Being-Towards-Winning

There are lots of great excerpts to share from Steven Connor’s new book A Philosophy of Sport. Here’s one:

The sudden approach of the finish line involves a significant shift of effort. Instead of pushing forward, to overcome a considerable and continuing resistance, you are about to break through from the playing of the game into some other state entirely. Ending is much more than simply stopping. Ending has a duration, with a beginning, middle and end of its own. When you are drilling through a piece of wood, you automatically reduce the pressure as you are about to penetrate the other side of the material. Landing a plane is a very different thing from simply aiming it at the ground, or a building, though both of these will assuredly bring it to an abrupt stop.

Ironically, therefore, one of th ways of seeing through the endgame successfully consists in pretending that it has not in fact begun. Billie Jean King used to try to avoid the dangerous slackening of tension involved in serving out a 5-3 lead to take the set (and the accompanying tension at the danger) by pretending that she was 3-5 down. Winning is like death. Everything in life leads up to death, and may in a sense be given purpose and orientation by it. The player possesses a being-towards-winning as human beings have what Heidegger calls a “being-towards death.”