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Sports and War

Sports and War

Last updated on: July 8, 2026 at 6:00 am by Gene Veith

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Sports and War 2026-07-03T18:40:19-04:00 Gene Veith

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“War is hell,” said General William Tecumseh Sherman, who did his best to make it so. But there must be something about it that human beings have always found compelling.

Today we mostly slake those primitive passions with computer games and violent movies. Also sports, which displace the conflict, excitement, suspense, physical demands, and victories of war in a peaceful, positive way.

I came across a fascinating article in The Federalist by Hayden Daniel entitled Soccer Is Spiritually A Third-World Sport. It’s kind of a snarky response to the World Cup, claiming that soccer is not a red-blooded American sport. But, setting that aside, he says some things about the different kinds of sports and the different kinds of war that are quite intriguing.

I want to report on what he says, offering some additional thoughts of my own. Here are the different types of warfare and the sports each one emulates.

(1) Military Simulation. “Football, rugby, and most other team contact sports simulate a classic line of battle. The offensive and defensive lines in football are like two ancient Greek phalanxes crashing together. A flanking move or a daring thrust up the center often decides the contest. Even polo is reminiscent of a cavalry battle. These sports mimic the methods of conflict favored by Western nations: disciplined bodies of men in formation outmaneuvering and outsmarting the enemy.”

(2) Duels. “The second category entails ritualized, almost Homeric duels between two opponents. Boxing, wrestling, fencing, and MMA are the quintessential dueling sports, and the West has a proud tradition of these types of contests stretching back millennia. Tennis and billiards sports represent this category as well. It’s man against man, and he who has the greater skill prevails. You can see the echo of Achilles v. Hector from the Iliad in all of them.”

(3) Man vs. Nature. “Avid golfers will readily attest to this. His opponent is the green itself or his own ego just as much as it’s Phil from accounting. Competitive swimming, skiing, and surfing see men battle against the primal forces of nature.”

(4) Man vs. Himself. Daniel briefly mentions this under “Man vs. Nature,” but it deserves its own category. Track and field sports–running, jumping, throwing–as well as strength sports such as weightlifting involve disciplining one’s body and pushing it as far as possible. It requires mental strength, self-denial, overcoming pain, and saying no to oneself.

(5) Tribal Warfare. This is where Daniel places soccer. “The vast majority of tribal societies had highly ritualized modes of conflict. Each side sizes the other up and skirmishes for a long time, which usually entails throwing pointy sticks at each other with not much intention to actually hit anything. Bravado replaces actual physical courage, and once they do clash, decisive victory is usually nonexistent, and casualties are typically very low. Now, this made sense because of the low populations of these societies — a traditional Western-style battle could mean the virtual annihilation of a whole tribe.” Soccer, he says, is like that, with its running up and down and low scores.

Daniel minimizes this as “third world” and less than “American.” But this kind of warfare has a long history, including with America’s Indian tribes, not to mention the Germanic, Celtic, and other tribal societies that would later constitute Europe, once they were conquered by the Roman battle lines. And I fail to see how a style of war with low casualties is an inferior approach to warfare. Tribal warfare could go on for generations without the contending tribes wiping each other out.

I’m not disputing the aptness of the parallel, though. Americans may think soccer is boring because of its low scoring, but this kind of football inspires tribal loyalties on a monumental scale.

(6) The Individual vs. the Group. I am adding this category to Daniel’s taxonomy, as the others don’t really account for the distinctly American sport of baseball, which has spread throughout South America and Japan. He classifies it as a “duel,” citing the one-on-one duel between the pitcher and the batter. But that is only one facet of the game. The batter is not just up against the pitcher. Rather, he is against all nine of the players on the opposing team, who are trying to catch any ball he hits or knock it down so it can be thrown to a team mate guarding the base that the batter is trying to run to.

I think this game is about the war between the individual and the group, and also, equally important, the war between the group and the individual. America, in its most innate values, champions the individual over the collective. This can be both a strength and a weakness, as we seem to lack the communitarian values of other countries, such as most of those that compete in the World Cup. Baseball also dramatizes the collective’s competition against the individual, so both sides are represented nine times in nine innings. Japan has a highly collective culture, so it appreciates seeing the group win, but it seems to appreciate the occasional rebellion of the individual, so that it can also appreciate seeing batters hit a ball that the group cannot handle. South Americans, I think, also have this double dimension, as evident in the conflict between the Communists and the dissidents in the baseball powerhouse of Cuba.

I’m not sure how to classify hockey, maybe as a combination of physical aggression, man vs. nature (that is to say, ice), and the fluid back-and-forth of low-scoring tribal warfare.

Or Aussie rules football, a sport I’ve come to enjoy. That’s rougher than American football, since it’s played without “armor,” high-scoring though without the battle lines, and in constant motion like tribal warfare.

Or cricket, the baseball prototype that goes on for days, perhaps embodying the war between the individual and the group that can be traced through the English culture that would become the basis of American culture.

What sports have I missed, and where would they fit in?

Photo: The Kansas City Chiefs lineup on offense for a play against the Pittsburgh Steelers defense, by SteelCityHobbies – MRR_0301, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4773126

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