No Contest: The Case Against Competition

by Alfie Kohn

  William A. Sadler, finally, notes that sports not only are not isolated from daily life (as play must be), but they actively train participants for that life as it is lived in our society.

  Athletes often are well aware that what they do is not play [he writes]. Their practice sessions are workouts; and to win the game they have to work harder. Sports are not experienced as activities outside the institutional pattern of the American way of life; they are integrally a part of it. . . . In other words, the old cliché is true: “Sports prepare one for life.” The question which must be raised is: “what kind of life?” The answer in an American context is that they prepare us for a life of competition.21

  Competitive recreation is anything but a time-out from goal-oriented activities. It has an internal goal, which is to win. And it has an external goal, which is to train its participants. Train them to do what? To accept a goal-oriented model. Sports is thus many steps removed from play.

  The argument here is not merely academic. Even when they do not talk explicitly about play, apologists for sport like to argue that it offers a “time out” from the rest of life. No matter how brutal or authoritarian sports might be, we are supposed to see them as taking place in a social vacuum. This claim has the effect of excusing whatever takes place on a playing field. (While governor of California, Ronald Reagan reportedly advised a college football team that they could “feel a clean hatred for [their] opponent. It is a clean hatred since it’s only symbolic in a jersey.”)22 It also has the effect of obscuring the close relationship between competitive recreation and the society that endorses it.

  That relationship, as Sadler saw, is reciprocal. Sports not only reflect the prevailing mores of our society but perpetuate them. They function as socializing agents, teaching us the values of hierarchical power arrangements and encouraging us to accept the status quo. In a 1981 study of children’s competitive soccer and hockey programs in New York and Connecticut, Gai Ingham Berlage was even more specific: “The structural organization of [these] programs resembles the structural organization of American corporations. . . . The values stressed in children’s competitive sports are also similar to corporate values.”23 It is hardly a coincidence, then, that the most vigorous supporters of competitive sports—those who not only enjoy but explicitly defend them—are political conservatives (Michael Novak, Spiro Agnew, and William J. Bennett are among those quoted in these pages) or that interest in sports is highest in the more politically conservative regions of the country.24

  Writing in the Journal of Physical Education and Recreation, George Sage observed that.

  organized sport—from youth programs to the pros—has nothing at all to do with playfulness—fun, joy, self-satisfaction—but is, instead, a social agent for the deliberate socialization of people into the acceptance of . . . the prevailing social structure and their fate as workers within bureaucratic organizations. Contrary to the myths propounded by promoters, sports are instruments not for human expression, but of social stasis.25

  Sport does not simply build character, in other words; it builds exactly the kind of character that is most useful for the social system. From the perspective of our social (and economic) system—which is to say, from the perspective of those who benefit from and direct it—it is useful to have people regard each other as rivals. Sports serve the purpose nicely, and athletes are quite deliberately led to accept the value and naturalness of an adversarial relationship in place of solidarity and collective effort. If he is in a team sport, the athlete comes to see cooperation only as a means to victory, to see hostility and even aggression as legitimate, to accept conformity and authoritarianism. Participation in sports amounts to a kind of apprenticeship for life in contemporary America, or, as David Riesman put it, “The road to the board room leads through the locker room.”26

  One of the least frequently noticed features of competition—and, specifically, of its product-orientation—is the emphasis on quantification.27 In one sense, competition is obviously a process of ranking: who is best, second-best, and so forth. But the information necessary to this process is itself numerical. There are exceptions—one can usually determine who crosses the finish line first just by watching, for example—but competition usually is wedded to specific measures of how much weight, how many baskets, how much money, and so on. Competition not only depends on attention to numbers—it shapes and reinforces that attention. By competing, we become increasingly reliant on quantification, adopting what one thinker calls a “prosaic mentality” in the course of reducing things to what can be counted and measured—a phenomenon that obviously extends well beyond the playing field.28 Play, by contrast, is not concerned with quantifying because there is no performance to be quantified. Like the seven-year-old athlete who was asked how fast he had run and replied, “As fast as I could,”29 the process-oriented individual gladly gives up precision—particularly precision in the service of determining who is best—in exchange for pure enjoyment. He who plays does not ask the score. In fact, there is no score to be kept.

  Within the confines of a competitive game, finally, there exists a phenomenon that could be called “process competition.” This is the in-the-moment experience of struggling for superiority that is sometimes seen as an end in itself rather than simply a, step toward the final victory. Thus, college football coach Joe Paterno: “We strive to be Number One . . . But win or lose, it is the competition which gives us pleasure.”30 For enjoyment to derive wholly from the process of besting another person is more than a little disturbing, but it does more nearly qualify as play since it is a process. What we need to ask is whether it really is the essence of competitive recreation. After waxing rhapsodic over process competition, Stuart Walker writes: “The philosophy [athletes] hear announced is that the game’s the thing, participation is what matters. But the questions they hear asked are, Who beat whom? Who got the medals? . . . The modern competitor feels that to be approved, admired, respected, he must win.”31 In fact, there is nothing especially modern about this phenomenon. The concern with who beat whom—the “product” of the event—is hardly an accidental feature of competition; it is not an afterthought that just receives too much attention these days. To structure an event as a competition is often to cause participants to struggle against each other in-the-moment, but it is first and foremost to designate a goal: victory. Process competition may exist as a pocket of play (though a rather ugly version thereof), but the overall effort is unavoidably product-oriented. It should come as no surprise, moreover, to find that this pocket will shrink: the last chapter considered the corrosive effect of extrinsic motivation upon intrinsic motivation. Any gratification from the game itself can be expected to diminish when an external reward (victory with its trappings) is introduced. And there is no competition without such reward. Overall, then, we must conclude that the pure pleasure of play excludes sports and all other competitive activities.

  FUN WITHOUT COMPETITION

  To have challenged the identification of competition with play is not to have proved that competitive recreation cannot be enjoyable. After all, various rule-governed, product-oriented activities do fill our leisure hours. In particular, the popularity of sports does not seem to depend on whether they qualify as play. Enthusiasts of such competitive recreation often specify—and commend to us—its unique advantages, so these qualities bear close examination. They are as follows:

  EXERCISE: The player improves his or her overall fitness, strength, and coordination.

  TEAMWORK: Team sports are said to promote a kind of group loyalty and esprit de corps that can come only from working toward a common end such as the defeat of the opposing team.

  ZEST: Without competition, we are sometimes told, recreational activities would hold no interest for us. Even critic George Leonard concedes that competition, “like a little salt . . . adds zest to the game and to life itself.”32 Betty Lehan Harragan uses the identical metaphor: “The competitive impulse adds salt and pepper, the spices,
to an otherwise bland and tasteless dish of aimless exercise. . . . Competition is what makes it all worthwhile.”33

  PUSHING ONESELF: In striving to win, the competitor is said to test his or her limits, to feel invigorated from the challenge, to experience a sense of sweaty accomplishment that is immensely gratifying.

  STRATEGY: Against an opponent, one has to think on one’s feet as well as move them. To anticipate and counter the other’s moves is to overcome an obstacle, which can be a lot of fun.

  TOTAL INVOLVEMENT: Sports aficionados frequently describe the complete experiential engagement that they enjoy, the sense of having transcended time. This theme is enthusiastically sounded in two books written as paeans to sports: The Joy of Sports by Michael Novak and Winning: The Psychology of Competition by Stuart Walker, a doctor whose free time is spent on competitive sailing. The same concept is described by several psychologists: Abraham Maslow’s “peak experiences” involve just such an unselfconscious immersion, while Robert Jay Lifton calls this “experiential transcendence” and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, as we have already seen, refers to it as the “flow” experience.34

  EXISTENTIAL AFFIRMATION: In sweeping, almost mystical language, several sports enthusiasts maintain that while competing one tastes perfection, asserts one’s freedom, and triumphs over death. For Walker, the competitor “enters a world of challenge, risk, and uncertainty and for a few moments re-creates it in accordance with his own design.”35 For Novak, the winner wrestles with “being” and “nonbeing.” “Each time one enters a contest, one’s unseen antagonist is death. . . . [It is] the exercise of freedom . . . against the darkness.” One becomes “more than self,” “expressing the highest human cravings for perfection.”36 For Gary Warner, competition is “so valuable [because] . . . every life needs moments of exultation.”37 And for A. Bartlett Giamatti, former president of Yale University, winning has “a joy and discrete purity to it that cannot be replaced by anything else.”38

  THRILL OF VICTORY: Some people, finally, report that beating someone else is an intrinsically, irreducibly satisfying experience.

  A careful analysis of these enjoyments reveals that none of them (except the last) actually requires competition. William Sadler put it well:

  We should not make the mistake of equating meeting a challenge with competition. There are many sports which can be exciting, can test the abilities and skills of individuals and groups, can bring harmony and happiness, can provide healthy exercise and an exhilarating change from the workaday world, can reunite persons with nature, can express . . . the highest human values, which do not require competition.39

  Let us take each advantage in turn. First, physical fitness obviously does not require competition—or even any rule-governed game. As the recent popularity of aerobics and other noncompetitive approaches to exercise makes clear, one can get a fine workout without a win/lose structure. Second, the camaraderie that results from teamwork is precisely the benefit of cooperative activity, whose very essence is working together for a common goal. Intergroup competition—the creation of a common enemy, a We-versus-They dynamic—is not necessary for group feeling, as I will show in chapter 6. The distinguishing feature of team competition is that a given player works with and is encouraged to feel warmly toward only half of those present, so cooperative activities are twice as desirable if this is our criterion. (This comparison actually understates the case since it does not account for the suspicion of, contempt for, and even violence toward one’s opponents that one finds in team sports.)

  As for the claim that competition, like salt, provides zest, the metaphor may be more apt than its proponents intended. Salt contributes to hypertension and also becomes a substitute for the natural flavor of the food itself. Only when we come to depend on salt does food seem bland without it. Similarly, competitive games create something very like an addiction so that recreation without the possibility of victory becomes less exciting. “It is not only work that is poisoned by the philosophy of competition,” wrote Bertrand Russell, “leisure is poisoned just as much. The kind of leisure which is quiet and restoring to the nerves comes to be felt boring.”40 Perhaps a better analogy is provided by the task of trying to interest a TV-dependent child in reading. Books quickly exhaust an attention span that has been attenuated by television. We might benefit from being weaned from what one critic called “the glass teat” just as we may eventually know greater pleasure from unsalted food and noncompetitive recreation.

  The dependence on sports to provide a sense of accomplishment or to test one’s wits is similarly misplaced. One can aim instead at an objective standard or attempt to exceed one’s own previous record*—the latter being what some people mean by the unfortunate phrase “competing with oneself.” Such noncompetitive striving can be very satisfying indeed, and cooperative games requiring skill and stamina similarly seem no less invigorating for the absence of a winner and a loser at the end. These games, as I will show shortly, often involve considerable strategy, proving that the obstacle to be overcome need not be another person. If large numbers of people defend competition because they want to be challenged, this cannot be surprising: it is the same confusion between achievement and competition that we have encountered before, and it is understandable given the hegemony of competitive games in our culture. Within such a game, striving is striving for victory, so someone who knows only competitive games will come to equate the two.

  The experiential engagement that includes transcending time does not require physical activity of any sort, let alone competitive activity in particular. Maslow and Lifton scarcely mention sports in their descriptions of the phenomenon, while Csikszentmihalyi, who does focus on recreation, not only includes dancing and rock-climbing, but specifically states that competitive sports are less conducive to the flow experience than noncompetitive activities. It may be possible to achieve this sensation in competition (including in battle), then, but one hardly needs to compete in order to experience it.

  Precisely the same is true of the grander claims made to the effect that sports represents an existential triumph. Anyone oriented toward spirituality to the extent that playing football becomes a religious experience is likely to find many activities have a similar effect. Rebelling against death and flexing one’s freedom, meanwhile, were central themes for Albert Camus, but his attention was directed toward love and creation, and toward rebellion against injustice, as the means for living these things. Camus’s later works reflect a special emphasis on the need to work with others and affirm their humanity as part of our own expression; this principle is reflected in the writings of such religious existentialists as Martin Buber and Gabriel Marcel, both of whom probably would have been appalled to hear competition cited as an example of affirmation and transcendence.

  This leaves only “thrill of victory”: the base justification that it feels good to prove oneself better than someone else, to succeed by making another player or team fail. In practice, it is difficult to isolate this rationale from the others; the gratification thought to result from competition itself can in many cases be traced to a feature that actually does not require competition at all. Thus, it is difficult to know how widespread is the irreducible enjoyment of beating other people. To whatever extent it does exist, though, we cannot just assert that someone who claims that this does bring him pleasure is mistaken: “You only think it’s fun.” On the other hand, it is quite appropriate to explore the psychological dynamics of such enjoyment, and I will attempt this in the next chapter. For now let me simply say that the pure pleasure of competitive triumph is first cousin to the pleasure of punching someone in a state of manic excitement. Perhaps the best we can do in either case is to insist that because of both its psychological origins and its consequences to all parties concerned, this is a pleasure we should not nurture and encourage. Both as individuals and as members of a society, we would do better to take our enjoyments from more constructive (or at least less destructive) pursuits. The free-time activ
ities we set up for ourselves and our children ought not to reflect and perpetuate our least admirable inclinations.

  ***

  The constituents of enjoyment that are used to argue for recreational competition actually do not, for the most part, require competition at all. We do not need to try to beat other people in order to have a good time. Why, then, are competitive games so popular? The first response is that the extent of their popularity may not be so great as we imagine, at least if participation is our standard of measure. Some people, of course, avoid or drop out of sports because of disabilities, other interests, an aversion to exercise, and so forth. But a huge proportion dislike such activities precisely because they are competitive. “For many children competitive sports operate as a failure factory which not only effectively eliminates the ‘bad ones’ but also turns off many of the ‘good ones,’” writes sports psychologist Terry Orlick. “In North America it is not uncommon to lose from 80 to 90 percent of our registered organized sports participants by 15 years of age.”41 Research in nonrecreational settings clearly shows that those who are not successful in initial competitions continue to perform poorly,42 thereby setting up a vicious cycle. Other research suggests that these individuals drop out when given the chance.43

  Many people who defend competition actually encourage this, invoking a “survival of the fittest” ethic. School athletic programs implicitly do likewise, concentrating resources where the very best athletes are. Expressions of indifference or even satisfaction when many participants drop out of a given activity are disturbing under any circumstances, but they seem particularly outrageous when it comes to recreation. What, after all, is the point of games if not to encourage widespread participation and enjoyment? This sort of attitude has become self-defeating, moreover, since many accomplished (or potentially excellent) athletes find the competitive pressure distasteful and onerous enough to bail out.