Does sport build character?

Should schools and colleges build character? If so, are competitive sports the best way to build it? If so, do some sports build character better than others?

To Jefferson, public education was the key to preserving republican government, because only well-informed people can be trusted with self-government. Yet at a time when 90% of Americans lived on farms and saw no need for more than rudimentary education, most colleges (like Harvard, Yale and Princeton) existed solely to prepare sons of the gentry for careers in the ministry.

As BSR's Tom Purdom recently pointed out in an essay about soccer, it was Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of England's Rugby School from 1828 to 1848, who first conceived the notion that education must develop character as well as mere intellect, and that character would be developed best through sport rather than book learning. As Purdom describes it, the game we know today as soccer or rugby "developed hardiness and physical courage, and it rewarded players who could combine teamwork with the ability to seize individual opportunities as circumstances changed."

Much the same sort of "muscular Christianity" was promoted in the U.S. by the Rev. Endicott Peabody, who modeled Groton in 1884 after his own boyhood experiences at Cheltenham College in England. Peabody lived long enough (until 1944) to see soccer upstaged in the U.S. by American football, which for my money is the ultimate character builder— because, more so than any other sport, it combines maximum physical challenge with maximum intellectual complexity.

The clichés were true

My own experience may be instructive. In retrospect, I got a terrific academic education at Penn. I took some excellent courses with stimulating professors, some of whom— like the sociologist Digby Baltzell, the short story writer Joel Sayre and the literature instructor Nancy Leach Sweeten— took a personal interest in me. My late lamented American Civilization major taught me to judge other cultures, past and present, according to their values rather than my own— immensely valuable training for a journalist. The sports columns I wrote for the Daily Pennsylvanian undoubtedly landed me my first job as a sports editor in Indiana.

Yet with the benefit of 47 years' hindsight, I see that all those hoary clichés about "life lessons learned on a football field" were true— that many of my most important lessons as a journalist and editor came not from my classes or the Daily Pennsylvanian but from playing football: for example, how to take criticism, how to give criticism, how to cope with adversity, and how to push myself beyond my presumed limits.

Jesus and basketball

Of course, Americans today have gone overboard in embracing the notion of sport as a character builder, as even rabid sports fanatics will acknowledge in their occasional sane moments. My small Indiana hometown of the '60s lived by two mantras: "Jesus is our savior" and "Basketball builds character." Yet when a school gym was opened for nighttime adult recreation sessions, the school board refused to include basketball in the program. "It attracts the wrong element," one board member explained.

So it's not sports per se that build character, I would argue. Anything that involves "learning by doing" builds character— and in many schools that lack nearby mountains to climb or jungles to explore, competitive sports represent the most cost-effective learning by doing experience available.

What's more, I submit, the secret ingredient in sports that breeds character is failure, because you learn more from losing than from winning.

Wilt Chamberlain's women

Think of the first "all-time sports great" whose name pops into your head. Ty Cobb and Pete Rose were terrific baseball players but obnoxious human beings. Ben Roethlisberger won two Super Bowl championships but also allegedly raped a college coed. Wilt Chamberlain claimed to have slept with 20,000 women. Julius Erving, a married man with a family, fathered a child out of wedlock with a sportswriter.

On the other hand, consider my Penn football teammates of the early "'60s, who never won more than three games in a season. That group includes Bill Novelli, former president of the mighty American Association of Retired Persons; Jim Riepe, former vice chairman of the T. Rowe Price Fund as well as the former chairman of Penn's trustees; plus a disproportionately high number of accomplished doctors, lawyers, business executives, money managers and even a TV and film actor (John Doman, of Mystic River and "Law and Order," among others). There's not a felon in the bunch that I know of.

Coach's farewell

A few years before he died in 2006, our coach, John Stiegman, invited his old Penn players to a lunch reunion. About two-dozen of us took him up on it, although we couldn't for the life of us understand why he wanted to see us. Before he came to Penn in 1960 Stiegman had known only one losing season in all his years as a player and coach; yet in five years of coaching us, he won just 12 games.

Why, in the evening of his life, we wondered, did Stiegman want to see us— the losers who destroyed his reputation— rather than the winners who had earlier paved his career path? For that matter, why did Frank Dolson, the Inquirer's late sports editor, often insist that we were his favorite of all the teams he covered in his 41-year career?

At that reunion lunch, Stiegman provided the answer. "You know, I hated to lose," he told us in his peroration. "But at least I was getting paid. But you guys— you had nothing to gain, yet you kept coming out to play, even when you were losing. That's what's really interesting— much more than the guys who were winning."

Locker room philosophy

Before bidding us goodbye, Stiegman urged us to reflect on why we had played football under those conditions. I found myself recalling my teammate Bob Harris, a defensive halfback.

"You know, this is really great!" Harris said to me in the dressing room one day before practice, without a trace of irony or facetiousness. "Every day we put on pads and spend 90 minutes running around a field and banging into each other. We get fresh air, terrific exercise, we work off all our aggressions— and when it's over, we're ready to hit the books!"

Many of my teammates regarded Harris as a flake or, worse, a closet intellectual. But I can't think of a more succinct justification for the role of football in a college education.♦


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