Bounce English Transcript

September, 2015

 

01:01:51

DAVID GOLDBLATT:         One of the things that makes ball games different is the degree of uncertainty and chaos and spontaneity that putting a bouncing ball with human limbs creates. That’s above all what balls bring, spin, uncertainty, variation, bounce.

 

01:02:15

JOHN FOX:    The ball game is a microcosm of our lives. When we win we thank God.  When we lose we curse the universe. It’s the place where we can act out the drama of human existence.

 

01:02:29

TOM: It happens across every culture, across thousands of years. These sports have developed with the ball at the center of them.

 

01:02:40

When we look back through time we see again and again the sphere fascinating, bewildering and enchanting our ancestors and asking us what does it mean to play and why do we love it so much.

 

01:04:25         

ISABEL:         Humans did not invent play.  We only develop it and add new elements.

 

01:04:37

The play instinct is deeply rooted in animals and humans as primates.

 

JOHN FOX:    Play is the thing.

 

01:04:45

It’s. The only point of playing is to play.

 

Play is the central paradox of evolution.

 

01:04:56

 It’s a huge puzzle because evolution is supposed to be efficient.

 

How did natural selection which is supposed to always be making everything more functional and more efficient produce this purposeless behavior that seems to be without function, seems to be pointless.

 

01:05:13

It involves a tremendous expenditure of energy.

 

ANTHONY PELLIGRINI:    Rats do it. Mice do it. Monkeys do it. Meerkats do it.

 

01:05:28

That it exists across these different species means that it’s been naturally selected for. So it’s important. As important as reproducing.

 

01:05:37

What is it doing?

 

JOHN FOX:    In the 19^th century scientists thought that if a cat was playing at hunting that they were practicing for an actual hunt.

 

01:05:48

But we’ve learned over time that it’s not that straight forward.

 

STAN:             When we studied the development of ball play in young animals what we see is early on they’ll do certain things which are pretty simple like just push the ball, maybe mount the ball and so on.

 

01:06:03

And then they learn, well, maybe I can dribble the ball. When they’re first learning that, they’re not good at it. They’re failing a lot.

 

01:06:13

They shouldn’t persist at that behavior. But the fact it’s because they want to be good at it. 

 

ANTHONY PELLIGRINI:    You’re not worried about solving a problem. So you’re more likely to generate these novel uses. So if you love the process, the process sucks you in.

 

01:06:27

Then you’re much more willing to go off on these tangents. Creativity. Novelty.

 

01:06:35

JOHN FOX:    It could be that flexibility is the key to what makes it adaptable to future situations in helping us to survive.

 

01:06:53

ANTHONY PELLIGRINI:    The classic example of this, Wolfgang Kurler, a famous German gestalt psychologist, had these chimpanzees.

 

01:07:02

ISABEL:         Kurler put bananas out of reach and he gave one chimpanzee two sticks. His name was Sultan.

 

ANTHONY PELLIGRINI:    Sultan took the sticks, jumped up with the sticks, threw the sticks up, couldn’t get the damn bananas down.

 

01:07:17

ISABEL:         He gets frustrated. Eventually he just sits.

 

ANTHONY PELLIGRINI:    Ah, the hell with it.  I’m just gonna play with the sticks.

Then oh, they do this, do that. Then they go together and the “ah ha” moment.

 

01:07:28

ISABEL:         Just by mistake, by the drive of novelty, by exploration, i.e., object play.

 

ANTHONY PELLIGRINI:    Sticks go together (noise). Bananas come down.

 

01:07:38

Quintessential form of social play is rough and tumble play. Play fighting.

 

SERGIO:        The golden rule you follow is I’ve got to give the other guy a chance.

 

01:07:52

There has to be reciprocity. And you see this in the rats all the time. You see one animal on top and then he gets thrown off and he goes on the bottom and they just keep doing this through a reciprocal interaction that you just don’t see in a real fight.

 

01:08:08

There’s a structure. Rules that you follow. There’s got to be enough cooperation to make it possible for both animals to win sometimes.

 

01:08:17

But in that structure you can have unexpected variation. The animal has to continually evaluate his or her actions and those of its partner.

 

01:08:28

And they’re exactly the sorts of things that help train the development of the prefrontal cortex. The play is shaping the brain to be able to perform in much more intricate ways than without it.

 

01:08:41

So we have a causal link between play, development of the prefrontal cortex and consequently the development of these social skills.

 

01:09:00

JOHN:             There’s increasing evidence that puts play at the center of some of the biggest evolutionary breakthroughs. Sociality and empathy through rough and tumble play. Tool use through object play.

 

01:09:16         

TOM:  The moment you have creatures entering into a metaphorical relationship with objects where a stone isn’t just a stone, it’s a tool, then you also have the possibility of other metaphorical relationships emerging.

 

01:09:29

Gestures, signs, signals. The beginning of language.

 

01:09:44

ISABEL: Generally I’m interested in the origins of human language and to try and understand how language evolved. It’s very interesting to look at our closest relatives.

 

01:09:55

Play is incredibly rich in terms of communication. When bonobos are playing they very, very often laugh.

 

01:10:04

Laughing becomes a signal to your partner that you are still playing.

 

01:10:15

MARC BEKOFF:       The way dogs do it, and other animals they do what’s called the play bow where they bow on their forepaws. They put their butts up in the air.

 

01:10:23

The play bow is used to say I want to play with you. And then it’s used very strategically. Before a dog bites another dog they’ll say I’m gonna bite you hard but it’s still play

 

01:10:34

And so we’ve discovered that the play bow is a very ubiquitous signal.

 

JOHN:             It shouldn’t surprise us that a ball in the hands of a highly intelligent and social animal is gonna bring out a lot of familiar behaviors that look just like what happens when we play.

 

01:10:59

But I think that behavior provides a clue as to why ball games are so important to us.

 

01:11:17

They play with the ball, I make it. What interests me about this work is that it makes me curious.

 

01:11:26

Mothers and their toddlers pass by here. As soon as the babies see the ball they want to touch it.

 

 

01:11:37

How do they recognize the ball if they don’t even speak yet?

 

01:11:42

They like it but don’t know what it means?

 

01:11:52

MICHAEL MOSCHEN:        The ball is a very universal experience. It’s a tool to explore security vs. insecurity.

 

01:12:01

And I think with a ball there’s a sense of give and take that’s very soft and very yielding.

 

01:12:09

I wanted to see if the possibility of emotion and deep emotion could generate a physical commitment to how to work with an object. Not to take a ball and control it but to let the ball be what the ball is. Round.

 

01:14:17

JOHN:             No one invented the ball. It had to come out of the natural world.

 

ISABEL:         Where do our predilection, our fondness for roundness comes from.

 

01:14:27

JOHN: Whether it’s the sun and the moon or a pregnant woman’s belly these are things that we see from the youngest age. 

 

01:14:36

The sphere is really a form that we’re drawn to in nature and are surrounded by.

 

ISABEL:         One thing we know for sure is that we’re primates. Primates eat fruit.

 

01:14:49

JOHN:             So much of our behavior really parallels or has relationship with the ape world.

 

ISABEL:         Food items, especially the highly caloric ones tend to be round.

 

01:15:00

JOHN:             Fruits, nuts, eggs, seeds and stones. It’s no coincidence that the ball evolved from these things that we depended upon for our existence.

 

01:15:14

TOM CHATFIELD:  Between one and two million years ago many of our hominid ancestors lived around the Olduvai Gorge area. Archeologists have found numerous stone artifacts and tools there.

 

01:15:26

JOHN:             Of the spheres that were found some of them were too large to hold in the hand so don’t seem to have been tools per se but an object of interest.

 

01:15:35

ROLAND:      And they gathered these balls. Perhaps they made them. Maybe they found some. Maybe they made others. Why?

 

01:15:44

ISABEL:         If some of these objects were not of practical use and were stemming more into the symbolic and perhaps artistic. It is in a way a stupid thing to do. It’s risky.

 

01:15:54

DAVID:          On the plains of Africa struggling to survive. You’ve got drought. You’ve got floods. You’ve got lions around the corner.

 

ROLAND:      The fact that they were gathered into one place means that they must have had some kind of significance.

 

01:16:05

TOM:  It’s quite possible our ancestors made no direct distinction between tools and metaphorical function.

 

01:16:15

It can be at once a hammer and a breaker and something beautiful and something playful.

 

01:16:22

JOHN:             Where these objects of play. Where they. One of the earliest forms of a ball that we know of.

 

JOHN FOX:    Ancient ball games were concerned with the idea of survival.

 

01:16:33

Survival against nature. Controlling the ball was their way of exerting control over the natural world which was so unpredictable, chaotic and dangerous.

 

01:16:44

The ball could represent much more than the actual object itself. It represented the movement of the planets, the seasons. It represented whatever you wanted to map onto it.

 

01:16:56

MANUEL:      The game evolved. It is started as a highly ritual activity and eventually was becoming a more recreational activity because people connected with them so much they gave meaning to their lives.

 

01:17:09

JOHN:             The first physical evidence we have of ball games being played is from ancient Egypt. They were highly symbolic affairs. The Egyptian pharaoh would throw the

ball and would kind of inaugurate the games with great spectacle.

 

01:17:20

In a way it’s not that different than say the president showing up and throwing the first pitch which is a highly ritualized affair that’s not really play in the sense of fun. It’s something much more meaningful.

 

01:17:34

MANUEL:      Games even are linked to the identity of people. And this is something very clear in the case of ulama.

 

01:17:42

JOHN:             The game of Ulama was played for over 3,000 years in a region spanning from Arizona all the way through to central America and into the West Indies.

 

01:17:54

DAVID GOLDBLATT:         When the Spanish came to Mesoamerica one of the things that freaked them out was the way the ball in the Mesoamerican ball game bounced. They couldn’t believe it.

 

01:18:08

MANUEL:      All humans in every ages always face the challenges of nature and they have responses that are similar regardless where in the world you are.

 

01:18:17

DAVID:          The genius of Mesoamerican society was to work out,  a),  not only how to make rubber, but how to vulcanize it, right. To give it that kind of incredible elasticity.

 

01:18:27

MANUEL:      In this case of the ulama it’s a rubber ball that comes from the trees. Tree produces a sap that is sticky. You feel that that sticky sap became part of your body like a second skin.

 

01:18:44

And you begin to manipulate that sap. It begins to grow little by little. It’s developing like a human being.

 

01:18:52

DAVID:          Imagine you’ve spent millennia as humanity kicking pebbles and skulls and something bounces. Oh, my God.

 

 

 

01:19:15

MANUEL:      So people felt a connection to the sacredness through these objects. Are they gonna  connecting to the essence of life.

 

01:19:31

JOHN FOX:    Ulama is arguably the oldest sport in the world. And today there’s maybe 100 players that can still play this sport.

 

01:19:56

MANUEL:      The ball represented the sun and the people trying to keep the ball in play represented different celestial bodies or forces of the sky because they understood that the sun had to do with everything.

 

01:20:08

All the aspects that give life to, to people.

 

01:20:14

JOHN FOX:    Europeans showed up in Mesoamerica with their own version of the ball. It was called pelota de viento and it was basically an animal bladder filled with air.

 

MANUEL  AGUILAR MORENO:   Those balls had a very dull bounce. Very limited bounce.

 

01:20:26

DAVID GOLDBLATT:         The Spanish thought the devil was in the ball. They really did. They thought some mad spirit, you know, that needs to be restrained and controlled is there.

 

01:20:36

JOHN FOX:    In 1588 the Spanish banned the game of ulama across Mesoamerica because it represented the pagan past of the culture.

 

MANUEL  AGUILAR MORENO:   They thought it was an integral part of religious or philosophical ideas that could be harmful to Christianity.

 

01:20:49

JOHN:             The Maya understood that sap from the rubber tree was the source of the movement in the ball. While blood is the source of human life

 

01:20:59

giving blood for blood is giving life to the stars and the planets. Restores order and restores balance in the universe.

 

01:21:20

Decapitation was clearly a central ritual associated with the ball game.  It’s found across cultures and throughout time. 

 

01:21:31

It’s actually something that’s still with us today. We see it in films again and again.

 

Now give me back my head. Wow. Got you head dude.

 

01:21:45

This image of a head that’s decapitated and then is played with or kicked around.

 

We got our war faces on. I’m Dave Beckham.

 

01:22:03

You guys. This man was alive a few seconds ago. We can’t play soccer with his head.

 

HUGH HORNBY:     In some of the games of folk football that there, the myth of a, a severed head does play a role.

 

01:22:15

I think it’s clear that the game represents the battle between two teams and there’s a sense that having a, a sort of battle origin myth fits in with that.

 

01:22:31

MAN:  There’s an old Orkadian tale about a young warrior called Sigurt who ran off to fight and kill an ancient and malevolent king called Tusker.

 

01:22:45

And Tusker was so described because he had protruding teeth. 

 

01:23:03

Now the boy did the job and set back on his way home with the head athwart his brawny thigh.

 

01:23:13

Because of the king’s protruding teeth they scratched the boy’s thigh and gave him an infection.

 

01:23:13

And as the boy was staggering in in his infected state the townsfolk were outraged that the king’s snaggled tooth had caused the demise of such a brave and valiant young warrior.

 

01:23:41

And in a state of collective rage they then proceeded to kick the old king’s head around the town square.

 

 

01:23:55

And thus is the explanation for the Kirkwall game of ba.

 

 

01:24:26

PAT KANE:   It’s a very, very old opposition between anarchy and order.

 

MAN: We think of it as we’re still allowed to go to war twice in a year.

 

01:24:40

MAN:  Three hundred guys there focused on one object only. It’s just the ba'. That is it.

 

It’s a grand tradition of popular sovereignty as the right to play any way you want to in the streets.

 

01:24:52

BA BALL MAKER:              The ba’ is first and foremost I would say it’s a tradition. This is a small island. Traditions are very well respected.

 

01:25:01

MAN:  It is a remote place to get to. You only play it two days of the year which are very special days, really. Christmas day and New Year’s day.

 

01:25:10

Ba player:        I mean, do. Look we’ve. Look, we’ve grown up in a house where you never know anything different. I mean, that’s what Christmas is. That’s what new year is. That’s what we do.

 

01:25:26

MAN:  Within the city of Kirkwall the town was divided between the Uppies and the Doonies. By the market cross which is in front of the cathedral.

 

01:25:37

MAN:  Above that are Uppies and below it are Doonies.

 

PAT KANE:   Traditionally you would find that the Doonie or the Doonie team would be associated with fishing, for example, or working the ports and the dock

 

01:25:47

whereas those from the higher parts of the town would be more associated with the farm land.

 

MAN:  Uppies tend to be a bit scrawny and tall, lanky people.

 

01:25:57

Doonies are more robust. Squatter. Handsome. Yeah. I would say that’s the difference.

 

01:26:05

MAN:  Basically the goal of the game is to get the ba’ to your own goal which for the Uppies is the Mackinson’s corner and for the Doonies is getting the ba’ in the water.

 

01:26:17

MAN:  It’s finished when it touches the wall and it goes in the water. End of story. Fantastic.

 

MAN:  If the ball went up it was going to be a good year for the farmer.

 

01:26:26

And if the ball went doon it would be a good year for the fishermen. So it’s all legend and hoo hah, you know. I mean, we just like to think of all these different stories.

 

01:26:40

Would you call it a sport?

 

BROTHERS:  No. No. It’s more important than that.

 

01:26:59

You don’t care about your own bodily parts. You’re willing to break things over it. You don’t care. It’s just the ba’.

 

01:27:06

You might get crushed against a wall, against a barricade.

 

The pressure in it is unbelievable. You have to try and relax. Try and not panic.

 

01:27:15

You’re in agony. For a lot of the time you’re in absolute agony.

 

So it’s not for everybody.

 

01:27:21

In the two hours prior to us going down to the game the nerves start kicking in. The children in the family know that to keep the bathroom clear.

 

01:27:39

MAN:  You can’t plan the game. Nobody knows what’s going to happen next. You have to get into a frame of mind where you’re ready for all hell will break loose.

 

01:28:14

It’s not a free for all but it basically it’s a free for all.

 

You don’t want rules. Everything’s dictated by rules. There’s a, a code of conduct but it’s not actually a rule.

 

01:28:28

You’re gonna hit somebody just do it once. Don’t do it twice. And things like that.

 

The only thing you can’t do in the game is you can’t change sides.

 

01:28:38

You know, once you’re a Doonie or an Uppie that’s you for the rest of your time.

 

MAN:  Rivals and best friends. I’ve got Doonie friends. They’re me best pals. But like we’re best friends 363 days a year and on two days. I mean, we’re not enemies by any means.

 

01:28:52

If anything happens we’ll throw punches. There’s no problem.

 

MAN:  But that’s the beauty of it. There’s no malice. There’s nobody bearing a grudge after it. It’s just. The ba’s the ba’.

 

01:29:05

BRUCE MOAR:        The game is something you start as a kid. You come through the boys’ game. You go into the men’s game. You’re learning the whole time and your game develops. You’re never too old to learn.

 

01:29:15

But it is a way to confirm the community. Literally helps people agree and chant the place that they’re in.

 

01:29:24

Hold the pressure, lads.

 

Come on, (name).

 

01:29:45

JOHN FOX: At the end of the ba’ once one team is victorious, they still have to decide which of the men that’s played that day gets to take home the ultimate trophy.

 

01:29:57

Debate ensues in the thick of this mob just on the heels of this team’s victory.

 

MAN:  There’s no process to say everybody has to agree on the winner. Some doesn’t agree whatsoever.

 

 

01:30:17

If the guy gets raised, you know, you can’t take that away from him.

 

01:30:27

It’s a big honor to be able to win a ba. You figure about two a year. A few hundred people playing. Not everybody’s going to get one.

 

The ba’ is. It is very treasured.

 

01:30:01

DAVIE JOHNSTON: Very proud of it. I love this as much as my kids. That’s 27 years ago. I still just get palpitations playing with it, touching it because I just feel so, so honored and so lucky to have been, you know, deemed worthy to take one of these.

 

01:31:22

JOHN FOX:    Kirkwall ba' doesn’t really resemble any game of football that you or I would recognize. And yet we know that Kirkwall ba’ is a descendant of the most ancient forms of football and that everything we play and call football today derives from it.

 

01:31:37

DAVID GOLDBLATT:         The games of Celtic Europe are basically being played by peasants. By shepherds. By the lower orders of the cities so of course they’re gonna be much wilder.

 

03:31:50

The aristocracy looked down their nose at ball games. They’re all about killing people on the horseback. That’s their pleasure.  By the time we get to the early 19^th century folk football, street football, all the different variations are beginning to disappear.

 

01:32:08

This is an era of class paranoia.  You know, you’ve got a ruling elite that is desperately riding the wave of the world’s first industrial revolution

 

01:32:19

and the one thing it really fears is large numbers of poor working class or rural people gathering together in one place. You’ve got a lot of folks saying this is akin to a riot.

 

01:32:31

It almost dies. What saves it is the public schools.  Sport is brought in as part  of the curriculum. As a way of occupying teen-agers dealing with too much testosterone.

 

01:32:44

Countering the threats of homosexuality and masturbation by exhausting everybody and providing systems of control from the top down to the bottom  of the school.

 

 

01:32:55

Then you layer onto that the notion of creating muscular Christian gentlemen. Christian soldiers who are going to run the empire. To create a moral imperial project of moderation, of fair play, of sexual moral discipline.

 

01:33:10

And games and football in particular is gonna deliver that. And that’s the culture out of which football emerges.

 

01:32:20

Once again the boys of Eton turn out to celebrate St. Andrew’s day by taking part in the war game. Two teams, the Collagers (ph) and the Amadens (ph) are involved in the rough and tumble.

 

01:32:29

The battle of Waterloo may have been won on the battlefields of Eton but it’s nearly always a draw in their own war game.

 

01:33:35

JOHN:

Like most sports at that time period it was really a collection of games played with a ball.

 

DAVID:          There’s a lot of different varieties of football being played in different public schools.

 

01:33:34

JOHN:             We see rugby which involves being able to carry the ball and we see something more like soccer that involves kicking but not carrying the ball.

 

01:33:53

DAVID:          That’s fine when it’s just at the school level. But by now the public school boys have left university. They want to carry on playing football now as young adults. But they find everybody has different rules so what are we gonna do?

 

01:34:05

How are we gonna deal with this? So there’s a real concern to systematize, formularize and make it work. And the 1863 rules drawn up by the football association are the rules that we pretty much still play today.

 

01:34:23

SAL PAOLANTONIO:         Here’s the idea about American football. I have the ball. I’m gonna advance it and you’re going to violently take it away from me. That’s it.

 

01:34:34

JOHN:             Americans embraced industrialism and modern capitalism and took it to a whole new level. American sports reflect that.

 

01:34:45

SAL PAOLANTONIO:         If you take the violence out of it, we’re playing soccer.

 

01:34:52

LEWIS LAPHAM:     When Americans bring ball games into the United States from Britain in the second half  of the 19^th century they bring with it the British amateur tradition.

 

01:35:05

It doesn’t matter whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game. It’s a sense that we’re all in this together. I mean, that’s the fundamental democratic idea.

 

01:35:13

SAL PAOLANTONIO:         American citizens at the time thought it didn’t have anything in common to what they were experiencing in their own country.

 

01:35:21

LEWIS:           People like Teddy Roosevelt are worrying that urban civilization is corrupting the manly spirit of the American upper classes.

 

01:35:31

That’s when we invent our American game of football which is a much rougher version. It was about winning. It wasn’t really about how you play the game.

 

01:35:47

SAL PAOLANTONIO:         The first thing that they did in transforming soccer to Americanized football was invent the first down.

 

01:35:57

The idea that you would gain territory, capture that territory, advance, move on and defend it, much like the concept of manifest destiny.

 

01:36:11

The whole idea that anybody who came here could have a chunk of the United States of America as it moved west. Well, that‘s football. 

 

01:36:24

You’re gonna capture territory and defend it. It was a clearly delineated and defined story. You don’t have that in soccer because the score rarely changes.

 

01:36:36

DAVID GOLDBLATT:         Most games end 1-1, 2-1. Less than 10% of games have more than five goals in them. They’re very rare. They’re very precious.

 

Goal. Totogu (ph)African celebrates.

 

01:36:50

If what you’re used to is 110 versus 108, football’s not gonna make a lot of sense to begin with.

 

SAL PAOLANTONIO:         Americans are easily bored. Let’s face it.

 

01:36:59

MIKE PESCA:           Soccer’s frustrating. Eleven things could go right and you don’t get rewarded for it.

 

SAL PAOLANTONIO:         That’s just not satisfying to American culture.

 

01:37:08

MIKE PESCA:           The vast majority of Americans believe that we are the authors of our own fate. There is no other country in the world that thinks that outcomes in life are as controlled by the individual as the United States does. 

 

01:37:24

Soccer seems to prove the idea that you could do all these things right and it still doesn’t matter.

 

This is why I think that America is a little resistant to soccer.

 

01:37:33

SAL:   The one thing we do know is if you play to a zero-zero tie after 90 minutes, not much has happened. That we know.

 

01:37:47

And they’re off. Nitsche and Hegeland (ph) Socrates. There he is Socrates. There’s the ball. There’s the ball.

 

01:37:57

We’ll be bringing you back to this exciting contest in a moment.

 

MIKE PESCA: I do think the criticism of soccer that Americans make that it’s too low scoring totally misses the point.

 

01:38:07

If you know the sport the amount of scoring doesn’t really matter. Football, soccer is like a, a European meal that goes on forever.

 

01:38:18

You can sort of just let it wash over you and take your time picking whatever plates that you want whereas it seems to me that a game like, you know, American football is like going to a food court and eating standing up in a hurry.

 

01:38:32

DAVID GOLDBLATT:         Football remains. Once the whistle blows for the first half that’s it for 45 minutes. There’s nothing else but the football.

 

01:38:45

The essential sporting drama, the movement of the ball. It flows.  Flow is ecstasy.

 

Etcha Parletta (ph). What a goal.

 

01:38:58

DAVID GOLDBLATT:         Yes, there are ups and downs and variations in the rhythm. It stops because people are feigning injury and all of that. We have our little theatrical cameos.

 

01:39:08

MIKE ROBERTS:      If you’ve just been kicked in the leg and it hurts you do not roll seven times over on the floor. This is not a natural reaction.  You listen to Argentinian football commentary and they praise players on cheating the referee. 

 

Spanish broadcaster

 

01:39:29

When Maradona scored his famous goal with the hand, that was a work of art because the referee didn’t see it.

 

Spanish broadcaster

 

01:39:38

DAVID GOLDBLATT:         Football is the most extraordinary personal and public theater of the emotions in the human soul.

 

01:39:50

What is killing I think all American sports is too much stop start.

 

Today’s first and 10 line is brought to you by your local Toyota dealers.

 

01:39:59

DAVID GOLDBLATT:         Because of the pathological demands of  commercialization the game’s been fragmented to the point where watching it is absolutely excruciating.

                                            

Join us at halftime as we announce this week’s winner of the Honda generator’s tailgate giveaway.

 

01:40:13

The OT presented by Lowes.

 

GFC plus football equals couch gating.

 

Served up by DW, the home of fan food.

 

01:40:22

DAVID GOLDBLATT:         The crowd is constantly being manipulated, engaged and bombarded in all of those things. No space to think.

 

01:40:31

LEWIS LAMPHAM: During the three hour broadcast of an NFL football game the ball is in play for maybe 11 minutes. The rest of the program is advertising, replays and video segments.

 

01:40:41

Shots of the players standing around in a huddle or gathering at the line of scrimmage. Therefore you have to have more and more special effects.

 

01:40:50

But that’s what happens when the game turns into a machine-made product.

 

01:41:12

MIKE PESCA:           I think football mirrors how we experience pleasure. I mean, football kind of gives us everything that we’re after. Celebrity. Athleticism. Violence.

 

01:41:25

And it has forensic videography. It’s not just a receiver stretching out his hands and catching the ball by his fingertips.

 

01:41:35

It’s also that bit of knowledge that he could be creamed by a defensive back at any moment so the danger plus the balletic expression is what makes football so exciting.

 

1:41:51

It’s impossible even to compare the thinking that goes on with football with any other sport. It’s the most primal but also the most cerebral and the most exalted.

 

01:42:02

But, you know, in this world of sports people use larger institutions to explain the things that they can’t explain. There is justice, there isn’t justice.

 

01:42:13

For 100 years as a Red Sox fan you were pretty much like a Scottish Presbyterian, right. You knew that life was suffering. Well, maybe that’s a. You’re a bit of Buddhist also. Right. If you’re a Yankees fan, you know, maybe that’s like being an evangelical Christian where there’s a reward now and there’s also a reward in the afterlife.

 

 

01:42:34

GORDON BURGHARDT:    Here at the University of Tennessee the football games are a, a prime example of, of ritualized behavior and in fact it’s often said here in Tennessee that the football is the, the main religion.

 

01:42:45

Well, certainly there are some people who claim they’re not religious and yet over 100,000 people come out to the games. They all wear the required regalia orange.

 

01:42:57

MIKE PESCA:           Religion seeks to explain the inexplicable and so does sports, you know.

 

01:43:08

DAVID:          Professional footballers. The whole hierarchy is meaningless and nothing without the crowd.

 

01:43:17

We’re the chorus, we’re the commentators. We provide the essential background and energy that gives it social meaning. Because until people invest cultural capital and their personal energies in the meaning of this life it’s just a silly game with a ball and 22 people.

 

01:43:35

MIKE PESCA:           It’s tribalism at its most basic. You put on face paint. You dress like other members of the tribe. You identify yourself mostly by the geographic community.

 

01:43:46

But of course if you’re someone from Cleveland who’s now living in L.A. your love of the Browns ties you to the city as much as anything else about Cleveland.

 

01:44:15

We think of watching sports, particularly maybe watching sports on t.v as being a passive act and yet science shows us that that’s absolutely not true.

 

01:44:29

MARCO IACOBONI:           Watching sports, it’s almost like being part of the game.  It’s. This, this mechanism in the brain makes us so into the game.

 

01:44:37

JOHN:             Somebody who watches a player on t.v kicking a ball, for example. The very same neurons that would fire in their brain if they were kicking the ball fire when within a player kick that ball.

 

01:44:49

MARCO:        We call these cells mirror neurons because it kind of suggests that I’m almost watching my own action reflected by a mirror.

 

JOHN:             We literally project ourselves in the game.

 

01:45:04

Mirror neurons allow us to feel on some level what we’re seeing athletes do on the field.

 

MARCO IACOBONI:           The blood pressure goes up a little. There’s a little increase in sweating.

 

01:45:18

People tend to mimic what they watch.

 

JOHN: Not only are we invested in the players but we actually have a cognitive connection to the ball itself.

 

01:45:27

MARCO:        They kind of orient their body toward where they want the, the ball to go. And in the way show our desire to influence how the object moves.

 

01:45:42

JOHN:             We are kind of one with the ball in this neurological sense.

 

MARCO:        It’s automatic. And it creates a connection between people.

 

Spanish broadcaster

 

01:47:43

DAVID GOLDBLATT:         I think the thing that sport in its modern form offers is brilliant storytelling.

 

01:47:49

The throw to second is high and wide. (name) coming off the bag. Nevertheless he goes on through with the pivot throw to first base. But both runners are safe.

 

01:47:58

JOHN:             Just as American ball games embraced the idea of data as an abstraction of the game itself and the story itself…

 

DAVID:          Once the box score system is invented, you’re got a really simple and effective form of visual representation.

 

 

01:48:10

JOHN:             These are games that are defined by quantifiable events. We see the emergence of statistics that captured elements of the game for spectators and others who might not be there.

 

01:48:21

DAVID GOLDBLATT:         Before television comes along people are watching boards in Times Squares where light bulbs light up to represent a ball or a strike. And it’s like how can that be interesting?

 

01:48:32

But the thing is it is interesting because it’s the story unfolding. When all you’ve got is just basically numbers in front of you it still works.

 

01:48:42

That’s what modern sport offers. You don’t have to see it.

 

Matthew drives a double down the right field line. It bounces…

 

01:48:53

JOHN:             Baseball and American football really gave rise to the whole idea of the broadcast of sports and they’re perfect for that medium of radio and television.

 

01:49:02

TOM CHATFIELD:  Mass media transformed the act of watching play into perhaps the greatest collective experience in human history.

 

Cheering

 

01:49:26

JOHN:             Television was used to broadcast soccer around the entire globe so it’s a little ironic that this medium that came out of these intensely American and quantified sports became the device for turning soccer into the most popular sport on the planet.

 

01:49:43

TOM:  More people watched the last soccer world cup than have ever belonged to any religion.

 

Technology is this amplifier that allows us to satisfy our urge to play.

 

01:49:59

You’re watching the most exciting game you will ever see on your t.v set. Telstar by Calico with three different games. Telstar handball, tennis, hockey. All three at an exciting low price.

 

 

01:50:10

TOM CHATFIELD:  The ball has pride of place in video games. The world’s first commercially successful video game, Pong, was an almost platonic reduction of table

 

01:50:21

tennis into two white bats and a square blob of ball bouncing potentially endlessly between them.

 

01:50:31

And all the instructions it offered its users was one iconic phrase, avoid missing ball for high score. Play was the cutting edge of computer experience.

 

Go. Fantastic runner.

 

01:51:13

Play had this magic ingredient. It turned the computer from being something difficult and obtuse like a math’s puzzle into something like a ball.

 

01:50:23

Something that you picked up and played with. And this deep fundamental fascination continues throughout the history of technology.

 

01:50:31

And in this sense our newest and most dazzling toys are just like rocks picked up by our distant ancestors thousands and thousands of years ago.

 

01:51:46

JOHN:             In modern ball games what makes them so compelling to watch and play is precisely the fact that they are highly organized. They’re organized around rules that are understood and highly repeatable.

 

01:51:58

ISABEL:         And undoubtedly, you know, if you play highly competitive games. If you play video games you get better.

 

01:52:05

JOHN:             The consistency of rules play and regulation repeated again and again allows players to perform greater and greater feats of excellence within those constrained variables in the rules.

 

01:52:15

DAVID:          The football being played today is immeasurably superior to anything that was played in the 20^th century, frankly.

 

 

 

01:52:26

It has allowed us to create an extraordinary stage for the amazing aesthetic performances. It’s fantastic.

 

01:52:36

When you have that level the questions and money and power arise. Because someone has to play for the circus and someone’s got to run it.

 

01:52:45

You have to have that if you want to have professional sport but how do you stop them taking over. How do you stop it becoming a pathology.

 

01:52:56

If you start trying to buy victory rather than achieving a win, I mean you’re not playing anymore. We’re out of the realm of play and we’re into the realm of politics and power.

 

01:53:11

In the perfect world there’s a symbiotic relationship between these highly structured, commercialized games and these unstructured ball games as kids play them.

 

01:53:24

They both exist for a reason.

 

Kids playing

 

01:53:41

DAVID:          It’s a spectrum. What’s the right mix. You know, what’s a good balance, what’s healthy, what works.

 

JOHN:             What happens unfortunately is when one displaces the other, when those sandlots force no longer exists

 

01:53:57

DAVID:          It’s so impossible for a modern commercialized spectaculars to replicate the innocence, the presence of playing its most basic forms.

 

01:54:07

JOHN:             We have to ask ourselves what’s being lost in the process?

 

01:54:38

SERGIO:        We know that kids now are couch potatoes. Childhood obesity is high. It’s like the first thing you want to do is encourage them to go out and get some physical activity.

 

WOMAN:       Look at all this cool stuff you get to wear. I’ll help you.

 

01:54:50

But because simultaneously we also are living in a world where parents are freaked out that, you know, there’s monsters hiding around every corner.

 

Walking down a street you never walked down before.

 

01:55:00

You never know what’s around the next corner. Some of the things might be terrible, so be careful turning corners.

 

One solution has been to overcome that is well, let’s get kids involved in various kinds of sports.

 

01:55:13

Say on a sports team. You’re playing football, you’re playing cricket, you’re playing baseball depending on what country you’re from.

 

01:55:20

JOHN:             Children are more likely to play in AYSO sponsored games of soccer than they are to grab a bunch of kids and set up their own game.

 

01:55:33

PETER GRAY:          Think of the difference between a pick-up game and an adult directed game of little league.

 

SERGIO:        In structured sports, somebody else has made the rules for you.

 

01:55:44

PETE:  Little leagues is good for learning skills. It’s good for learning how to swing a bat, maybe how to throw a curve ball.

 

Ready, set, release.

 

01:55:54

But how important for most people ultimately are those skills?

 

Keep your eye on the ball. Remember. Eye on the ball.

 

01:55:56

ISABEL:         They will still exercise their bodies and engage with others but it’s not the same as the free play that allowed Sultan, the chimpanzee, to put the two sticks together.

 

01:56:12

PETE:              Being able to get into somebody else’s mind to solve your own problems. To take initiative, to create rules collaboratively with other people.

 

1:56:27

JOHN:             These pick-up ball games or sandlot sports are based upon sports that we know but the rules are innovative and tailored in the moment of play to reflect the specific needs of this community or that community or this group of kids or that group of kids.

 

01:56:42

PETER:           The kids have to create the rules because they’re playing on whatever ground they’re playing on. It’s not a real baseball diamond. You have to set a rule that you can’t hit it where it’s gonna possibly break a window.

 

01:56:54

You can’t go running out into the street.

 

There’s all this negotiation, understanding, figuring things out.

 

01:57:04

SERGIO:        What’s the game we’re gonna play? What rules are we gonna follow? What are the consequences if you don’t follow them? How many times is somebody allowed to break a rule before they’re excluded from the game, right.

 

01:57:13

The kids have to decide that.

 

PETE:  All of which are extremely important skills for all of life. 

 

01:57:20

SERGIO:        There’s no substitute for that kind of process where the kids are not only given the physical exercise but they’re actually getting the brain training to actually design a  social world that they can now negotiate.

 

01:57:53

MELVIN KONNER: One of the great classics on, on children’s games is, is Piaget’s book on marbles.

 

01:58:06

It's about how children’s moral development occurs while playing marbles.

 

01:58:15

Showing how they develop a sense of fairness, a sense of competitiveness within rules.

 

PETE:  With adults around they see the rules as sort of something that comes down to them on the basis of authority.

 

01:58:29

It’s as if the rules are God given.

MELVIN:       They get a little older and they start thinking, well, wait a second. We can make the rules different if we want to.

 

01:58:39

PETE:              They are realizing that if it’s not fun and fair you can change the rule.

 

MELVIN:       In either (ph) direction with each other in play they’ll develop their own sense of morality.

 

01:58:51

JOHN:             Once again we see that the ball is at the center of this social dynamic.

 

ISABEL:         Balls produce unpredictability because we literally don’t know where the ball is gonna bounce.

 

01:59:01

The actual variability of play is the key to its value. It confers flexibility.

 

01:59:11

JOHN:             Having to adapt the rules and to be sensitive to other people in the context of play is a natural  part of these unstructured freer ball games as children play them  and is exactly what connects them to rough and tumble play in animals.

 

01:59:46

MARC:           I look at a ball as being equivalent to like a social catalyst. It gets animals to play with one another, interact with one another.

 

01:59:56

PAT KANE:   It is about a relationship between risk and security.

 

The name of the game and what we inherit from other animals is that play is risky. But they don’t get hurt that much because you’ve got the rules that don’t allow them to bite another animal or kick another animal or slam into another animal too hard.

 

02:00:16

STUART BROWN:   Watch a kid begin to have to share or a kid that punches another kid too hard and the other kid cries or a kid pushes another kid down and that kid is, is all bent out of shape.

 

02:00:25

And then you yourself get pushed down or punched hard. You begin to have a sense of what it’s like to be the other.

 

It’s my ball.

 

 

02:00:34

PAT:    We have to rehearse the dark stuff and the violent stuff as much as we rehearse the socialable stuff.

 

STUART:        And when you don’t get to play like that from within yourself. When you don’t make some mistakes you’re really devoid of a kind of an internalized sense of what it is to have empathy.

 

02:00:56

JACK PANKSEPP:    Children that haven’t had lots of play they are the ones that are more likely to be violent criminals.

 

02:01:02

They simply do not understand what’s happening other people’s minds. Maybe they don’t care as much.

 

02:01:10

SERGIO:        By denying kids that free play, that social free play in particular, what we’re denying them is the opportunity to really push their frontal cortices to the, to the maximum of their ability.

 

02:01:20

MARC:           And it’s just gonna have devastating effects on interpersonal interactions and communication.

 

SERGIO:        And I think we actually doing the exact opposite of what we should be doing.

 

02:01:30

STUART:        You begin to see this is really pretty important to being fully human.

 

02:02:10

I do have a sense that preparation for the unexpected, for the search for novelty can open us to new forms are really necessary to survive in an ever changing world.

 

02:02:21

DAVID:          Humanity is engaged in a gigantic experimental crisis and we simply do not know what is coming our way.

 

02:02:32

STUART:        We’ve had glaciers we’ve had volcanic eruption. We’ve got global warming, over population. I mean, these are things that require flexibility and innovativeness to solve.

 

 

 

02:02:43

DAVID:          We are going to have to be incredibly spontaneous and incredibly inventive and we are going to have to think collectively if we are to have half a chance not of stopping these problems but of dealing of the consequences and the uncertainty that we have unleashed upon ourselves.

 

02:03:01

STUART:        I think that’s why play is there. To give problem solving capabilities and novel ways of looking at the world that we wouldn’t get otherwise.

 

02:03:13

LEWIS LAMPHAM: Play is the imagination of new worlds.

 

It’s extending the reach of mind and possibility.

 

02:03:38

We will come up with some idea to rescue us. That’s where it will come out of. It will come out of the realm of play.

 

02:03:54

DAVID:          To open yourself to spontaneity, uncertainty and caprice of the ball. It’s an extraordinary thing.

 

02:04:02

What we don’t know is whether we have the heart and the wit and the guile to bring it under control. Let’s hope so.

 

02:04:21

There are worse ways of exploring it than watching people play a game of football.