It is popularly believed within sport's practice communities that a contest fails if the competitor who performs most skilfully in it does not win. The belief is rarely acknowledged explicitly, and therefore deserves to be considered ideological in a sense. In this paper I challenge that belief. For conceptual reasons, I confine the discussion to the purposive sports, e.g. football and tennis. The concept of skill is approached by articulation of a set of platitudes about skill in the purposive sports. (...) The first is the conceptual wedge between skill and success. The second is the distinction between skill and other performance-relevant qualities such as courage, strength and luck. The third is the fact that skill deficits can be compensated by sufficient amounts of the other performance relevant qualities. The fourth is the dispositional and dynamic character of skill. The relation between skill and final objectives in the purposive sports means that (i) qualities such as nerve and courage can trump the more skilful performance; and (ii) poor execution of a narrow range of skills can result in the competitive failure of the more skilful performance. There is no viable ideal of sport that would ground regret about the realisation of the immediately preceding possibilities. The inclination towards such regret might be partly motivated by the wish to take a gratifying view of ourselves. An end to this response, and a more inclusive, less hierarchical conception of sport skills, is worth recommending. (shrink)

Styles of Radical Will, Susan Sontag's second collection of essays, extends the investigations she undertook in Against Interpretation with essays on film, literature, politics and a ground-breaking study of pornography.

Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel are a great collection of sermons by Joseph Butler, the famous English theologian and philosopher.

In a previous article (Kretchmar 2005), I identified problems in a certain species of games and traced these harms to something I called a 'game flaw'. Unfortunately, 'the beautiful game' is a member of that species. I say it is unfortunate because Paul Davis (2006), when taking me to task for providing an argument that, in his terms, was 'not especially compelling', focused on the game of soccer (hereafter, football). The issue over which we contended is one of 'time management'- (...) that is, how game initiation, duration and closure are structured. I suggest that two basic methods for managing such requirements are available. Games take place during a stipulated amount of time or for a specified number of events. In my original article, I identified four fundamental problems that may accompany time-regulated games. In this essay, I attempt to fortify those claims against Davis's criticisms. (shrink)

This paper is a response to Nicholas Dixon's defence of the moderate partisan as the ideal fan of team sports. For Dixon, the moderate partisan is someone who combines a partisan fan's loyalty for a particular team with a purist fan's desire to see fair and skilful play by all participants. My aim is to argue that there is no ideal fan of team sports. In particular, there is nothing specially commendable about the moderate partisan's loyalty that justifies the claim (...) to be the ideal fan. There are many other ways of being a fan than being a purist or a partisan as described by Dixon. None of them is morally superior to the other, assuming that they meet basic requirements of respect for others and for fair play. I argue that the commitment of partisan fans to particular teams is better explained by other values than the moral virtue of loyalty. A better explanation and justification of partisanship, and indeed of fan interest in sport generally, is found in the human attachment to narrative as a way of creating meaning in our lives. (shrink)