Brian Koonce: Playing Sports as an Art

Nietzsche's category of art that he calls Apolline most certainly applies to the skill with which it takes to play sports.  Apolline art is characterized by a higher sense of truth or consciousness, and although usually pertaining to static forms of art, I believe it can apply to performing athletic feats as well.  In practices and games, a player must clear their head of all else but the ins and outs of the game; what they need to do, what their teammates will be doing, what the other team will be doing; an example of the higher consciousness about which Nietzsche writes is the ability of an athlete to know all these things while at the same time controlling their body while it performs athletic feats about which most people can only dream.