Playing in Wartime
Andy Crouch
July 1, 2001
What do sports and play have to do with life in the midst of war? America's professional sports ground to a halt in the wake of 11 September-a suspension unparalleled even after Pearl Harbor or the assassination of JFK. Many other forms of organized play were voluntary casualties in the days and weeks after the attacks, as America mourned and prepared for whatever was coming next.
Since then, the NFL has resumed its schedule, bad movies and sitcoms are making their regularly scheduled debuts, and even leisure travel has edged back toward typical levels, in spite of war in Central Asia and anthrax at home. But all these activities are now accompanied by one of this new era's inescapable questions: Isn't this, well, trivial?
It's a good question. And it seems a bit lame to trot out the general-purpose response that to give up our trivial amusements now would only give the terrorists what they want-so we must return to trivial normalcy with a vengeance! The attacks on America were apocalyptic in the original sense of the word, disclosing and testing the value of human lives, putting our work and play alike under judgment. It would be strange and disturbing if all we saw in this apocalyptic looking-glass was the vaguely amused stare of the average television viewer.
But sports and leisure are not trivial. At least they don't have to be.
Every kind of play sits on an axis between the two great sources of Western culture, or, you might say, between wrestling and resting. At one end there is the Greek agon (literally, "wrestling match"), the struggle of the hero against the conditions of existence. The agon is the domain of the professional athlete, whether Tiger Woods or Barry Bonds; but it is also often the realm of the weekend hiker ...
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