If you re in high school, you might begin to take things more seriously when your school faces off against a rival s in a game of Basketball or Soccer. These games teach things beyond the sport itself. And, while I have always been wary of the sports as metaphor crowd, these are lessons we not only need to learn at an early age, but need reinforced in later years from time to time. The act of playing hard and playing tough need not be an invitation to brutality, or to machismo, or even to show off your really, really expensive sports shoes with the cool logo on them. Almost all images of sport the classic thrill of victory, agony of defeat model are designed to tell us about other people, and about ourselves.
Good sports teaches physical skills, mental skills and social skills, along with the myths.
It was interesting to me as stories from our Contributing Editors came in for this issue, that several centered around young people. Susan Laws competition piece, as well as both Kitty Beuchert s and Nancy Norell s hunting offerings, recognize that these acts are valuable to young people both in the present and the future. Not only does the process of acquiring of new skill require learning , it also requires the teaching by someone else in the cases cited in the pages, parents and grandparents. All three of our writers recognized pretty quickly than in these troubled days, this sort of familial sharing of knowledge and recreation is not just wholesome, but probably vital. A friend with three kids grown and nearly grown has made it a point to teach them not just how to shoot, but his own love of it.