Terminación y montaje final

Common games of sport and gambling are but stripped down, stylized and abbreviated dramas, inviting the direct or vicarious participation of masses of people seeking for some adventure, no matter how miniscule, to provide story matter for their lives.

The temptation is strong simply to regard sport and gambling as expressive of the ludic impulse – forms of play motivationally sui generis, as Huizinga (1949) would have it. Without denying that sport and gambling are developmentally related to the ludic impulse, continual adult involvement with sport and gambling cannot be accounted for in this reductive fashion. An alternative interpretation is that participation, direct or vicarious, in sport or in gambling provides occasion for what Goffman (1967) refers to as “the generation of character,” or for the development of what Mancuso and Sarbin (1983) call self-narratives. Children perhaps begin to play at sports and games of chance for the same motives as kittens playing with a ball of yarn. But transformations can occur from the ludic base. “To display or express character, weak or strong, is to generate character. The self, in brief, can be voluntarily subjected to re-creation” (Goffman, 1967, p. 237). Somewhere in the developmental sequence a transformation occurs, so that activity once pursued out of blind motive is now engaged in with reasoned purpose, however miscalculated that activity might be as strictly hedonic rationalism (compare Allport’s 1937 concept of functional autonomy). The guaranteed payoff for sport and gambling activity is that they provide a venue for stylized and reasonably safe adventures, and so provide sequence and story for the lives of the participants.

This argument can be usefully elaborated by considering the self- transforming functions associated with each of the four forms of play identified by Caillois (1961). These are:

Agon. Games or sport played against an opponent involving the

possibility of victory or defeat. All professional sports fall into this category, as do such confrontational gambling methods as poker or backgammon.

Alea. Games in which the outcomes are determined entirely by chance –

craps, roulette, lottery games, bingo. In sport, chance is not supposed to play much of a role, except in coin flips to determine who gets the ball and other minor intrusions.

Mimicry. In this form of play, the actor imitates another person, role, or

object – as when children play cowboys and Indians or pretend to be an animal. Adult theater is mimicry play. Another case of mimicry play is that of the football fan who identifies with the team and symbolizes this identification through use of the pronouns “we” and “our,” or perhaps by using team emblems as a part of personal apparel.

Vertigo. Amusement park rides provide a clear example of this form of

play. Long-distance running also belongs. Fights and sentimental betting are also classifiable here, for this sort of betting is instrumental in producing a greatly heightened sense of the dramatic impact of the events in question. (See Herman, 1976, for an elaboration of these categories.)

All of the sporting events, gambles, and other forms of play here mentioned have the character of being closed or finished dramatic episodes. These events have a conventional beginning, a middle, and an end. And all are in some way value weighted. The yield is victory or defeat in the agon category. It is monetary wins and losses for chance games. The value weighting for mimicry, I suggest, is one of direct identity enrichment through an amplification of one’s repertory for role enactments.

The value of vertigo is revealed through an examination of the nature of the thrill: that which James said we live for even as we live by habit. Balint (1959) suggests that the thrill involves three essential elements: fear, voluntary entry, and hope for survival.

A Ferris-wheel has just these characteristics, as does a fox hunt, a bobsled run, or sky diving. The value of such action is that the consequences of having enjoyed such thrilling experiences flow beyond the bounds of the occasion. One tells stories about these events, “dines out” on them, elaborates and embroiders on successive retellings. In this fashion, the life story of the participant is enriched.

These elements of the “thrill” are present in the three other forms of play as well. For certainly in agonistic play there is fear, voluntary entry, and hope for survival. Similarly, entry into aleatory games is voluntary, involves fear of loss, and even in the case of Russian roulette one hopes for survival. Mimicry involves the fear of embarrassment, of being caught out, of having one’s identity improperly read. Here again one decides to enter the play and one hopes to overcome or master stage fright, or the risk of being exposed.

The thrill is the expected product of adventure. Engagement in the types of thrill-producing play here outlined offers the same kind of potential for self-construction as outlined previously for adventure. Here are confected episodes which are bound to produce swings of value, and thus is time filled and punctuated – existing becomes living. This theoretical view is strongly supported by observation. Guttman (1978) provides a summary of empirical investigations of athletes. The protocols

overwhelmingly support the positive self-construction effect of sports participation; “feeling that one exists,” “discovering myself,” “realizing oneself,” “finding an expression of the self,” “knowing oneself,” “communicating nonlinguistically,” “obtaining recognition from others,” or “dominating others.”

Guttman quotes from Roger Bannister’s description of his feelings as he neared completion of the first four-minute mile:

I had a moment of mixed joy and anguish, when my mind took over. It raced well ahead of my body and drew my body compellingly forward. I felt that the moment of a lifetime had come. There was no pain, only a great unity of movement and aim. The world seemed to stand still, or did not e x i s t . . . . I felt at that moment that it was my chance to do one thing supremely well. I drove on, impelled by a combination of fear and pride. (1976, p. 77)

This is a literary reconstruction of a fleeting moment, but one that succeeds well in showing the dramatic and self-constructive potential of a single agonistic sporting event. The context for this performance was unique and transformed it into the thrill of a lifetime. The accomplishment was ratified by a huge public, waiting anxiously to see who would be the first human being to cause two completely arbitrary metrics, 240 seconds and 1,760 yards, to converge by unaided human pace. Roger Bannister, physician, has a place in the annals of history far more distinguished than that of later and faster runners. As a component of individual biography, surely Bannister’s record-breaking run occupies for him a more central place than is commonly the case for middle-aged men who happened to have competed in athletics in their youth.

Direct participation in sports is extremely common among young people. James Michener (1976) makes the point in his compendious survey, Sports in America: “Young people need that experience of acceptance. . . . In the United States it is sports that have been elected primarily to fill this need” (p. 19).

Sports in the United States constitutes one of the chief means, if not

the chief means, by which a young person might construct a life story

that is generally considered to be full and complete. As noted previously, sports involvement by means of spectatorship virtually permeates the entire U.S. population – with the vast majority of the population devoting daily attention to occurrences in the world of sport.

Gambling activity in the United States is extremely common, accepted, and shows every indication of a trend toward increasing volume. A recent report states that in 1983 $132 billion was wagered,

with about 20 percent of that amount lost to the gambler. In other words, in 1983, something like $26 billion was paid in voluntary taxation and contributions to the owners of legal and illegal gambling enterprises. This figure might be considered to be the price tag attached to the aggregate of aleatory thrills purchased by the U.S. population in the year.

Participation in sporting activity, as player or as spectator, and in gambling activity is pervasive in our world, and at the same time is noneconomic in the narrowly rational sense of that term. Moreover, both of these classes of activity are so heavily stylized and rule bound as to produce events that are esthetically uninteresting and intrinsically boring. Slot machines cycle in about 5 seconds. A hand of 21 is often completed in less than a minute, and almost all casino games complete a cycle in less than five minutes. Baseball, football, and basketball games might be said to command some interest for their pure beauty or intrinsic dramatic quality, but I argue that this appeal is slight and fleeting. Extrinsic context in the form of league or national competitions or comparisons with existing records does contribute to the interest of what is going on, as does a complete knowledge of the intricate possibilities diverging from each moment of play. But the crucial element in a sporting contest is that its outcome is not known ahead of time; and more, that there are those on and off the competing teams who look to the final result with personal interest. An adventure in the small, one might redeem the empty time by investing attention and perhaps money in the unfolding of the minor fates involved. Aleatory gambling events are totally devoid of interest unless one buys part of the action. Then there is thrill to be had, if only the downward thrill of disappointment. Poker is a game of the utmost mechanical simplicity, and is therefore entirely without interest unless enriched by the exchange of tokens of value. When so enriched, poker is one of the few human activities that is commonly sustained over periods as long as 24 hours or more, with few or no interruptions for sleeping, eating, or any purely ludic diversion. These contrived adventures are important. Out of their combination and repetition elements are acquired for the construction and sustenance of suitable self-narratives.