As this year’s tenting season comes to an end, I’m reminded of something that makes Duke particularly unique among top universities in the United States. We live in a nation that takes pride in both our innovative thinkers and our transcendent athletes, but for some reason, colleges here seem to find difficulty in reconciling these two realms of achievement. Rarely does one find an institution that can foster world-class academics and a stellar sports programs without having to compromise one for the other. Indeed, there seems to be a persisting cultural myth in our discourse that assumes the identities of scholar and athlete to be mutually exclusive—as if the mind and the body have to exist as separate entities within our being.
Unfortunately, this dualistic interpretation can often lead us to neglect intersections that may exist between our cognitive and corporeal identities. For instance, modern approaches to medicine in the U.S. dictate that we see a physician for bodily wounds, a psychologist for our mental health, and perhaps a religious official for our spiritual well-being. While it may sometimes help to focus on a single aspect of our being, we must be careful not to assume that these realms exist neatly in isolation from one another. In a similar manner, I think we often see academics and physical exploits as noble pursuits in their own ways that yet occupy different planes of significance in our lives.
Somehow I’m not content with leaving the discussion there. There has to be a deeper cultural richness in our sports that reveals a truth in our human nature beyond the mere physicality of the games themselves. How else can we explain the ineffable pleasure we enjoy from pushing our bodies to the limit and competing with others? Or the perseverance we find to push on despite repeated failures to perfect a dribbling technique or break a personal mile-time?
One of my personal favorite explanations borrows from Freud to explain our fascination with the concept of play. It’s possible that we see a game as our own small way of maintaining a degree of psychological control over the world around us. As children, we all come face-to-face early on with our vulnerability as individuals who possess little agency to resist the overwhelming powers of nature. From a young age we learn to feel an existential helplessness at the moment we’re prohibited from doing or obtaining something. As a way to assuage our anxieties of impotence, people throughout history have created games of all sorts in which the right amount of skill, perseverance and little bit of luck can allow a player, for a suspended moment in time, to exercise control over his or her fate.
More poignantly, however, our forms of play and their surrounding traditions often serve as powerful social dramas that reimagine the cultural practices of the community from which they originate. It’s easy to dismiss our games as being confined merely to their space of performance—after all, outside of Cameron, the Crazies are just regular, everyday Duke students. But as anthropologist Clifford Geertz might argue, sporting events such as basketball games are actually rooted profoundly to our world off the court. They act not only as forms of entertainment, but also as a sort of “stage” upon which our cognitive codes are projected and reenacted in the form of a charged, competitive performance.
For instance, rivalries in sports often trace their origins to certain critical points upon which boundaries of high sensitivity within a culture are trespassed—regional identities, racial disparities and class differences, among others. The 1980s Lakers-Celtics rivalry was memorable because it exemplified a series of binaries that were sensitive to the American conscience at the time—West vs. East, black vs. white, flashy showmanship vs. blue-collar fundamentals. In international soccer, few rivalries can match the fervor of Argentina-Brazil because historical narratives of shared borders, racial resentment and political confrontation surround each game with an atmosphere much heavier than the sport itself.
Yet, once players step onto the field, hierarchies that may exist in the outside world are momentarily suspended to allow both teams an equal opportunity for victory. Games are built upon rigid sets of rules by which all participants must abide. No matter how inept the referees are perceived to be, their word remains absolute—otherwise, this makeshift realm of fair and equal play would fall apart. When the game clock is running, our surface-level ties are briefly forgotten, allowing us to confront our deeper anxieties and raw relations with other players with directness and honesty. Sports provide a space for pure human fellowship in a way that words often cannot create for themselves.
We care about our sports because they’re more than just games—they are deep structures of performance in which we watch our culture being played out before us and thereby better understand it ourselves. They render visible what is often invisible yet crucial to who we are. As sensory creatures, we often find it difficult to understand the ideological complexity of our nature. Our minds need sports as tools of corporeal introspection—to visualize abstract, intellectual notions of sensitivity and control by comprehending them in tangible terms of the body. Organized play thus acts a poignant simulation of our unspoken values and beliefs.
As a Duke student, the words “dirty-black tenter” and “Cameron Crazie” have formed a crucial portion of my self-identifying vocabulary these days. To someone outside of Krzyzewskiville, the idea of sleeping outside in the winter cold by choice just screams irrationality. But what consecrates the experience in my mind is the way it expresses our identity as members of a makeshift micro-community that crosses the boundaries of our separate worlds. No longer do people tent just to gain entrance to a basketball game. Instead, the tradition has reached beyond its original purpose to create a narrative of unity among students of different backgrounds. Section 17, like any good team, is one body composed of many minds, a microcosm of how sports can bring together a collection of brilliant minds under a space of mutual understanding.
To me, Duke is a place where diversity becomes unity, where mind and body merge to fulfill human potential, all under a shared desire to win. So Carolina better be ready come February 18th—because that’s exactly what we’ll do.
Chris Lee is a Trinity junior. His column runs every other Friday.
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