Presence, Sport and Falling Short: Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Lili Alvarez (Critical Essay‪)‬

During the UK coverage of the first quarter of Super Bowl XLI, a US commentator remarked: "When you force athletes to think, they make mistakes." (1) This casual observation unwittingly echoed the brain versus brawn exclusivity cliche that seems stubbornly prevalent within academic and sporting spheres, even today. Headlines such as "Bookworm Janko Ousts Gonzo" (from brash British tabloid, The Sun (2)), referring to the Serbian tennis player Janko Tipsarevic's self-confessed love of reading--and reading more than simply the Dostoevsky quote tattooed on his arm--heighten this impression. (3) British soccer in particular has been poor at accommodating players who have advanced beyond secondary education before hitting the big time: Graeme Le Saux is a case in point. Le Saux was one of very few soccer players to obtain a university degree before being picked for England. Although he could be fractious on the pitch, his level of education and "sensitivity" marked him out, and he was often considered to be homosexual because he read a left-leaning, quality newspaper: the Guardian. Conversely, in 1986 (and probably many times subsequently), soccer intellectual and former Real Madrid coach, Jorge Valdano, complained in Revista de Occidente that intellectuals gave footballers far too little respect; and Spanish novelist, translator and columnist, Javier Marias, acknowledged this to be the case in "Letras de futbol" (86). (4) This, then, is a phenomenon that Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht has identified as belonging to an enduring, and in the twentieth century, reinvigorated Cartesian worldview delimited by and from the academic context, but by no means unique to it, as the above examples illustrate. Gumbrecht reminds us that it was Descartes "who for the first time made the ontology of human existence, as res cogitans, explicitly and exclusively depend on the ability to think and who, as a consequence, subordinated not only the human body but all the things of the world as res extensae to the mind." (5) We note, advisedly, that no blame is laid with Descartes, and instead "Cartesian" thinking is seen as the (inevitable) endpoint of a century of intellectual debate (Gumbrecht 33).