How to Read about Sports

I’m going to start this essay on sportswriting in what might seem an unusual place, not in a stadium, ballpark, or arena, but at the puppet theater. In 1810, the German writer Heinrich von Kleist published a short philosophical dialogue titled “On the Marionette Theatre,” in which the narrator of the story recounts a conversation with a dancer who claims that a puppet can be more graceful “than a living human body.” This astonishes the narrator, but he is slowly persuaded by the dancer’s argument and his idea that the gracefulness of a puppet results from its lack of self-consciousness. In fact, the dancer tells the narrator, he regularly attends puppet shows so that he can achieve their same qualities in his bodily movements, meaning minimal affectation and a seamless union of mind and body. The story concludes with the dancer telling the narrator that “grace appears most purely in that human form which either has no consciousness or an infinite consciousness. That is, in the puppet or in the god.”