ABSTRACT
This chapter examines sports as a repository for both idealized and degraded parts of self-experience. Sports as action and fantasy catalyze a variety of nostalgic longings, including wishes to resurrect positive experiences from childhood as well as to create false, idealized fantasies about who we wish we were then and now. Sports also contain degraded elements of self that result from attempted reconciliation between playful fantasy and realistic disappointment. Athletes, as the containers of these idealized fantasies, are ambivalently held objects, adored but also hated because they can never live up to the longed-for idealization. The author also examines our longing for a time when play was our job and the suspension of disbelief in sports was a shorter jump from everyday life than the responsibilities and stresses of adult life allow. Nostalgia and the recollection of our sports heroes and our own achievements allow us to dip back into that treasure chest of memory and, of course, fantasy.
