After being omnipresent in the media, Quebec hockey player Guy Lafleur, who died on April 22, will be entitled to a national funeral on May 3. He is not the first athlete to be elevated to the rank of gods, but he could be the last if we are to believe Antoine Robitaille in The Journal of Montreal “It marks the end of an era of hockey. Before obsessive fitness bot gamers.”
Various other commentators have given us to understand that Guy Lafleur preferred to follow his instincts, his nature, nature, rather than obey the instructions of the coaches.
This fact, which may seem banal, contains a deep intuition. Gabor Csepregi, a Canadian philosopher-athlete who took part in the water polo events at the Montreal Games in 1976, will help us explain it. His dual status gives his reflections on sport a singular authenticity, which can be seen from reading body intelligencea book he published in 2014 (PUL).
Let go
The robot body is the body perceived and experienced as a machine, an instrument at the service of a will separate from it and remotely controlled by a team of experts. The goal is measurable performance, not that graceful achievement in surrender of which Csepregi speaks so well. The intelligence of the body, according to him, is not that which is applied to it from the outside, but that which irrigates its muscles, which would confirm many neurologists who refuse to limit intelligence to the brain. We thus move away from the dualism of Plato and we push to its limit the substantial union of soul and body dear to Aristotle.
Csepregi is of the opinion that not only is total control of the body through the will impossible, but also that the supreme moments in sport are reached by surrender. What tennis player, however amateur, hasn’t noticed that it’s when he lets go that he makes his best exchanges? He then understands that the unconscious often does things better than the conscience.
These are, says Csepregi, those moments that audiences appreciate the most. Supported by his trainer, the athlete tries to obtain perfect control of his body, but he always comes up against a limit: as if life always ends up resisting the will. And it is paradoxically when he loses control of his body, or renounces it, that the athlete experiences his finest moments. He then abandons himself to his autonomous body, to his spontaneity, to his creativity. The lived body, the living body then takes over the machine body, but only for a certain moment, a moment of grace when the athlete “goes to do what he cannot do”.
Is going beyond, then, in reality abandonment? Yes, replies Csepregi, and this happens in all sports, whether individual sports or team sports.
This position is not a theory reserved for specialists in sports philosophy and psychology. It touches all aspects of human life, marking the difference between living and functioning. Everything in today’s world, starting with the overwork of children, encourages us to function rather than to live, so much so that we are entitled to say that to philosophize is to think about sport.
Wonder of nature
It is to philosophize in this way that the many admirers of Guy Lafleur are invited at this time. What they admire first, perhaps without always knowing it, is a marvel of nature and not a product manufactured by technology, a dimension confined to the background. For the Greek poet Pindar, commentator of the first Games, the marvel in question was a sacred thing. For any man today, she is a gift calling for gratitude. Isn’t this the deepest if not the primary cause of Quebecers’ overflowing enthusiasm for Guy Lafleur?
The good hockey player, like the bon vivant, is the one who seizes opportune opportunities well. There is a Greek god embodying this faculty: Kairos. He is often depicted as a young man with a thick tuft of hair at the front of a bald head at the back; it was a question of “grabbing him by the hair” when he passed… always quickly. Guy Lafleur, “the blond comet, mane in the wind”, looks like him.