The epitome of grace…what makes sports matter

What Willie Mays Meant

"… The value of sports, as the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen writes, is that, although the activities themselves may seem arbitrary or trivial—hit this ball into a pasture so far that it can't be caught, or then try to catch it—chasing such goals creates new paths of agency and aspiration for us to mimic inside ourselves. "Oh, the unruffled nonchalance of that game," was Roth's concluding remark about New York baseball in the forties and fifties. If we feel that nonchalance today when we watch Mays, it's because it models the possibility of being at once urgent and at ease, racing as hard as humanly possible to make the play, with the secret knowledge that you will, indeed, make it. That double pursuit, outwardly hard-charging and inwardly serene, is the epitome of grace in every human endeavor. (Just the other night, Connor McDavid showed, again, how it is done in hockey.) This is what makes sports matter. To borrow an image from Angell: all the rest of us do in life is run down uncatchable balls, drop them, and then pretend we haven't. That's why seeing one perfectly caught is so satisfying that we'll never stop watching it, even after the catcher has left center field for good."

 —Adam Gopnik

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