A few months ago, I turned on the radio to find one of my favorite talk-show hosts hopping mad. He had attended a San Diego State football game, when something he witnessed before kickoff really set him off. He explained, “Right before the teams went back in the tunnel for the pregame talk, a bunch of players from both teams met at midfield and chatted for a while. Maybe they knew each other before college, or maybe they met at an all-star game, but they stood out there talking and shaking hands and such.” The talk-show host let his listeners know that such behavior would never be allowed back in the good ol’ days. “I hate that fraternizing with the enemy,” he said. “In my playing days, the only time you talked to your opponent was after you knocked his block off.” 

As I have done all too often lately, I sighed at the lack of belief in the potential for sport to go beyond merely reflecting society to actually improving it.

More than a few social critics have observed that sport is the great metaphor of life — every good and bad experience in life has a corresponding experience on the playing field. Or put another way, athletics gives you the chance to practice life’s most challenging moments when the stakes are relatively small. For example, on a playing field, you learn to respond to the truth that “life’s not fair” as you lose a game due to unfortunate or even unlucky circumstances. In life, you may be forced to respond to the truth that life’s not fair in the face of tragedy. In one, the stakes are unfathomably high; in the other, you lose a game. But in both, your challenge is to move beyond the cruelties that are set in your path to find a way through to life after tragedy and loss.

That leads me back to our story of the sports-show host. The primary metaphor in all of sport is war. We talk of attack and defense, of our offensive weapons and of protecting our homeland (or field). Some aspects of that metaphor are harmless; some are not. When we think of sport as war, it carries with it certain implications. For example, in war we have enemies, and to keep us focused on winning the war, we often have to dehumanize our enemies. They are evil, or at least much worse than we happen to be. And with war as the controlling metaphor, the same thing happens in sport.

This past November my team was playing in the Mountain West Conference tournament in Provo, Utah. We had flown to the tournament, while UNLV, the team we had faced for the regular-season championship, had driven a charter bus. After the tournament, our coaching staff had to stay for the coaches meeting, which meant we couldn’t drive the team back to the hotel in our rental vans. I casually suggested that our players could get a ride back in UNLV’s bus. You would have thought that I had just slapped their mothers. “Coach, are you kidding?” they said. “Did you see the things they did and hear the things they said at our game? They are not the kind of team you want to be riding around in a bus with.”

That was all I needed to hear, for now I was determined to get them to ride together. When UNLV’s coach readily agreed, my team slowly followed the UNLV team out to their bus, all the while giving me that “we’ll get you” look.

Two hours later, we returned from the coaches meeting to a hotel lobby full of players from both teams mingling together. When I asked how it went, one player remarked, “They were so cool — they taught us some really weird song that they sing, and we taught them some of your crazy sayings.”

You can respect and even like an opponent, while playing against them with every ounce of your heart and soul. That is the lesson of the bus ride, and if given the chance, it can suggest to us a different approach to how we contest differences in the world of ideas and ideologies.

Things are bad globally. There are many reasons for that, but a primary one has to be our inability to disagree with respect and dignity. The Christian and the Muslim disagree on religion, so they demonize the humanity of the other side. The capitalist and the socialist disagree on political structure, so they make the other side out to be the embodiment of evil. The disagreement is not the problem — the commitment to the maxim “the other side can’t simply be mistaken, they must be evil” is the problem.

We apply the language of war to differences of opinion as well, and so we dehumanize the enemy. But it doesn’t have to be that way, in sport or in the real world. And for the coach, the athlete and the fan, the good news is that eliminating the war metaphor in sport, or at least parts of it, may teach us all a bit more about how to eliminate the war metaphor in public disagreements.

If we are going to move toward an athletics “cease fire,” I suggest two ways to start:

n At every opportunity, let’s get opposing teams together off the field. Perhaps whole conferences could come together for a community-service project the weekend before the first week of games.

n Coaches, resist the urge to cast everything in war metaphors. The other team is not the enemy, they are not evil, and they are not “attempting to sneak into your house in the middle of the night to steal your children” (actual quote from a college football pregame speech). Show your players that you can respect the other side, while still doing everything in your power to win the contest. Show them, and everyone else who is watching, what it means to disagree with respect and dignity.

Wouldn’t it be cool if sports showed us the best of what this world could be, instead of the worst of what it already is?

Mike Giuliano is the head women’s soccer coach at San Diego State University.