Let’s celebrate sport for no other reason than the sheer joy of it
Everybody loves a winner, Hong Kong included, but sport is not just about being the best – participation and having a good time are what count most
Are Hong Kong people crazy about sport? There seems to be evidence aplenty that they are. Every time Hong Kong’s football team pulls off a win in a World Cup qualifier, the entire city goes into a frenzy.
Lee Lai-shan, the windsurfing gold medallist at the 1996 Olympics and Sarah Lee Wai-sze, who won a bronze medal at the London Olympics, have become Hong Kong’s favourite daughters. And 19-year-old Rex Tso Sing-yu, having gone through 19 professional bouts without defeat, is now a local hero and a role model for teenagers.
Yet he talks about sport in mainly economic terms, focusing on how sports events can be big business giving impetus to a huge chain of related industries such as advertising, food and beverages, tourism and hotels. When our athletes win in a big way, he also suggests, they can unite the community by fostering a sense of pride in its members.
But sport isn’t just about winning and it’s certainly not only for the winners. More than anything else, it’s about participation and having a good time. The Irish novelist Iris Murdoch was certainly no champion swimmer. Yet she loved the sport because, when swimming, she felt “cured of all ailments and dissatisfactions, as of all other longings”. Swimming, she wrote, like dying, seems to solve all problems but you remain alive.
For some people, playing sport is as close as they can ever come to a state of happiness
To the American philosopher Henry David Thoreau, the great joy of walking lies not in mechanically putting one foot in front of the other en route to a destination but in mastering the art of sauntering.
What they want to express is a central truth about sport – it makes people feel good.
Sport, whether it can generate economic benefits or not and regardless of how well it is played, enables the expression of higher human qualities which often lie dormant in ordinary life, such as daring, discipline, loyalty and sacrifice. It concentrates the mind and provides a context for heroism, a sense of urgency and drama. And it creates a strong sense of purpose and meaning as well as an experience of passionate engagement generating powerful emotional responses.
For some people, playing sport is as close as they can ever come to a state of happiness. It produces the mental state in which they are fully immersed in a feeling of energised focus, full involvement and enjoyment in the process of performing an activity, whether it is swimming, walking, cycling, windsurfing or any other sport. Psychologists call this mental state “flow”, also known as the zone.
So let’s celebrate sport but for no other reason. Just for the love of it.
Perry Lam is a local cultural critic
