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Boys to Men
I logged in tonight because I wanted to write a post about boys and men. Then I saw this extraordinary post by Ole Summers, and I realized that nothing I had to say needed to be said.
But I’ll say it anyway, because I thought it and wanted to say it and the mood to write so rarely strikes anymore in the hurly-burly of life as it has been this past year or two.
My youngest three played sports in high school. They didn’t play in college; they weren’t of that caliber. (We have at least one member here whose daughters are of that caliber. Doc, you know of whom I speak.) But mine played all the sports offered to them, basketball and softball and football and baseball and soccer and tennis and track, and they played well and hard.
My kids are grown now, but I still watch my little Catholic high school take on the local public school giants. Tonight I cheered as our varsity boys’ basketball team defeated a previously undefeated team in a stunning 54-39 victory. It was glorious.
It was also fierce and brutal and a testament to the power of young men bent on a single task and consumed with its execution.
I’m stronger than any boy on that court tonight. I’m an ox. But at my best, I never had the skill and reflexes of these young men, nothing like it. And I probably never had the passion. They were animals, lightning-quick and absolutely relentless. Our boys, the five starters who played the whole game, rallied from a ten-point deficit to win a spectacular victory through sheer will and guts and determination.
We rarely see this anymore, this potential. So many boys today are lame. They waste their time on screens, they go to college and become oversensitive crybabies — or decide they’re girls and do that poorly as well. We almost never see the power and drive and utter single-minded commitment of young men in battle.
As I said, it’s glorious.
Elsewhere on this site, there’s a brief conversation about college athletics. I’m agnostic about college athletics because I’m generally agnostic about college; it just isn’t something I care about, and I’m not sure it’s a good thing. But, though I spent my youth resenting the athletes and the time wasted in high school sports, I’ve come to wonder if the experience on the field and on the court wasn’t, for many and for mine, the most valuable part of their high school educations.
But back to the boys. What I saw tonight reminded me of the astounding potential of highly motivated, dedicated, trained, and fiercely determined young men. (I had a girl as well, and she was a tiger. But this post is about boys becoming men.)
I’m not saying that sports really matter, in and of themselves. I’m saying that Sparta wasn’t without its wisdom, and that we should stand a little bit in awe of the capacity of disciplined and passionate young men to perform at an extraordinarily high level, whatever the goal placed before them.
And we should celebrate every opportunity we have to see humans at their best.
Published in General
I, of course, am not agnostic about sports having spent several years coaching both high school and college players and believe in the those type of moments that you saw tonight. They are not uncommon. But they are more rare than they need to be. But they are the moments that can mix with the values exposed to them repeatedly to give them (and the rest of us) a true sense of the potential that is all of us. That is what competition is about. Living a life of Liberty is by nature competitive because it calls for our drive to improve and aspire to our best.
My two daughters also were (and are) tigers who competed hard but, yes, we desperately need men who will set a tone for achievement, who will defend and lead families and not be afraid to fill the role of leadership that they are supposed to in balanced and healthy society. Thanks for opening this vital topic.
I’ll say it.
Sports are not for everyone, of course. But I learned more in football and track than I did in school for much of high school and college. More valuable stuff, anyway.
Learning how to work hard, how to fail, how to work hard again, how to succeed, how to work with people that you may not have much in common with toward a common goal, how to follow, how to lead – I just can’t imagine my life without sports.
There are other ways to learn all those things, of course. But sports is a great way to do it. And sports are beautiful.
I’m biased, as you point out in the OP. But I think sports are among the most vital programs that any school has.
We agree; I simply expressed the thought poorly. What I wanted to acknowledge is that, when both teams play honorably, the outcome of any given game is less important than the play itself — not to the players in the moment, perhaps, but in the greater scheme of things. They’re games, after all; at the end of each night one team will celebrate and the other will have a quiet bus ride home, but both will meet again.
In that sense, sports isn’t like, say, law enforcement or the practice of medicine, where the specific outcome of any given encounter may have a great and enduring impact. It’s just a game.
What the players put into the game is what matters.
I wrestled in High School (thanks to being pretty low-weight), but was not very good. The one thing I could do was to avoid a pin, so the coach had the star in the next higher weight class (who came in very high in the state) practice on me with me starting on my back.
It was a real lesson in never giving up which has stayed with me.
I agree. Participation in sports was a godsend for me. I would be negligent not to mention the huge positive impact Scouting had in my life.
I am a professional artist, a rather “wussy” profession for a man (Has anyone seen Downton Abbey where Matthew said callously to the Butler Molesly “A gentleman’s gentleman, that’s a rather silly profession for a man!”). But I was raised with a fierce atmosphere of “manly” competition that translated into qualities that help tremendously in my artwork, like determination, patience, focus, etc.
I played Junior High School Football in ninth grade. I was small at the time and got knocked around by the bigger guys and eventually grew tired of training. About three-quarters way through the season, I went up to my coach who was doing lunchroom supervision at the time and told him I wanted to quit. What he told me took me aback, “If you quit football now, I will paddle you every single day that you don’t show up for practice!” Shocked, I later told my dad what had happened and a big grin came across his face and he retorted “That’s great! When you come home I will paddle you too!” (and he would). He then went on to lecture me about the importance of finishing something that you start, which I didn’t quite understand at the time.
So I finished the season “under threat.” Since I was small (not anymore because I was just a late grower) I tried my hand at wrestling, where you compete against boys close to your weight. If I thought football was tough, it was nothing like I endured through four years of wrestling. My father, a professional artist himself, and never a wrestler but a former boxer, took it upon himself to train me, if not in wrestling moves, but in physical fitness. I actually trained harder during the off-season than I did during the season under my wrestling coach and science teacher, a former Marine. My father told me that his father drilled into him “If you’re gonna commit to something you should go hog wild on it.” (He was from the Deep South)
I became a pretty good wrestler, not a State Champ or anything like it, despite the fact that my coach once told me that I was in better physical shape than most of the State Champs and in better shape than everybody on my team. So I never achieved accolades in the wrestling world, but the lessons of hard work that I learned stuck with me for life. Throughout the years I’ve noticed that former wrestlers in general were very stalwart men (with a few notable exceptions).
The other thing that I learned from wrestling was that when you went into the ring, it was just you against whoever showed up and you did the best you could.
That was a useful lesson for my career as an Engineer. Whatever the problem, it is up to you to work out a solution (sometimes with a team, though)
I agree with this 100%. I think that is why I have so much appreciation for good coaches and disdain for bad ones. At the high school and college levels you are not just coaching a team, you are helping to mold men. And with the breakdown of the family structure in America, that is becoming more important than ever.
Back when I used to have to hire staff members, often right out of college, I always gave preference to athletes (don’t tell HR) because I knew they understood hard work and teamwork.
It is way different than “team sports” (Though wrestling in schools is counted as a “team,” it is essentially a lone encounter for each wrestler on the team). The psychological pressure is huge when you are out on the mat all by yourself against an opponent and all your classmates and family are in the stands watching.
Extremely tangential here, but since I just found this out the other day (and posted about it in the PIT), and Supertramp is one of my favorite bands…The drummer from Supertramp now coaches High School baseball.
https://minaretspress4.wixsite.com/minaretspress/post/rockstar-coach-bob-siebenberg
The article is from the school paper, and it’s pretty clear the writers have only a vague idea of what Supertramp was, but it’s still a nice story.
Great post, Hank. I think that sports are very good for boys.
I’m skeptical about whether sports are good for girls. I guess that it depends on what type of woman you want your little girl to grow up to be. I’m hoping that my girls decide to focus on motherhood, rather than career. My girls are dancers and singers.
It seems to me that in just about every country that’s followed the path of feminism, marriage rates and birth rates fall. It’s interesting that people on the Left in particular, who seem to talk so much about “sustainability,” aren’t troubled by the decline of marriage, family, and even childbearing outside of family.
There’s an easy solution, of course. Just apply the nondiscrimination principle. If the girls want to play sports, they can compete with the boys, just as black athletes compete with white athletes.
Interesting perspective. Something like that might be required to keep Western society going.
I saved this comment someone else made, a while back:
Oh, I don’t know. I know quite a few women who seem to be wonderful wives and mothers yet who played sports in school. While I think the differences between the sexes are real and statistically significant, I also think there’s a lot of overlap, and quite a few women are more interested in being competitive athletes than are quite a few men. (That is, the bell curves overlap.)
However, there is no doubt that at the upper end of most sports males absolutely dominate in terms of athletic prowess. Telling girls they have to compete with boys would essentially shut them out of most athletics, at least in larger schools. I think that’s neither necessary nor appropriate.
I think that’s probably a correlation that doesn’t imply causality. My own guess is that prosperity brings with it both a declining birth rate and a greater willingness to extend equal rights to everyone. I suppose we might encourage both marriage and childbirth by limiting opportunities for women and thus making them more dependent on men, but I wouldn’t support that even if I thought it might work.
Apples and oranges, I think. There’s no reason boys of different ethnicities and skin colors shouldn’t compete with each other; there are sound biological reasons why girls are at an enormous disadvantage against postpubescent boys.
So, to my past hypothetical, “If women getting to vote etc is part of what causes the trend towards socialism etc, and considering how women usually end up living (and dying) in such societies, is it worth the end of Western Civilization for women to get to feel good about themselves – empowered, etc – for 100 or 200 years no matter how the future ends up including for future women?” your answer is “Yes.”
How sad.
Also, the way we construct the male gender (on top of the male sex, which is not constructed) is by rites such as sports in which they compete against each other for the admiration of girls. It’s not the only consideration, but it’s one.
So to my hypothetical: “If literally enslaving women and forcing them to have babies against their will would contribute to slowing the descent into socialism and the end of Western Civilization, you’re all for it?” your answer is “Yes.”
How sad.
Of course, you no more addressed my hypothetical than I addressed yours. Let’s speak for ourselves, and not for each other.
I thought you were enough of a scientist/mathematician/whatever to know that’s not how logic works. Apparently I was wrong.
Logic doesn’t support your rhetorical leap, KE. You don’t get to equate my approval for equal legal rights for women and support for high school girls’ basketball to a lazy acceptance of the downfall of Western Civilization. That’s just silly.
I want to follow up on this part, Hank.
I doubt that you’re right, but I’m not aware of evidence that would settle the issue. I have seen reports of extremely low marriage and birth rates among South Korean women, and there might be some studies comparing countries on this issue, but I haven’t seen them.
I did find this report on the total fertility rate in the US, showing higher fertility for the religious than non-religious. This is consistent with my hypothesis, as I think that religious people would be more likely to hold traditional views about family. Among the religious — attending service weekly or more — the TFR is around 2.2, while among the non-religious, TFR is around 1.3.
I don’t like your strawman argument about “limiting opportunities for women.” I’m talking about teaching girls that when they become women, their primary focus should be marriage and family, not career.
I do think that female sports pushes women in the other direction, and not by limiting their opportunities, but by presenting them with opportunities to compete in a women-only environment, which makes them think that they’re better than they actually are. They then learn competitiveness and aspects of teamwork, which can be beneficial lessons in some endeavors, but are probably negative characteristics when it comes to marriage and family.
Almost all of the wealthy countries in the world seem to be on a path to demographic suicide, including ours. It seems to me that this is a true crisis, supported by solid empirical evidence, unlike the climate change hysteria and other Left-wing narratives.
I suspect that fixing this problem, though, would require libertarians to adapt to unfavorable facts, which is pretty unlikely.
But you were arguing that since I oppose A, I must therefore support the exact full opposite of A. Which is not logical. There are basically an infinite number of possibilities between what amounts to “Women must be allowed to destroy Western civilization” and “Women must be slaves.” Just for starters, there are several women on Ricochet who think that women voting is a mistake, a problem. And women weren’t slaves before the suffrage movement, so why would they suddenly become slaves if that were removed?
The “Handmaid’s Tale” trope is nonsense too. If it came to that, if some biological catastrophe were to occur such that most MEN were infertile, do you think things would just keep chugging along as if nothing changed, because “Men Rule The World” or something? Baloney.
Hank, the fertility issue got me thinking further, and I looked up some additional data. I found a report on fertility in the US, by educational attainment, here. The bottom line is that educating women is correlated with a huge drop in the fertility rate. The figures for 2019 are:
This is not directly related to sports, but is related to my larger concern about feminism. Those figures are really bad.
It’s been over 25 years since Herrnstein and Murray pointed out the dysgenic effect of this reproduction pattern. They demonstrated that these results applied to IQ, as well as educational attainment. IQ is highly heritable, and we have a situation in which the fertility rate is highest among low-IQ women with little education, and low — far below replacement — for high-IQ educated women. The expected result is a long-term decline in population IQ, among other problems.
I’m becoming more confident in the truth of the hypothesis that feminism is a long-term suicide pact. Societal death by childlessness, essentially.
I’m going to push back against the “strawman” assertion here. You wrote the following:
I contend that such a policy would significantly limit opportunities for women. We can debate that point, if you wish, but it isn’t a strawman.
That was part of the point about voting, too. Women didn’t have the vote when the country was started, but that didn’t make them slaves.
And also, referring back to my comment #12.
Yes, since previously competing only with other women might get them believing that they’re on a more equal footing with men – such as a husband – than they really are.
Mark Steyn covered this very well in what might still be the best interview ever, with anyone, on any subject (based on his book “America Alone”):
https://www.adrive.com/public/RaM8Mj/NARN%2012-02-06%20NARN%201%20Hour%202%20Mark%20Steyn.mp3
Ibid.
It might be a straw man – or at least more or less useless/irrelevant – in that it in effect teaches women only how to compete with other women, but that’s not what they would be doing after school, in the real world.
Yes. And my point was that you were making a similarly silly leap when you decided that me being unwilling to limit opportunities for women was the same as me being complicit in the death of Western Civilization. Go back and read your comment and you’ll see that I was simply repeating your hyperbole back to you, before pointing out that neither of us would make sense if we said what you said.
Regarding women voting: I think women tend to vote in ways I don’t like more often than men do, and I would prefer if women in general chose to stay home rather than showing up at the polls. However, I won’t advocate that women lose the right to vote. You’re welcome to once again accuse me of complicity in the death of all that’s holy for my defense of women’s suffrage, if you like.
I thought we were talking about limiting the opportunities of women to participate in high school athletics, Jerry. Are we now suggesting that letting the girls go to school is really the root of our problem?
There are places in the world where they don’t allow the girls to go to school. One of the things I like about America is that we aren’t one of those places.
Well at least you admit it, that’s a start.
I think that doesn’t actually make sense. You’re suggesting that women won’t learn to compete in the world unless they compete against men in high school sports. By that logic, boys won’t learn to compete with men in the world unless they compete against men in high school sports.
That’s like saying that kittens doing battle with balls of yarn are learning nothing, because they won’t grow up to eat balls of yarn. Skills are transferable. All of growing up is tilting at pinwheels, so that someday we can tilt at windmills. Or whatever.
Boys grow into men.
Girls/women don’t grow into or otherwise become men, no matter what certain El-Jibbity etc lunatics like to claim.