James Schall opens his essay “On the Seriousness of Sports” with a few passages from ancient literature that discuss the topic. “If we look in classical literature,” he says, “we will find, perhaps unexpectedly, several passages that show a knowledge of or reference to sports. . . . Such reflections from such sources ought to cause us to wonder a bit about sports.” Schall pulls from Plato’s Laws, Aristotle’s Politics, and Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians (to which we could add Pindar’s Olympian Odes) both to demonstrate that we have, from the beginning, loved sport as a good for its own sake and to suggest that it is integral to the human experience. Schall wants to convince us that sports are, as the title suggests, serious. How serious? He argues that “the closest the average man ever gets to contemplation . . . is watching a good, significant sporting event.” 

So, quite serious. 

In the Republic, Socrates tells us that he does “not believe that a healthy body, by means of its own virtue, makes the soul good. On the contrary, I believe that the opposite is true: a good soul, by means of its own virtue, makes the body as good as possible.” While I do not disagree with Socrates, the opposite is also true: since we are body-and-soul creatures—physical and spiritual—a healthy body certainly does contribute to a healthy mind and clearer soul. Sport can prepare men and women to live a virtuous life. 

Athletic performance is characterized by a certain tension: it is both violent and graceful. It prepares persons both for battle and for dance. It seems uncontroversial to claim that sport prepares us for a kind of conflict. We need only look at sports like football, hockey, rugby, and lacrosse to see that a form of violence is integral to some games. Lacrosse was created by Native American peoples to prepare for war. (This accounts for the brutality of its roots and the ongoing physicality of the game as it is played today.) I spent five years playing lacrosse at the Division I level. In learning to play, I realized quickly that I had to develop something akin to what Sean Speer has called, in these pages, a “primal” aggression. Sometimes winning a game requires doing bodily harm to the opponent—not with the intent to knock them out of the contest but enough to send a message. In this way the game becomes—or is analogous to—a kind of war. Schall further points out that, in violent sports, “the only way not to be injured in some way is not to do anything, and that may not work.” If you don’t watch your back, you could get demolished. 

It might not be so obvious, though, that sport prepares us for dance. Figure skating and gymnastics are certainly dancerly—but what about the more violent sports? Can football, hockey, rugby, lacrosse, and others like them really be considered a kind of dance? 

In a word, yes. Even these more naturally aggressive sports retain a dancerly character. The casual football fan watching a high-level NCAA or NFL game can appreciate the creative, intuitive shiftiness of running backs and the acrobatics of wide receivers. However, that same fan might object when he or she watches the offensive and defensive linemen go at each other with a magnificent savagery that seems not too different from a lion fight. Surely we cannot call that a dance? 

If you watch elite offensive and defensive linemen with attention, however, you will notice the footwork: defending a quarterback from a rushing defensive lineman requires not just good positioning but reacting to an oncoming blitz that, if designed creatively, can take any number of forms. This agile footwork is, of course, combined with brute strength and startling, frightening speed. Put these together—agility, strength, and speed—and you have a combination that often makes for a spectacular dance. 

We can also take an example of a more obviously elegant sport. While David Foster Wallace’s magnificent Infinite Jest is about many things, the reader spends a good chunk of the novel reading and learning about tennis. Wallace—a rather good tennis player himself—bestows on us a few pages of breathtaking poetic beauty as he describes a volley. He describes the server as 

Here we already see the dual character of the athlete. The server (Hal) is described as a musician and as a kind of hammer. Outside sport, rarely do we see a single action or actor so fittingly characterized by two such different roles. Wallace goes on: 

Stice’s play is described as merely forceful: he “wanted to serve so hard he could set himself up to put the ball away on the next shot, up at net”; “Stice drove this backhand hard down the line . . . a blazing thing.” Hal’s style, however, is an alchemy of force and finesse: his serve “seemed to set in motion a much more involved mechanism, one that took several exchanges to reveal itself as aggressive”; it enjoys a “faint brushing action”; he hits his “flat textbook drive cross-court into green lined space, hard but not flamboyantly so.” His performance is neither simply forceful nor simply dainty. It possesses a panache, but with muscle. He is a violinist-hammer; he is an athlete. His play is not just “pretty”—it is dazzling, exquisite. It is aggressive and forceful because it is elegant. In other words, force must be rightly ordered; elegance enables one to use one’s strength effectively. Elegance is, in a way, its own kind of strength: when we do a thing elegantly, we compel attention. Elegance, by its very nature, arrests and can surprise us because it is beautiful. Hal’s precise, choreographed return forces Stice to reposition himself, puts him off his usual flow. 

The sport of lacrosse marries strength and finesse at a level surpassed (in my biased opinion) only by hockey. Learning to combat force with force is not, mentally, very challenging. When I got hit, I hit back. Learning to combat force with elegance is a tougher mental challenge. When hit, the easy thing to do is to seek immediate vengeance, to impose my will on the one who attempted to impose his on me. It is harder—but a more excellent form of competition—to respond with elegance. Say I am knocked down and lose possession of the ball. Instinct tells me to respond in kind. However, this is often not the right play. It is often better to hustle into a defensive position and play my angles just right such that I subtly position myself to intercept my opponent’s pass. This play requires restraint (going against instincts), strength (hustle), and finesse (intercepting a small target at a high speed). “In other words,” Wallace argues elsewhere, serious athletic performance “is a kind of art.” 

In his short essay “The Necessity of Chivalry,” C.S. Lewis—a medievalist by training—describes the chivalry of the knight as a harmony of force and elegance: 

A knight is equally able to chop off heads and dance in court. He is a fighter and a dancer. He is, as Wallace says, “never hurried or off-balance,” ready for anything. 

We might, then, describe the athlete as a kind of knight: fierce in competition but able to channel his or her ferocity into higher levels of skill—in short, chivalrous. Though always in battle and not in court, the athlete who can compete with utmost ferocity and utmost elegance, finesse—in a word, skill—is a performer who inspires the same kind of awe we feel when we take in a beautiful work of art. He or she becomes an instance of beauty and, Wallace avers, “grace.” Hans Urs von Balthasar was fond of characterizing the experience of beauty as a kind of “lightning-flash”: just as lightning streaks and crashes down to earth and across our vision with furious speed and power, so too does the athlete leap into vigorous and forceful yet precise motion. Likewise, Flannery O’Connor liked to describe grace as a “shock,” as something “violent” that “cuts,” or knocks you down when it falls on you—what it might feel like, in other words, to be struck by lightning. Grace heals; but first it often wounds. Athletic performance is, in this sense, an instantiation of grace: something at once violent, unexpected, and terrifying, but always ordered toward an elegance that could not have been predicted yet nonetheless makes sense. 

Treating athletics as a mere game is not enough: competition that is not competitive forms, in Lewis’s twentieth-century British slang, “milksops.” And treating athletics as a mere competition of force is not, on the flipside, too much—it is, rather, not enough: competition without subtlety forms barbarians. “If we cannot produce Launcelots,” Lewis says, “humanity falls into two sections—those who can deal in blood and iron but cannot be ‘meek in hall,’ and those who are ‘meek in hall’ but useless in battle.” Later in the Republic, Socrates makes this same distinction: there is “savagery and toughness, in the one case; softness and overcultivation, in the other.” 

The athlete, then—the one who combines force with skill—is an ideal image for the fully integrated, catholic human being, a bodily manifestation of grace, suggesting to us something about the nature of man. In their angelic motion—swift, easy, and strong—the athlete suggests to us that man is, as Wallace puts it, “both flesh and not.” 

The athlete may even, I believe, suggest to us something about the nature of God. Earlier in Infinite Jest, Hal’s brother, Mario, is so moved by Hal’s performance that he regards it as a quasi-religious experience: “I was going to ask if you felt like you believed in God, today, out there, when you were so on. . . . I don’t get how you couldn’t feel like you believed, today, out there. . . . You moved like you totally believed.” Pope Leo recently suggested that the elegance of athletic motion reflects the beauty of the Trinity: “For God [as Trinity] is not immobile and closed in on himself, but activity, communion, a dynamic relationship between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, which opens up to humanity and to the world. Theologians speak of perichoresis: the life of God is a kind of ‘dance.’” There is a give-and-take, a push-and-pull, in athletic competition that resembles something of the love within the Trinity. This interior dance of God is productive, effusively creative: when athletics is undertaken in a serious, competitive manner, it can produce Lewis’s Launcelots. Even if it does not induce belief in a God, it has a good chance at producing chivalrous people. 

If we have the eyes for it, then, we may see the strong beauty of the divine nature shining through athletic struggle. We may even be able to see athletic competition—fierce as it may be—as a manifestation of love. We will be better human beings because of it.