by Phil Cousineau
As a boy, I would lie awake at night clutching a transistor radio in my hand, futzing with the metal clip antenna, wiggling my earphones so I could catch the thrill of the games played by our local baseball football, basketball, and hockey teams. On the wings of those voices from WJR in Detroit I flew, and as I heard those games unfold, my love for my hometown grew. In the simple act of rooting for my team, I was participating in a tradition that stretches all the way back to ancient Greece.
Spectators “pulled for” athletes from their own city-state during the Olympic Games, and across the centuries, we have identified with runners, chariot racers, and ball teams. We continue to live or die along with them as they test their fate on the playing fields. To this day, I’m riveted by the sports pages and my heart quickens whenever I see the word “Olympics.”
One spring evening in 1967, in my freshman year high school, I told my parents that I was thinking of going out for the track team. My father muttered over his Salisbury steak. “That’s a good thing,” he said. “Maybe it will give you some discipline. Do you know the origins of the word athlete?”
My brother Paul and I rolled our eyes, recognizing the usual prelude to one of dad’s lectures on the genius of the ancient Greeks. This time, he asked me to follow him downstairs to the basement. Dad tossed a dictionary and some back issues of National Geographic onto the pingpong table. He scoffed at the idealized portrayal of athletes in paintings from the Renaissance onward. But then we talked about the thrill of their exploits. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York a few years before, we had seen a vase with a portrait of Pheidippides who ran 26 miles from Marathon to Athens, to report the results of a crucial battle. Before he died of exhaustion, he delivered his message: “Rejoice, we conquer.”
Opening the dictionary next, my father said, “Look, it’s right here. Athlete is from athlon, the ancient Greek word for contest.” His voice grew serious. “If you learn how to compete you’ll do well for yourself. That’s why sports are important. They teach you how to deal with adversity, how to rise above yourself, how to believe in yourself.”
My father was trying to pass the torch of inspiration to me as many fathers have done before.
Many years later I read about Sydney Mills a poor Oglala Sioux who did the same thing for his son on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. He assembled a scrapbook filled with stories of the great warrior Crazy Horse and newspaper clippings about Olympic champions.
“Olympians are chosen by the gods,” he told his son, Billy. Those words would burn in the boy’s imagination, as he fought hard to overcome the legacy of racial prejudice, poverty, obscurity, the loss of family members.
Billy Mills set several long-distance records at the University of Kansas. He joined the Marines and began training for the 10,000-meter race for the 1964 Tokyo games. A virtual unknown, he ran in borrowed shoes—and won.
At Mills’ induction into the world sports humanitarian Hall of Fame, author Nicholas Sparks said, “He took up running to escape the pain and emptiness he felt inside.” As Billy himself put it, “ I was a mixed-blood and orphan you couldn’t get much lonelier than that.”
How do sports fill us up? And at what age, do we begin to put our faith in them?
Race ya! a pack of seven-year-old boys shouted to my son Jack, at the local playground. When I asked why he ran off with them without a moment’s hesitation, Jack responded, “For the fun of it!”
“Time is a child playing,” said the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. “Moving counters on a game-board: The kingdom belongs to a child.”
As children know, play has no goal—it is the reverie of being in the moment. The beauty of play is its spontaneity. But play allows children to practice their upcoming roles as adults by exercising their imagination. By reveling in the body’s possibilities and the joy of natural learning. Play is crucial not only for the development of the individual child but for the evolution of the species.
Psychiatrist and play expert Stuart Brown says play is the primary engine of evolution. “My first inclination,” he told me, “is to ground our games in the wondrous world of animal play.” Our human traits of grace and agility, endurance, perseverance, optimism, and confidence are all grounded in that special state of being that is hard to define but recognizable as play, he added. Brown’s associate Bob Sagan who studies both bear and human play, believes play is a rehearsal for challenges and ambiguities we face later in life.
The word play goes back to the Anglo-Saxon word plegan which means to exercise. It also refers to a rapid movement like clapping, or playing a musical instrument. The old Dutch pleien means to leap or to dance. There has always been a kinship between sport and the arts. But above all, sport is related to the right way of living. Plato says in The Laws, that life must be lived as play. The Greeks were acutely aware of this connection. The word for competition and for drama was agonistes. Thus athletes and actors were kindred spirits each a participant in the play of fate and destiny.
Yale scholar and former baseball commissioner Bart Giamatti has written extensively about the spirit play in modern life. In Take Time for Paradise he says, “I believe we play games and watch games to imitate the gods.” For Giammatti, all play, including professional sports, “aspires to the condition of paradise.” And what is paradise? It is the dream of a place outside of time and within a sacred space, where we are free.
If you go deep enough into agony you find the real meaning of ecstasy from the Greek ekstasis which means being beside yourself. This is what we now call being “in the zone” or in a state of flow. The contest is a test of a spirit that leads us to a place beyond our ordinary selves. It gives the athlete a momentary experience of rapture.
There’s a good reason why sports are called a past-time: they’re supposed to take us outside and beyond ourselves. To lift us up so we transcend everyday life. Writer and adventure poet Diane Ackerman says in Deep Play, “The central moment in so many sports that one often feels. and perhaps becomes addicted to, involves doing something dangerous and the fear of leaning into nothingness.”
Yes, risk is important–as is our joust with the Old Bald Cheater, Time. Yet sport also provides a camaraderie that sustains us and keeps us from falling into the abyss.
The story of Jesse Owens in the 1936 Berlin games is an illustration of this. I remember the first time I heard his name. It was the late 1960s. Our school track team was competing at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. As part of his pep talk our coach, Mr. Leonard Natowski, informed us that we should feel honored because we were about to run on the same oval where Jesse Owens raced in the Big Ten championships on May 25, 1935. That was the day he broke three world records and tied a fourth in a span of 70 minutes.
The 1936 Berlin Olympics were part of Hitler’s grandiose plan to prove to the world the purity of the Aryan race. But Jesse Owens upstaged him winning gold medals and the 100-meter dash to 200-meter dash, the 400-meter relay, and the long jump. All of that is legendary—but this is the understory of how he won in the long jump which he later said made all the other victories possible.
Because he was a world record holder 26 feet 8 ¼ inches Owens was heavily favored to win but he fell on the first two jumps. While agonizing over his final qualifying jump, Owens was approached by one of his rivals—Germany’s Luz Long, the epitome of Aryan youth, tall blond blue-eyed. Long was completely unsympathetic to the vainglorious theories of Nazi superiority. “What’s eating you?” he asked Owens. “You should be able to qualify with your eyes closed!”
Knowing the qualifying distance was only 23 feet 5 ½ inches, Long recommended that Owens simply mark a spot a few inches before the wooden take-off board and jump from there. He even offered to mark that spot with his towel. Owen smiled and thanked him and easily made his next attempt. On his final jump in the competition, Owens leapt 26 feet 5 ½ inches, shattering the Olympic record.
The first to congratulate him was Long who lifted Owens’ arms high in the sky. “I have gone farther than Luz,” Owens wrote in his autobiography. “I had set a new Olympic record. I jumped farther than any man on earth. Luz didn’t let go of my arm. He lifted it up—as he had lifted me in a different way a few days before—and led me away from the pit and toward the crowd. ‘Jazze Owens,’ he shouted, ‘Jazze Owens!’ Some people in the crowd responded, ‘Jazze Owens! They were cheering me, only I knew who they were really cheering. I lifted Luz Long’s arms. “Luz Long!” I yelled at the top of my lungs. ‘Luz Long! Luz Long!'”
Years later Owens said, “In a more important way, Luz Long was the winner. He had done his best, and without him, I never could’ve done mine. Luz showed me the spirit of the Olympics. You can melt down all the medals and cups I have won and they would be plating on the 24-carat friendship I felt for Long at that moment.”
It’s important to recall the origin of the Olympic Games: Some trace this ritual to Herakles who challenged his brothers to a footrace. He measured the distance pacing 600 steps, which was called a stadia—the origin of our word stadium. Herakles was known for super-human feats of strength, courage and selflessness, and was so loved by the gods that they allowed him to become one.
But perhaps the most compelling story comes from the Greek Dark Ages. Around the 8th century BC. King Iphitus grieved because his country had been laid to waste by civil war and pestilence. When he sought the advice of the oracle at Delphi, he was told to bring men together to compete in games of skill. He later signed a treaty with the king of Sparta and the king of Pisa to ensure no fighting for a month before and after the Games, so pilgrims. spectators and athletes could travel safely to and from the festival. The inaugural games in 776 B.C. began with a chariot race, later replaced by athletes running the length of the stadium.
The five-day long Olympiad thus combined elaborate religious ceremonies with art and athletics on a scale scarcely imaginable today. For nearly twelve hundred years—293 Olympiads— the Games and pilgrimages continued without interruption.
Yet the legend of King Iphitus shows us an important aspect of the Games—how sports can help us sublimate our violent instincts. Perhaps our world is now so divided because we have forgotten how to compete in the game of life.
Like all great dramas about the human condition, the Games hold a mirror up, asking like the poet Mary Oliver:
Listen, are you breathing just a little/And calling it a life?
If only a little, why not more? Why are you not breathing hard and fast, as if in the most exhilarating race, stirring you to do your best, to reach for the laurels, the life of excellence? Is this not what every Olympiad requires of us—to reflect on the game of life within the Game?
A regular contributor to Reinventing Home, Phil Cousineau is the author of more than 30 nonfiction books. His latest is The Lost Notebooks of Sisyphus. Phil is a noted scholar, filmmaker, travel leader and storyteller. This article was adapted from his highly acclaimed book, The Olympic Odyssey: Rekindling the Spirit of the Great Games.