One of the reasons we’re supposed to play sports is because it builds character. As a kid I remember thinking, “this is bullshit.” But then I had kids myself and have now spent years dragging them—and being dragged—to various kinds of character-building exercise. I found a girls’ football club for my daughter even though she didn’t want to play. It seemed like part of my paternal duty, because middle-class American girls play soccer. Then I gave up. I tried the same with basketball, which she turned out to like; sometimes in spite of yourself things get passed down.
What’s strange about all this is that built into the decision to make them do these things is the moment, some years down the line, when they will choose to quit—because everyone does. And you make them play even though you know full well that when they do quit mild feelings of parental failure and disappointment will afflict you.
But I hassle my kids to show up anyway. Because there is something you can learn from sports that you can’t learn from any of the other things you make your kids do. My daughter spent a couple of years in ballet and I was struck from the beginning how orderly and precise the instructions were. The music lessons I’ve sat in on have been similar: you learn to do the same thing over and over the same way until you get it right. Obviously sports also involve repetition and precision but the chaos-generating tendencies of an unpredictable adversarial environment slightly shift the emphasis. And the incentive-structure looks different, too.
Failure and losing are built in. Somebody wins and then there are the other people who don’t. Practice drills, even for small children, use competition as threat and reward. For you to do well somebody else has to do less well. So you learn to want other people to fail. You also learn to fail yourself, publicly and humiliatingly, again and again. Because other people are better than you, and it’s not enough to do your best—unless you include under “doing your best” practising hours after practice is over, hitting or kicking balls against a wall, running wind sprints, lifting weights, drinking creatine shakes, until a few months or years later the balance of power has changed.
You learn to improvise, to adapt to changing circumstances and even cheat in the interests of the team. The kid who slowly and meticulously circles back when she misses a cone in a two-team slalom-style race at the end of practice, when the coach isn’t looking, while all of the kids on her team shout, “Come on, come on, just do it,” will eventually learn to cut corners. If she sticks around.
Some of the laziest people I’ve been around are professional athletes. My teammates would take the hotel lift to go up one flight of stairs. They drove when they could walk. They spent sunny afternoons on the couch in darkened rooms playing video games. But they were also capable of trying much, much harder than I could. Part of what you learn as a good academic student is to work moderately hard at everything. Study for tests, hand in your homework, check your answer sheets. Don’t kill yourself because there’s always another test coming, another paper, on a different subject, which you will also have to interest yourself in and give a reasonable account of. In athlete-speak, you learn to give an honourable 80 per cent of your capacities to any task.
What you learn from sports is that there’s no point in doing that. If there’s a 50-50 ball and you try quite hard to get it, the other kid will try harder and you might as well not have bothered. Outcomes are zero sum. The only thing that works is constant, relentless, completely excessive effort and concentration. And sometimes that doesn’t work either.
Whether these are lessons we want to subject our kids to, I don’t know, but as the Women’s World Cup kicks off in France it seems useful to remind ourselves that there’s no particular reason why my son should learn them but not my daughter.
