Talk about using sport as a vehicle for getting at life’s bigger issues…
Wednesday night at Santa Clara University, The Institute of Sports Law and Ethics (ISLE) hosted the third annual ETHOS Award honoring initiative in the ethics of sport. ISLE continued their focus on institutions aiming to enact positive, ethical change in sport by honoring ex-NFL player Wade Davis for his work as Executive Director of “If You Can Play” (IYCP).
“If You Can Play” espouses one central message. It’s a message that should seem so logically airtight that none would challenge it, yet one which has not nearly become entrenched in the zeitgeist of sports culture: If you can play, [then] you can play. As one IYCP video depicts, the basketball hoop or ski mountain doesn’t care who you like—boys or girls—so why should we? If you can play, you can play.
Davis wanted to take this further than just the homophobia prevalent in the sporting culture. He also applied it to sexism and, really, any other –ism. If you can love, you can love. If you can serve and protect, you can serve and protect. A truism if there ever were one.
To make matters more complex, ISLE’s chairman, Ron Katz, offered some brief remarks, including this morsel: “Inclusiveness is at the foundation of ethics.” A clear tie-in with that night’s award winner, no doubt. But here, Katz made a much grander statement, as he had asserted a foundational component of the entire enterprise of ethics.
The comment struck me initially, primarily because I had not heard it put that way in my years of reading and writing in philosophy. But as I mulled it over, it seemed that inclusiveness just had to be a primary factor in an ethical framework. That next morning, I began my 8:00 AM philosophy class by having the students evaluate Katz’s statement. I challenged them to choose a word other than “inclusiveness”: respect and empathy were met with the greatest approval, though inclusiveness remained at the top of the list.
But all of this is somewhat beyond the scope of what’s important regarding Wednesday night’s award. Sport again served as the catalyst for profoundly big-picture concepts and reflection. These ideas and the “If you can…” approach clearly apply outside the sporting arena, to our everyday lives, and to how we treat each other in the real world.
Davis provided even more where that came from. He asked us to disrupt our culture’s denigration of certain groups by not just becoming an ally: He urged us to become an accomplice, reminding the full-capacity audience that silence is complicity. Another great ethical lesson: one can be held morally accountable for a non-action.
He finished with a favorite quote of his taken from the late poet and writer Maya Angelou who said, “Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.” As I write this, I can already see my lesson plan for our next philosophy class: “Evaluate the following claim, ‘Courage is the most important of all virtues.’” If not courage, then what?
Davis has got us all talking. And “If You Can Play” has us acting. When sport can incite discussion and action based on a foundation of inclusiveness, empathy, respect, and courage, it has allowed us to achieve the sort of greatness that transcends the playing field.
