To succeed in sports management education and understand the sports business, you must break it down into its two words: sports and business. You have to answer this question: “what is a sport?”
In my online sports management education career, I ask my students “who likes sports?” on the first day of class each year. They all raise their hands, which is what I hope to see.
However, this ultimately leads to the question of “what exactly is a sport?” These days, a lot of people think a sport must be a big commercial enterprise. They image a league or global sports superstructure with a large presence on TV. But does this really constitute a sport? Is that what people like about sports or sports management? How do I know if I am watching a sport?
You might say that it has to be a competition. You may also say that a sport has to be unpredictable so that you can’t ever truly predict the outcome. You might say that somebody has to win. As we narrow down the definition, we could also say that it has to be athletic.
I think there’s something to the word “athletic” that defines sport, and I think that’s what most people like. Most fans appreciate that there are classic athletic virtues in sport. These include speed, endurance, strength, grace under pressure, heart (as Ernest Hemingway called it,) and other qualities.
In 1938, a Dutch social psychologist named Johan Huizinga wrote his treatise Homo Ludens, alluding to the “play” element in culture. On Huizinga’s timeline, we first came down out of the trees, becoming “Homo,” or mankind. Then, mankind stood up, becoming “Homo erectus.” They looked around and saw that they could better master their universe by standing up and looking around. After that, mankind started trying to persuade others to do what they wanted them to do, as well as what they themselves wanted to achieve. They used their world to build, construct, and change things, becoming Homo sapien, the thinking men.
Once other thinking men thought differently, they started running into problems. They disagreed. When one thinking man tried to force another thinking man to do what they wanted to do, there was a disagreement. Sometimes one thinking man would get upset, maybe even killing the other thinking man.
After a while, men said amongst themselves: “this isn’t working.” They needed to create another space where they could act out the virtues of being alive, of being full-fledged Homo sapien human beings, without killing each other. Therefore, says Huizinga, they invented “play.” Play is a very specific human realm that is not real life.
People like to say that “sport is just like life.” I disagree — sport is not like life. Life is very complicated, a sprawling, incomprehensible thing. People have been trying to figure out what life is since life itself began.
Sport is not life. It is rather separate and distinct from life. Huizinga distinguishes between life and play — play is distinct, separate, not real life. Play has rules. And rules are supreme.
