Years ago, I sat on the floor across a low, polished wood table from my Zen master, Taizan Maezumi-roshi, both of us absorbed in translating a revered text by the great Zen ancestor Dogen Kigen. Sipping green tea to warm us against the winter morning chill, we worked slowly and with great care.

As we worked through the morning, I was scarcely aware of the passage of time, or even of the intense ache in my knees from hours of kneeling, Japanese-style, on the floor. Noticing the sun breaking through the late-morning haze, I was filled with a gracious sense of that intimate meeting of minds that is at the heart of Zen practice.

Our absorption was broken by a knock on the door. Charlotte, Roshi's assistant, stepped in to inform me that there was an important phone call for me from Paul, a friend and fellow Zen student. This was odd. It was understood that interrupting Roshi's meetings was not a casual matter. I asked Charlotte to tell Paul that our meeting was nearly over and that I would call back promptly. A few moments later, she returned, saying that Paul insisted on speaking to me right away. Curious, and a bit annoyed, I asked what could be so urgent that it couldn't wait ten minutes. Charlotte replied, evasively, that I should just come to the phone.

Had I been focused less on Dogen and more on the conversation, I would have been able to read the conspiratorial signals indicating that this was a matter best taken up outside Roshi's ken. Instead, I pressed the issue and, given no choice, Charlotte said that Paul had been offered free tenth-row tickets to that night's Lakers-Sixers game and needed to know right away if I could go.

A formal Zen training period, such as we were then in the midst of, is highly structured, and one should miss meditation sessions only with good reason. I was well aware that, in Roshi's eyes (which I now sensed were burning holes in the back of my head), Laker games clearly did not qualify. I turned back to meet his gaze and saw not the stern look I had anticipated but a very different expression, one of bafflement. I had seen the expression on just a handful of occasions. It was reserved for those times when the behavior of his American students appeared to him so strange as to be incomprehensible. With a start, I realized that he hadn't a clue as to why this matter would cause me the slightest hesitation.

We held each other’s gaze, now two strangers staring across a seemingly unbridgeable chasm. After a long moment, things became clear, and I asked Charlotte to tell Paul I could not go to the game. The matter settled, we returned to Dogen.

But the matter was not as settled as I thought. Two hours later, as though in the space between two thoughts, I found myself on the phone pleading with Paul for the other ticket. I was in luck. That night, I slinked off to the Forum. It was a great game.

Back at the center after the game, sleepless from a giddy blend of guilt and elation, I reflected on the day's events. It occurred to me that the chasm that had loomed between Roshi and me was also a chasm within myself. Two parts of myself, both rooted firmly and deeply, were strangers to one another. Both exerted powerful claims on my being, though the nature of these claims and the ways they made themselves felt were very different indeed. But the most striking difference was in my conscious relationship to them.

I regarded the spiritual impulse to be a fundamental human imperative, and I saw the refinement and cultivation of it as something with intrinsic and self-evident value. Through a practice such as Zen, this impulse was made explicit in activity and linked to a tradition of guidance, insight and inspiration. Through practice, one joined a centuries-old conversation about what is most essential in human experience. And within the framework of that conversation, the purpose, meaning, and significance of practice is given the kind of rich elaboration that elicits and gives intelligibility to one's deepest intuitions.

The pull of sports was something else again. With the exception of a two-year post-’60s trial separation, they had been a constant in my life. Sports were just always there to be enjoyed. They were so close a part of daily life that I had rarely, if ever, paused to reflect on the power of their hold on me. I was an informed fan, fairly well-read in sports literature, yet the source of my passion, even the idea of it, remained obscure. I asked myself what it was that, as former Major League Baseball commissioner A. Bartlett Giametti said, held such a “purchase on my soul.” But I was hard-pressed to answer. I simply did not have ideas that could do justice to the power of the experience.

Over the years, my love of sports—our love of sports—has ripened into a compelling question in my life, a kind of koan, if you will. What began as a problem of self-understanding became in time a source of self-understanding.

The religious nature of sport is the subject of Michael Novak’s The Joy of Sports. Novak argues, eloquently and persuasively, that in American society sport is a kind of "natural religion." "I am saying," he writes, "that sports flow outward into action from a deep natural impulse that is radically religious: an impulse of freedom, respect for ritual limits, a zest for symbolic meaning, and a longing for perfection. I don't mean that participation in sports, as athlete or fan, makes one a believer in 'God,' under whatever concept, image, or experience one attaches the name. Rather, sports drive one in some dark and generic sense 'godward.'"

Sports satisfy our deep hunger to connect with a realm of mythic meaning, to see the transpersonal forces that work within and upon human nature enacted in dramatic form, and to experience the social cohesion that these forms make possible. Whether or not we so name them, these are religious functions. But our society so thoroughly secularizes sport that we can barely recognize, let alone express, what it makes us feel. Sport is, in Novak's words, "a faith without explanation."

The historical record substantiates Novak's argument. Our ancient ancestors believed sport was a gift of the gods, something with divine purpose. Sport has its beginnings in religious rites performed to win favor with the gods, to placate unseen powers, to honor departed heroes. Most importantly, they were a form of fertility magic. The ball games of native America, the wrestling matches of West Africa and Japan—these and other forms of ritual contest among ancient peoples were created to expedite the passing of the seasons, to bring rain, and to ensure abundant harvests.

Ancient Greece was, of course, the site of an extraordinary flourishing of sacred sport. For the Greeks, athletic contests were offerings to the gods. They were surrounded by ceremony and celebrated in poetry. Within this sacred context, sport was a container in which aggressive passions were channeled and transformed and an arena in which virtues were cultivated and displayed. Participation in sport, whether as contestant or spectator, was seen as an activity that educated, enriched, and emancipated the soul.
Sports may no longer be about transcendence, but they still enact transcendence. They retain their power to intensify experience and awaken within us a larger sense of being. They continue to provide forms that make present to us the primordial forces that in other times were called gods, that today might be called archetypes, and which still constitute the primary themes and motifs of art, philosophy, and psychology. This is the hidden dimension of sport, its secret life.

To do its inner work, sport demands from the player the rigorous application of skill, intelligence, and creativity within the inherent designs of the game. From the spectator, it demands a knowledgeable and loving eye. From both, it requires a passion to know those moments when we glimpse that perfection of form that is always sensed yet never attained.

Although we in the West have long ignored the primacy of sport’s inner life, recent years have brought a growing awareness of the role of consciousness in sports. We are, as a culture, finally catching up to Yogi Berra, who long ago observed, "Ninety percent of hitting is mental. The other half is physical." One indication of this inward shift is the advent of the term “the zone.”

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