SOURCE: “The Work of Play: Anger and the Expropriated Athletes of Alan Sillitoe and David Storey,” in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 33, No. 1, Spring, 1987, pp. 35–47.

[In the following essay, Hutchings examines the role of sports and the athlete in the work of Alan Sillitoe and David Storey.]

“At the same time that factory work exhausts the nervous system to the uttermost,” Karl Marx observed in Das Kapital, “it does away with the many-sided play of the muscles, and confiscates every atom of freedom, both in bodily and intellectual activity” （422）. Nowhere has this observation been better exemplified than in the English novels of working-class life since the late 1950s. Whether toiling at lathes like Arthur Seaton in Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Arthur Machin in David Storey's This Sporting Life or at a milling-machine like Smith's in The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, the protagonists of such fiction typically find that their actions soon became automatic, reducing them as workers （and, more importantly, as human beings） to mere operative extensions of the factory's machinery in exactly the way that Marx described. For virtually all of these working-class protagonists, the body and its pleasures provide refuge from the workaday monotony, fragmentation, and dreariness of factory-bound life in a class-ridden world. At the end of the week, having received their pay packets, they leave behind the factory with its noise and smells, eager to have “the effect of a week's monotonous graft in the factory … swilled out of [their] system[s]” in the “cosy world of pubs and noisy tarts” （Sillitoe, Saturday Night 7, 33） for which such novels are renowned. For many, however, sports provide an equally vital source of such pleasure—and, for those who play the pools or frequent the betting-shops, the prospect of supplementary profit or loss as well. To some fans, such as the narrator of Sillitoe's short story “The Match,” a team's dismal fortunes on the playing-field even presage a crisis in the day-to-day relationships of family life; to some athletes, such as the narrator of This Sporting Life, a team's collective endeavors provide a welcome release for the frustrations and pain that such personal relationships involve. Even to those who no longer play the game, like the middle-aged sportswriter who is the central character of Storey's novel Present Times （1984）, the world of sport—with its clear rules and its unambiguous outcomes—provides a haven from the various cultural upheavals and controversies that rive the modern family as well as contemporary society as a whole.

For spectators and participants alike, the importance of the “game” extends far beyond the vicarious enjoyment of fans' team-loyalties and the athletes' personal accomplishments. Yet, as characters in Sillitoe's The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner and Storey's This Sporting Life and The Changing Room come to recognize, sport, play, and even the body itself have been expropriated by exactly the social “establishment” from which they are alienated. Turned into the “work” of professional rugby for Storey's characters and into officially mandated “games” in Sillitoe's novella, “play” and sport become dehumanizing, no longer fulfilling their original and essential recreational functions in the way that they did in earlier times. Although in both authors' works the characters' participation in sports affords them a certain personal satisfaction and fulfillment that life in the “real” world cannot provide, the fact of the athlete's expropriation not only provides a crucial symbol for the causes of the characters' alienation and anger but also has implications well beyond their particular time, class, and society.

Almost invariably in such fiction, the protagonist is repeatedly described as being “big”—a standard image of the worker in twentieth-century art of all forms, of course, from Soviet Socialist Realism to the murals of the W. P. A. Yet, as Sillitoe has pointed out in one of his essays in Mountains and Caverns, such a portrayal of a working-class protagonist had particular importance in England in the mid-1950s when

working men [who were] portrayed in England by the cinema, or on radio and television, or in books were … presented in unrealistic terms … behaving in the same jokey but innocuous fashion. They lacked dignity in fiction because they lacked depth.

（37–38）

In stark contrast to Alfred Doolittle, Andy Capp, Alf Garnett, and countless others, Arthur Seaton and Arthur Machin tower over their parents and over their bosses at work—even though, symbolically, Seaton's “tall frame was slightly round shouldered from stooping day in and day out at his lathe” （Saturday Night 58）; even Smith in The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner is taller than the other boys, though not specifically described as big. For many, such size reinforces an equally sizable ego: “it makes you feel good,” Arthur Machin is told by the woman he loves; “it makes you feel big—you know how you like to feel big” （This Sporting Life 147）. Through his success at Rugby League football, Arthur Machin finds both recognition and a source of supplementary income, both of which are means by which, he explains, he “kept his head above the general level of crap, and that … was the main thing” （18）.

Beyond such fundamental considerations, however, the sport also provides an outlet for important emotions that cannot be expressed in his workaday world. Specifically, Storey's protagonist finds particular satisfaction in the arousal of

a kind of anger, a savageness, that suited the game very well. … This wildness was essential to the way I played … [and] seemed to correspond to my personality. … [It was] a preliminary feeling of power. I was big, strong, and could make people realize it. I could tackle hard, and with the kind of deliberation I took a pride in later, really hurt someone. I was big. Big! It was no mean elation.

（20）

Similarly, as Sillitoe's narrator runs across the chilly fields at dawn, he finds both an elation and a release for the anger that he feels for the “In-laws” of ostensibly respectable society:

Them bastards over us aren't as daft as they most of the time look. … They're cunning, and I'm cunning. … If only “them” and “us” had the same ideas we'd get on like a house on fire, but they don't see eye to eye with us and we don't see eye to eye with them … the pig-faced snotty-nosed dukes and ladies—who can't add two and two together and would mess themselves like loonies if they didn't have slavies to beck-and-call. … [But] standing in the doorway in shimmy and shorts … I feel like the first bloke in the world. … And that makes me feel good, so as soon as I'm steamed up enough to get this feeling in me, I take a flying leap out of the doorway, and off I trot.

（Loneliness 7–9）

Whether, like rugby, a particular sport requires a subordination of self to the collective endeavors of a team, or whether, like long-distance running, it allows free rein to the individual alone, each athlete finds—uniquely, through the experience of sports—an “alternate reality” into which the problems and anxieties of the everyday world no longer intrude.

Yet even though sports allow such outlets for the anger and frustrations that build up in their lives, the athletes in both novels soon find that they themselves—and, indeed, their respective sports as well—have been expropriated by the very same “establishment” that they rail against, so that （as a character in This Sporting Life complains） “a great game … [is being] spoiled by people who try and make it something else” （185）. Specifically, in Storey's works it is being made a business, even an industry—with paid managers and owners whose interests do not necessarily coincide with those of their workers, the players. Before he has even signed his contract, Machin is told that he is now “property of the City” team （This Sporting Life 59）, and he soon remarks that “they bought and sold players” like any other commodity or product. Consequently, the athletes can no longer be regarded primarily as human beings; their success or failure on the field becomes a matter that must be assessed in terms of profit and loss rather than any more “humane” values. Voluntarily co-opted as part of a system of paid performance for commercial entertainment, Machin soon realizes that he has not only been dehumanized but even reduced to the level of an animal:

I was an ape. Big, awe-inspiring, something to see perform. … People looked at me as if I was an ape. Walking up the road like this they looked at me exactly as they'd look at an ape walking about without a cage … [a] thing to make them stare in awe, and wonder if after all … I might be human.

（163–164）

On and off the playing field, no less than when he stands at his lathe in the factory, Machin has been dehumanized by the work of play. As a professional athlete—no less than as a factory worker—he is an operative cog in a commercial, mechanistic enterprise whose owner is far removed from the struggles and sufferings of those who toil on his behalf.

Although Smith in The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner is certainly not a professional athlete like Arthur Machin, he has been expropriated in exactly the same way by the “establishment” that runs the reformatory in which he is confined. The novella's opening line makes this expropriation unmistakably and emphatically clear: “As soon as I got to Borstal they made me a long-distance cross-country runner” （7; emphasis mine）. During the weeks of his training for a championship race, Smith is repeatedly encouraged to “win them the Borstal Blue Ribbon Prize Cup for Long Distance Cross Country Running （All England）” by the borstal's governor—an “owner” who, like the capitalists caricatured in any form of agit-prop, is a “pot-bellied pop-eyed bastard” with a grey moustache and “lily-white workless hands” （11, 9）. In fact, his relationship with Smith is defined in explicitly contractual terms, a quid pro quo befitting an employer and employee:

“We want hard honest work and we want good athletics,” he said as well. “And if you give us both these things you can be sure we'll do right by you and send you back into the world an honest man.”

（9）

Although Smith receives no remuneration of any kind for his efforts in the race （not even a quid in exchange for all of his quo）, his running—no less than Arthur Machin's rugby—has clearly been made a form of contractual work rather than play. And like Machin, Smith finds this expropriation dehumanizing and compares himself to an animal （though his chosen simile is less unflattering than Machin's ape metaphor）: “They give us a bit of blue ribbon and a cup for a prize after we've shagged ourselves out running or jumping, like race horses, only we don't get so well looked-after as race horses, that's the only thing” （8）. Not even the cup and blue ribbon will be Smith's own because they will belong instead to the winning institution—a reform school qua factory whose product is “honest men”; its governor/manager never once suggests that the athlete should win for himself—that the laborer should receive the reward of his toil—or even that （altruistically） the sport can provide a sense of personal achievement and a satisfaction all its own whether he wins or not. Accordingly, Smith recognizes that the victory, which he is quite capable of achieving, “won't mean a bloody thing to me, only to him, and it means as much to him as it would mean to me if I picked up the racing paper and put my money on a hoss I didn't know, had never seen, and didn't care a sod if I ever did see” （12）. Because Smith's athletic endeavors receive no recompense of any kind, whereas Arthur Machin's are at least a professionally contracted and compensated job, Sillitoe's protagonist is seemingly the more wholly expropriated of the two; yet, in cunningly subverting the plans of those who seek to keep him under their control, Smith is also the more defiant and independent of the pair.

Against all such attempts at dehumanization and expropriation, the narrators of both novels affirm the existence of an innately human alternative. However successful others may be in “owning” the athlete's body （which, like a factory's machine, is well-maintained, powerful, efficient, and smoothly functional）, they can never control his mind, subdue his emotions, quash his spirit, or quell his independent will. Thus, as Smith contends, he retains a vital freedom of thought and feeling—an unsubduable psychological independence—that those around him fail to acknowledge and/or refuse to take into account:

I'm a human being and I've got thoughts and secrets and bloody life inside me that [the governor] doesn't know is there, and he'll never know what's there because he's stupid. … I can see further into the likes of him than he can see into the likes of me … and I'll win in the end even if I die in gaol at eighty-two because I'll have more fun and fire out of my life than he'll ever get out of his.

（12）

Relying on exactly the same “cunning” and the pleasures of “thinking” that Arthur Seaton cites in claiming “it's a hard life if you don't weaken” （Loneliness 7; Saturday Night 34, 28, 32）, Smith deliberately loses the race that he could easily win; in so doing, he unmistakably asserts a fundamental human freedom not to suborn himself, not to conform, and not to comply.

For Arthur Machin as well, the primacy of powerful and innately human “feelings” abrades against his “professional” obligations as an athlete—though the emotions involved are more adult （and more amatory） than the adolescent rebelliousness that fuels the defiance of Sillitoe's long-distance runner. Although the hard physical contact involved in professional rugby provides an ample outlet for his anger and frustration, and although the perquisites of being a celebrity （an expensive car, ostentatious dinners, public recognition） provide an ego-gratification that exceeds even the salary that he earns, his attempts to express more tender emotions cause much of the turmoil in his life. In the rough-and-tumble sometimes brutally violent world of the playing field, Arthur Machin excels and is appropriately rewarded; in the fragile often stormy relationship with the woman he loves, he encounters a pain no less acute—and no less real—than the pain caused by the physical injuries he gives and receives. Paradoxically, the strain that besets his loving relationship with Mrs. Hammond, the widow from whom he rents a room, is caused by the very same personal traits that contribute so much to his success at rugby: aggressiveness, recklessness, ruthlessness, and a certain impervious disregard for whoever or whatever might thwart his attempts to achieve his goals. As he gains more and more acclaim for exhibiting these traits in the game, he becomes increasingly insensitive in seeking an intimate relationship, until, in his frustration, the type of conduct that is appropriate and applauded on the field obtrudes in—and disrupts—the home as a sudden brutal outburst of domestic violence occurs.

Although the nature of his chosen sport itself inherently demands a number of his macho traits, such tendencies are accelerated by the fact that he is a paid professional who is economically （as well as socially and psychologically） rewarded for successfully behaving in this way. Accordingly, Arthur admits,

I was a hero … [but also] the big ape again, known and feared for its strength, frightened of showing a bit of soft feeling in case it might be weakness. … No feelings. It'd always helped to have no feelings. So I had no feelings. I was paid not to have feelings. It paid me to have none.

（This Sporting Life 163）

Nevertheless, as his frustrated love for Mrs. Hammond, his anger, and his grief over her death near the end of the novel demonstrate, powerful and vital human “feelings” have not been entirely suppressed despite the dehumanizing pressures that accompany the work of play. Through their resurgence, even in unpredictably and unacceptably explosive ways, such emotions clearly demonstrate that the athlete has not been wholly expropriated by the economic system that “owns” him. Rather than merely a well-functioning body that seems impervious to pain, Arthur Machin is a complex and fully human being with feelings that—like those of Sillitoe's long-distance runner—are not entirely subject to any form of control; he is, accordingly, a man rather than a mechanism, “A. Machin” rather than “a machine.”

The fact that the pervasive influence of economics alters even the most fundamental meaning of the word “play” is particularly evident in The Changing Room （1972）, Storey's ostensibly “plotless” drama. For the play's athletes and nonathletes alike （the players, the trainers, the team's owner, and even its janitor）, the sport is a source of supplementary income—a commercial enterprise—rather than the source of enjoyment that “play” is traditionally held to be; the rugby match is a contractual rather than a wholly “voluntary” obligation, a form of work rather than play. Subtly but surely, the insidious influence of commercial “professionalism” becomes evident: the owner of the team does not watch it play, retiring to the locker room to warm himself and to enjoy a drink and conversation instead; the team's subsequent victory celebration commingles the players' satisfaction at their achievement and their relief that, in miserable weather and despite physical pain, another of their contractual performances has been completed. As Christopher Lasch has observed, economic concerns taint the basic nature of sports as

the managerial apparatus makes every effort to eliminate the risk and the uncertainty that contributes so centrally to the ritual and dramatic success of any contest. When sports can no longer be played with appropriate abandon, they lose the capacity to raise the spirits of players and spectators, to transport them to a higher realm. Prudence and calculation, so prominent in everyday life but so inimical to the spirit of games, come to shape sports as they shape everything else.

（“Corruption” 30）

Among players who can be sold or traded like commodities and retired by a decision of the owners, the whole concept of being a team is （as Lasch suggests） “drained of its capacity to call up local or regional loyalties” and therefore

reduces itself （like the rivalry among the corporations themselves） to a struggle for shares of the market. The professional athlete does not care whether his team wins or loses （since losers share in the pot）, as long as it stays in business.

（“Letter” 40）

Although the athletes in Storey's work are “professional” in that they are paid for their participation in the sport, it is not their primary occupation （or “profession”）; all also hold “regular” jobs in the world “outside.” They play intensely and unrestrainedly, but they are by no means obsessed with winning—a subject they hardly mention among themselves; neither is there any concern about “representing” their particular locality. The owner of the team gives a typical pregame speech inciting them on to victory, but he takes little actual interest in the game itself. The players, like workers aggrieved at the policies and practices of management, complain about the stinginess of the owners and want a “more hygienic” system of separate showers to replace the common bath. A distinction between the workers/players and the owners/management is thus clearly evident in The Changing Room; the intrusion of economic issues—including charges of corporate （“Club”） stinginess, low compensation, and unhygienic conditions—has blurred the age-old distinction between “work” and “play.”

Yet regardless of the compensation that any of the characters receive, the “realm” of sport remains vitally separate from their lives in the “outside” world and their jobs there. The essential reason for this is that, as Johan Huizinga remarked in Homo Ludens, “Play is not ‘ordinary’ or ‘real’ life. It is rather a stepping out of ‘real’ life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own” （8） wherein specific and binding rules are observed and administered by impartial officials and a definite hierarchy—in which each person is expected to perform a specific role and duty that he knows well—prevails. In fact, as Huizinga points out, “inside the play-ground an absolute and peculiar order reigns. … Play … creates order, is order. Into an imperfect world and into the confusion of life it brings a temporary, a limited perfection” （10）. For players and spectators alike, the game offers a ritualistic reenactment of an unending struggle between competing forces; in Storey's play, the central conflict is between “us” and “them,” the primary terms used to refer to the teams. Yet, as in The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, this fundamental dichotomy provides a metaphor for much larger issues in the world “outside” the realm of games and “play.” Within the microcosm that the artificial world of sports provides, such struggles are resolved with a certain finality at the end of the match; yet, paradoxically, there are no final victories. As in the macrocosm of the world “outside,” the major struggles of self against other and “us” against “them” are never completely and unambiguously resolved; even at world championships and after tournament “finals,” one hears “Wait until next year!”

Although their “play” is actually contractual “work,” Storey's rugby players find that their experience as members of a team provides a personal satisfaction that their job in the “outside world” lack. As Christopher Lasch has pointed out,

Modern industry having reduced most jobs to a routine, games in our society take on added meaning. Men seek in play the difficulties and demands—both intellectual and physical—which they no longer find in work. … Risk, daring, and uncertainty, important components of play, have little place in industry or in activities infiltrated by industrial methods, which are intended precisely to predict and control the future and to eliminate risk.

（“Corruption” 40）

In the workplace, standardization and automation have supplanted individual craftsmanship and personal pride; as work is ever more deprived of personal responsibility and integrity, sports remain a haven in an increasingly mechanized, literally “heartless” world. Specifically, the experience of being a member of a team offers Storey's athletes a number of attributes that are seldom if ever found elsewhere in life: a functional and hierarchical “social” order in which each player knows his clearly defined “position”; a role suited to his particular skills, on which others rely and the success of the collective enterprise may well depend; authoritative rules; reliably impartial officials whose decisions are immediate and （usually） irreversible; “a temporary, a limited perfection”; personal autonomy and accountability; the opportunity to display carefully developed skills and individual judgment; and an unambiguous resolution that yet allows the prospect of a different （and, to the loser, more appealing） outcome on another day. All of these attributes share one all-important characteristic: certainty—the quality that is most absent in the modern age of doubt, anxiety, alienation, and anomie.

Among the players themselves, therefore, the experience of “belonging to” the team provides a temporary union that is forged through common purpose and shared endeavor. As they change their clothes and prepare to play the game, the athletes must set aside their various differences and the preoccupations of the outside world and assume new responsibilities and interdependencies as members of a team. Confirmed through wholly secular rituals that are unselfconsciously but unfailingly performed, this crucial “change” remains beyond the reach of those who have expropriated the game for purposes of their own, transforming it into an economic enterprise and commercial ceremony. Unlike traditional religious rituals, which confirmed a union and a significance lasting beyond the duration of the activity （and sustained the participants until their next involvement in the group）, the wholly secular rituals of the changing room perform no such function; nevertheless, the lives of the players would clearly be less satisfying without them. Though the effects are both fleeting and impermanent, the athletes achieve an instance of order and unity that their lives in the outside world cannot provide.

Significantly, This Sporting Life ends in the locker-room rather than on the playing field itself because the latter is the site of the devalued commercial ritual that the game has become. As he joins in the players' postgame horseplay as a new team member undergoes an initiation with a ceremonial shower （a secular rite of passage）, Arthur Machin achieves—through a renewal and confirmation of the team bond—a brief respite from the still-intense personal grief that he feels over the death of Mrs. Hammond. Like Paul Morel's decision to turn away from his self-absorbing grief at the conclusion of D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, Arthur Machin's action in the novel's final scene does not in any way deny the intensity—or the sincerity—of the grief he feels; yet by participating in the collective life of the team and taking part in one of its wholly private rituals, he too has “chosen life” rather than the death, personal isolation, darkness, and despair that are associated with the “outside” world.

Because long-distance running is an individual sport rather than a team effort, Sillitoe's Smith finds no such communal bond in the experience of sports, nor does he seek any such affirmation. Yet for him, too, the sport provides a haven from the factorylike regimentation and routine of borstal life, and it allows him to assert his individuality and self-reliance in a way that his workaday life in the “outside” world seldom affords. Unlike his job at the factory lathe, running allows him complete autonomy; success in the race—like success in his criminal activities—requires careful planning, agility, strategic maneuvering, and the assumption of risk. As Lasch points out, “risk, daring, and uncertainty, important components of play, have little place in industry or in activities infiltrated by industrial methods, which are intended precisely to predict and control the future and to eliminate risk” （“Corruption” 24）. Because the sport has been expropriated by the governor and others like him, however, the rewards for taking such risk will not be his own. By deliberately refusing to win the race, Smith reaffirms the importance of daring, risk, unpredictability, and personal autonomy. Just as he was punished for his similar assertion of autonomy in his criminal activity, he is punished for having defied the authorities and violated their social norms—though he becomes a hero to the other boys, who recognize the significance of what he has done and understand the paradox that, under the circumstances of such expropriation that makes work out of play and attempts to dehumanize the worker/athlete into a mere mechanism, deliberately and defiantly to lose is to win.

Whereas Sillitoe's depiction of sports was not derived from any personal experience as an athlete （as he explains in “The Long Piece” in Mountains and Caverns）, Storey's portrayal of the world of rugby-league football in This Sporting Life was based on his own first-hand experience as a member of a team. While a student at the Slade School of Art in London in 1953, Storey returned home each weekend to England's industrial north, where he played professional rugby for Leeds. Thus, he led a dual life, dividing his time between the physically demanding “public life” of a professional athlete and the private creative life of an art student; after each match, he would return to London to resume a type of life quite apart from （and perhaps incomprehensible to） the working-class teammates with whom he was regularly, though temporarily, united on the field of play. Years later, during an interview published in Sports Illustrated, he described the experience as follows:

The pleasure to me is in the pitch of endeavor, sustaining it, going beyond it. In many ways I hated rugby, but it allowed people to do marvelous things. Often the real expression occurs at the point of physical and mental exhaustion. I recall one very hard game, played in pouring rain on a pitch that seemed to be 15 feet deep in mud. My relations with the team were at their worst. I should have hated every minute of that match, but suddenly something almost spiritual happened. The players were taken over by the identity that was the team. We were genuinely transported.

（Duffy 69）

That the experience was “something almost spiritual” is a crucially precise phrase, suggesting Storey's conscious realization that a truly “spiritual” （that is, religious） experience cannot by definition arise from a wholly secular activity and cannot occur in a desacralized world.

The same evolution from participation to “spectatorship” shapes the histories of both sport and theater; yet, as Huizinga contended in Homo Ludens, so much of the ritual value of sports has been lost in modern times that “however important [the contest] may be for the players or spectators, it remains sterile … the old play-factor [having] undergone almost complete atrophy” as a result of “the fatal shift towards overseriousness” in sports “play” （198）. Yet notwithstanding the devaluation of sport （and life） by professionalism and the less-than-heroic stature of modern man, the rugby match and related activities do manifestly provide something “real” in the players' lives. “The ancient connections between games, ritual, and public festivity,” which Lasch described in his essay on “The Corruption of Sports,” have been diminished but not eradicated because play retains “its capacity to dramatize reality and to offer a convincing representation of the community's values … rooted in shared traditions, to which [games] give objective expression” （30）. Like the “sacred space” of traditional religions, the playground is, as Huizinga observed, “hallowed, within which special rules obtain. All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart” （10）.

The fact that these terms are even more applicable to the activities of the locker room is fundamental to Storey's works: unlike the commercial public ceremony of the game itself, the “change” is literally “an act apart,” occurring within a “temporary world within the ordinary world,” a wholly secular sanctuary to which only those with proper “credentials” are allowed access and in which the players' particular and binding but nontraditional rituals are unselfconsciously performed. The significant action of the play is the temporary reaffirmation of what Huizinga termed “the feeling of being ‘apart together’ in an exceptional situation, of sharing something important, of mutually withdrawing from the rest of the world and rejecting the usual norms” （12）. Despite his dour conclusion in the final chapter of Homo Ludens that the “ritual tie [having] now been completely severed sport has become profane, ‘unholy’ in every way, [having] no organic connection whatever with the structure of society” （197–198）, Huizinga also maintained （in his first chapter） that vestigial formal elements of ritual and play survive today:

The ritual act has all the formal and essential characteristics of play … particularly in so far as it transports the participants to another world. … A closed space is marked out for [play], either materially or ideally, hedged off from the everyday surroundings. … Now the marking out of some sacred spot is also the primary characteristic of every sacred act. … Formally speaking, there is no distinction whatever between marking out a space for a sacred purpose and marking it out for sheer play. The turf, the tennis-court, the chess-court, and pavement hopscotch cannot formally be distinguished from the temple or the magic circle.

（18–20; emphasis mine）

Accordingly, the playing field is the profane world's counterpart of the “sacred space” of a theocentric culture. Yet much more than the public arena, the locker room constitutes a secular “holy of holies”—a “closed space” that may be entered only by those who are responsible for the performance of the public ritual that relies to a remarkable degree on “the feeling of being ‘apart together’” that is fostered among them. As Lasch has observed, sports constitute the most efficacious modern means whereby both participants and observers may be （in Storey's phrase） “genuinely transported”: “Among the activities through which men seek release from everyday life, games offer in many ways the purest form of escape. … They obliterate awareness of everyday reality, not by dimming that awareness but by raising it to a new intensity …” （Lasch, “Corruption” 24）. Though none of the team members could articulate its significance, each finds in the experience of sports a personal renewal through the affirmation of the team bond—and a unity, transcendence, and significance that would be missing from his life otherwise. Storey's meticulous depiction of this event, “invisible” though it is, affords an insight into the athlete's experience as an athlete that is unique among the depictions of sports in modern literature.

The expropriation of the athlete is not exclusively economic, however, as Sillitoe's works reveal; its basis is more broadly social, having its origins in the power of one person or group to “have the whip-hand over” others （Loneliness 13）, demanding allegiance to an institution, class, city, or state. Accordingly, in his essay on “Sport and Nationalism” in Mountains and Caverns, Sillitoe argued that “The Olympic torch is a flame of enslavement” for exactly this reason （84）, expropriating athletes as champions of the state in much the same way that Storey's athletes become “property of the City.” Against such dehumanization and what Sillitoe in Her Victory termed “the slavery of expectation” （392）, both authors assert remarkably similar alternatives, though vaguely defined by both as just “feelings” and “thinking.” Implicitly, these are a recognition of individuality and the inner self, persistent and defiant even in a mechanized world. For Arthur Machin, it is the belated recognition of the importance of his love for Mrs. Hammond; for Smith, as for Arthur Seaton, it is an affirmation of the unsubduable “thoughts and secrets and bloody life inside me” （Loneliness 12）—including the essential freedoms not to conform, not to “play along,” not to win for others' sakes, and not to live by others' expectations and desires. Despite Marx's assertion to the contrary, both authors' works demonstrate that not “every atom of freedom” has been confiscated by those seeking to expropriate “the many-sided play of the muscles” in play as well as in work. In the anger and defiant self-assertion of their expropriated athletes—rather than in that of their counterparts still in the factories—Sillitoe and Storey alike have found a crucial symbol that not only embodies the predicament of people in a specific time, place, and class but also resonates throughout modern societies as well.

Works Cited

Duffy, Martha. “An Ethic of Work and Play.” Sports Illustrated 5 Mar. 1973: 66–69.

Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. Boston: Beacon, 1950.

Lasch, Christopher. “The Corruption of Sports.” The New York Review of Books 28 April 1977: 24–30.

———. Letter/reply in “Corrupt Sports: An Exchange.” The New York Review of Books 29 Sept. 1977: 40.

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production. Trans. from the third German ed. by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. Ed. Frederick Engels. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Lowery, 1872.

Sillitoe, Alan. Her Victory. London: Granada, 1983.

———. The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. New York: NAL, 1959. 7–47.

———. “The Match.” The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. 105–113.

———. Mountains and Caverns: Selected Essays by Alan Sillitoe. London: Allen, 1975.

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