The Theater of Sports: Belief and Heroism
Does sports make a believer out of you?
Table of Contents
This is Part 1 of a series on Sports and Theater: The Hero’s Journey. Read Part 2 here.
Subscribe for new posts every week!
I don’t believe in much.
I doubt there’s an anthropomorphic god playing with our lives. I don’t think everything has a divine purpose. Most social clubs repulse me, and I, them. And you can probably guess where I stand on religious holidays. (They’re great if I get the day off).
For someone who doesn’t “play along” much of the time, I have some pretty bizarre convictions about the stuff I do care about. If I like something, I’ll delude myself into thinking I was meant to find it. If I’m in a place that makes me feel safe, I’ll attribute “special qualities” to it even if it’s unremarkable. If I get the slightest sense you’re not an asshole, I’ve already imagined an alternate universe where you and I are best friends.
I am, in short, a believer in my own right…
So when The New York Times started investigating belief by looking at “religion and spirituality,” I thought… why stop there?
José Mourinho (The Playbook, S1, E3)
Belief is too universal to be contained within the walls of any religious institution. It reverberates through culture, relationships, music, art, and quite prominently in sport, where gargantuan arenas and small indoor courts transform into altars of courage, devotion, and sacrifice. Where people, young and old, congregate to witness the hero’s journey — someone who captures the peak and pit of human potential. It’s a tale as old as time. A new adventure dares you to go where you’ve never gone before, to achieve something you never thought possible, and return eternally transformed.
Welcome to Joyce’s monomyth, an archetypal story that appears not only in myth and literature, but also — as Joseph Campbell observed — “if you are sensitive to it, in the plot of your own life.”
Suspension of doubt
There are two kinds of people you never want to watch a game with. Someone who’s always interrupting. And someone who insists we’re going to lose. My dad is the latter. Which is why the only “sport” we ever enjoyed watching together was the scripted storylines of WWF (later WWE). At the end of the day, it didn’t matter who won. What mattered was loyalty to the characters we so loved.
When you’re in the throes of an intense competition — Ali vs. Frazier, Sox vs. Yankees, Djokovic vs. Nadal, Pakistan vs. India, Barcelona vs. Real Madrid, South Africa vs. New Zealand — the last thing you want to hear is someone on your side preempting failure. It ain’t “Christlike”. Yet it begs an important question…
When is it okay to call it? A few seconds before it’s over? A few minutes? Does a true faithful believe all the way till the end or, like a rational spectator, oscillate between belief and skepticism?
That’s the beauty of awe-inspiring live theater. Anything can happen. That much I can attest as a sports-agnostic who’s witnessed disbelieving crowds believe again at the final hour. Indeed the most exhilarating moments in sport occur in impossible circumstances — when all hope is lost.
“I had faith! I had faith!” – Michael Jordan to coach Phil Jackson after game-winning shot at the buzzer
(Chicago Bulls v. Utah Jazz, 87-86, 1998) | Getty Images
Belief in the game
Watching a game is often seen as this chest-pounding male-bonding activity. You sit together, cuss together, scream together, cheer together.
But the actual act of experiencing the game? Rooting for your team. Keeping up morale. Hoping, expecting, sometimes even praying for them to win. It takes a certain kind of vulnerability. You open yourself up to the possibility that you could be wrong. That the reality you desperately believe in may not come to light. Do you go all in? Or do you stand at a safe distance to avoid disappointment? It’s a chance we take, similar to the gamble we take in the game of life.
In Where the Action Is, essays on the theater of risky behavior, sociologist Erving Goffman notes:
“Wheresoever action is found, chance-taking is sure to be. As soon as the coin is in the air, the tosser will feel that deciding forces have begun their work, and so they have.”
Nowhere is this action more palpable or the stakes higher than competitive environments where the strength of ten can pale against the luck of one. National sports in particular mimic the structure of a kind of choose-your-own-adventure game where the best team learns to play off of each other’s strengths. As the audience, you choose the sport and player that best represents your innermost struggle. All art is activated through the projector of our own experience.
Top (L to R): Aragorn the reluctant hero, Frodo the ringbearer, and Boromir the steward-prince of Gondor
Bottom (L to R): Scottie Pippin with Phil Jackson, Michael Jordan with his father, and Dennis Rodman with the Larry O’Brian trophy
Of course, we usually place our chips on the player who best represents our transcendent ideal. An incarnation of what we aspire to be in the story of our own life. Your own personal Jesus. With your sincere belief combined with theirs, the game itself becomes a moment of revelation. Greatness exists — and you not only bear witness but also testify to it. It happened. You were there. And what does it mean if you knew it all along?
This is why winning a championship is so much more than a career milestone. It’s the myth of the hero finally made real through the attainment of treasure — a journey marked by the confrontation of our deepest fear. No matter the sport or the team, every hero’s journey begins with this call to adventure. Do you accept the invitation? Will you seize the moment?
I will take the ring to Mordor… though I do not know the way.”
(LOTR: The Fellowship of the Ring, 2001)
Each game becomes life and death as we tip-toe between sincerity and skepticism, constantly gambling for and against ourselves. This process of self-identification is so crucial to the faith of sport that local sports clubs are often revived through cultural and class-coded appeals to “home” that help generate feelings of belonging — of being “one of us.”
Legendary football manager and head coach José Mourinho explains how self-identification stood at the heart of his own phenomenal success when he led FC Porto to a historic UEFA Champions League victory back in 2004, marking the first time a club outside the “big four” leagues won the trophy since 1995:
“The north of Portugal, where Porto is, is an area of hardworking people. It’s an area where people feel a big connection with the club — if the club represents the values of those people. People there, they demand that spirit, they demand that sacrifice. The first thing that the club had to recover was these principles that make people fall in love again with your team. We wanted homegrown players, players with a deep feeling for the club. People that they could say: This is one of us.”
This is why coaches don’t just look for exceptional talent — they look for an exceptional team profile where greatness can be cultivated, measured, and challenged time and time again against new threats. This is part of the process of building the hero’s character, where physical and mental strength are relentlessly tested before the big showdown.
Belief in yourself
“Those guys, when it gets stripped down, don’t believe in themselves. They aren’t sure they can hit the big shot, so they can’t. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.” (Michael Jordan, 2024)
When it comes to elite talent in professional sports, there’s simply no substitute for unwavering self-belief. The belief that you can beat the odds. Defy gravity. That you can fly. This is what separates good from great — and it’s the same laser-focused discipline and self-assurance found in individual sports like tennis, swimming, and pro wrestling. Take it from “The Mozart of Chess” Magnus Carlesen, five-time World Chess Champion and World Rapid Chess Champion:
“If you don’t have the ability to make quick decisions based on intuition, mostly confidently, then you will miss out on so many opportunities because you see dangers that aren’t actually real. When I was 17, I was playing against the best players in the world and I discovered very quickly that in order to not just draw them, but to beat them, you have to have the belief that you can compete with anybody. And within a few years I was completely convinced — rightly or not — that I was the best.”
This is what makes “miracle moves” that occur during moments of acute stress a thing of beauty. Indeed it’s what brings millions of non-believers into the church of sport, where the holy matrimony of mind and matter make anything possible. The greatest basketball player of all time may never walk on water. But once upon a time we damn near saw him fly. And that’s something to behold.
“In time, physics professors and even an Air Force colonel will take up an intense study of the phenomenon, trying to answer the question that obsessed a global audience: “Is Michael Jordan flying?”. They will all measure his “hang time” and declare that his flight is an illusion made possible by the momentum delivered by his speed at liftoff. The more they talk of extraordinary thigh and calf muscles and fast-twitch fibers, of his “center of balance,” the more they sound like men grasping at air.”
Roland Lazenby, Michael Jordan: The Life
What in the laws of physics?
Belief in taking chances
Yet no athlete, no matter how confident, dodges the mortal blows of flaw and failure. Total commitment means overcoming these fears and suspending disbelief to charge ahead, even if the act itself defies logic. There is no room for cynicism in the co-creation of fiction. Your job is to play with total sincerity a character who is at once you and something greater than you. As with acting in a well-written scene, this requires absolute trust both in the team and the process.
In the theater of sport, winning is emblematic of life itself. Will you fight together or die alone?
This kind of devotional belief is often resurrected at the lowest point in the game, either through a battle cry for loyalty or a higher calling. This is straight from the playbook of war heroes. The only way to take a risk so spectacular is an equally spectacular belief — that the laws of nature will conspire to help you, should you rise to the occasion.
Similar invocations can be found in art and literature, where the pursuit of doing the right thing becomes more noble than the thing itself. This is where the unexceptional is made more meaningful through constant juxtaposition with the opposite. Like the fellowship in Tolkien’s beloved trilogy, the strength of any team is determined by the disparateness — and unlikely union — of its characters.
“A moral of the whole (after the primary symbolism of the Ring, as the will to mere power) is the obvious one that without the high and noble the simple and vulgar is utterly mean; and without the simple and ordinary the noble and heroic is meaningless.”
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, To Milton Waldman, 1951
Building character
As a public figure, the hero is pushed to extraordinary limits and in turn discovers “hidden powers” needed to adequately play the part of a lifetime. In some cases, the hero lives a thousand lives, representing the breadth and complexity of their journey. Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Lebron James. Each hero must slay the allegorical dragon defined by the cultural crusade of that age. And much like god, they are immortalized by the sincere belief of their audience.
Take Michael Jordan, widely lauded as the greatest basketball player of all time, who reached a stunning career high with six NBA championships, 4 gold medals, and various accolades during his iconic run with the Chicago Bulls in the eighties and nineties. Despite the overwhelming success of a hero whose “competence could only be rivalled by his confidence,” Jordan remained an enigma in the all-seeing eye of the press.
L: Michael Jordan | R: The late Kobe Bryant
Try watching The Last Dance, a 10-hour docu-series compressing 500 hours of NBA footage detailing the best years of His Airness — complete with behind-the-scenes footage, live reactions to controversial moments, and emotional reactions to age-old rivalries — and you’ll finally see the man as well as the myth and the legend. Throughout his highly scrutinized career, the hero felt somewhat distant, inaccessible, and in doing so, he remained mythical and perpetually out of reach.
No matter what you make of the documentary, the hero’s plight for trust and transparency is always complicated by the fickleness and distraction of hero-worship, the rising tide of cancel culture, the precariousness of a larger-than-life public image, and the conflicting interests of a hungry mob constantly vying for the hero’s attention:
“The athlete is often confronted with a fundamental dilemma, whether to conform to the expectations of his peers (teammates), the expectations of the management, or the expectations of the public. Since each of these audiences might use different criteria for evaluation, the athlete becomes adept at the art of impression management. He is ‘cool’ for his peers, demeaned for the management, and dramatic for the fans.”
Ingham, A. (1975) ‘Occupational Subcultures in the Work World of Sport’
This is eerily similar to the actor’s paradox — not just the conflict of being present and absent during a demanding performance, but the ruthless demands of a show that goes on and on and on. It’s not unusual for the theater or film actor, particularly the latter, to juggle multiple characters in addition to the one portrayed for the stage or screen.
The actor must continue to shapeshift in order to remain culturally and socially relevant. A jester at talk shows, a disciplinarian on set, a tactician at press junkets, and a phantom that keeps fans yearning for yet another glimpse.
Allies and competitors
Just as we present a certain version of ourselves around others, so do we engage in deference and avoidance rituals to save face or to ensure we don’t violate someone’s “ideal sphere”. This explains, in part, why Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, the person he considered “the best team-mate of all time” weren’t as close as we’d like to think. In a tell-all autobiography, six-time NBA champion for the Chicago Bulls and two-time Olympic medalist revealed:
“Michael and I aren’t close and never have been. Whenever I call or text him, he usually gets back to me in a timely fashion, but I don’t check in just to see how he’s doing. Nor does he do the same. Many people might find that hard to believe given how smoothly we connected on the court.”
Scottie Pippen, Unguarded
Social interactions are filled with “defensive” tactics, like avoiding topics that are likely to embarrass us or those we care about. We are constantly dodging, misdirecting, and sometimes avoiding those that threaten our game. Mastering deference means mastering this agility.
Similarly in sport, defensive players need to know “where the action is” in order to take consequential risks. Watch as the late Kobe Bryant reviews Pippen’s brilliant defense, noting at 1:55: “This shows me that he is keenly aware of the actions that are taking place out here on the floor.”
It’s no surprise that the same mental jiu jitsu needed to succeed in highly competitive situations can also create growing tensions between teammates. In everyday life, we’re usually vigilant of this erosion, especially in work-based interactions. We tread carefully at dinner parties and office meetings when a certain topic has the potential to uplift someone’s character at our expense. It’s the same reason why some of us avoid getting too close to colleagues we secretly (or not-so-secretly) compete with. It’s a way to prevent role conflict in a contentious egoic environment.
🏀 Like it? Share it. 🏀
In Part 3 of the deception series, I explore how avoidance and distance helps to maintain a pecking order and establish dominance and rank, especially in hierarchical teams and organizations. This is partly to avoid “character contests” — disputes arising out of conflicting perceptions of self and other. In The Last Dance, we find Michael Jordan constantly testing the limits of his teammates, supposedly for their own good or the good of the team. At one point, he tearfully admits:
“Winning has a price and leadership has a price. So I pulled people along when they didn’t want to be pulled. I challenged people when they didn’t want to be challenged. But I never asked them to do something I wasn’t willing to do myself.”
One of the things that separates talent from a cultural icon is the latter’s ability to alter the course of history without being reduced to a less-than-ideal moment. The hero is tested equally on their adaptability and mental resilience, driven by situational awareness and their understanding of self in the broader context of history. One might say professional athletes face various incarnations of death to become who they are.
Death
Like heroes, athletes too face a “turning point” after a symbolic death changes the trajectory of their careers. Sometimes this manifests as wish fulfillment, often resembling a kind of self-imposed exile, similar to MJ’s abrupt departure from NBA and brief stint with the White Sox, as a gift to his late father. Sociologist Erving Goffman explains how these risks can unlock new facets of identity:
“The self can be voluntarily subjected to re-creation.”
We see a far more extreme version of self-annihilation play out in the film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, when Faramir selflessly heeds the wishes of a father “whose will has turned to madness.” It’s a haunting scene echoing the hero’s desperate (at times tragic) need for love and acceptance.
It’s worth noting that in the book Faramir exercises wisdom and compassion through a kind of devotional and selfless heroism, contrary to the traditional warrior represented by his brother Boromir: “I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.” This was partly a reflection of Tolkien’s own vision, and the reason why he identified most closely with his character:
“I am not Gandalf, being a transcendent Sub-creator in this little world. As far as any character is ‘like me’ it is Faramir — except that I lack what all my characters possess (let the psychoanalysts note!) Courage.
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, Footnotes: To Mr. Thompson, 1956
Pain and privacy
While many of us know what it’s like to lose a loved one, most of us do not know what it feels like to do so at the height of an unpredictable athletic career — let alone in the insatiable eye of the media that both venerates and crucifies you. Much of this trauma remains private, not just from the press, but from one’s own team. The athlete’s strict regard for emotional privacy is particularly noteworthy in Pippen’s own memoir when he reflects on Michael losing his father:
“When I heard the news, I should have reached out to Michael right away. Instead, I went through the Bulls’ PR department, and once they told me no one from the organization had been in contact with him, I gave up. Having lost my own dad three years before, I might have been able to offer Michael some comfort. To this day, he and I haven’t spoken about his father’s death.”
Scottie Pippen, Unguarded
When The Last Dance finally reveals the story of how both Michael Jordan and Steve Kerr lost their fathers, it illuminates all the things that were tragically left unsaid in the golden age of basketball.
Rebirth
The impact of death, symbolic or otherwise, can be particularly transformative for athletes in the public eye, and more so in single-player sports, where the player already bears the burden alone. The hero isn’t always tested on their physical strength — but they are constantly tested on resilience. This is what we mean by gameness.
Another shining example is tennis champion and four-time Olympic gold medalist Serena Williams, who showed remarkable “gameness” in 2003 after her oldest sister and personal assistant Yetunde Price was killed in a crossfire in Compton. The mental toughness needed to go on in the face of death is not something you can conjure at mere will. After a period of intense change, Williams went on to win Grand Slam titles in 2005, 2007, and 2009.
Here’s how her trainer described Williams’ comeback:
“I worked with Peyton Manning before his final season. I’ve worked with thousands of professional athletes, some of the best in the world. I evaluate them all on their mental toughness, and Serena is one of the most mentally tough individual athletes I have ever seen, man or woman, in 30 years of experience.”
Mackie Shiltstone
Whether in sport, battle, or ordinary life, we are all constantly tested on our gameness as we forge ahead in the face of unimaginable grief and suffering. This is why comebacks are foundational to the legacy of an athlete or artist, dead or alive.
It’s the resurrection of a hero destined to rise again.
🎬 Cool stuff referenced in this piece: The Playbook (S1, E3) by Netflix, What’s My Name: Muhammad Ali, The Last Dance by ESPN Films and Netflix, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of The Ring by Peter Jackson, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, Braveheart by Mel Gibson, Michael Jordan: The Life by Roland Lazenby, Unguarded by Scottie Pippen, Where The Action Is: Three Essays by Erving Goffman, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Occupational Subcultures in the Work World of Sport by Alan G. Ingham. Enjoy!
💭 Leave a comment and share your thoughts!
Thank you for reading. Join the Backstage Newsletter for new posts every week!