our colonizer, we might have developed soccer as a national sport, as many Latin American countries have.
Instead, we became addicted to basketball, a legacy from the Americans, who brought in another sport, baseball, which didn’t quite prosper because we did not create the public space needed for the game, or for that matter, for most sports, soccer included. Note how even the poorest towns have a cockfighting arena, but no public facilities for sports.
Basketball took off partly because it required less public space. In fact, Filipino-style basketball is often played on hijacked space, like the tiniest streets and alleys, or the barangay hall’s yard.
Alas, while we are fanatically in love with basketball, it just doesn’t like us. The reason I hear most often for this non-compatibility is that we don’t have the height for it. But height is a matter of both nature and nurture and even as we see a younger generation of Filipinos (and Filipino-Americans) reaching new heights, excellence in basketball isn’t going to follow that easily.
I suspect partly it’s because basketball has to be played with elaborate rules, and by a team. For all the talk about the community-oriented Filipino, he doesn’t always work that way when it comes to sports (or for that matter, business and politics). We make rules to break them, and I don’t say this in a negative way. To survive, we’ve learned to be ad-hoc, to modify rules along the way, and if we lose out in the process, we cry “foul!” and “unfair!” You just can’t play basketball that way.
There are other reasons, of course, for our problems with basketball. One of these is the massive investments that need to be poured in for a team to be internationally competitive. One Chinese blog writer, Xue Qong, notes how the Chinese team didn’t fare too well in what he calls “professional sports” like basketball, soccer and tennis, saying this was because these are sports that have high “spectator value” and, therefore, attract commercial sponsors.
That’s why basketball survived in the Philippines in a large way, with large private corporations and schools, investing heavily in the spectator event and particular athletes who, in effect, became professionals. But the investments in Philippine basketball do not come anywhere close to those in American basketball or European soccer, where athletes themselves become commodities for swapping, and where they are heavily used to push not just sports goods but all kinds of other consumer products. (Remember Yao Ming for Apple computers?).
Xue Qong cites a second category of sports where individual performance is important, like track and field and swimming. These events do not carry as much spectator value as basketball and soccer do, but they do draw some following, so the private sector invest in individual athletes, mainly with the hope that champions will endorse their products (e.g., shoes, swimwear).
Xue Qong notes how China chose to concentrate on a third category of sports: gymnastics, weight-lifting, ping-pong. These are events which draw even fewer crowds than swimming, but because they can be sources of Olympic gold, they were seen as worthwhile investments. Not only that; these sports have a better fit with Chinese history and culture. I’ve already mentioned the interface of gymnastics and acrobatics.
What’s interesting too about this third category of sports is the way individual champions can be shaped. It is not accidental that China and the former socialist states of Russia and Eastern Europe harvested gold medals in this area. These states pick out potential athletes at a very early age, separating them from their families and subjecting them to intensive (some say cruel) routines that shape the bodies and minds of the athletes.
Speaking of bodies and minds, Chinese athletes were certainly spurred by a strong sense of nationhood, of performing for China on a world stage. Patriotism does blend well with individual achievement in sports.
Geeks, jocks
A last point about the link between culture and sports: It’s time we moved away from the stereotyped distinction between “geeks” and “jocks.” We tend to think of athletes as all brawn, no brains; and geeks as scrawny, bespectacled bookworms.
Is a geek jock possible? The Chinese believe so. They boast of athletes like table tennis champion Deng Yaping, who has a Ph.D. in land economics from Cambridge, and Chen Yanqing, a weightlifting champion who has a master’s in applied psychology from Suzhou University.
Athletes are encouraged to go on to a university, particularly Renmin in Beijing, where they are given extra support to pursue academics. Not only that, there is a separate Beijing Sports University where athletes can enroll and get degrees that are related to sports and athletics.
It is also through Beijing Sports University, and other centers, where China is pursuing a strong program in sports sciences. As the country becomes richer, both the State and the private sector will have even more resources to put into sports, including integrating science into sports. They know western countries invest in sports sciences, marshalling physics, medicine and other sciences to monitor their best athletes to figure out the right formulas for training.
Our resources are much more scarce, but we might want to think of taking the first steps toward bringing back sports, culture and education—starting out with local sports, no matter how lowly they seem—and with a local ethos that emphasizes competition but not in an obsessive must-win way. That’s why I say we should deemphasize the medals for now. Athletics is both about becoming a better sport and developing sports.
Culture and sports
Originally Posted by radiostar
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