Make sports a force for respect, good will, and peace on earth.

The main thing is that we develop a grand mission or quest that is worth fighting for and that has a purpose that transcends our everyday squabbles and conceits. It could involve the practice and cultivation of skills, beginning with physical activity itself, continuing on to creative and intellectual activity, and perhaps reaching a goal of transcendent importance – transcending our personal need for glory.

One of these qualities is that we would not only limit our enjoyment in defeating the other, but go so far as to appreciate and even help the opposing side!

Sports has many advantages, such as forming community and expressing deep emotions. It is an outlet for pure entertainment and a release of our natural instincts. It is a way to perfect talents and develop personal excellence. It teaches us endurance, to overcome adversity, and to deal with defeat. But we can set a standard higher than mere victory. We can bring sports back into the world of thoughtfulness, making it even more enjoyable and powerful, as well as a force for good.

Sports celebrates the pagan hero: the winner, the strongest.

“One has only to recall the wild, crazy enthusiasm with which people participated in the various wars of the past two centuries – the readiness of millions to risk national suicide in order to protect the image of ‘the strongest power,’ or of ‘honor,’ or of profits. And for another example, consider the frenzied nationalism of people watching the contemporary Olympic Games, which allegedly serve the cause of people. Indeed, the popularity of the Olympic Games is in itself a symbolic expression of Western paganism. They celebrate the pagan hero: the winner, the strongest, the most self-assertive, while overlooking the dirty mixture of business and publicity.”
To Have or To Be, 117

Do not suggest that only your team should be victorious

Sports can have unexpected effects, for individuals and in society. It can make us more egotistical and less sensitive to others. We can be overly concerned about our team and our success, and less sensitive to the needs of others. Greed, aggression and conflict can be an indirect result of this state of mind. Enthrallment by spectator sports can be an artificial, socially constructed reality that magnifies ambition, competition and isolation.

– Do not overemphasize your own superiority.
– Do not suggest that only your team should be victorious. Say something good about other teams.
– Create a mini-climate for meaning at the arena.

Sports can be desensitizing – or it can potentially be used as a force for good. Think about how you are leading your life, and the long-term effects of what you do. Do not limit your enjoyment to defeating the other, but also appreciate and even help the opposing side.

Sports represents exceptional valuation of the human body

“Sports represents an exceptional valuation of the human body, as does also modern dancing. The cinema, on the other hand, like the detective story, makes it possible to experience without danger all the excitement, passion and desirousness which must be repressed in a humanitarian ordering of life.” Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, 219

We seek meaningless pleasure

“The Alps themselves, which your own poets used to love so reverently, you look upon as soaped poles in a bear-garden, which you set yourselves to climb and slide down again, with ‘shrieks of delight.’ When you are past shrieking, having no human articulate voice to say you are glad with, you fill the quietude of their valleys with gunpowder blasts, and rush home, red with cutaneous eruption of conceit, and voluble with convulsive hiccough of self-satisfaction….It is pitiful, to have dim conceptions of duty; more pitiful, it seems to me, to have conceptions like these, of mirth.” The Genius of John Ruskin, 308

Professional football is a physical assault by one team on another

“Two dedicated and disciplined armies. Outfitted in the distinctive armor of the gladiator, twenty-two athletes, eleven to a side, cross the boundaries to test one another in the most primordial manner – hand to hand combat.
Other societies had their symbolic wars….Professional football is basically a physical assault by one team upon another in a desperate fight for land.”
“A game of physical dominance; the weak are punished unmercifully and the unskilled are run off the field.”
The First Fifty Years, National Football League, 1969

Professional sports breeds hatred

“These are not even the biggest problems with pro-football and other professional sports. The biggest is the hatred it breeds between rival teams and rival fans, and the justification of rage and anger. Cut throat competition, in which winning and losing is all that matters, is a very addictive, blinding pursuit that sucks valuable time and energy and money out of people's lives and community resources. We only remain addicted because the vast majority of the population still hasn't emotionally graduated from middle school. And the story of how it destroys children and families has yet to be written, because people are too intimidated to talk. Can you imagine how truly great- rather than sham great - we could be if all that violent, angry, hateful energy were directed towards building our communities rather than addicting fans so that they don't have to feel the empty voids inside themselves?”