Professional Sports

Throughout history, athletics have represented a higher understanding than just a physical contest between individuals and teams. In their best sense, sports, training, and competition, when having been viewed from a holistic, transcendent standpoint, involve the mind, body, and spirit in a more elevated pursuit that expresses joy and produces character.

In their finest expression, athletes are symbolic of the struggle for victory in life over the common internal enemies of man (fear, lack of control, ineffectiveness, depression, etc.) Thus they become a form of encouragement to pursue greater things, and an example of trained excellence and discipline.

Professional sports in America represent the highest order of competition and the most dramatic example of cultivated talent and sophisticated strategy for winning. This is why they have the potential to generate so much excitement and so much of a following among the people. It is also why they can be rendered meaningless and loose the enthusiasm and loyalty that they other wise would have generated had they remained connected with the fans and the nation’s best ideals and values.

 

Professional sports in America need to reconnect with their greater purposes and more elevated qualities while the athletes themselves need to restore their connections with the fans that support them.

 

“The mere athlete becomes too much of a savage.”
– Plato