I wrote this after the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. I believe it carries a useful message for creators and artists: that we’re best served by our work when we offer our talents in service to a higher cause, and when we delight in the process – not wasting time and energy dreaming of some imagined better future “after…” or “when…”
Great athletes, artists, and creators aren’t made – they’re born. They’re the product of many lives of gradual, progressive development. This was borne out vividly for a young sports scientist who after completing his PhD was fortunate to find a position in the world-renowned Ball State Human Performance Laboratory working under Dr. David Costill, PhD., a sports science legend.
The young guy believed that what separates great athletes from the mediocre is hard work. Work hard enough, and you, too, can become an Olympian. Costill told him flatly that he was wrong, and after months of weighing and measuring the world’s best marathoners and sprinters, he was forced to agree. There was no way that Joe or Jane Blow, with their malformed and deficient physiology, could mold themselves into champions by effort alone.
I heard recently from a world-class swimmer and All-American water polo player that I met at Stanford in the early 1960s through my roommates who both played on the water polo team. The athlete in question, whose name I won’t give as he values his privacy, told me something of his background and the characteristics he’d been born with that enabled him to excel.
“I was born with freakishly large hands and feet, and an unusual capacity to process oxygen.” What I remember from meeting him 60 years ago is my immediate impression of a young man with extraordinary positive energy. He was a great guy to be around, and my roommate, himself an All American, remarked afterward on the wonderful positivity he exuded.
Few creators could dash off the gorgeous lines blessedly preserved in one of Leonardo’s countless sketches. Nor could we paint water lilies with a power to draw all eyes instantly to them from the end of a museum hall sixty feet away. Nor could we raise people’s heart rate with a portrait of an old man, as Rembrandt could.
Great art is karma, but it is also attunement – it’s practice, inward and outwardly. The physical refinements are necessary but relatively trivial to greatness – the wonderful hand-eye coordination counts for nothing without the soul, heart, and brain.
Yet at our level we are the equals of the great ones, because we can each individually ask for inspiration, and to the extent that we have refined our receptors we can receive it and transmit it for the delight, upliftment, and spiritual hope and health of others.
So here goes – see if you can find yourself at the Olympics.
The best parts of the Olympics are, in a sense, local. They aren’t about medals, dominance, or national pride. They’re about individuals extending themselves and giving together.
The best of the Olympics isn’t about whipping others, but individual pluck and energy. Michael Phelps’s eight Golds effectively hide who he is. For sure, if you’re on the cover of Sports Illustrated, you’re Big Sport and you’ve arrived.
Even the dopers, sent home in disgrace, must know the joy of inner expansion occasionally. Reaching the Olympics requires austerity – how could they persevere without the incentive of a primal joy? These are things we don’t do only for fame or gain.
Trust Joe Henderson, one of running’s most inspired elders, to spot a landmark article in Sports Illustrated soon after the 1972 Games, which were marred by a terrorist hostage-taking in which 11 Israeli athletes died. I’m grateful to Joe for sharing its message, because it has influenced my thinking about sports for fifty years.
In “Gleanings From A Troubled Time,” Bil (correct spelling) Gilbert dissected the positive and negative faces of sport after a difficult Olympic year.
Nowadays, [sport] exists on at least three levels. There is first True Sport, the manifestation of man’s seemingly innate urge to play. True Sport is organized for and often by participants and is essentially a private matter like eating or making love. High Sport is True Sport raised to the level of art by the talent, even genius, of its participants. It is public in the sense that all art is public (great music, painting, literature or sport is incomplete until that time when it is displayed, judged and acclaimed). Finally there is Big Sport in which elements of True and High Sport are present but are modified by other considerations, notably commerce and politics.
It’s a moody, sad article, but it’s redeemed when the tenor suddenly shifts toward the end and Gilbert relates how he and a pal, a college coach, drove four young members of a local girls’ track team to a nearby all-comers meet.
Instead of having to fill out tricky affidavits of eligibility and swear to false performances in the interest of getting into more desirable heats, there was simply a row of event sheets spread out on a long table under the mosquitoes.
“What are we meant to enter?” the girls asked.
“Enter anything you want. School’s out.”
Gilbert contrasts the relaxed mood of the small-time show-up-and-run event with the hype of Big Sport:
It was possible, as it was not earlier in the season, for strategic, political and competitive reasons, to sprawl out on the wooden benches very pleasantly, drink Cokes, slap mosquitoes, talk shop and gossip about the grim summer track events in Eugene, Ore., Canton, Ohio and Frederick, like veterans who have been through the same battle but on different sides.
Big Glenda was there, all 280 pounds of her. She is a phenomenon, a huge, mountainous, exuberant, gross white girl, who for mysterious reasons and in mysterious ways has gathered together from the heart of the District of Columbia a bunch of very strong, fast black dudes, the D.C. Striders. Big Glenda rubs down these tough boys like a trainer, swats them around, eats them out like a sergeant and mothers them like a hen. She begs money for them and gets them scholarships. They love it and she loves it. “There is no mystery about the D.C. Striders,” says Big Glenda. “We’ve done it all with love.”
Gilbert concludes:
High Sport is the creation of geniuses, the exceptionally talented and passionate. It is the sport of [chess champion Bobby] Fischer, [Mark] Spitz, [Billie Jean] King. It satisfies the same needs as other arts. It provides a medium and method of expression by which the talented can comment on themselves and their world. High Sport artists also serve their audiences by stimulating them to consider the nature of man and the world.
True Sport is a Winchester All-Comers meet. It stands to High Sport as a craft does to an art. It is a dignified, honest activity, perhaps of more general social value than High Sport since it involves many more than the few who can practice High Sport. It satisfies the human need for play. Also, as any craft does, it provides an outlet of expression for those who are not high artists, for those with insufficient ability or perhaps dedication. In the same way, it gives pleasure to small audiences, people who have either participated in or studied the sport and have some critical appreciation of it.
Big Sport is a corrupted, institutionalized version of True Sport, which often attempts to pass itself off as High Sport. It stands to High Sport and True Sport as a molded plastic angel does to sculpture and pottery. Occasionally there will be moments of High Sport or True Sport within the framework of Big Sport (as, for example, Spitz swimming in the Olympics, [gold-medalist Dan] Gable wrestling there, Chamberlain winning the last playoff game for Los Angeles). Usually these are testimonials to individual perseverance and passion, to the ability of individuals to put up with institutional inefficiency and the institutional predilection for consistency and routine.
Gilbert is telling us that even at the High Sport / Big Sport / Olympic level the best of True Sport can still be found, and that those of us who were born with mere True Sport bodies and souls should rejoice.
We find True Sport in the underdog U.S. water polo and women’s soccer teams who inspire us not only as artists. We’ve seen their rough edges – how the soccer team got skunked by Brazil last year, and how, at the beginning, the water polo team wasn’t much of a team at all.
Maybe there’s a good chance they’ll lose their finals. But we cheer them on because they’ve built something special starting from scratch, even as we can. We cheer them for their process as much as their results, because our process is theirs.
Update: The U.S. women’s soccer team beat Brazil 1-0 in a game the Brazilians dominated offensively. The Americans were the underdogs to the end, played like a team to the end, dug down and played gritty to the end, and won.
The U.S. men’s water polo team, who weren’t expected to reach the medal round, took silver, losing by 4 points to Hungary, a powerhouse in water polo-mad central Europe.
Surprise. The U.S. men’s basketball team were severely challenged by a ferocious Spanish squad in the gold medal game. The U.S. emerged in far more inspiring fashion than anyone expected. They fought hard and proved they could submerge themselves and meld as a team. The San Francisco Chronicle’s Scott Osler described it beautifully in his post-game wrapup column.
Okay, then, what are the lessons for creators? Are we stratified like athletes? I think so.
True Art is creative work that is inspired from within.
High Art happens when True Art is infused with the transcendent energy and magnetism of high spiritual truth.
Big Art is exemplified by the film industry, which is notorious for bending and subordinating True Art to commercial ends. (This explains why bad movies are made.)