ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a series of exemplars examining pleasure within and through sport for older individuals. It examines some popular cultural reflections of cultural attitudes toward aging, primarily through an examination of poetry dealing with aging. The pleasures to be found in aging bodies and in the actual process of aging, the chapter explores the populist concept of Wabi Sabi and apply it to terms of selected historic poetic writings, specifically drawn from works by Lu Yu and three Korean sijo poets. The chapter demonstrates differing possibilities for worldviews toward the aging body, to disrupt the hegemony of Western views. It has been deliberately counter-scientific, counter Western-hegemonic, and as a result it has also over-simplified and generalized very complex societies and worldviews. The West's dominant discourse has naturalized such attitudes toward the aging athletic body as one that 'fights the good fight', that continues to exemplify a dominant, masculine ideal of the sporting body.
