The art of sport

WHEN QUARTERBACK DOUG FLUTIE announced his retirement from football on Monday, news reports invariably included footage of his 1984 Boston College Hail Mary pass, widely considered to be one of the most dramatic college football plays of all time. Across the country, replays of the ''Miracle in Miami" were punctuated with the ''boo-yah!"-style color commentary that, for better or worse, now seems to characterize most sports programming. Not that Flutie's heave isn't worthy of hyperbole; 21 years later, it's still thrilling to behold. But underlying the cries of ''en fuego!" or ''straight butta" (or whatever catch phrase is currently in fashion at ESPN) is another, calmer term, that might be used to describe this and other great sports moments of the highest order: beautiful, in the philosophical sense of the word.

So argues Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, a professor of literature at Stanford University, in his new book ''In Praise of Athletic Beauty" (Harvard). Gumbrecht laments that most contemporary academic analyses of ''sport" as a cultural phenomenon tend to be socially patronizing, dismissive of sports fans as having fallen for a modern-day version of the old bread and circus treatment. Such thinkers, he argues, ''find it difficult to admit that the fascination with sports can have respectable roots in the realm of aesthetic appeal" more typically associated with the so-called high arts. Conditioned to look for aesthetic pleasure in a concert hall or museum, we fail to recognize that watching a tense seventh game of the World Series (or a championship fight or a 100-meter dash) might be considered a legitimate aesthetic experience as well.

To ground his argument, Gumbrecht turns to that staple of sports bar disputation, Immanuel Kant's ''Critique of Judgment." At the center of Kant's writings on aesthetics is his conception of the ''beautiful" as paradoxically related to ''purposiveness." The paradox, as recounted by Gumbrecht, is that although ''something does not need to have a purpose in order to be beautiful. . .whatever we find beautiful looks as if it had a purpose." A triple axel or bicycle kick or 6-4-3 double play clearly have no function outside the arena or off the field. And yet, writes Gumbrecht, such actions give a distinct ''impression of purposiveness." They are beautiful to behold because they appear both carefully calibrated and perfectly natural.

Gumbrecht employs another of Kant's theories of aesthetics, ''subjective universality," to address the communal aspects of sports spectatorship: How it is that certain sports moments (the Ali-Foreman Rumble in the Jungle, USA hockey's triumph at the Lake Placid Olympics, Bobby Thomson's Shot Heard 'Round the World) come to be recognized by individual fans as particularly worthy of canonization, a collective judgment of beauty that coalesces and only deepens with time. Subjective universality-the sense that ''our individual acts of aesthetic judgment always imply the expectation, perhaps even the invitation, for everybody to agree"-may explain why a diverse stadium crowd will gasp as one in response to an acrobatic alley-oop or an improbably converted flea-flicker.

Of course, Kant, who died in 1804, wouldn't have known an alley-oop from a hole in the ground, and Gumbrecht doesn't mention whether he was much of a sports fan. In any event, there's more to appreciating beauty in sports than what Kant offers: Clearly, the beauty of a play also depends on the circumstances in which it was made. This is why DVD compilations like ''404 Great Soccer Goals" and their brethren are so unsatisfying to watch all the way through; without context, the disembodied plays feel like nothing more than sports pornography. Kirk Gibson's home run in Game 1 of the 1988 World Series is revered by baseball fans not because it was so beautiful in and of itself; the play's aesthetic clout comes from the knowledge that Gibson hit it cold off the bench, on a bum leg, against a future Hall of Fame pitcher, and that no one had hit a come-from-behind, game-winning home run in a World Series ever before.

. . .

The art critic Dave Hickey builds his essay ''The Heresy of Zone Defense" (published in his 1997 collection ''Air Guitar") around another such moment of transcendent athletic beauty: Julius Erving driving baseline in the 1980 NBA Finals, veering though the air around Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, under the backboard, and then, somehow, reaching back under the glass for a reverse layup. After the game, Magic Johnson joked that the Lakers weren't sure at the time whether to inbound the ball or ask Erving to do it again.

''Everyone who cares about basketball knows this play," Hickey writes, and it's true: Even for sports fans like myself who were merely toddlers in 1980, the words ''Dr. J" and ''reverse layup" are sufficient to summon the precise mental image.

Hickey attributes the universal joy inspired by Erving's play to the fact that it ''was at once new and fair": within the rules of the game invented in 1891 by James Naismith, and yet impossible for Naismith (or anyone else, for that matter) to have anticipated until Dr. J actually pulled it off. The relationship between fair play and aesthetic appreciation may also explain why replays of Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa's record-setting 1998 home run chase felt breathtaking just a few years ago but now seem to have lost their capacity to inspire strong feelings.

Hickey also writes of the aesthetic rewards reaped by attentive spectators who know ''what to watch for" (in basketball, according to Hickey, ''basically, everything"). As in art or music, such knowledge isn't strictly necessary but it deepens the aesthetic experience. I enjoy modern art, although I have only a layman's understanding of it. My sense of the beauty of Ray Allen's perfect jump-shooting form, on the other hand, is enhanced by the innumerable bricks I've hoisted over two decades of pickup hoops.

Our desire to better understand all the nuances of our complex games accounts for the prodigious number of retired all-stars working as sports ''analysts," as well as the countless interviews and profiles of celebrity-athletes (athletic celebrities?) that go out each day to newsstands and over the airwaves. The problem, as anyone who's watched their share of post-game interviews knows, is the incredible banality with which athletes typically talk about the extraordinary abilities and accomplishments for which they are renowned. Having run for four touchdowns or hit three home runs in a game, shouldn't there be more to say about the experience than ''It feels great" and ''I'm just happy to be here"?

David Foster Wallace devotes his essay ''How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart" (included in his latest book, ''Consider the Lobster") to the conundrum. Onetime tennis phenom Austin disheartens Wallace because he can't reconcile her on-court brilliance, not only physical but mental, with her staggeringly insipid tennis memoir. It's certainly not a lack of intelligence, as Wallace points out: ''Anyone who buys the idea that great athletes are dim should have a close look at an NFL playbook, or at a basketball coach's diagram of a 3-2 zone trap."

Wallace ultimately concludes that looking to athletes for insights into the nature of athletic beauty discounts the possibility that athletes are capable of such feats precisely because they can ''invoke for themselves a cliché as trite as 'One ball at a time' or 'Gotta concentrate here,' and mean it and then do it." Any of us in the stands or watching at home, under such circumstances and scrutiny, would buckle and fail precisely because we think too much (that, and the fact that most of us have mediocre hand-eye coordination and aren't in particularly good shape).

There's no time for distractions or doubts when Kareem is rising into your path to block your shot or when you're deciding whether to swing at a full-count slider with the opening game of the World Series on the line. It may well be, Wallace writes, ''that those who receive and act out the gift of athletic genius must, perforce, be blind and dumb about it-and not because blindness and dumbness are the price of the gift, but because they are its essence."

Of course, intellectualizing any innately emotional or physical experience (say comedy, or sex) runs the risk of diminishing, if not destroying, the pleasure we take from it. Thankfully, for the 9-year-old kid who watched as Flutie took the final snap of that B.C.-Miami game (my brother and I were lying on the floor in front of the TV; my grandmother was visiting and across the room), there was no danger of that. I'll never forget the moment: the high arc of the spiraling football, the diving catch in the end zone, and then a wave of elation, intense beyond description, on the field but also far beyond it. A thing of beauty.

Matthew McGough is the author of ''Bat Boy: My True Life Adventures Coming of Age with the New York Yankees."