Sport and the (Asian) Martial Arts Ethos: "Winning Ugly"

Title: Sport and the (Asian) Martial Arts Ethos – Subtitle: “Winning Ugly” ON TERMINOGY: WHEN I TALK ABOUT ‘SPORTSMANSHIP’ I REALLY MEAN ‘SPORTSPERSONSHIP’, INCLUDING MEN AND WOMEN. THE INCLUSIVE TERM HAS NOT ESTABLISHED ITSELF YET AND I DO REFER TO SOME HISTORICAL TEXTS WHICH USE ‘SPORTSMANSHIP’. FOOTBALL – not American Football = SOCCER I will start with 2 theses: Thesis 1.: The martial arts ethos plays a similar role as the idea of SPORTSMANSHIP in Western sports. 2ndly: Often, when people act in an UNSPORTING MANNER, the display of central skills is replaced by something else – and that is often UGLY. In a good competition you bring out the best in each other. You want to beat your opponent when she is at her strongest; this is one aspect of sportsmanship. NICELY ILLUSTRATED IN TV SERIES: COBRA KAI [Update of Karate Kid]: Instructor Johnny Lawrence tells his students off after a tournament for fighting ‘dirty’ – one competitor was deliberately injured = weakened: ANALOGY: “Two Cobras In The Jungle. One Kills The Strongest Lion, The Other Kills A Crippled Monkey. Which Cobra Do You Want To Be?” The lesson is: How much joy – or even honour – can there be in such a win – knowing that you beat a weakened opponent. In popular games (e.g. football) we have been observing for more than a century that the ‘winning attitude’ (winning at all cost) has gained greater acceptance, to the detriment of the notion of sportsmanship. Defenders keep kicking the star striker (Ronaldo), to wear HIM down – and sometimes they have to go off on a stretcher. When football was played by gentlemen, committing a deliberate foul was bad form. Here is a quote from 1891, discussing the novel idea of the penalty kick – and the penalty area in football: “It is a standing insult to sportsmen to have to play under a rule which assumes that players intend to trip, hack, and push their opponents and to behave like cads of the most unscrupulous kind. I say that the lines marking the penalty area are a disgrace to the playing field of a public school.” [= private school, where you will find gentlemen] Gentlemen would not behave like that. (McIntosh 1979: 80) But - things have changed. Today, players frequently fall down in the penalty area (simulation); they argue with the referee (disputing decisions), attempt to intimidate the referee (by squaring up to them), or they commit strategic fouls. All of this subverts the ‘good contest’. Thesis: Sportsmanship promotes the ‘good contest’ (You want to beat your opponent when she is at her strongest) What is ‘sportsmanship’? Amos Alonzo Stagg, head football coach of 40 years at the University of Chicago [1892-1932], defined sportsmanship as ‘a delightful fragrance that people will carry with them in their relations with their fellow men.’ 50 YEARS LATER: Henry C. Link in his book ‘ Rediscovery of Morals’ (1947) writes: ‘Sportsmanship is probably the clearest and most popular expression of morals.’ What I take from such definitions is that SPORTSMANSHIP is about how we treat others – our opponents. I propose that sportsmanship is part of your sense of FAIR PLAY. Now we need to know what ‘fair play’ is. TENTATIVELY: central to FAIR PLAY is: the equality of conditions for all competitors. The rules of a game aim to insure FAIR PLAY: equality of conditions. For example, in football, at half-time you swap sides with the other team, so as to equalise for any advantages/disadvantages of terrain/weather. But FAIR PLAY is more than this: I would suggest that SPORTSMANSHIP is that part of fairness which goes beyond what is covered by the rules – or what the rules require. Peter J. Arnold (1983) writes: ‘The idea of sport as a social union takes into account, but goes beyond an agreement to willingly abide and play by the rules in the interests of what is fair. It is also concerned with the preservation and continuation of its best traditions, customs, and conventions so that the community which makes up the social union cannot only cooperatively participate in sport, but successfully relate to one another as persons through an understood, shared, and appreciated mode of proceeding.’ [This sounds Kantian: you are not relating to each other merely as means when you are playing sports.] EXAMPLES of SPORTSMANSHIP: A Tennisplayer can overrule the line-judge and say to his opponent: ‘No, your ball was in.’ [Nadal] Paulo Di Canio stopped play by intercepting the ball with his hands (= handball). [During a Premier League match in 2000, Di Canio was receiving a cross into the penalty box, but he caught the ball with both hands and thus stopped play. Di Canio had seen the opposite goalkeeper Paul Gerrard collapse outside the penalty box and refused to take advantage of the unguarded net. Di Canio broke the rules (handball) but not for opportunistic reasons – to benefit his opponents.] The Spanish runner, who was in 2nd place, guided the man in the lead, who stopped running, thinking he had crossed the finish line, toward the actual finish line. [May the best athlete win! Critic: ‘Part of running is knowing where the finish line is. But the Spanish runner obviously disagreed.’ At a highschool event, one girl was – wrongly – disqualified, but the girl who ‘won’ handed over her medal to the disqualified athlete. SPORTSMANSHIP in these examples means: A win must be earned, must be based on merit. Sport here understood as: ‘A FAIR MEASURE OF PERFORMANCE – ON THE DAY’. James Keating (1962: 29) quotes from Webster’s dictionary: A sportsman is "a person who can take loss or defeat without complaint or victory without gloating and who treats his opponents with fairness, generosity and courtesy. Examples of poor sportsmanship include: throwing equipment, using illegal equipment, bad language, arguing with an umpire’s judgment call or harassing an umpire, opposing players or spectators." Keating, p. 32: For a professional athlete ‘to work daily and often intimately with one's competitors and to compete in circumstances which are highly charged with excitement and emotion, while still showing fairness and consideration, is evidence of an admirable degree of self-mastery.’ [overlap with MA!] [Keating differentiates between SPORT (diversion, fun, play) and ATHLETICS (serious, contest for prize) – I am not sure how useful that distinction is.] PRELIMINARY DEFINITION: Sportsmanship: 1. An act which benefits your opponent, but which is not required by the rules; 2. Not using the rules strategically – i.e contrary to their purpose – to gain an [UNFAIR] advantage. I WANT TO ILLUSTRATE THE 2ND ELEMENT NOW – Using the rules strategically. This is about The Good Contest and the exercise/display of skill We can say that a central function of the rules of a game is to facilitate – to protect – the display/exercise of skill. Intentionally interfering with the ability to display or exercise one’s skill [e.g. hacking at the star striker] prevents a fair measure of performance – and it is contrary to sportsmanship – because you don’t bring out the best in each other. If I manage to take the ball away from you – skilfully and in accordance with the rules – you have nothing to complain about. At that moment, my skills are just superior to yours. I do curb the display of your skills – because I have taken the ball away from you – but I do so in accordance with the rules – I am the better competitor. EXPLAIN YUGOSLAVE FOUL: TACTIC BY THE YUGOSLAV TEAM IN THE 1980 In Basketball: If I stop a quick counter attack, before it can develop, through a FOUL = Yugoslav foul, then I curb your display of skill, because I stop your counter attack – but I also curb my own display of skill, because I use a foul, rather than outplaying my opponent – or playing hard defense. Quote from: Friedrich Georg Jünger: DIE SPIELE (1953: 99) where he says something very important about skills – first in the original for the benefit of our German speakers: ‘Regeln sind nicht nur die positiven Bestimmungen, die den Anfang, den Fortgang und das Ende des Spiels sichern, sondern auch die negativen, die ein spielwidriges Verhalten nicht zulassen. Dazu gehört, daß die Geschicklichkeit eines Mitspielers nicht vorsätzlich verletzt wird.’ In English: ‘Rules are not only positive determinations which secure the beginning, continuation and end of the game, but also negative determinations which don’t permit rule violations. Part of this is that the ability to display one’s skill may not be intentionally interfered with by other players.‘ [MY STANDARD EXAMPLE WOULD BE: consistently hacking at Ronaldo to make him less effective]. So, players who interfere with or curb the display of skill of their opponents either A) break the rules or B) act contrary to the idea of SPORTSMANSHIP – because displaying your game-related skills is central for a good contest. – YOU CAN ABIDE BY THE RULES AND STILL CURB THE DISPLAY OF SKILLS BY YOUR OPPONENT – something I will illustrate soon. The ‘good contest’ (as noted by Arnold 1992: 243; Fraleigh 1982: 42) requires a certain attitude by the athlete: embracing the idea that the contest should promote the display of skills of all competitors – MINE AND YOURS – (within the boundaries of the rules). One function of the rules is to safeguard the display of skill (Jünger 1953; Fraleigh 2003: 170). When a competitor deliberately curbs the display of skill of an opponent, we witness a ‘bad contest’. If this curbing of skills results in a win for the ‘bad contestant’, it is often called an ‘ugly win’. The contest is not just substantially impoverished, i.e. not as good as it could be, there is also an aesthetic element to suppressing the display of skill in sports – it is ‘ugly’ to watch, because the beauty of skilful action is replaced by something else (e.g. cynical fouls, strategic fouls, or a misuse of the rules). AS I SAID ABOVE: YOU CAN CURB THE SKILL OF OTHERS BY VIOLATING THE RULES [A FOUL] – OR MIS-USING A RULE. HOW THAT CAN BE DONE I WILL ILLUSTRATE WITH AN EXAMPLE FROM A MARTIAL ART. THE MA ETHOS In a book on Sportsmanship from 1931, Charles W. Kennedy takes the view that it was not sufficient that sportsmanship characterises man's activities on the athletic field; it must permeate all of life. This is very close to Asian Martial Arts. I want to distinguish the new phenomenon of MAs as sports [OLYMPIC TAEKWONDO, JUDO & this year KARATE IN TOKYO] and MA proper See Irena Martínková & Jim Parry (2015): Martial Categories: Clarification AND Classification, Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, DOI: 10.1080/00948705.2015.1038829.: understood as a system of self-defence/fighting which is rooted in a philosophical doctrine (Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism). Because of this philosophical basis, MAs are often viewed as paths to self-cultivation [cultivating your skill, character, self-control, virtues] So just like the old-fashioned view of SPORTSMANSHIP the ETHOS of such MAs imbues your life: FOR EXAMPLE: RESPECT FOR OTHERS - PARTICULARLY ELDERS [ALSO, RESPECT FOR TEACHERS: MA - BUT ALL TEACHERS – THEY HAVE ACHIEVED A CERTAIN SKILL LEVEL. [“Those who can – do; those who can’t, teach.” (used by George Bernard Shaw's in a play 1905)] Some principles from Shotokan Karate [https://blackbeltwiki.com/20-principles-of-karate]: First know yourself, then know others. Karate goes beyond the dojo. Karate is a lifelong pursuit. Apply the way of karate to all things. Therein lies its beauty. This to illustrate how the MA imbues your life. Irena Martınkova & Jim Parry write: (2016: 155): ‘in present society the emphasis on victory is immense, and often dominates contemporary sport. This approach affects the way of fighting – victory over an opponent does not necessarily require reaching the perfection of the individual (which is the aim in martial paths), nor absolute excellence (which is the aim in martial arts), but only relative excellence (enough to win this particular contest).’ So Martinkova & Parry have diagnosed the same illness we have in other sports – in MA as sports: the winning-at-all-cost attitude. The ethos of the MA (which to some degree plays the same role as sportsmanship in Western sports) is in conflict with how some practitioners approach the sport. Illustrate: Two years ago, at the World Taekwondo Championships in Manchester there was a lot of booing, when the British fighter Bianca Walkden won gold. Walkden defeated her Chinese opponent Zheng Shuyin, not on points, but by forcing her opponent repeatedly to step outside of the ring, which led to Zheng’s disqualification. The rules state that if you incur 10 penalty points – called gam-jeom - you will be disqualified. Walkden won by PUSHING – not by kicking, punching & blocking – the traditional skills of TKD. She introduced a new skill of pushing your opponent out of the fighting area. SHOW VIDEO CLIP: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW, THE SCORE IN THE FINAL ROUND IS 20:6 FOR SHENG. 5 OF THE 6 POINTS FOR WALKDEN ARE PENALTY POINTS. ONLY 1 SUCCESSFUL PUNCH FOR WALKDEN = 1 POINT. SHENG: 20 POINTS FOR SUCCESSFUL KICKS & PUNCHES. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/av/taekwondo/48318270 Sheng had beaten Walkden in the previous 3 encounters. After the fight Walkden said: ‘I went out there needing to find a different way to win and a win is a win if you disqualify someone – it’s not my fault.’ [Note the use of active voice – not passive voice. Walkden doesn’t say: ‘I beat her’, she says: ‘I disqualified her.’ Normally you would use the passive voice: ‘Miroslav was disqualified’ – because he did something wrong. His opponent didn’t make him be disqualified – his opponent didn’t disqualify Miroslav – Miroslav did that himself.] Also note Walkden’s addition: ‘it’s not my fault.’ I think here Walkden admits that something went wrong or wasn’t quite right in the fight: she didn’t win in the traditional way: kicking & punching. To win by PUSHING – your opponent out of the ring is unusual – unless you do Sumo wrestling. The British fighter’s message here is: it doesn’t matter how you win, it only matters that you win. HISTORY OF RULE CHANGE IN TKD: Pushing your opponent (using your hands) has been against the rules of sparring in Taekwondo for a long time (for at least 30 years, when I was a young instructor in Edinburgh). In early 2017 there was a rule change. Now pushing your opponent is allowed if you immediately follow up with a kick. But simply pushing your opponent, without any follow-up attack, is still penalized. The rule change was introduced in order to facilitate continuity of fighting. Often fighters get into a clinch, which would then have to be broken up by the referee. It is noteworthy that Walkden’s follow-up kicks after pushing never resulted in a score. Her kicks were either too weak or only perfunctory because the aim was to push her opponent over the boundary line, rather than to score valid points for kicks or punches. The purpose of the rule change, to facilitate continuity of fighting, was subverted because the fight was stopped every time Walkden pushed Zhang out of the ring. Walkden was using this rule-change to her advantage. The booing of the audience reflects the undesirability of a victory by a clearly inferior fighter based on deliberate disqualification (due to a combination of poor ring management skills by Zheng and several refereeing errors). After all, the central test in Taekwondo is: kicking and punching (and blocking). And in this respect Zheng was the superior fighter and the score would be 20:1 for Zheng, if we were to ignore the penalty points resulting from pushing. From the martial arts point of view this was not an honourable win – but viewed as a sport Walkden was happy to win in this way. Walkden did not beat Zhang on points but through forcing her out of the fighting area, which led to her disqualification. A true martial artist could not enjoy winning in this fashion. In this bout we could see how the ethos of the martial art and the ethos of the Olympic sport came apart. One of the tenets of TKD: integrity (here understood as respect for your opponent and for yourself), this has been abandoned in favour of the idea that winning is all that counts. Walkden was using Sheng merely as a means to win – not to promote the good contest – not to bring out the best in each other. She re-assigned a new purpose to this particular rule – effectively undermining the good contest. Such a split is something we have been observing in Western sports for a while now. In football, for example, sportsmanship and fair play urge against committing strategic fouls or trying to argue with the referee, but competitors do it anyway. In Manchester it became apparent that when martial arts become sports they are not immune to such tactics: using the rules in a way which is contrary to the spirit of the martial art is now an option. Two other examples from Olympic Taekwondo come to mind: the use of the VAR-card at the end of a match to give a tired fighter an opportunity to take a breather and, second, when being comfortably in the lead, refusing to engage with your opponent in the dying moments of the final round by running out of the contest area. Such a competitor is refusing to fight. This tactic only results in one penalty point, but it is contrary to the spirit of Taekwondo, because of another of its tenets: indomitable spirit. Zheng displayed the traditional skills of punching, kicking and blocking (scoring 20 points); Walkden displayed the new ‘skill’ of pushing your opponent out of the ring (scoring 10 penalty points), as well as a minimal display of central skills (scoring 1 point for a punch). Walkden mainly curbed the display of her own skill, and to a lesser degree that of her opponent. She replaced the central skills of her MA (punching, kicking and blocking) with the skill of pushing your opponent out of the ring until they are disqualified. This match was a bad contest as well as an ugly contest, but, more importantly, it violated the tenets (its ethos) of Taekwondo. This illustrates how the ethos of the competitor and the ethos of the MA can come apart, when there is a sports side to the MA (just like in Western sports). ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF USING THE RULES TO GAIN AN ADVANTAGE – BY CURBING SKILLS: CRICKET Underarm bowling incident 1981 [WARNING: I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT CRICKET!] [https://thenewdaily.com.au/sport/cricket/2018/03/28/underarm-bowling-incident/] “With New Zealand needing a six from the last ball to tie the match, Greg Chappell decided to order the underarm delivery to deny NZ any chance of tying the match, let alone winning. As a batsman, it is almost impossible to hit an underarm bowl. As a result, Australia won the match and the series 2-1. The underarm ball was not against the rules at the time. However, it was considered to be unsportsmanlike.” EXPLAIN UNDERARM BOWLING! Rather than bowling overarm = throwing/pitching, you roll the ball along the ground. SHOW VIDEO CLIP [3 Minutes in]: Video at 3 Minutes in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmknUVoY6ho SUBSEQUENTLY UNDERARM BOWLING BECAME ILLEGAL This action effectively stopped the contest. If you use this tactic then: You curb your own skill, by rolling the ball along the ground. You curb the skill of the batsman – and the fielders who would try to catch the ball. [YOU ARE REPLACING THE CENTRAL SKILLS of CRICKET WITH SOMETHING ELSE: UNDERARM BOWLING] NZ prime minister Robert Muldoon described the underarm bowl as “the most disgusting incident I can recall in the history of cricket” and “it was an act of true cowardice and I consider it appropriate that the Australian team were wearing yellow”. Former Australian captain Richie Benaud, said in his television commentary that the underarm bowl was “gutless”. MORE RECENT EXAMPLE FROM TENNIS: At the US open, earlier this month, to Andy Murray’s considerable irritation, Tsitsipas took a seven minutes toilet break – and a medical time-out as well. Later, Murray labelled the extended break as “cheating”. I don’t think it’s cheating. Let’s assume that he didn’t need such a long toilet break. If Tsitsipas used these breaks strategically, he misused/misapplied the rules. Rather than playing he used breaks strategically – contrary to the spirit of the game. Not promoting his own skills, nor those of his opponent. This is also winning ugly. He weakened his opponent, Murray, rather than promoting the good contest. NOTE: Winning ugly is not the same as running down the clock. When you want to hold on to your lead, you can play hard defense. This may sometimes be boring for viewers, but not always. After all, you are using a central skill: holding on to the ball. There is a standing challenge to your opponent: Come and get it, if you can! Supporters of the STRATEGIC FOUL [in BASKETBALL for example] will say – to the team in the lead: You have to earn it at the foul line! But resorting to a foul is a failure of skill – they couldn’t take the ball away from us. The SFer replaces the skill of outplaying their opponent – by getting possession of the ball – with a foul. If you win, based on a strategic foul, you have replaced skillful action with fouling. YOU WIN UGLY. The philosopher Aurel Kolnai helps us to explains what is going on here: Games & Aims (1965: 121) – BERNARD SUITS/GRASSHOPPER A game is defined by its constitutive rules (together with the equally arbitrary agonistic aims of the partners, i.e., the theme proper of the game);[then Kolnai contrasts this with life] moral rules, however relevant they are to the conduct of life, do not define life, which can be carried on with more or less success and enjoyment in occasional or systematic defiance of some or many moral rules; what they define is the person’s moral status in life, which has no analogue in [sic] game. The concern of “being moral” or “being good”, no doubt intimately conjoined with many standard and focal purposes in life, itself constitutes one such paramount purpose whose service demands a great deal of thematic attention, thought, strategy and effort; whereas to abide by the rules of the game is not a thematic part of the game but merely a self-evident presupposition of playing it. The rules form an immutable set of data on which, but not for which, all planning and thought-effort in the game has to work. Suits (2005: 46) had the same insight: ‘In morals obedience to rules makes the action right, but in games it makes the action.’ Winning Ugly is not cheating. It means to use the rules to your advantage, to incorporate them into your game plan. Kolnai explained that the rules have a transcendental function: they are the conditions of the possibility of playing a game. ANALOGY: Imagine you are a dancer. You cannot dance without a floor = transcendental element = the condition of the possibility of dancing. Now, if you take out bits of the floor and throw them at your fellow dancers/competitors – so that you will shine, and they might trip, this will make it difficult for them to dance – but also difficult for you. You are curbing the skills of others – and of yourself, when you use the rules as part of your performance/game plan. And that is the conceptual mistake: to misuse the rules or to violate them, so that you may gain an advantage. If you do this, then you win ugly. You incorporate something that has a transcendental function (rules – safeguarding the display/exercise of skill) into your performance. This is contrary to the spirit of games – but it is also a conceptual error. I have suggested that: 1. MA as sports can succumb to the WINNING-AT-ALL-COST disease; 2. This can be done by winning ugly: by either violating the rules (SF, or hacking at the star striker) or by misusing the rules (as Bianca Walkden did – and the underarm bowler did) = you replace a central skill with something else. IF TIME, DiCanio Video: https://www.premierleague.com/video/single/935675