Sports, Empowerment and War
by Shelby Lyman
The idea of sports as a form of manly empowerment is an old one.
Teddy Roosevelt, a future American president of Rough Riders fame, declared inProfessionalism in Sports (1890): “There is a certain tendency … to underestimate or overlook the need and virile qualities of the heart and mind.”
Three years later, in an essay in Harper’s Weekly titled “The Value of an Athletic Training,” he argued that “manly out-of-door sports” could contribute to the growing role of the U.S. as a world power. Vigorous athletics would help build “courage, resolution and endurance.”
Curiously, the sedentary and minimally physical game of chess also was seen as a form of empowerment by leaders of the revolutionary Soviet society of the 1920s.
In 1963, Rodion Yakovlevich Malinovsky, a Soviet military commander in World War II and minister of defense in the 1950s and 1960s, wrote in Chess in the USSR, “We in the Armed Forces value chess highly because it disciplines a man, helps to increase strength of will and powers of endurance, develops memory and quick-wittedness, and teaches logical thinking.”
Two decades earlier, after months of excruciating and deadly face-to-face combat, Soviet armed forces drove Hitler’s powerful legions back from the gates of Stalingrad, Leningrad and Moscow.
Was training in chess a factor in their victory?
Source: http://www.vnews.com
This FIDE election is war for Kasparov.