"Does Our Lucrative Sports Culture Take Away a Boy's Humanity?"

    ...If you were a boy, you remember that at some point playground culture became sports culture. If you were able to enjoy the first, that didn’t always mean you could succeed at the second. Play morphed into competition as early as society could get us to internalize the idea that we were vying with other boys for affirmation and the emblem of “manhood.”
   The boys who were “real boys” (those most likely to grow up to imitate “real men”) were the best at competitive sports. They were “winners.” They were the idolized who most successfully internalized the competitive spirit that our culture needs to keep its economy and military going.
   Internalizing that model of manhood is how most of us actually came to believe that “competition is good.” We’ve built a society so dependent upon competition that it’s hard to even imagine how we could live well without it. So, we embrace justifications for it.
   It’s an unquestioned basic truth men and women are supposed to accept as they both value manhood, even if what competition is good for is not human relationships but production and profits...."

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