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Editor’s Note: This is a guest article by Karl Zinsmeister<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n Organized sports, from college athletics to local Little League teams, are slowly coming back to life after being on lockdown. There are those who will say that these activities aren’t “essential.” But they’ve been saying that since before the pandemic. And they couldn’t be more wrong.<\/p>\n There are folks who have long argued that sports are just escapism. Plenty of teachers and professors think athletic teams are nothing but a distraction from serious learning, and even an encouragement to bad behavior.<\/p>\n There are now politicized critics who whine that high-level sports foster too much competition. That they are too militaristic. Too violent. <\/p>\n One super-trendy claim is that athletic competition encourages \u201ctoxic masculinity.\u201d <\/p>\n Those complaints miss fundamental truths about sports, for males in particular. For many boys and young men, classrooms are uncomfortable places. Athletic teams are often a saving compensation. <\/p>\n When I first arrived on a college campus, I had a bad reaction. I didn\u2019t appreciate the smugness and sense of superiority that I encountered among lots of smart people at an Ivy League university. I didn\u2019t like the softness of many scholars, and their disconnection from the hard knocks and grueling demands that life places on less coddled citizens out in the real world. I didn\u2019t see much respect on campus for the people I grew up with \u2014 who value grit, humility, and hard work much more than philosophical navel-gazing.<\/p>\n To escape some of the things I didn\u2019t like about academic life, and to get closer to people I could admire, I poured myself into sports. I originally played on the Yale football team, then shifted to rowing. I sometimes tell people that I majored in rowing in college, and that\u2019s only partly facetious. <\/p>\n Eventually I found an academic path that excited me, and managed to create a life of the mind that I\u2019m proud of. But I retain a deep respect for the life of the sweaty, bruised, and exhausted body, as well. <\/p>\n Because, done right, sport is not just play. It is not trivial. When undertaken as a discipline (which of course is completely different from watching as a spectator) sport can be one of the most formative activities any human ever takes part in. <\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t in a classroom that I discovered the power of resilience and stamina. It was in sports. That\u2019s where I learned to keep going despite hard blows. That\u2019s where I accepted the necessity of drudging labor, and the irreplaceable value of preparation. <\/p>\n Sport is where I learned the very most vital lesson of my entire life \u2014 which is that in any really fierce battle, the competition is not the person across from you. The competition is your own pain threshold, your internal discipline, your perseverance. Can you defeat your own weaknesses and go beyond your comfortable limits?<\/p>\n So much for athletic competition not being educational. <\/p>\n But then there\u2019s that \u201ctoxic masculinity\u201d argument. <\/p>\n It\u2019s true \u2014 it is certainly true \u2014 that male nature, when it escapes cultural boundaries and guardrails, can be brutal and dangerous. But that\u2019s exactly the reason we need arenas, defined by rules and traditions of fair play, where young males can bang against each other in ways that build rather than destroy. <\/p>\n Because it\u2019s just a fact of nature that most men are attracted to ferocity. You can channel those ferocious instincts into activities that are constructive. Or you can pretend that men can just be talked out of ferocious interests. I\u2019ve got news for the critics: significant numbers of those men who are denied wholesome outlets for their young male impulses will instead become abusers, gangbangers, outlaws. <\/p>\n Traditionally, there have been lots of places where young males could take risks and strengthen themselves without burning down their neighborhoods. In fact, for thousands of years, it was an almost universal experience for young men to enter rites of passage<\/a> where they would face stiff physical and moral demands on the path to adulthood. A Spartan teenager had to live off the land alone for a year.<\/a> If you were an American Indian you needed to capture an eagle with your bare hands. In Europe you became a knight. Or emigrated to a wild land. You ran off to sea.<\/p>\n I sometimes get asked by young men how they can become an interesting writer. I tell them they should first do something interesting in life. Herman Melville turned into one of the world\u2019s greatest novelists after joining the merchant marine, sailing a whaling voyage, and then serving on a frigate. He wandered Tahiti, worked as a beachcomber and rover. He was jailed in Australia. (Of course, everybody was jailed in Australia.) <\/p>\n I\u2019m currently reading through the novels of James Fenimore Cooper. He started as a student at Yale but was expelled for some classic young male pranks. These included bringing a donkey into a classroom. The one that got him thrown out was using a small keg of black powder to blow the door off of a friend\u2019s dorm room. With college suddenly out of the picture Cooper joined the U.S. Navy, where he had many adventures, including overseeing the building of a 16-gun brig in the middle of a wilderness in upstate New York so it could be launched into the Great Lakes to fight Britain during the War of 1812. <\/p>\n