On Exercise with a Small Ball

For many years now, September has been my favorite month. The summer is coming to an end. The weather is warm. The school year is starting. New routines are beginning. Hope and excitement are in the air. But there is another thing that makes September so sweet: college football.

I am embarrassed to admit how much my emotional state fluctuates every weekend in the fall depending on the fortunes of teenagers tossing pigskins around on artificial turf. Marcus Aurelius advised us not to root for teams in the arena, but, try as I might, I'm not the stoic that he was. I care about these players. And I eagerly look forward to every new season, when my dreams of a national championship remain undashed.

It is with some pangs, then, that I have watched the disreputable role that law and lawyers have played in college sports over the last few years. Competing lawsuits, temporary injunctions, warnings from attorneys general, interventions by federal and state judges, all have contributed to a widening sense that our legal system is making a travesty of university athletics. They threaten to undermine a central facet of academic life that has been around for well over a century. It almost makes us forget that these are games, not businesses.

The state of college athletics is such a shame because sports are one of the purest forms of human experience. The joy of throwing a ball with a friend is undeniable. It builds our bodies, our minds and our souls. The combination of exertion, cooperation, concentration, skill and endurance is unique, and it provides a way for us to simultaneously commune with nature and with our fellow man. It is a distinctly human enterprise.

Ball games go way back. The first description of playing ball comes from Homer's epic poem, The Odyssey. Nausicaa, the goddess-like princess of Phaeacia, comes upon a shipwrecked Odysseus while she is throwing a ball with her friends. She overthrows one of her sprinting maidens, and the ball plops down next to a sleeping Odysseus, awakening him and setting in motion the plot arc that eventually leads to Odysseus' return home to Ithaca. The idea that the first ball player in world history was a princess delights my daughters, who are constantly complaining that I only watch boys play sports. This is not entirely true--I coach my daughters' various sports teams and derive great pleasure from it--but I have taken their criticism under advisement.

I had a homecoming of my own last weekend when I gathered a few old friends on a local field to throw a football together. We are all in our forties now, so our routes were slow and our spirals wobbly, but boy, did we have fun. One of our group, a former soccer player, kicked what seemed like an impossibly long field goal (probably about 20 yards in reality) straight through the middle of the uprights. Another, a former pitcher, whizzed lasers at us at astonishing speeds. I didn't do much to write home about, but I did take the opportunity to sprint the length of the field and raise my hands in celebration. It was an hour of paradise.

Galen, the famed Greek physician who lived in the second century A.D., understood the importance of sport to human health. He wrote a treatise entitled "On Exercise With a Small Ball," in which he concluded that ball games were the best form of exercise. They were convenient. They exercised the entire body. They were constantly varied. They were relatively safe (Galen had spent some time as a doctor to gladiators, so he had seen firsthand the damage that bloodsports could wreak on the human body). Ball games required focus and vision and strategy. They were good training for future generals. But most important of all, they were good for the soul.

"I especially praise physical training that provides health for our bodies, harmony for our parts, and excellence for our souls," Galen said, "all of which are qualities found in games with the small ball."

In case you doubt the wisdom of the ancients on the virtues of ball games, may I quote the wisdom of Nick Saban on the topic: "It's not about beating the other guy. It's not about being better than someone else. It's about you being the best that you can be."

I hope that games with small balls will not be destroyed by the shifting landscape of college (and apparently now youth) sports. Perhaps our lawmakers will come through with a Hail Mary bill to save sports before the time clock expires.