Capitating

Tomaso's Goal, Capitating Sports and How Gratitude and Detachment Permit of Moderation

By John Taylor; 2007 August 19

This summer has got to be the busiest in my whole life. Now that Marie is working evenings, I have the kids on my hands exclusively five nights a week, plus they are around all day. For the first time I am looking forward to the start of school in September. With last week's rain and threats of rain I had another run-in with migraine. Even my last resort, drinking glass after glass of water, did not save me entirely from this attack. Which brought up a disconcerting question, "True, John, you have had fewer than a dozen attacks all year long, but is that because imbibing massive amounts of water is such a sure-fire protection, or could it be just that the climate this year has been the driest on record for at least seventy years?" I have been able to produce reliably and even plan my activities without constant interruptions from attacks under drought conditions, but maybe I am like those neurological patients in the film "Surfacings," brought to normalcy by a drug which, it turns out, works only temporarily. In the end the poor blighters sink back into the haze of mental obscurity. If so, there is nothing I can do about it. Every second of life is precious, no matter what, and I am infinitely grateful to be alive in this Day of God, even if everything is not how I would want it to be.

Tomaso had his final soccer tournament yesterday, two games, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. I found out that the team had in fact scored this season, getting one goal in their third and one in their fourth game; evidently we missed those games. Anyway, they have not scored for so long I felt like promising a loony for the first kid to score a goal. Wanted to say it but did not; I am shy, I guess. I did have a standing promise of a reward for Tomaso, but he has played goalie for half of every game so far, and when he is not in goal usually is put on defense.

This time, even though Tomaso is their most experienced goalie, she put in his place for both games a taller player who had stayed away for the whole season. Worse, he hates playing goal. The other father of a Tommy, Terry, and I normally stay behind the goal posts to catch the missed shots and advise the goalie. There are so many shots on goal that we are kept very busy chasing balls and throwing it back. Terry was a top goalie in both soccer and hockey, and sorely regrets not coaching this year. (During a rare time when we were not chasing missed shots on goal, I mentioned that I saw the film Miracle and that my old hero Tretiak was in it. He said that he was on a Canadian junior team that toured Europe and went to Russia and played the Soviet Red Army Team, with Tretiak in goal. My respect for Terry went way up when I heard that.) I could see why she put this other little guy in goal, as he showed that he can kick several times further than Tomaso. Unfortunately, perhaps to spite Terry's constant admonitions to kick it to the side, he kept kicking it down the middle into a forest of opponents, which cost us several goals each game.

For the first time in a long time, the entire team turned out for this final tournament of this first season of this all-Dunnville league. On the whole the Blues did much better as a result. They were actually getting relieved once in a while and played more vigorously as a result. But it was hopeless. Terry explained how this team was chosen. It seems that the other coaches all got their pick of the best players. Then, after that, there was a spurt of applications by beginners. So they dredged up a new coach at the last minute who got no choice of players and formed the Blue team. Our blues did well, all considered, that Saturday. They only lost five to nothing in the first game, and four to one in the second game. Marie had to go to work at four in the afternoon that day, so at half time of the second game I drove her home. I rushed back, only to find out that I had missed the only goal the Blues got that day. To the immense pride of this Taylor family, it was Tomaso who scored it! I immediately forgave the coach for not putting Tomaso in goal that day.

Terry told me what had happened while I was gone. The Orange team felt safe and pulled their best player from forward to put him into goal. It was only 3 to 0 at that point. Just after the half, the ball made a rare appearance on the other side of the field. Tomaso got his goal, and they suddenly realized they might lose against the worst team in the league. So immediately they pulled their ringer from goal and put him on forward again. Well, at least we put a little fear into them, albeit briefly. And even with their ringer back, we held them to only four or five to one at the end.

Terry is determined to coach next year, and so would I if I had the knowledge he does. Fortunately, as the poet says, `where ignorance is bliss, `tis folly to be wise.'

I look at how this sports system is set up and wonder how my idea of capitation sports might work out. Capitation sports would not just pick out a small elite to `represent' us while we sit back and cheer on their ephemeral improvements. Capitation sports would be sensible about how things really are. It would work with the average physical fitness of an entire neighborhood and pit that standard against improvements made in other neighborhoods of equivalent size and makeup. That way, victory would not depend on how the best do in an athletic contest but mostly on how much the worst improve.

This would be better because of how the human body works. We get a false impression from elite sports, which are backed by powerful commercial interests and exclusive attention from the media. In spite of that, the reality is that the human body does not benefit from taking it to extreme levels of performance. In fact, it is harmed. Studies have found that mortality among top level athletes is higher than those who exercise within the bounds of moderation. True, they are better off than the sedentary, but not by as much as you would expect. In a statistically run sporting system, the aspirations of an entire community would rest largely on improvements by its least athletic. Their hopes would rest in how the most obese and sedentary members make progress. Sure, everybody would have to keep fit in order to win, but those who can contribute most to improved averages would be those who stand in need of exercise more than others.

That is why I focused in on the advice of that wealthy Athenian to Socrates yesterday. He consciously planned his entire lifestyle around keeping himself and his horse fit, ready for increased growth in peacetime, and ready for the strain of war in case of conflict. If neighborhoods thought that way, if they planned homes, buildings and social activities with an optimal lifestyle for all members in mind, and compared their progress with other, similar places, there would be rapid improvement.

Like anything, if capitated fitness were carried to an extreme it would cease to benefit. Just imagine fat and lazy people becoming prized commodities. Just as talent agents presently scout out the best hockey or football players and offer astronomical salaries and other benefits, in a capitation sports system a wealthy neighborhood would be sending scouts to bribe the worst non-jocks in other locations to come to there and start improving their physical condition there. In itself, that would hardly be a bad thing, but once the rewards become substantial you would see the same thing that is ruining professional sports now, what with doping scandals. But instead of elite athletes ruining their bodies with steroids to coax out an edge in performance, people of average fitness would move away, stop exercising and eat like pigs to fatten themselves up. They then would move into the neighborhood that offers them the most blandishments to come there and improve their fitness level. Such behavior would increase mortality as much as doping must do among elite athletes.

A way to get around such problems might be to capitate moderation itself. Anything that can be measured is fair game for capitation, and there would surely be signs that people are carrying competitive fitness improvement too far. One help would be to capitate wealth and ethnic variety as well as physical fitness. That way, individuals would be less desperate for money, would have several independent sources of data and values, and thus would be less inclined to surrender their health at any cost.

Needless to say, religion in its pure form is designed to protect against our natural inclination to go to extremes. Abdu'l-Baha explains the benefits of both gratitude and detachment, how both attitudes work together to protect us from our own weakness, from the seductive illusion that robustness in one aspect of life is the same as strength overall.

"All that has been created is for man who is at the apex of creation and who must be thankful for the divine bestowals, so that through his gratitude he may learn to understand life as a divine benefit. If we hold enmity with life, we are ingrates, for our material and spiritual existence [are] outward evidences of the divine mercy. Therefore we must be happy and pass our time in praises, appreciating all things.
"But there is something else: detachment.
"We can appreciate without attaching ourselves to the things of this world. It sometimes happens that if a man loses his fortune he is so disheartened that he dies or becomes insane. While enjoying the things of this world we must remember that one day we shall have to do without them.
"Attach not thyself to anything unless in it thou seest the reality of God - this is the first step into the court of eternity. The earth[ly] life lasts but a short time, even its benefits are transitory; that which is temporary does not deserve our heart's attachment." (Abdu'l-Baha, Divine Philosophy, 134-135)