In Praise of Athletic Beauty

As our efforts to explain and predict are baffled, we retreat into pure pleasure. Then the question becomes: Enjoy what, how? Fortunately, a new book helps lead us back to becoming the armchair aesthetes we were all along. In Praise of Athletic Beauty, by Hans Ulrich Gumbrechtis the book, and football the central game Gumbrecht really is a fan, and he is trying to make sense of a fans experience. Instead of focusing on the easy caseseverybody can admire divers and gymnasts and the lacier kind of ice skatershe takes for his subject the aesthetic of ballgames, which, he points out, began to become central to Western life as spectator sports only a century ago. His central thesis, to round it out a little crudely, is that we watch sports not out of identification with the players but out of a kind of happy absorption in someone elses ability. -- Adam Gopnik * New Yorker * How would Kant, who tried to define beauty, feel about a perfectly turned double play? Hed love it, says Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. The Stanford comparative literature professors In Praise of Athletic Beauty is a thought-provokingand academically rigorousdefense of the grace and aesthetic worth of sports. * Sports Illustrated * Marvelous Gumbrecht pays moving tribute to the aesthetic excellence of great athletes and describes the deep human satisfactions that great athletic performances give to those who watch them, whether as partisans or as connoisseurs. -- Leon R. Kass and Eric Cohen * New Republic * Reading In Praise of Athletic Beauty by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is indeed a valuable experience Gumbrecht has eye-opening ideas on the transformative power of athleticshow, for example, a sumo wrestler, the most undignified and ungraceful of athletes outside the ring, can suddenly become the embodiment of dignity and grace inside it. * Sports Illustrated * Gumbrecht laments that most contemporary academic analyses of sport as a cultural phenomenon tend to be socially patronizing, dismissive of sports fans as having fallen for a modern-day version of the old bread and circus treatment. Such thinkers, he argues, find it difficult to admit that the fascination with sports can have respectable roots in the realm of aesthetic appeal more typically associated with the so-called high arts. Conditioned to look for aesthetic pleasure in a concert hall or museum, we fail to recognize that watching a tense seventh game of the World Series (or a championship fight or a 100-meter dash) might be considered a legitimate aesthetic experience as well. -- Matthew McGough * Boston Globe * Written for the common reader in an approachable fashion, this delightful volume draws on Gumbrechts favorite athletic experiences. -- Michael Novak * Claremont Review of Books * Yes, being a sports fan is not pure aesthetic appreciation: it is deeply enmeshed, as Bourdieu and others could easily show, in social, psychic, economic, and political strategies. But, if the aesthetic dimension that Gumbrecht praises is ignored, it is difficult even to understand these strategies or to grasp why they are attached to this set of human activities and not another. -- Stephen Greenblatt * Harvard Magazine * Professor of Literature Hans Gumbrecht is a sports fan. Not only a sports fan; Professor Gumbrecht is a fan of sports fans, so much so that he has written In Praise of Athletic Beauty to describe, and to make respectable, the hours spent watching baseball, football, tennis, and other sports. Dissatisfied with the academys somewhat elitist dismissal of sport as just another capitalist banality, Gumbrecht wants to argue that there is more to the roar of the crowd than mere tribalism. To Gumbrecht, the current mass appeal of sports represents more than the manipulation of the masses by advertising corporates. There is something almost transcendental about sport; some aesthetic quality that united us with the Greeks, the Romans, even with the gods themselves

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is Albert Gurard Professor of Literature at Stanford University.