ABSTRACT
Many of the current debates about social problems in sport articulate around the two different perspectives on sport encapsulated in the above observation. The artistic term ‘perspective’ suggests that one gets a different view of an object relative to one’s position or distance from that object. The same applies to sport - writers adopt different theoretical positions and/or write from positions of involvement in, or detachment from, sporting practice. Consider the following two statements:
In Huizinga’s eyes, his comments about the intrinsic qualities of play should apply equally well to sport: a sacred realm of activity set apart from other activities. In contrast, another perspective is as follows:
Two wholly different perspectives on sport. The first is that, through their specific rule structures, sports are distinctive social practices, self-contained, and separated out from the rest of social life. All sports (including those which take place in natural environments like climbing or canoeing) provide a set of psychomotor challenges, conditioned by rules, regulations and the necessary equipment, and for which participants have developed skills and strategies in order to meet that sporting challenge. This perspective brings into sharp relief the difference of sport to other activities, the nature and structures of a diverse range of sporting challenges which have been, and continue to be, developed. We can call this the ‘timeout’ perspective - the suspension of the ordinary, the entering into a separate sphere of social life.
