When we play, we experience joy that seems to transcend time
Star Tribune, February 23, 2000
By Katherine Kersten

The high school basketball season is drawing to a close. Last week, as I left a game, another parent told me jokingly that he expects "withdrawal symptoms" to set in once our school's Friday night games end.

I know what he means. As a cultural experience, high school basketball games are unique. The bleachers teem with a noisy, excited crowd, and fans can expect a full gamut of emotions: the thumping heart during a crucial free throw, the wild delight as one's team pulls out an unexpected victory, the head- shaking despondency as the team goes down in defeat.

The passion that basketball elicits seems vastly out of proportion to what's happening down on the court. After all, it's only a game -- five kids struggling to get a ball in a hoop, and five kids trying to stop them. Right? But if this is so, why does the experience provoke such powerful emotions, such nail-biting? What is it about a close game that can raise adults -- staid accountants and insurance salesmen by day -- to their feet in a paroxysm of fervent shouts and applause?

As a relatively new (and untutored) basketball fan, I've tried to understand the game's appeal. Some things seem obvious. Put simply, basketball games are fun. It's entertaining to see difficult things done well i.e., a kid stuffing a ball in a hoop when a 6-foot-4 behemoth is straining to stop him. And of course, we human beings love competition, especially if it involves our offspring or their schoolmates. Basketball games are dramatic and fast-moving, at least when well-matched teams are playing. We wait with anticipation to see, not only who will win, but how the victor will do it: What will the strategy be, what clever moves will surprise us?

For parents and students, high school basketball games are also great social occasions. We live in an atomized society, where all are engaged in disparate tasks. At a game, dozens or hundreds of us come together and, on some primal level, turn our wills in the same direction. Most of us spend the week at a desk or behind a counter, doing the same thing we've done for years. Basketball can be a cathartic outlet for our energies, a satisfying way to express loyalty to the young people in our lives.

But it seems to me that there's much more to high school basketball, and high school sports in general, than this. While we may not be able to put it into words, I think we intuit it, and sense that it is the touchstone of our passion.

Social anthropologists point out that man, across all cultures, is a game-playing animal. He is homo ludens, the creature who plays. Man uses his intelligence -- not just to meet his basic needs -- but to devise sophisticated patterns of activity, structured by rules, through which to "recreate," or renew himself. Complex games, like chess or basketball, resemble musical composition or mathematical inquiry. They are beautiful creative expressions of the exuberant human spirit.

When played skillfully and with good sportsmanship, games are a deeply humanizing activity. Good coaches can help young athletes see that they are not on the court or in the pool primarily for external rewards, like social status or a letter jacket. They are there to seek internal rewards: most importantly, the sense of achievement that comes from striving for excellence and developing the physical and mental skills their game demands. These internal rewards include the profound pleasure of working as a team, i.e., cooperating to perform an intricate and complex activity that no one player is capable of performing alone. Anyone who's played in a string quartet or danced the tango will understand.

Paradoxically, I've learned most about the value of sports not from a book about basketball but from sociologist Peter Berger's "A Rumor of Angels," which explores the way that human beings encounter the divine in daily life. Berger sheds light on one of sports' most mysterious aspects: the way time seems to slow or stop during an intense and closely contested game.

Berger explains the phenomenon this way. When human beings play, they construct a kind of enclave in a serious world. A game like basketball is, in essence, a separate universe with its own rules. For the duration of the game, the outside world ceases to exist for players and spectators. The time structure of ordinary life collapses into the movements of the game.

Play's intention, says Berger, is joy. Even when a game makes us miserable, we sense that this is a perversion of its essential nature. Joyful play liberates us momentarily from the serious world. It suspends our awareness of death and pain -- our consciousness of "living towards death." In this way, it allows us to experience again the deathless joy of childhood, when it seemed to us that we would live forever. When we play, time seems momentarily suspended. As a result, play lets us experience joy as eternal -- as being, "in some barely conceivable way, a joy forever."

Why, then, do we love to play? In Berger's view, it is because play gives us a foretaste of eternal joy. It is a signal of transcendence, which points beyond itself to a supernatural reality.

Many things can mar the essential beauty of games, and thereby make joyful play impossible. When it comes to high school basketball, for example, poor coaching or poor sportsmanship can undercut all the sport's potential benefits. And professional sports are another matter altogether. To the extent that external, not internal, rewards control, a sport becomes -- not "recreating" play -- but a job like any other.

All in all, however, I no longer find myself scoffing when I stroll by those T-shirts that say "Basketball is life" at the discount store. Ironically, in a way their makers never intended, they have a point.