Failure in Sport

Kelly William W., 宮原 かおる, 杉本 厚夫

doi:10.5987/jjsss.11.1

This paper deals with a profound irony at the heart of modern sports: that sports, for almost all of us almost all of the time, are about losing, not winning-about facing failure, not savoring success. The disappointment of defeat, not the satisfaction of victory, is the common condition of playing and watching.<br>I distinguish here between three broad types of losing: routine failure, the continual necessary production of losers; radical failure, which is failure so complete that it causes dismissal, release, resignation; and, somewhere between the routine and the radical, are those per during losses that constitute repetitive failure. Repetitive failure is the hardest to accept and to explain.<br>Using the case of the Hanshin Tigers, an Osaka professional baseball team of immense regional popularity but perpetual poor showing, I enumerate several different kinds of factors by which players and fans address, adjust, and accept repetitive failure. These include factors common to many sports, elements distinctive to baseball as a sport, factors distinctive to Japanese baseball, and those rationalizations peculiar to the Hanshin Tigers. I argue that we must identify sets of structural patterns and culturally-inflected rationalizations that keep people playing and watching despite persistent outcomes of defeat. It is a composite model rather than a single “logic of failure” that explains this and other such cases.

Failure in Sport

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