Do Sports Build Character or Damage It? / Mark Edmundson

This essay appeared on January 15, 2012, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, a newspaper and website that presents news and information relevant to college faculty and staff. Edmundson is an English professor at the University of Virginia. Following is an excerpt from the opening section of the essay, where he discusses the positive elements of participating in sports.

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The first year I played high-school football, the coaches were united in their belief that drinking water on the practice field was dangerous. It made you cramp up, they told us. It made you sick to your stomach, they said. So at practice, which went on for two and a half hours, twice a day, during a roaring New England summer, we got no water.

The coaches didn’t cut anyone from the squad that year. Kids cut themselves. Guys with what appeared to be spectacular athletic talent would, after four days of double-session drills, walk hangdog into the coaches’ locker room and hand over their pads. When I asked one of them why he quit, he said simply, “I couldn’t take it.”

Could I? There was no reason going in to think that I would be able to. Compared with those of my fellow ballplayers, my physical gifts were meager. What I had was a will that was anything but weak. It was a surprise to me, and to everyone who knew me, how ferociously I wanted to stay with the game.

I liked the transforming aspect of the game: I came to the field one thing — a diffident guy with a slack body — and worked like a dog and so became something else — a guy with some physical prowess and more faith in himself. Mostly, I liked the whole process because it was so damned hard. I didn’t think I could make it, and no one I knew did either. My parents were ready to console me if I came home bruised and dead weary and said that I was quitting. In time, one of the coaches confessed to me that he was sure I’d be gone in a few days. I had not succeeded in anything for a long time: I was a crappy student; socially I was close to a wash; my part-time job was scrubbing pans in a hospital kitchen; the first girl I liked in high school didn’t like me; the second and the third followed her lead. But football was something I could do, though I was never going to be anything like a star. It was hard, it took some strength of will, and — clumsily, passionately — I could do it.

5 No one really noticed my improvements, least of all the coaches. But I did, and I took great pleasure in them. Football became a prototype for every endeavor in later life that required lonely, painstaking work and that was genuinely demanding. Through the game, I learned to care more about how I myself judged this or that performance of mine and less about how the world did.