A Metaphysical Excursus

Thesis: An athlete is greater than any single person for he combines the attributes of various types of people.
Anti-thesis: There may be many qualities of athletes that make them like common, everyday people, but there is still something about them that puts them on another level.
Summary of key arguments in order they appear in the selection:
--According to Paul Weiss, most men go throughout life without any “vision or wisdom.” Even though people have goals and dreams, it is uncommon for someone to actually achieve something beyond what they achieve in their everyday lives. However, athletes are different. An athlete is able to escape from the mundane world of everyday life by creating his own world of sport. A world in which he must master his body in order to achieve success against other, opposing bodies. In these ways he gains some sense of vision and wisdom from being able to control his body and escaping from the confusions of the daily world. What makes the athlete different than other people is not that he has to do his best, but that he also has to try his hardest and continue to try and accomplish a set goal. He must learn to control his body in order to be the best putting him on an artistic level. Intellectuals, artists and religious people along with athletes all try to escape from “the world of common sense” in order to examine their immediate fates. For the athlete, this means that he must only focus on his sport and what is happening in his game by losing focus on the world around him.
--Weiss describes a form of finality that he calls Actuality. He describes how it is only through being cut off from the world that one can truly see what is, and will always be, real. The athlete, by controlling his body, is able to make what he does “more clearly that which is in fact and forever the case.” I took this to mean that what the athlete is able to physically accomplish is viewed as fact since it is something that is well defined.
--The athlete can be viewed similar to other men in that everything he does is finite. Nothing the athlete does is going to make him last forever, which is the same for every human as well as everything else in the universe.
--Athletes do not try to look nice or make a game appealing to the public, even though their actions are public. Instead, the athlete simply focuses solely on his game, all other aspects such as beauty are byproducts of the game. By creating their own reality of the game that they know is not the reality of everyday life, athletes are better capable of understanding what reality truly is.
--People of action focus on a goal for the future and try to accomplish it in the present, with little concern of the past. However, athletes play a game with rules and strategies that have existed for long periods of time, thereby allowing them to link to their past as well as preserve it.
--Athletes are like other people because they have private lives. Unlike other men, athletes lives are more distinctive because of the uniqueness of their lives; they constantly push themselves to physical and mental limits.
--Athletes are like religious men because both are judged by beings they do not really know. Whereas the religious man is judged by God, the athlete is judged by other people so he can learn how they judge and how he compares to his fellow athletes. Through competition and team effort, athletes are able to come together in ways that would otherwise not be possible. This bonding would be described by the religious man as being the work of God.
--While an athlete may cease to exist in the physical sense, their excellence in the sport can always be remembered.
--Weiss states that being immortal in any sense is a touchy subject.
--An athlete’s greatness is not based on their private lives.
--Everyone is representative of the human race. A fact or truth, be it in sport or otherwise, is fact no matter what. --“The athlete is sport incarnated, sport instantiated, sport located for the moment, and by that fact is man himself, incarnated, instantiated, and located.” Athletes strive for their own excellence while still realizing the excellence of others, and in doing so, they become representative of sport itself.