Every Tuesday evening I relinquish the apartment to my girlfriend. Give her the place to herself. Pack my laptop and go to a community centre a couple of blocks away to squeeze in some writing (of stuff like this, usually). There's a TV in the hall. Always playing a hockey game (Tuesday nights, anyway)(in season). A few old duffers sit and watch. I park myself out of sight, out of earshot. With my back to the community centre's ice rink. Tuesday evenings are drop-in nights there. Five bucks a person. Assorted players skate and pass and shoot and play a long scrimmage. No fans. No one's watching. The scoreboard's turned off. I don't know if the same people show up every week, but there's always the same number of them, roughly.
So those people are choosing to play instead of watching the game on TV. I'm sure they're all fans of the pros. They certainly check the score and watch the highlights when they get home. But to them, playing is clearly more important than watching.
We're a culture of spectators. We accept that our jobs consist of doing things we have little or no interest in, and then after work we live vicariously through professional athletes, actors and musicians. Musicologist Daniel J Levitin writes about how buildings whose specific function is watching professional musicians perform go back no further than five hundred years. Before that music was something everyone did. Everyone played, everyone sang, everyone danced. In tribal African cultures, it's still like that. Sports are still like that for elementary and high school students here. Some participate more enthusiastically and with more skill than others, but everyone plays. Everyone gets at least some exercise. Everyone experiences the feeling of marshalling their efforts for a common purpose. Everyone has direct involvement in the team's victory or loss. Then we reach a point where we decide to let the professionals do it for us. We'll hang our hopes on them.
The pros certainly play better than the people in my community centre rink. Just like Eric Clapton plays guitar better than I do. But if there's a god of hockey, who does he love best: the fans whose relationship to the sport consists of watching, cheering, booing, waving flags and arguing about what the team should do, or the amateurs playing for the love of it, as well as doing the fan stuff when they're not playing?
What do we lose when we reduce our involvement to spectating? How is the experience different for those local players watching a game, as they consciously and unconsciously learn from the pros and strive for that kind of excellence when they're next on the ice? What are the long term psychological effects on the masses whose biggest emotional ups and downs are in the hands of others?
