Radio National's The Sports Factor

with Amanda Smith
13/04/01

No Pain, No Gain!


Summary:

 For Good Friday, how the notion of "No Pain, No Gain", that's so embedded in sport, links with a Christian tradition of improvement through pain and suffering. Sports philosopher JEFF FRY talks about the ecstatic dimension to pain and suffering in sport.

And sports historian WILLIAM BAKER discusses the parallels between evangelical faith and sport, and why athletes who 'get religion' often turn to the evangelical brand for guidance and sustenance.

Plus, a few laughs with DAMIAN CALLINAN, whose one-person show "Sportsman's Night" is one of the hits of this year's Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

Details or Transcript:

THEME





Amanda Smith: And on The Sports Factor this Good Friday, the agony and the ecstasy: how the notion of ‘no pain, no gain’, that’s so embedded in sport, links with a Christian tradition of improvement, of resurrection, through pain and suffering.



Also, some of the parallels between evangelical faith and sport, and why athletes who ‘get religion’ often turn to the evangelical brand for guidance and sustenance.



And later in the program, we’ll have a few laughs with Damian Callinan, whose one-person show ‘Sportsman’s Night’, is one of the hits of this year’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival.



Damian Callinan: Well for those who are not familiar with the Sportsman’s Night, it is basically an event where a lot of people who aren’t very good at sport come along and listen to people to used to be good at sport.



Amanda Smith: And more from Damian Callinan, and the strange and wonderful institution of The Sportsman’s Night, coming up later in The Sports Factor.



Before that though, because it is Easter time, some influences that Christianity has brought to our sport.



William Baker is Professor of History at the University of Maine, in the United States, and a former American college footballer. One of his interests is in the structural similarities between evangelist faith and organised sport, which he sees as particularly strong in his country. But he’s also interested in how Christianity has shaped the modern Olympic Games, that great festival of sport that sometimes also seems like a religious festival. According to William Baker, when the French aristocrat, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, invented the modern Olympics at the end of the 19th century, his conception was deeply influenced by his own religious background and beliefs.



William Baker: He came out of a French Catholic background and it was important to him that he create in the Olympics a kind of ritual and a kind of mythology that was quasi-religious, if you will. He in fact became a humanist, he was originally trained for the priesthood, or his parents wanted him to go into the Catholic priesthood. He went to a Catholic school, he did his vespers, he did his mass, he did his religious studies, but he lost his faith. His creeds fell apart in his hands. And so he turned to that French humanist religion, the so-called Religion of Humanity, by Auguste Compte and he fashioned the Olympic Games in that new humanist direction as he understood it. But he brought to that his Catholic heritage of ritual, and mythology and ceremony and processions and hymns and all that sort of thing. So lots of people have noticed that especially opening ceremonies of the modern Olympic Games, is often like being in church. At least there is a part of the spectacle that is very churchlike.



Amanda Smith: And what informed his kind of famous, much-repeated in various form, idea that these Games are not about winning but about participating?



William Baker: Well that again is a classic kind of amateur ideal, and he gave it a famous way of saying it. But in truth he picked that phrase up from an American Bishop who was in London in 1908 preaching a sermon at the end of the first week of the London Olympics, a fellow by the name of Talbot, a Bishop from Pennsylvania, he was a guest speaker at St Paul’s Cathedral in London, and Coubertin was there in the audience, he heard the sermon and the Bishop said something of that sort: ‘the important thing is not winning, but the important thing is competing’. He was concerned about the nationalism that was intruding upon the Games, and so he was trying to focus on the Games and on the athletes and he was saying to the athletes and to the Olympic officials in the audience, ‘the important thing is not the flag, and it’s not the winning for exterior purposes or ulterior motives, the important thing is the game itself and competing, whether you win or not even'. And Coubertin sort of had a flash of light with that, and he went out saying, and frequently referred to this Bishop as the fellow who had reminded him and had freezed for him that famous saying ‘the important thing is not winning, but participating, or competing.’



Amanda Smith: And the interesting thing is that that was as late as 1908 so that’s one, two, three, four Olympic Games down the track, so de Coubertin was kind of making it up as he went along.



William Baker: Well he was, sure. And I think that’s one thing that makes the history of the Olympics interesting, because lots of things got made up as it went along. In other words, it wasn’t just born out of the heavens in a burst of light and was forever done. A couple of the wonderful ironies of the Olympic processions and ceremonies and all the rituals, is that in 1936 the Germans, the Nazis, for the Nazi Olympics at Berlin, created two of the very famous rituals that became a part of this whole churchlike and some would say Pagan like doings. For example the torch relay, the Germans created that in 1936. You light the torch at Olympia, you bring it through the various countries to the site of the Games. And second they created this wonderful, and again a religious reference, event illuminating the clouds. They called it the Cathedral in the Clouds shot of the beams of light meeting in the sky, particularly in the closing ceremonies, and the Germans created that. So lots of these rituals happened over the hears, in many cases Coubertin thought them up, in other cases the various hosts of the Games created them.



Amanda Smith: Well in their original conception through to now, have the Olympic Games taken on the trappings of religion, so as to make the Games seem more important and special and meaningful than just a bit of running and jumping and swimming etc., or do they really function, do you think, on some kind of religious level?



William Baker: Well one theologian has called religion nothing more than ultimate concern, that is what you’re concerned about ultimately is your religion. Now that can be a saviour God, or it can be a very material kind of reference, you can worship your car, you can worship your family, you can worship nature, or you can worship sport. Do I have to suggest that people tend to make sport their ultimate concern in the modern world? Many people do. There are lots of false Gods in the Olympics: patriotism, consumerism, and ultimately the biggest false God of course, probably is sport itself.



Amanda Smith: So you do see it as a false God?



William Baker: Yes, of course, yes. On my better days I believe in God, and my assumption is that one good reason for people to believe in God, a sort of Judaeo-Christian God, one good reason to believe in God is that one does not get caught up in false idol worship, and sport becomes a false idol. And ultimately sport is, I would contend, wonderful and happy a thing as it is, and worthy a thing as it is, that I want to sustain and see it even enlarged; ultimately it’s not God.



Amanda Smith: I guess in the Olympic Games in terms of the kind of ritual we’re talking about is I suppose in a Christian sense, High Church; what about Evangelical Christianity in sport? I know you’re interested in that as a subject too.



William Baker: Well I’m speaking here as an American who sees a lot of this in my culture. I know that in the States the people who are most visible, the athletes who are most visible in religious sort of witness and that sort of thing, are more evangelical, they are a born-again group, and that is certainly not a negative term for them. They avow that they have been reborn by the spirit of God and by Christ and I would contend that sport has a unique attraction for evangelicals because in many ways the structuring, the theological structuring of the evangelical faith is very similar to the structuring of sport. For example, an evangelical tends to be somewhat Calvinist in the belief that one is either saved or lost, one is either of the elect or one is of the damned; one either believes in Christ or you don’t, it’s very decisive.



Amanda Smith: That’s like you’re a winner or a loser.



William Baker: That’s right. Or a term we use in the States, maybe it’s a sexist term, but to tie a ball game is like kissing your sister, it’s comme ci, comme ca. No, in sport you either win or your lose, and athletes know that. And the ultimate goal is to win. And you play the game for the game’s sake, you try to be a good sport and so forth, but there is that pressure both from within and without to win the game. Well that’s sort of like evangelicalism, you either win and you go to heaven or you lose and go to hell. And there are lots of other similarities. I think both sport and that evangelical religion frequently borders on superstition. Athletes are notoriously superstitious: put their socks on the same way the always do if they win, the coaches wear the same tie to games if they’ve won in the previous week and so forth. There’s a lot of research done on this. Athletes are notoriously, utterly superstitious. That personalistic, evangelical religion, it borders I think always on a kind of superstition that God will intervene and do certain things that in the ancient world they would say ‘The Gods did it for me, or did it this way, or did it that way’. Some athletes talk about God helping them win this game. Well I would say that’s really in the superstition because I doubt if God’s particularly interested in the outcome of a specific game. But you see my point. There are lots of structural similarities between evangelical religion and sport.



Amanda Smith: Sports historian, William Baker. And a collection of lectures Bill Baker gave in Sydney in 1999 is published by the University of New South Wales Press, under the title, ‘If Christ Came to the Olympics’. And he’s just finished a new book, ‘Playing with God – How Religious Folk Learned to Embrace Modern Sport’, and that’s due out next year.



And someone else who’s drawn a link between Christianity and sport is another American, Jeffrey Fry, who teaches philosophy, and the philosophy of sport, at Ball State University in Indiana.



Now we’re all as much familiar with images of athletes grimacing in pain and suffering in loss as we are with them achieving glorious feats. And what Jeff Fry’s interested in is the pain and suffering endured by athletes as an intrinsic part of what they do, the ethic of ‘no pain, no gain’, and its religious overtones.



Jeffrey Fry: Well what I find very interesting is that there is a parallel between what one finds in certain religious discourse about pain and suffering, and what one finds spoken of by athletes about their own pain and suffering. In particular, you hear in athletic discourse this notion of ‘no pain, no gain’, it’s kind of a locker-room slogan. And what I find very interesting is that there are parallels in certain religious literatures which attempt to deal with human pain and suffering and provide a kind of justification of it in a religious context. In particular, I traced a line of response back to St Irenaeus the Bishop of Lyons, who died at the turn of the third century, and Irenaeus had this view that human perfection is a result of development; we did not start out perfect, contra Augustine who did hold that and then held we had this kind of catastrophic fall. Rather Irenaeus believed that we developed, that we started out in very immature state, and perfection is something we strive for in development, and the world is a vale of soul-making, it’s an appropriate place for development and growth and soul-making, through trial and tribulation, suffering and pain.



So I find an interesting parallel between what Irenaeus said and what we hear in athletic discourse about pain being a medium for gain.



Amanda Smith: So this fits the idea of improvement through pain that applies equally to the athlete as to that religious tradition of improvement through suffering, and it’s a self-inflicted pain that leads to virtue.



Jeffrey Fry: Yes. In the case of the athlete it’s chosen, and in the case of life experiences in general it’s not always the case that it’s chosen. But in each case, pain can be viewed as an opportunity. Elaine Scarry who wrote a book called ‘The Body in Pain’ argues that pain is constrictive, that as she puts it, ‘it unmakes the world, it destroys language, it reduces us to groanings’. But in both the theological literature I traced, and also in the athletic discourse that I looked at, there is another side to pain. Pain can also be expansive, it can be an opportunity for growth, it can lead to new self-understandings and broaden the horizons of self-understanding and what is possible for the self.



Amanda Smith: So in that sense, would you see athletes, particularly athletes, as kind of more self-actualised than the rest of us?



Jeffrey Fry: Well in a certain sense, yes. The philosopher William James, the American pragmatist, suggested that few of us really explore the limits of our possibilities, at least in a certain realm of their existence. Athletes, certain elite athletes, do explore those limits. So in that particular arena of life, they probably are more self-actualised.



Amanda Smith: Well I want to talk to you about this in relation to coaches and athletes, because it seems to me that this raises issues for coaches. Their job is to turn the athlete from the person they are into the person they can be, the ideal athlete I suppose. That requires a kind of empathy I would imagine, to do with pain and suffering, and that in itself seems difficult to me, because pain is a kind of funny thing, it’s hard to feel or understand another person’s pain, isn’t it?



Jeffrey Fry: Yes. With regard to one’s own pain, there is nothing so immediate or certain as the experience of pain. But between one’s own experience and the pain of another, there is a great gulf. So the coach of course is not experiencing the pain of the athlete who’s running, for example and who’s now in a state of oxygen debt and experiencing muscle burn and so forth. But a good coach will have to have a kind of empathic understanding of what the athlete is undergoing; unfortunately it’s not always been the case, some coaches seem to be oblivious to the pain athletes undergo, but a good coach, and I think that being a good coach is not an easy task at all, it’s highly underrated, the difficulty in being a good coach, the good coach has to have a tremendous amount of sensitivity and works with the athlete in a partnership and does not lord it over the athlete. The coach asks the athlete to experience pain, yes, but it has to be done in a kind of partnership relationship in which the coach is helping the athlete to realise his or her goals and not simply an imposition of the coach’s goals upon the athlete.



Amanda Smith: As in the religious view of pain and suffering that you’ve talked about, do you think there’s a kind of ecstatic dimension to pain and suffering in sport?



Jeffrey Fry: Yes, very definitely. Ecstatic in the sense that in the experience of pain and breaking through barriers, limitations that one posited for the self previously, one comes to a new self-understanding, the new horizons open. One’s former limitations are no longer limitations, and as a result of that one comes to a new understanding of who one is, a new understanding of the self. So one gets outside of the other self and adopts a new self-understanding.



Amanda Smith: And yet the American cyclist, Lance Armstrong, a Tour de France winner, describes that race, the Tour de France, as ‘a contest in purposeless suffering’; how do you read that comment?



Jeffrey Fry: Well frankly, I don’t think that he really means that, because elsewhere he has spoken of in fact his need to suffer, and that suffering is cathartic for him, he says it’s ‘cleansing’ for him; those are rather enigmatic, cryptic words, I’d like to know exactly what he means by that. But it seems clear to me that he does find some personal meaning in the suffering, the pain and suffering he endures as a cyclist. I suppose what he means to say when it’s ‘purposeless suffering’, is that it doesn’t accomplish any great social goal. However I’m not so sure that that’s the case either, because Armstrong has really been a beacon of hope for those in the cancer community and also outside the cancer community, and to watch someone like Lance Armstrong face pain courageously.



Amanda Smith: This is both as someone who had testicular cancer and also as someone who endures the Tour de France?



Jeffrey Fry: Exactly. Someone who endured tremendous pain in his treatment for testicular cancer, massive doses of chemotherapy, and miraculous recovery, still goes out and accepts these challenges and endures the pain and suffering of cycling, I think is a tremendous inspiration to other people. So it’s not purposeless, I don’t think.



Amanda Smith: Jeffrey Fry, from the Department of Philosophy at Ball State University in the USA, on the purpose of pain, in sport and religion.



Now, from the sacred to the profane. Because this time of year is not only a time of religious festivals. It’s also the time of Australia’s International Comedy Festival, held annually in Melbourne.



There’s a number of shows in the Comedy Festival this year which take sport as their theme, particularly Australian football. One of them is called ‘Sportsman’s Night’, performed by Damian Callinan. It’s about a country football team, the Bodgy Creek Roosters, who’ve been banned from their league for rough play. The inspiration for Damian Callinan to do this comedy show about country football came from a real-life event.



Damian Callinan: Well, without wanting to offend a particular part of Central Victoria and those people in other States who didn’t know the story last year: there was a football club that was banned for on-field discretions we’ll call them, but they weren’t really on-field because they took place before the game in the playground. But what amused me about the whole thing, and it kind of saddened me, was this country town was being portrayed all over the TV tabloids as a victim, that they were going to lose their club, therefore the town was somehow going to die as well.



I suppose it was a reflection on rural Australia at the moment, that that’s the reality, they haven’t got a lot left. And the other side of it though was that the violence was almost ignored, it was like, ‘Well that’s excusable’, it’s somehow part of the culture and just move on. So I was sad on both levels, but two sadnesses make funny. So I decided to write a show about it.



Amanda Smith: Well certainly over the past several years and particularly the incident you’re talking about in Central Victoria last year, the recurrent story about country footy is that it’s dying, country clubs and leagues are folding, there aren’t enough players, and the story that’s always told is that when a country town loses its footy club, it loses the heart and soul of the town. But your show really parodies the idea of the footy club as the mainstay of a local community in a way, especially I’m thinking through the character you use as a kind of narrator in the show who is a 10-year-old boy who hates football but has to pretend that he likes it.



Damian Callinan: Yes I suppose when I saw these TV news reports about the story of this club I actually happened upon seeing an interview where this little kid was there, standing next to his grandfather, and was looking into the camera dolefully, wondering why he was there, and he was virtually by rote, telling the camera what his grandfather had told him to say, which was ‘If we’ve got not footy club then there’s nothing to do on Sat’dys’ was his actual quote. And I suppose it made me look at that kid and think if you are from a town like that, maybe that’s not what you think, maybe the footy club isn’t that important, but it’s so much a part of your life that it has to be, you know, the whole family goes on Saturday, you go there on Thursday night with Dad because he’s there getting pissed with his mates and it struck me that it’s quite said for a kid like that to be in that environment, and the lack of imagination I suppose. I mean I grew up and I loved footy, I was lucky, but I didn’t grow up in the country, mind you, I had options.



Amanda Smith: Well the way you tell the story of this local footy club and town as through the premise of a ‘Sportsman’s Night’ and you play a whole range of characters that you might expect to appear at this kind of event, tell me about the Sportsman’s Night as an institution and as you represented it in your show.



Damian Callinan: Well for those who are not familiar with the Sportsman’s Night, it is basically an event where a lot of people who aren’t very good at sport come along and listen to people to used to be good at sport. That explains it pretty much in a nutshell, but just to pain the picture, there’s generally, oh it’s not always all men, there’s usually about a 10% quota of pretty hard core of female footy followers, then there’s the 10% who are just long because there’s nothing else to do and it’s a night out, and someone’s got to bring the plate, surely. It’s exactly that, usually it’s their fundraiser for the year; in the case of this show it’s the fundraiser to pay for their legal appeal, so they can exist as a club. The club’s in crisis obviously, it’s about to die, they’ve brought in a new coach and he’s been in the city for a while and he’s changed, he’s kind of grown New Age sensibilities, but with his kind of bogan demeanour, he kind of naively tries to insert things into the club’s culture. I’ve actually got Troy with me, if you’re interested in talking – Troy, come over here, mate.



Amanda Smith: This is Troy Carrington who's the coach of the Bodgy Creek Roosters Football Club.



Troy Carrington: ‘Ow are youse going, Amanda? Oh look, I suppose when I come back to coach Bodgy Creek I recognised pretty much that at the end of the day, or any time of the day really, I’ll need to make a few changes about the club. If we were to survive in the long term. So the first thing I done is got ourselves a feng shui consultant into the rooms. Now as you can see she’s – a lot of people say your feng shui in the club rooms is just a few throw rugs and a Japanese water feature in the shower block. Not so, Amanda, no not at all. In fact she’s actually hung all our premiership pennants in this kind of Arabic tent effect, and lined all the kegs up to face Venus. She’s done a lovely job.



But the next thing I done, is I made them all go through, like the players, a mock pregnancy, because I believe that you really need to encourage a family nurturing environment in the club. So I’ve got half the blokes to play a mock pregnancy, the other half to act as surrogate fathers. And I think we’re gunna go somewhere with that.



Amanda Smith: I’m speechless. Tell me more.



Troy Carrington: Oh youse want to know more, Jeez well, I wasn’t going to tell you the rest because the whole thing bloody arsed-up actually, because four blokes who had genuine injuries couldn’t get near the ultrasound, and then of course some blokes started failing their skinfold tests because they’re eating for two, and poor old Peter Hall and Barry Chambers came to blows over what school to send their kiddie to, so the whole thing’s gone completely skew wiff, and fair dinking, we’ve actually had to pull the plug on the whole thing the other day because Eric Dodds had a miscarriage in one of the practice matches. Poor bugger’s had a hysterectomy, looks like he’ll miss the season. So it’s not all a bed of roses coaching in the country, particularly with the kind of blokes we’ve got down there, they’re very toey, very niggly.



First training run Nipper smacks Simmo on the mouth for dropping a chest marker and there was a massive all-in brawl, and someone found out the pub might be changing hands. It’s not an easy job, 'manda.



Amanda Smith: No, well I can see that. Thanks, Troy.



Damian Callinan: Troy’s got to run off and take training.



Troy Carrington: See ya, mate. See you Amanda, thanks for the chat all. Ta.



Amanda Smith: What that does I suppose is conjures up all the kind of crazy ideas that coaches do come up with to motivate and improve their players, and I mean at the top level. You know, AFL coaches getting their players to walk over hot coals is one that comes to mind. And as we’ve just heard, you’ve taken that idea to some delicious and ludicrous extremes in this show.



Damian Callinan: And I think a lot of the AFL clubs have done it, particularly in the kind of era of the ‘90s where New Age sensibilities were coming in a little bit, but they never quite embraced things properly, it’s still the same ethos: let’s make them do firewalking, because pain is going to get them somewhere, rather than something perhaps nurturing, because it’s just against the whole credibility of the club.



Amanda Smith: And I guess the humour in this kind of scene is that it’s such a clash with the culture of this particular footy club, the Bodgy Creek Roosters, this team that’s been banned from its League for two years for causing this punch-up, a 'melee', in the marvellous terminology of the game.



Damian Callinan: A 'harmless melee', in the terminology of the Club President.



Amanda Smith: Is it with affection or disdain that you satirise country football in this show?



Damian Callinan: Good question. It has to be both. In order for the show to work on lots of levels, and meaning that country people love the show, city people love the show, people who love footy like the show, people who hate footy love the show; everyone kind of gets in on some level with it, and to write a piece like this, you do have to have some affection for it, and that comes through the writing, even though some of it could be construed as being quite bitter and pointed, and I’m really making quite a hook into the whole violence of the club. But if you look at that from an amusing side, you’re at least looking at it. People look at the show, and go, ‘Oh hang on, yes, that is quite an interesting, well almost sad thing that the clubs are built on that kind of violent tradition.’



Amanda Smith: But what you’re also suggesting through this 10-year-old kid you’ve got as a character who doesn’t really like footy, who just says what his grandfather tells him to say, he’s much more interested in documentary film making and environmental issues, what you’re kind of suggesting is that there is a younger generation in those country towns for whom football in particular, or sport in general is not very relevant.



Damian Callinan: No, and I suppose that’s true across urban and suburban areas where there’s a lot more competition. There may not be tangible competition in a town like that, footy might be the only sport, but they’re seeing other sports on television, they’re seeing basketball, they’re seeing baseball, and all the other media sort of oppositions to it. So yes, it does become a lot harder, and it’s sadder for the kind of father figures, because that’s their life, and you can see the Club President is almost like willing all the people to be a carbon copy of his life to justify the fact that ‘I spent 24 years of my life playing 456 games for this club. It vindicates it if other people are doing the same thing, and therefore anyone who doesn’t want to play footy, there’s something wrong with them.' So yes, that’s how I look at it.



Amanda Smith: And Damian Callinan’s show ‘Sportsman’s Night’, is part of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, running until the 22nd April.



And that’s The Sports Factor for this Good Friday. Michael Shirrefs is the producer, and I’m Amanda Smith. If you’re having an Easter break, hope it’s a safe and enjoyable one. And I look forward to your company same time next week, here on Radio National.

Guests on this program:

Professor William Baker
Professor of History at the University of Maine in the USA.

Jeffrey Fry
Teacher in the Department of Philosophy at Ball State University in the USA.

Damian Callinan
Comedian and performer of "Sportsman's Night" at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival until 22nd April 2001.

Presenter:
Amanda Smith

Producer:
Michael Shirrefs

© 2002 ABC