The spring 2011 issue of The Point features a great essay on the metaphysical implications of March Madness by my Duke colleague Michael Gillespie. Some of my personal highlights are:
“The Greeks’ March madness differed from our own, but is there a hidden parallel? Watching a basketball game at Duke in Cameron Indoor Stadium is certainly an extraordinary experience. The stadium itself is sometimes described as a shrine or as the mecca of college basketball, and almost every tourist who visits Duke wants to see it. Most are disappointed: ‘It’s not very large.’ ‘It’s like a big high school gym.’ Or my favorite, ‘It’s much more impressive on TV.’ And so it goes. But fill it up with fans when UNC is in town and it’s a different place. Then you begin to understand why some have suggested changing Duke’s motto from ‘Eruditio et religio’ to ‘Eruditio et basketballio.'”
And, when discussing the reception held by President Obama at the White House after the Blue Devils won the 2010 national championship:
“America is often characterized as a civilization without a culture and when one looks to the traditional arts this does not seem an outrageous claim. But perhaps sports play this role for us, reaching down into the core of our being and giving its mysterious source a symbolic expression. Perhaps the rituals of sports such as basketball represent what we are better than more intellectualized forms of art—perhaps they are better able to move us and, however obscurely, to reveal something that is hidden from us. Many certainly think of sports as mere entertainment, or an appendage of a culture industry that caters to the lowest tastes, and thus as shallow and inconsequential. But if so, how should we think of the Greeks, who thought as highly of their sports as of their drama? Should we not at least consider whether, to use Nietzsche’s phrase, our experience of sports is not superficial out of profundity?”